Dear Ron,
to 1.
I attended only a few of the biochar presentations. From the program and
the presentation I it seemed that biochar has not been studied as a CE
measure. Most of the talk/posters were about soil enhancement. (BTW, it
is the international year of soil.) Some authors of CE-biochar papers
have been present but were not talking about CDR.
There has also been a press conference with the some of the people that
have been at the CE session.
http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2015/session/19804
to 2.
Conveners of the session have been Helene Muri, Simon Driscoll, and
Peter Irvine.
The session seemed balanced. Some talked about the interlink of a
volcanic eruption and stratospheric SRM (Korhonen) or sea-level rise and
SRM (Applegate). I wouldn't call them in particular positive rather then
very negative.
Nils
Am 20.04.2015 um 05:01 schrieb Ronal W. Larson:
Andrew and list
1. Besides your message below being about Prof. Caldeira’s comments
on SRM, this is a nice reminder that a major “Geo”-related conference
ended a few days ago. At:
http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/egu2015/sessionprogramme
I found about 40 oral and poster presentations on biochar and about
the same number with a biomass flavor. This seems to be down a little
from the previous year, found at:
http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/egu2014/sessionprogramme
Could those who attended give us a flavor for how the various SRM
and CDR/NET approaches were being viewed by conference attendees?
2. I was surprised to see Prof. Caldeira’s session had only 4 other
papers on SRM - none of which seemed particularly positive.
3. With apologies for bringing up the “only” subject again so soon, I
wonder if others see a disparity with the above statistics and a
sentence almost at the end below:
/"The only thing a politician can do to start the planet cooling is
solar geoengineering./
Ron
On Apr 17, 2015, at 3:16 PM, Andrew Lockley <andrew.lock...@gmail.com
<mailto:andrew.lock...@gmail.com>> wrote:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32334528
By Simon Redfern
Science writer
16 April 2015
From the section Science & Environment
Any attempts to engineer the climate are likely to result in
"different" climate change, rather than its elimination, new results
suggest.
Prof Ken Caldeira, of Stanford University, presented research at a
major conference on the climate risks and impacts of geoengineering.
These techniques have been hailed by some as a quick fix for climate
change.
But the impacts of geoengineering on oceans, the water cycle and land
environments are hotly debated.
They have been discussed at a meeting this week of 12,000 scientists
in Vienna.
Researchers are familiar with the global cooling effects of volcanic
eruptions, seen both historically and even back into the deep past of
the rock record.
With this in mind, some here at the European Geosciences Union
General Assembly have been discussing the possible worldwide
consequences of pumping sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere to
attempt to reflect sunlight back into space and cool the planet.
Planetary sunshade
Two hundred years ago this month, the huge volcano Mount Tambora
erupted in Indonesia, throwing tonnes of gas and ash into the
stratosphere.
Maybe as much as 100 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide aerosols
spread as a blanket around the globe, acting like a planetary sunshade.
Global temperatures plummeted, and across America and Europe 1816
became known as the year without a summer.
Such global cooling processes, but managed in a geoengineering
solution, have been touted by some as a possible mechanism to
extricate the planet from its path towards a warmer future.
Solar radiation management would use stratospheric sulphate aerosols
to dim the Sun. Using a variety of climate models, Ken Caldeira, from
the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, has
investigated the likely consequences of such geoengineering on
agriculture across the globe.
Mount Pinatubo
Mount Pinatubo pumped 20 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide high into
the sky above the Philippines
His research shows that while dimming could rapidly decrease global
temperatures, high CO2 levels would be expected to persist, and it is
the balance between temperature, CO2, and sunlight that affects plant
growth and agriculture.
Exploring the regional effects, he finds that a stratospherically
dimmed world would show increased plant productivity in the tropics,
but lessened plant growth across the northerly latitudes of America,
Europe and Asia.
It is easy to see how there might be geopolitical shifts associated
with changes in regional food production across the globe.
"It's probably the poor tropics that stand to benefit and the rich
north that stands to lose," said Prof Caldeira.
But what if geoengineered sulphate aerosols were, nonetheless,
deployed and then a large volcanic eruption like Pinatubo in the
Philippines took place? Three such eruptions occurred in the last
century so the scenario seems likely.
Bad timing
Hannele Korhonen, of the Finnish Meteorological Institute, suggests
that the climate impacts could be quite unexpected.
Her results indicate increased temperatures in the Southern Ocean and
in northerly latitudes, as well as the mid-Pacific, but cooling in
African and Asian mid-latitudes.
Regional weather patterns would still change, as they did after
Tambora in 1816, with similar widely felt disruption.
"Deploying solar radiation management methods would lead to a
completely new climate state with enhanced greenhouse effect and
reduced solar radiation," said Korhonen, adding: "There are great
uncertainties, related especially to the regional climate impacts of
solar radiation management."
Commenting on the results, Helene Muri, of the University of Oslo,
said: "These modelling experiments have highlighted the new risks
associated with solar radiation management. The safest option is, of
course, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and aim for a more
sustainable way of living and managing the planet."
It is not at all obvious what the other consequences of global
geoengineering approaches might be. For example, Patrick Applegate
from Pennsylvania State University, reported that solar radiation
management may yet fail to prevent sea-level rise from melting ice
sheets, which respond on much longer time scales than the temperature
effects of solar shielding.
Aside from being ineffective in stemming sea-level rise, solar
radiation management - according to results from Jerry Tjiputra at
Bergen University - would lead to increased ocean acidification in
the North Atlantic.
These results also suggest that climate engineering could not offer a
long-term solution, with the world eventually being in the same
place, by 2200, as it would reach without any geoengineering
interventions.
Asked whether he believed solar radiation management would be
deployed, Prof Caldeira responded: "A lot has to do with how bad
climate change will end up being. Humans are quite adaptable as a
species.
"On the other hand, projections for summers in the tropics suggest
almost every summer will be hotter than the hottest summer yet on
record, associated with crop failures. There is the possibility that
there would be widespread crop failures in the tropics in the summer.
"The only thing a politician can do to start the planet cooling is
solar geoengineering. If a catastrophic outcome does occur, the
pressure to deploy a scheme could be overwhelming.
"Research into this is an act of desperation on the part of
scientists. People see the greenhouse gas concentrations increase and
are looking for other ways to reduce environmental risk."
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