A Way to Reduce Climate Risk?

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Clarissa

December 12, 2014

Has anybody heard about this:

I work across a lot of pieces of research, but I’d say the frontiers are trying to understand how much effectively turning down the sun, solar geoengineering, actually reduces the climate risk that people care about: Crop losses, ice sheets melting, temperature extremes, or what have you.

There’s no question it reduces the global average temperatures; even the people who hate it agree you could reduce average global temperatures. . . .The answer is, it works a lot better than I expected. It’s really stunning. It looks like it can cut, like, 80 percent of the total variation in climate, which is really stunning.

In some ways we should be singing it from the rooftops. But the scientific community is so painfully scared of talking about it. These papers come out, and people find the best ways to say, well, it sort of works, but it’s really awful.

The fact is, people really appear to have found a way to significantly reduce the climate risk — by more than half, which is a big deal.

This sounds like the best news ever, if its true. Why isn’t anybody rejoicing?

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17 responses to “A Way to Reduce Climate Risk?”

Anonymous

December 12, 2014

Given how difficult it is to even characterize the present changes in climate, I would not trust any predictions about what such technologies might do to the climate. Plus, even if it works, there is the eternal question of who pays for it.

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Crystallizing Chaos

December 12, 2014

Given how difficult it is to even characterize the current effects of human activities on the climate, I would not put too much trust into the predicted effects such speculative technology. And even if it stands to hard scrutiny, there’s the eternal question of who pays for it.

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1. Clarissa
  
  December 12, 2014
  
  Of course, let’s not allow ourselves to feel good, not even for a second. 🙂
  
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  1. Crystallizing Chaos
    
    December 12, 2014
    
    Ha ha! Sorry for being such a downer.
    
    Here’s some feel good news – solar cells have reached 50% efficiency. http://cleantechnica.com/2014/05/06/new-cpv-cell-brings-50-conversion-efficiency-closer-says-developer-semprius/
    
    Market-wise, these kinds of technologies are much more likely to take off than any planet wide effort to control or fix the climate.
    
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aglaonika

December 12, 2014

“This sounds like the best news ever, if its true. Why isn’t anybody rejoicing?”

I don’t even understand the technology the article is talking about, but the scientist guy on the photo has amazing blue eyes. Until I figure the hard part out I’m just rejoicing in that :-). I hope someone comes and explains the science stuff to the laypeople in the comments, so I can rejoice in that too.

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1. Clarissa
  
  December 12, 2014
  
  You Noticed the most important part. 🙂
  
  My question is : if we don’t trust scientists, how do we differ from climate change denialists?
  
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  1. aglaonika
    
    December 12, 2014
    
    That we want to understand, even if not the actual calculations but at least the principles behind. And we are also open to new things. Climate change denialists just want to keep their heads in their asses forever, because they like the comfy dark warmth inside. We are lead by curiosity and a desire of learning, they are lead by fear and denial. We ask because we want to progress, they ask because they want to regress or at least keep the status quo.
    
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  2. djiril
    
    December 12, 2014
    
    There is a difference between trusting the validity of something that the majority of scientists agree on and trusting a few scientists with ideas that are controversial within the scientific community. Not to mention the scientist interviewed in the article admits that people might die as a result of his idea being implemented. He just thinks that if it works the way he intends (and that’s a big if as far as I can tell) less people will die in the long run.
    I would really like to know what climate scientists in general think about this idea.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      December 12, 2014
      
      “I would really like to know what climate scientists in general think about this idea.”
      
      – So would I. Let’s wait for links and otehr interesting pieces on the subject.
      
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E (The Third Glance)

December 12, 2014

I study this sort of stuff (broadly speaking, anyway). And what has been proposed in this article, the “cloud brightening” is a neat idea with absolutely no practical chance of working. The idea is that you’d simply make Earth more reflective and therefore absorb less light. This means that we’d have less heat, which would ostensibly counteract the rising temperatures due to increased CO2. But the thing is that things like that might work for a year or two, but then they backfire. The example of the volcanic eruption – yes, it did cool the planet by a degree or two for a couple of years, but then the planet recovered. The carbon cycle and system is far more complicated than this person believes, and has numerous positive and negative feedbacks. Changing how reflective Earth is doesn’t actually change the existence of those feedbacks. What if he brightened the earth too much? Just a little bit off in the calculations (even 0.1%) could plunge us into a giant, irreversible ice age. Or it could change weather patterns everywhere and completely destroy our ability to grow the very crops that he is trying to protect.

Most of the so-called “geo-engineering” solutions to global climate change are very simplistic, and fail to take the whole system into account, and so they sound very good on paper, but in practice, they’re incredibly dangerous. Our knowledge of the earth system continues to improve, but we really don’t know enough to predict all the things that will happen if we take certain actions. And what we DO know, suggests that while these schemes might fix one small aspect of the problem, they really screw up many other things. And this isn’t from an alarmist scientist who is “afraid to try anything new”. It’s from a thoughtful, educated, critical thinker, who realizes that the earth system is more complex than these solutions make it out to be.

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1. Clarissa
  
  December 12, 2014
  
  Obviously, there is no possibility that lay people will even understand the language of the linked piece. But I’m posting it because I believe it is crucial for the hysteria to subside and calm, rational voices of actual scholars to be heard amongst the apocalyptic narratives of the hysterics. (Just in case, you are definitely not one of said hysterics. 🙂
  
  I believe that the climate change discussion absolutely needs to happen. But it is not happening on a scale it needs to be because it’s been hijacked by imbeciles on the one hand and the clinically unhinged on the other. And when it gets to picking sides between the two groups, I can’t decide which one is worse. People who speak about it in normal, rational voices are really nowhere to be found outside of the scholarly community that is not talking to laypeople a whole lot. And that is a problem.
  
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  1. E (The Third Glance)
    
    December 12, 2014
    
    “People who speak about it in normal, rational voices are really nowhere to be found outside of the scholarly community that is not talking to laypeople a whole lot. And that is a problem.”
    
    Yes, yes it is. Because when I speak calmly and rationally, no one listens. That’s a problem for pretty much every debate in this country. Calm and rational don’t get headlines, so we get erased. And putting lots of brainpower and time and effort into doing things that constantly get erased and ignored is very exhausting and frustrating. Especially when there are other things that are interesting and worthwhile for our brains to be doing. So can you understand why we aren’t easily found.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      December 12, 2014
      
      “Because when I speak calmly and rationally, no one listens. ”
      
      – Me! Me! I will listen! But that is admittedly a very tiny audience. 🙂
      
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  2. paranoid
    
    December 13, 2014
    
    ” Me! Me! I will listen! But that is admittedly a very tiny audience.”
    
    A bit dated from 2009 but written in language for lay people: https://royalsociety.org/~/media/Royal_Society_Content/policy/publications/2009/8693.pdf
    
    Recent but not written for lay people:
    http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/372/2031.toc
    
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fluffymog

December 12, 2014

I’m no geoengineer or climate scientist, so I haven’t read the primary literature this guy is on about, but I agree with E that this development is simplified and ‘upsold’, as presented – the models seem to work, at least some of them, but it’s always worth thinking that we have THIS PLANET ONLY – if we get this wrong we could make things a lot worse. Cutting emissions hard and fast will we know at least stop doing more harm. Big volcanic eruptions have effects over a year or two, true, but having the equivalent of that happen every year for a long time… who knows WHAT other effects that would have? Acids injected into the lower atmosphere by industry etc. cause smogs, acid rain, devastating impacts in some places – you’d need to have a wide concensus among those trained in the right fields that this was very unlikely before you went ahead (like the broad concensus which exists that the climate is warming – oh wait, that doesn’t really exist, does it?). Sure, we need people with these big ambitious ideas, they push everyone else into action, all the rest of it – but as a non-US-ian I do see something of a tendency to believe that a SuperHero will come up with an ‘easy’ idea like this and fix things so consumerism can carry on unchecked – it can’t, indefinitely, but that just isn’t an acceptable conclusion, it seems to me.

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musteryou

December 12, 2014

Experimental science can always have counter-effects that are worse than the problem it is trying to rectify. When the ramifications are extreme, one has to have a lot of trials in the lab first. Even then, the results of any technology are far from certain. Consider aviation and how many mistakes were made to get to the level of efficiency we have today — square windows bursting, airships being set on fire, etc. Technological development is a long, slow and painful process.

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Jones

December 12, 2014

“The fact is, people really appear to have found a way to significantly reduce the climate risk — by more than half …”

Let’s compare the problem to a very loud sound — let’s say it’s 100 decibels.

Someone says, “It’s too loud”, and you tell them you can turn it down to half the volume, proceeding to do just that.

This person gives you a surprised look and says, “It’s still too loud”.

The sound is now at 97 decibels — it’s still very loud.

Generally when someone says they can do the equivalent of a 10 log10 (2) reduction (three decibels when it comes to sound), I have to ask, “Why can’t you turn it up to eleven?”

If you can do half, why can’t you do a full power of ten reduction, or several powers of ten reduction, targeting the harmful effects precisely?

Massive resource and energy expenditures just to reduce something by half are not sensible fixes — if you can reduce by half, you should be able to refine the technology to get at least one power of ten, perhaps multiple powers of ten, or perhaps reduce the problems at their source so you’re doing the equivalent.

In fact, the solution in this case sounds like another version of the problem: the technology producing the problems won’t be remedied by applying another technology that suffers from the same problems when it comes to scale of effects.

You’re better off investing the money toward improving the harm-causing technology so it produces less harm, rather than attempting to apply technological plasters to it.

Not only is this a sort of Ockham’s Razor mode of thinking, it also represents a net lower expenditure of energy in order to correct the targeted harm. (Thus smokestack scrubbers are more effective than targeted cloud seeding, carrying less risk of SOx and NOx pollutant transfer to ground water, for instance. That mention of sulphuric acid wasn’t merely academic — that’s H2SO4, where the x in SOx is 4.)

Otherwise, when someone manages to get two powers of ten (100x) improvements toward this sort of thing, I’ll be suitably impressed. (That’s 20 dB of loss, to extend the sound example, BTW.)

In the meantime … IT’S STILL TOO LOUD. 🙂

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