Re: [geo] Modelling Geoengineering, Part II | ClimateSight
The storage was in the soil, not the plants - as I recall. I assume higher NPP and drier soils are contributing. A On Sep 17, 2012 4:05 AM, RAU greg gh...@sbcglobal.net wrote: Geoengineering allows natural carbon sinks to enjoy all the benefits of high CO2without the associated drawbacks of high temperatures, and these sinks become stronger as a result. From looking at the different sinks, we found that the sequestration was due almost entirely to the land, rather than the ocean. Has meso-scale experimentation with elevated CO2 in plant communities shown greater net storage of carbon under elevated CO2? e.g.: http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/effects-of-rising-atmospheric-concentrations-of-carbon-13254108 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-air_concentration_enrichment While some increases in primary production are found, soil respiration also is seen to increase: http://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/40769/PDF so the net effect on air CO2 could/should be zero, especially if plants are not carbon limited, which would seem the usual case. But in a very brief search I see no discussion of this. Anyway, is there empirical evidence that land sinks increase under high CO2 at constant T? -Greg -- *From:* Andrew Lockley andrew.lock...@gmail.com *To:* geoengineering geoengineering@googlegroups.com *Sent:* Sun, September 16, 2012 3:51:19 PM *Subject:* [geo] Modelling Geoengineering, Part II | ClimateSight Poster's note: Fascinating and very readable blog post by UVic modellers. Only available here as it won't be published. A http://climatesight.org/2012/09/16/modelling-geoengineering-part-ii/ ClimateSight Climate science and the public Menu Modelling Geoengineering, Part II Near the end of my summer at the UVic Climate Lab, all the scientists seemed to go on vacation at the same time and us summer students were left to our own devices. I was instructed to teach Jeremy, Andrew Weaver’s other summer student, how to use the UVic climate model – he had been working with weather station data for most of the summer, but was interested in Earth system modelling too.Jeremy caught on quickly to the basics of configuration and I/O, and after only a day or two, we wanted to do something more exciting than the standard test simulations. Remembering an old post I wrote, I dug up this paper (open access) by Damon Matthews and Ken Caldeira, which modelled geoengineering by reducing incoming solar radiation uniformly across the globe. We decided to replicate their method on the newest version of the UVic ESCM, using the four RCP scenarios in place of the old A2 scenario. We only took CO2 forcing into account, though: other greenhouse gases would have been easy enough to add in, but sulphate aerosols are spatially heterogeneous and would complicate the algorithm substantially.Since we were interested in the carbon cycle response to geoengineering, we wanted to prescribe CO2emissions, rather than concentrations. However, the RCP scenarios prescribe concentrations, so we had to run the model with each concentration trajectory and find the equivalent emissions timeseries. Since the UVic model includes a reasonably complete carbon cycle, it can “diagnose” emissions by calculating the change in atmospheric carbon, subtracting contributions from land and ocean CO2 fluxes, and assigning the residual to anthropogenic sources.After a few failed attempts to represent geoengineering without editing the model code (e.g., altering the volcanic forcing input file), we realized it was unavoidable. Model development is always a bit of a headache, but it makes you feel like a superhero when everything falls into place. The job was fairly small – just a few lines that culminated in equation 1 from the original paper – but it still took several hours to puzzle through the necessary variable names and header files! Essentially, every timestep the model calculates the forcing from CO2 and reduces incoming solar radiation to offset that, taking changing planetary albedo into account. When we were confident that the code was working correctly, we ran all four RCPs from 2006-2300 with geoengineering turned on. The results were interesting (see below for further discussion) but we had one burning question: what would happen if geoengineering were suddenly turned off?By this time, having completed several thousand years of model simulations, we realized that we were getting a bit carried away. But nobody else had models in the queue – again, they were all on vacation – so our simulations were running three times faster than normal. Using restart files (written every 100 years) as our starting point, we turned off geoengineering instantaneously for RCPs 6.0 and 8.5, after 100 years as well as 200 years. Results Similarly to previous experiments, our representation of geoengineering still led to sizable regional climate
[geo] Geoengineering and Climate Management: From Marginality to Inevitablity by Jay Michaelson :: SSRN
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2146934 Geoengineering and Climate Management: From Marginality to Inevitablity Jay Michaelson Hebrew University of Jerusalem December 14, 2010 Tulsa Law Review, Vol. 14, p. 221, Winter 2010 Abstract: In 1998, when I wrote the first law review article advocating Geoengineering as a climate change mitigation strategy, Geoengineering was both unknown and unpopular. Twelve years later, the political economy of Geoengineering – or as I prefer to call it, Climate Management (CM) – has shifted, precisely because the conditions I outlined in 1998 have stayed so strikingly the same. Then, I argued that the lack of political will, absence, complexity, and sheer expense of climate change mitigation made meaningful preventive measures, i.e. cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, extremely difficult to undertake. After a decade of obfuscation and misinformation by powerful political actors, the case seems stronger than ever.Today, while CM remains at the margins of our popular political discourse, there has been an explosion of scientific and policy analyses. Solar Radiation Management (SRM: increasing the concentration of sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere) and Ocean Iron Fertilization (OIF: seeding gigantic phytoplankton carbon sinks in the oceans by fertilizing them with iron) have both been explored and advanced by credible scientists, scholars, and even entrepreneurs. Additionally, CM has been tentatively explored by conservative think-tanks and pundits – to the horror of environmentalists.Yet the mere fact that conservatives support Geoengineering should not, in itself, cause liberals and greens to oppose it. Supporting CM should give any environmentalist pause, both because of its riskiness and because so many of our political foes support it. But CM is a climate change strategy that, unlike regulation, might actually stand a chance of becoming reality. It is the only approach to climate change that can act as a compromise between liberals and libertarians, greens and browns. As climate change becomes ineluctable, geoengineeering becomes inevitable. Number of Pages in PDF File: 39 Keywords: climate change, greenhouse effect, geoengineering, Newt Gingrich, Paul Crutzen, climate management, international law, environmental law JEL Classification: K32, K33 Accepted Paper Series -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
Re: [geo] Tyndall center presentation on 4C future
Anderson's latest paper was published online in the September 2012 issue of Nature Climate Change available behind a paywall herehttp://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v2/n9/full/nclimate1646.htm. The Editors of Nature Climate Change describe Anderson's views, a bit, in their freely available editorial, iClarion Callhttp://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v2/n9/full/nclimate1681.html/i, published in the same issue. Anderson often refers to himself as an engineer in his talks, to emphasize that when he talks about what tech fixes are possible now, given his view that civilization very likely has committed itself to destruction already unless it changes more than top level political debate has had on its table for discussion so far, he is referring to things that have been proven out at full scale. He says he loves technology, but refers to things that exist as gleams in the eyes of researchers such as various geoengineering ideas, as tending to resemble what he calls magic. I haven't heard him talk about SRM. He does talk about removing CO2 from the atmosphere and from point sources before it gets into the atmosphere because many if not all projections that civilization can cope with the amount of fossil fuels it seems to think it is going to burn involve massive deployment of CCS. Because CCS has not been deployed at full scale anywhere yet he mentions that this means his analysis of plans to save civilization with it are a tad risky compared to plans that do not depend on technology that has yet to be developed. His idea of what powering civilization with breeder reactors would mean is massive movement of weapons grade plutonium moving around as fuel supplies. The University of Manchester published this notehttp://www.sci.manchester.ac.uk/news-events/news/bows-and-anderson-discuss-a-new-paradigm-for-climate-changedescribing the latest Anderson and Bows paper. A quote: They * [ Anderson and Bows in their new paper ]* *provocatively suggest the scientific community has contributed to a misguided belief* that incremental adjustments in economic incentives, a carbon tax here, a little emissions trading there and the odd voluntary agreement thrown in for good measure will deliver the necessary reductions in emissions. They proceed to criticize the dominance of a financial mentality and how many within the scientific community underplay the severity of their analysis to ensure their conclusions support the orthodoxy of economic growth. David Roberts at Grist examined Anderson's views earlier this year in a series of posts starting herehttp://grist.org/climate-change/2011-12-05-the-brutal-logic-of-climate-change/ . Anderson's opinion that there is a widespread view among his colleagues that civilization is likely committed as of now to changes incompatible with an organized global community apparently contradicts the* McNugget and McBurger theory, ** *which holds that the exponentially expanding numbers of the global middle classes will not necessarily even notice as *all fossil fuels are burned* while they stayed glued to their Xbox screens playing video games ordering fast food as necessary for survival. In at least one version of this theory the fast food never stops arriving and the power to the wall outlets of these bozos never fluctuates. Inquiring minds wonder what will happen when a top flight McNuggetBurger theorist or two happens to be on a panel with Anderson himself, or someone else Anderson would call a colleague who shares the widespread view he speaks of. On Sunday, September 16, 2012 4:35:38 PM UTC-7, Ron wrote: List: 1. I found this 70+ slide Ppt by Kevin Anderson (the attachment to Andrew's posting about 14 hours ago) to be a most interesting presentation. It suffers by having no voice. I have not yet found when or where it was presented. In following up, I found that his (and Alice Bows') 2011 paper on same topics is free at:. http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1934/20.full.pdf Also I found that a well-done 27 minute video (showing both him talking and the slides) from 2009 (cited in his Wiki article - as #6) is available at http://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/ouce/4degrees/session_10_1_anderson.mp4?CAMEFROM=moxacuk A similar 55 minute video (but with only slides and voice) from 2012 is at: http://vimeo.com/39555673 (newest and longest, so possibly a good place to start) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/geoengineering/-/UKemNLUlVWYJ. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
