Re: [AMEG 8562] Re: [geo] Re: 2. What are some potentially false 'memes' related to solar geoengineering?
Dear John - Had you a technique that worked securely, quite a few people might sleep better at night. But Ken once accused you, if I remember correctly, of "making reckless statements," and since you don't have such a technique, trying to speak in ways that intentionally builds a feeling of dependency on non-existent technologies to be deployed 9 months from now would seem to count as such. I find it somewhat frustrating, because what you seem unwilling to do is the >2,000 year old political strategy of "divide and conquer" as applied to climate strategy (you're not alone in this, I might add), since whenever you want to create this feeling of complete dependency upon geoengineering for the near-term, you tend to revert to speaking of "emissions" as a single lump phenomenon, and therefore hopeless, when in fact it is virtually unquestionable that if your concerns are really so immediate, there are 100s of shovel-ready, very practical projects involving SLCF emissions, that no one in the world is opposed to in principal, that are vastly under-appreciated by so many people, and that you could be helping to accelerate enactment of, which could take out some forcing from the Arctic more quickly than anything else. We don't really know just how much "cooling power" would be needed to significantly improve Arctic conditions for the near-term. There's virtually a 100% chance that what I mention would help, though, and might even work better than has been projected already in the literature (i.e., in the UNEP BC/O3 study, etc.). That's because, I believe, the implications of the recent Cowtan & Way material is very significant to the concerns of your group AMEG, but you've paid little attention to it. What I mean is, there's a very close correspondence of timing between the so-called warming "pause" and an increased acceleration of Arctic amplification - so poorly recorded in the primary data sets as to virtually get rid of the pause entirely once it is corrected (see discussion at Real Climate), which to my mind has all sorts of potential implications about the causes of what we see happening in the Arctic - how much is internal feedbacks, how much comes from rather rapid changes in oceanic/atmospheric circulation, etc, and this in turn has implications for the Flanner papers that you have so often depended upon to estimate how much "cooling power" would be needed to help the Arctic. In short, Jim Hansen has often said that one of hardest things is to tell a forcing from a feedback, and I think you would need to get that straightened out first before making such an estimate correctly But in the meantime, I'd just suggest concentrating a lot more on the things that we already are certain will work, even if they clearly can't "solve" the problem (which, needless to say, geoengineering alone couldn't either, even if you had that technique all ready to go) Best, Nathan On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 2:46 PM, John Nissen wrote: > Thanks for your response, Nathan, with your concern that SRM techniques > are unready and unproven. > > I didn't say anything about which techniques might be used for cooling the > Arctic, or how well they might work, or the probability of success. If we > have no option but geoengineering to cool the Arctic - if that is the only > way to provide enough cooling power (which we can estimate as in the order > of a few hundreds of terawatts) - then *we have to find a way of doing it*, > or face the risk of complete Arctic meltdown. > > To deny the need for geoengineering to cool the Arctic is to risk > self-destruct - like pressing the trigger in Russian roulette where every > chamber may contain a bullet. Are we to rely on IPCC global climate models > which predict that sea ice will last for decades, when the models have > abjectly failed to anticipate minimum sea ice in 2007 and 2012? Are we to > believe that these minima were just one in a million year events, arising > from freak conditions in the Arctic? Are we to believe that there is no > vicious cycle of warming and melting from albedo loss, when the sea ice > volume is following an exponential trend? > > On the other hand, there are two techniques which have a good chance of > working because they are based on well-known natural phenomena: the cooling > from stratospheric haze and the cooling from cloud brightening. > > Re stratospheric aerosol, we know that this can have a dramatic cooling > effect from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. We know that the > thickness of the stratospheric haze has recently increased due to man-made > emissions of SO2 puncturing the tropopause and entering the stratosphere at > low latitude. If the SO2 were injected at suitably high latitude, in the > lower stratosphere, then Brewer-Dobson circulation would take the resultant > haze of fine droplets towards the pole where they would fall back into the > troposphere within a few months. We just need to determine the optimum > la
Re: [AMEG 8562] Re: [geo] Re: 2. What are some potentially false 'memes' related to solar geoengineering?
Dear Nathan, I would sleep better at night if one government in the world was preparing to lead the battle to save the sea ice and prevent Arctic meltdown. While governments are being told that there is no immediate requirement for geoengineering and they should focus entirely on emissions reduction, we are losing precious time which means the probability of successful geoengineering is reducing. It is as if we, as a society, are sleep-walking over the edge of a cliff. Everyone is aware of the danger of tipping points, but how many realise that we are past the tipping point with the Arctic sea ice? This isn't even mentioned by IPCC in AR5. The cycle of warming and melting is self-sustaining and thus the _rate_ of warming and melting are increasing - i.e. we have highly non-linear processes to deal with. If we were in any other walk of life, we would declare an emergency, but because we are dealing with our own beloved Earth System we can't believe how quickly the Arctic is changing. So nothing is being done to cool the Arctic and break the cycle. Here in the geoengineering group are people who know what to do in this circumstance. Some are advising government. Are they giving the right advice? Are they willing to change their advice, even if it means calling for geoengineering? I am afraid that there is so much prejudice against geoengineering in the scientific community (about 99% at AGU were against geoengineering when Gavin Schmidt asked), that any suggestion of geoengineering is met with horror and suspicion. Who is brave enough to speak up for geoengineering, and the vital need to cool the Arctic with SRM? I am confident that geoengineering can be made to work, if people recognise that it has to be made to work. Cheers, John P.S. What Ken Caldeira once accused me of was of getting my science wrong. I have always tried to be sound on science, so I challenged him to say what I'd got wrong. You will not have seen my challenge, because it never got through moderation onto this list. -- On 17/08/2014 21:24, nathan currier wrote: Dear John - Had you a technique that worked securely, quite a few people might sleep better at night. But Ken once accused you, if I remember correctly, of "making reckless statements," and since you don't have such a technique, trying to speak in ways that intentionally builds a feeling of dependency on non-existent technologies to be deployed 9 months from now would seem to count as such. I find it somewhat frustrating, because what you seem unwilling to do is the >2,000 year old political strategy of "divide and conquer" as applied to climate strategy (you're not alone in this, I might add), since whenever you want to create this feeling of complete dependency upon geoengineering for the near-term, you tend to revert to speaking of "emissions" as a single lump phenomenon, and therefore hopeless, when in fact it is virtually unquestionable that if your concerns are really so immediate, there are 100s of shovel-ready, very practical projects involving SLCF emissions, that no one in the world is opposed to in principal, that are vastly under-appreciated by so many people, and that you could be helping to accelerate enactment of, which could take out some forcing from the Arctic more quickly than anything else. We don't really know just how much "cooling power" would be needed to significantly improve Arctic conditions for the near-term. There's virtually a 100% chance that what I mention would help, though, and might even work better than has been projected already in the literature (i.e., in the UNEP BC/O3 study, etc.). That's because, I believe, the implications of the recent Cowtan & Way material is very significant to the concerns of your group AMEG, but you've paid little attention to it. What I mean is, there's a very close correspondence of timing between the so-called warming "pause" and an increased acceleration of Arctic amplification - so poorly recorded in the primary data sets as to virtually get rid of the pause entirely once it is corrected (see discussion at Real Climate), which to my mind has all sorts of potential implications about the causes of what we see happening in the Arctic - how much is internal feedbacks, how much comes from rather rapid changes in oceanic/atmospheric circulation, etc, and this in turn has implications for the Flanner papers that you have so often depended upon to estimate how much "cooling power" would be needed to help the Arctic. In short, Jim Hansen has often said that one of hardest things is to tell a forcing from a feedback, and I think you would need to get that straightened out first before making such an estimate correctly But in the meantime, I'd just suggest concentrating a lot more on the things that we already are certain will work, even if they clearly can't "solve" the problem (which, needless to say, geoengineering
Re: [AMEG 8562] Re: [geo] Re: 2. What are some potentially false 'memes' related to solar geoengineering?
Hi, John - For me, there's a complex mix of facts and fictions in all this. In terms of Jennifer Francis & her work, she wrote to your group specifically, after I suggested it, and stated that she "emphatically" did not think that arctic geoengineering (and this was on the assumption that the forcing would certainly be net negative, I believe) could counteract jet stream changes, or those to NAO, AO, ENSO, etc, and briefly stated her reasons, which seemed pretty clear. It's now a couple of years later - as I've suggested before, you might want to contemplate what she was saying. For the rest of what John writes here, on some details: on SLR, I think Hanson sees Pulsewater melt 1A rate as even *higher* than what you state, and there's some evidence of almost as high a rate in the Eemian, which is even more relevant for today, but there's no way, given the big, slow signal of sea level, that you could ever talk about total "sea level commitment" (a metric that should be used much as "climate change commitment") separated from CO2 and other emissions policy. I don't get the point, therefore, when trying to push for your 'geoengineering alone' approach - which is, again, what you seem to suddenly revert to in the rhetoric above - that you bother with this. I agree we've been geoengineering already, although I'm not sure why you bring in the work of Ruddiman, etc, on the Holocene early human impact issue, to support it, since that work is not a slam dunk (20th century "geoengineering" is) - although some recent work looks clearer than his, but only from ~2,000 yrs ago, with methane from cattle being a larger part of it. If geoE's problem is a bad rap in the media, that certainly isn't what's impacting my thoughts, or those of many on this email chain, or Jennifer Francis, etc. And clearly everyone thinks that the problems are very serious, and I don't think anyone is "ignoring the trend" on sea ice on this list. I wrote to you before about the loose talk of using TiO2 for a stratospheric haze, and find that really thin stuff. Did you ever talk to a chemist about this? Like Ruddiman, John Yates, probably the leading TiO2 chemist in the world (after Fujishima, anyhow) is also at UVA, and so when I was there at the music department, and had some ideas about a mild thing that could possibly be done w/ TiO2 (on its photocatalytic side, not white reflectivity side), organized a little experiment that got run in the Lehmann lab there, and so was then invited by Yates to come visit his lab, in which he has constructed a way in which one can look in at a single TiO2 molecule, and observe how the poor bonding in one of the O atoms is the source of TiO2's amazing properties (which could well become important for the future, but more likely in solar cells and such). But from what I know about TiO2, as a non-expert, it seems to me like something of a joke to imagine that you could expect to get any good effect putting TiO2 into the stratosphere to get cooling. What are you putting it in? Is it serving as pigment for reflectivity, scattering, etc? Like all white pigments, it's completely transparent until it's in a vehicle where the refractive index is in a particular ratio to the pigment'syou can protect the TiO2 when it's "inside" something, but then you're, you know, throwing fossil fuels or acrylic acids and stuff into the stratosphere.if it's not encased in something, then you get all those 'band gap excitation' properties activated, all that.but who knows, maybe that's even a good idea - you might not get any reflectivity, but maybe you'd clean up a tiny bit of stratospheric methane! Cheers, Nathan ps - Saying things like: "So geoengineering is our only option to cool the Arctic and stop the melting," is really just poor, I feel. It merits criticism, I think, as it is the kind of disinformation that can create a kind of cult-like group-think quality among those who buy into it.. On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 12:06 PM, Fulkerson, William wrote: > Dear all: > I agree with John. The loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic seems serious > to me particularly if Jennifer Francis is correct about the Arctic Jet > Stream changes impacting lower latitudes. > > Bill Fulkerson, senior fellow > > wf...@utk.edu > > Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment. > > The University of Tennessee > > 1-865-680-0937 > > 1-865-974-1838 Fax > > > > > From: John Nissen > Reply-To: "johnnissen2...@gmail.com" > Date: Sunday, August 17, 2014 6:39 PM > To: nathan currier > Cc: Arctic Methane Google Group , Google > Group , "kcalde...@carnegiescience.edu" < > kcalde...@carnegiescience.edu>, Andrew
RE: [AMEG 8562] Re: [geo] Re: 2. What are some potentially false 'memes' related to solar geoengineering?
As I have been looking at the sea ice thickeness measurements all through summer, it seems that the rate of sea ice pulverisation has gone up with more thickest ice being pushed to the Atlantic via the Fram Strait and also to the Barents Sea through the gaps between the Franz Joseph and Svalbard archipelagoes. When we look at the sea ice area on Cryosphere Today that is 639,000 km2 below average. This is one of the best sea ice area readings for perhaps 15 years, but it is deceptive because the thickest ice from behind the Queen Elizabeth Islands (northern Nunavut) and Greenland has been pushed out to the Atlantic Ocean and also to the Beaufort Sea. Summer 2014 has seen virtuall all sea ice over 5 metres disappearing to the Fram Strait. There are still some thick ice 3-4 metres left north of Nunavut and also in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska and Yukon. The Central Arctic has thinner ice as the very thick perennial ice from behind the Queen Elizabeth Islands have been pushed aside either towards the Atlantic or towards Alaska. The snow's high reflectivity cannot be fully replaced and I have for years lectured about the methane clathrates also erupting on shore. This summer three fairly sizable methane craters have been found in the Taimyr Peninsula and the Yamal Region in northern Russia. I think these will also start to happen on the sea floor. I think it is possible to see vast increases of on-shore methane cratering much like the amount of moulins and crevasses has increased in the proper ice (like glaciers in Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard). I think that sulphuric acid or sulphur dioxide would be quantitatively available for sky brightening, but may be white chalk particles would be environmentally friendlier as there are strong opposition to acidification in the Arctic regions as it helps to release mercury from the soil to drinking water. It bears to be remembered that according to the ice cores, Toba eruptions massive injection of SO2 lasted just for 6 summers before the levels of SO2 returned back to earlier background levels in Greenland ice cores. There is no hope of things staying for long as Toba injected 3,500 km2 ash and aerosols and we cannot match such a master injection of SO2. So, there will have to be a continuous resupply to maintain any substances in the cold and still Arctic air in the winter months. Will that kind of fleet of aircraft be acceptable and how much we actually can cool the air. We should not be overly optimistic of great blinds to be put in place by man to compensate lost snows. Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 16:03:12 -0400 Subject: Re: [AMEG 8562] Re: [geo] Re: 2. What are some potentially false 'memes' related to solar geoengineering? From: natcurr...@gmail.com To: wf...@utk.edu CC: johnnissen2...@gmail.com; arcticmeth...@googlegroups.com; geoengineering@googlegroups.com; kcalde...@carnegiescience.edu; andrew.lock...@gmail.com; dr.adrian.t...@sciencespectrum.co.uk; h...@invent2.com; petercarte...@shaw.ca; jtoppin...@yahoo.com; robert.cor...@getf.org Hi, John - For me, there's a complex mix of facts and fictions in all this. In terms of Jennifer Francis & her work, she wrote to your group specifically, after I suggested it, and stated that she "emphatically" did not think that arctic geoengineering (and this was on the assumption that the forcing would certainly be net negative, I believe) could counteract jet stream changes, or those to NAO, AO, ENSO, etc, and briefly stated her reasons, which seemed pretty clear. It's now a couple of years later - as I've suggested before, you might want to contemplate what she was saying. For the rest of what John writes here, on some details: on SLR, I think Hanson sees Pulsewater melt 1A rate as even higher than what you state, and there's some evidence of almost as high a rate in the Eemian, which is even more relevant for today, but there's no way, given the big, slow signal of sea level, that you could ever talk about total "sea level commitment" (a metric that should be used much as "climate change commitment") separated from CO2 and other emissions policy. I don't get the point, therefore, when trying to push for your 'geoengineering alone' approach - which is, again, what you seem to suddenly revert to in the rhetoric above - that you bother with this. I agree we've been geoengineering already, although I'm not sure why you bring in the work of Ruddiman, etc, on the Holocene early human impact issue, to support it, since that work is not a slam dunk (20th century "geoengineering" is) - although some recent work looks clearer than his, but only from ~2,000 yrs ago, with methane from cattle being a larger part of it. If geoE's problem is a bad rap in the media, that certainly isn't what's impacting my thoughts, or those
