It's impossible to *prove* S = 1. In fact, coaxing the Earth out to a
higher orbit might work, but that's not something we could conceivably
do. Meanwhile an undiscovered 'practical solution' doesn't help us,
and there are probably a lot of people scratching their heads looking
for one.
I'm not sure what you mean by "establish a rigorous, widely accepted
definition of the problem." If I were to take a stab at that it would
be:
Climate change could, before the end of this century, through loss of
arable land and migration of insects and pathogens, cause 'permanent'
(>1,000 years) disruption of the global food production capability,
cause the fragile global economy to collapse, and greatly reduce the
human population that the planet is able to support. And a large,
rapid change to the climate may exceed the adaptive capability of
ecosystems and biomes, and therefore trigger massive extinctions.
Mitigation alone may not be sufficient to prevent this outcome, and
CDR may prove not to be viable.
As you expertly expressed "Developing SRM capabilities should be
considered very seriously."
Glyn
On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 8:22 PM, Yousif Masoud <yousif.mas...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14/07/10 20:59, Glyn Roberts wrote:
>>
>> 2. I think the tone of the request should be explicitly to urgently
>> *prepare* a SRM deployment capability, not for its ASAP deployment as
>> implied. Deployment would be a second gate. We will lose precious
>> time to develop a viable system if we try to pass the deployment gate
>> first. At the same time a governance framework needs to be
>> established and the holistic long-term consequences of any deployment
>> need to be far better quantified - how safe is it. This work should
>> be acknowledged as part of the process.
>>
>> A comment to Jousif...
>>
>> You say: "In science, there is no such thing as "only hope" or "only
>> option"". That's a fine motivational cliche but it is not hard coded
>> into science that N=>2, where N is the number of options. It is of
>> course entirely possible that SRM is the only thing we could do to
>> stop catastrophic climate change. That's not to say that this has yet
>> been adequately established within the scientific community.
>>
>
> Developing SRM capabilities should be considered very seriously.
>
> Here's my formulation of the original letter:
>
> Let S = {x : x is a solution to a potential problem that is going to end
> life as we know it}
>
> Can you prove that the cardinality of S is 1?
>
> I would argue that funding is necessary to establish a rigorous, widely
> accepted definition of the problem. Spoken languages (the ones I know at
> least) are not expressive enough.
>
> Regards,
> Yousif
>
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