The Geoengineering Thread

[Graeme]

UN scientists vet global warming fixes

On the heels of another halting round of talks on climate change, UN scientists this week will review quick-fix options for beating back the threat of global warming that rely on technology rather than political wrangling.

Experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), meeting for three days from Monday in the Peruvian capital Lima, will ponder "geo-engineering" solutions designed to cool the planet, or at least brake the startling rise in Earth's temperature.

Seeding the ocean with iron, scattering heat-reflecting particles in the stratosphere, building towers to suck carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere, and erecting a giant sunshade in space are all on the examining table.

watoday

[Graeme]

Saving Nature by Ending It: Geoengineering and the Moral Case for Conservation [Video]

Climate change is a foregone conclusion. The amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere from two centuries-worth of fossil fuel burning (and, apparently, with decades more worth to come, given the glacial pace of efforts to slow said emissions) is enough to substantially warm global average temperatures. And that leaves so-called geoengineering—the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of planetary processes, in the words of the Royal Society—as the leading candidate for a techno-fix of the global warming problem, a fix the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will begin to explore in Lima, Peru this week.

"The Arctic is melting much faster than people expected," noted physicist David Keith of the University of Calgary, during a talk outlining why "nature" should be preserved at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, during the Equinox Summit in early June. "My generation utterly failed" to restrain greenhouse gas emissions, he remarked. "The next generation will have to do it."

Keith is one of the world's leading proponents of geoengineering research as well as an advisor on climate and energy to one of the world's leading philanthropists (and richest men), Bill Gates. As a maker of machines, including the first atomic-scale interferometer, Keith doesn't think we're running out of techno-fixes or even beginning to approach any limits on resources, technological progress or even the Earth's ability to support an expanding human population. "It is true that we will run out of easy oil in the Middle East with profound geopolitical impacts, but that's very different than running out of oil," he said. "We have an absurd amount of hydrocarbons in the world and a growing technological ability to get them out at prices we can afford."

In other words, peak oil (or coal or natural gas) won't save us from climate change. What might, according to Keith? Government regulations, which are what has allowed progress on remedying environmental problems from air pollution to eliminating toxic heavy metals from the soil.

So what then is the impetus for such regulations? A popular position, taken by both environmental groups and big business, is that nature offers economic value. So-called ecosystem services—such as clean water or pollination of crops—contribute billions to the global economy.

scientificamerican

[Graeme]

The radical science of geo-engineering: Maybe it’s not so crazy

In the absence of meaningful international progress on a workable emissions-reduction strategy, some climate experts have begun to ponder more radical Plan B solutions designed to prevent a torrid future filled with fierce hurricanes, vanishing glaciers and flooded lowlands.

These “geo-engineering” technologies (see sidebar), some seemingly plucked from the realm of science fiction, propose techniques to artificially reduce global temperatures and soak up excess carbon as an alternative to traditional fixes, such as green power and energy-efficient buildings. The proposals run the gamut from whitening clouds to capturing airborne carbon and deploying vast quantities of reflective materials into the orbit around Earth to deflect incoming solar rays.

About 60 scientists and international relations experts gathered this week in Lima to contemplate the rapidly growing body of geo-engineering science and, in effect, consider a once-unthinkable question: Should the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which oversees Kyoto (and its eventual successor), seriously consider geo-engineering as part of its arsenal for fighting global warming?

The meeting in Lima is an indication that the science of geo-engineering is gaining a new aura of legitimacy on the world stage, even though few would dispute that it represents a drastic response to arresting climate change. Not only is it rife with complicated legal and ethical questions, there is also the terrifying prospect of what could happen if one of these global-scale interventions fails or has unforeseen consequences.

theglobeandmail

[Graeme]

Geo-engineering: green versus greed in the race to cool the planet

Geo-engineering – artificial efforts to mitigate global warming by manipulating weather patterns, oceans, currents, soils and atmosphere to reduce the amount of greenhouses gases – evokes ideological, political and financial passions. For those who have more or less given up on UN climate talks, it is, along with nuclear power, the only practical planetary way to avoid catastrophic climate change; for others, it is an irresponsible move into the unknown by the rich world that will inevitably have unintended consequences, most probably for the poorest.

But as attempts to get major economies to agree to reduce emissions through energy efficiency falter, so groups of scientists, universities and entrepreneurs are coming together, patenting ideas and pressing the case with governments and the UN to back experiments as the first step towards wide-scale deployment of a suite of technologies.

From just a few individuals working in the field 20 years ago, today there are hundreds of groups and institutions proposing experiments. They fall broadly into two camps: one aims to remove greenhouse gases from the air and store them underground; the other, more controversially, tries to cool the Earth down by reflecting sunlight from the atmosphere or space in a process known as solar radiation management.

The range of techno-fix ideas is growing by the month. They include absorbing plankton, growing artificial trees, firing silver iodide into clouds to produce rain, genetically engineering crops to be paler in colour to reflect sunlight back to space, fertilising the ocean with iron nanoparticles to increase phytoplankton, blasting sulphate-based aerosols into the stratosphere to deflect sunlight, covering the desert with white plastic to reflect sunlight and painting cities and roads white.

There are serious proposals to launch a fleet of unmanned ships to spray seawater into the atmosphere to thicken clouds and thus reflect more radiation from Earth. Most controversial of all is an idea to fire trillions of tiny mirrors into space to form a 100,000-mile "sunshade" for Earth.

Most are unlikely to be seriously considered but some are being pushed hard by entrepreneurs and businessmen attracted by the potential to make billions of dollars in an emerging system of UN global carbon credits. Research by ETC, the Canadian-based watchdog, shows at least 27 patents have been granted to inventors and assignees including Bill Gates, Dupont, the US government and various corporations. Chemical engineer Michael Markels has four patents, Professor Steven Salter of Edinburgh University and climate change scientist David Keith have two.

guardian

[dohboi]

G's been a bit quiet here for the last week or so, so I though I'd throw him this bone:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389556711000281

Fighting global warming: The potential of photocatalysis against CO2, CH4, N2O, CFCs, tropospheric O3, BC and other major contributors to climate change

At the laboratory scale, photocatalysis is a promising method to convert many air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, to safer products for human health but also environmentally more acceptable, such as nitrate and carbon dioxide...

► Photocatalysis can destroy all long-lived well mixed GHGs: CO2, CH4, N2O, CFCs, HCFCs.
► Photocatalysis can also eliminate short-lived climate forcers soot, BC, O3, NOx, SOx.
► Indoor and outdoor large scale local pollution remediation applications are given.
► Self cleaning coatings, paints and glass for urban use are commercially available.
► In the near future photocatalysis can help to fight global warming and climate change.

[Graeme]

Dohboi, Nice find. Looks promising. Glad to see a positive post!

[dohboi]

Don't get any ideas, G. I still see these things as trying to put out a fire with a can of gasoline. I just try to keep track of what the bastards are up to these days.

You might be interested to know that I turned over most of my 'lawn' to carbon sequestering native grasses and forbs years ago. This seems to me the best strategy for much of the world north of the tropics, since trees can contribute to warming by changing albedo if they are planted into what otherwise would be grassland.

Most native grasses have upwards of 90% of their biomass underground in the root system, which can go 15+ feet deep and represent hundreds of miles of root per grass blade.

So I'm not against these types of efforts to let the earth do what it 'wants' to do anyway. I'm just suspicious that the same kind of hubris that got us into this--thinking that we were smarter than the planet (or than God, if you wish)--is likely to get us out of it, or even do anything other than make everything even worse.

[Graeme]

I'll continue to try to be optimistic for our future. I like this essay.

Geo-engineering, nuclear power and climate change: playing God is good for the planet

Most Greens also emphatically object to geo-engineering – the idea that we could consciously alter the atmosphere to counteract climate change, for example by spraying sulphates high in the stratosphere to act as a sunscreen. But the objectors seem to forget that we are already carrying out massive geo-engineering every day, as a hundred million people step into their cars, a billion farmers dig their ploughs into the soil and 10 million fishermen cast their nets.

Certainly, deciding on something as epochal as intentional climatic geo-engineering would involve us in some awesome collective decisions, which we have only just begun to evolve the international governance structures to manage. But if we want the world of tomorrow to resemble the world of today, we will need to act fast. On climate change, meeting the proposed planetary boundary means being carbon-neutral worldwide by mid-century, and carbon-negative thereafter. The former will not be possible without nuclear new-build on a large scale, and the latter will need the deployment of air-capture technologies to reduce the concentration of ambient CO2.


Most importantly, environmentalists need to remind themselves that humans are not all bad. We evolved within this living biosphere, and we have as much right to be here as any other species. The Age of Humans does not have to be an era of hardship and misery for other species; we can nurture and protect as well as dominate and conquer. But the first responsibility of a conquering army is always to govern.

telegraph

[dohboi]

Well, homo-not-so-sapien does not seem to need much encouragement to 'play God' and most of the result have not been particularly good for God or for God's creation (if we must insist on using this kind of theistic language).

Better by far, it seems to me, to learn from 'God' how sequestration has been done by the earth and try to allow the world to return to a state where this could happen again.

At the root of this is some kind of extremely deep-seated radical faithlessness that the world can get along without our constant poking, prodding, manipulating...It is really rather extremely obnoxious if you think about it in terms of human relations--what if you were in a relation with someone who constantly insisted that you were completely stupid, had no idea how to run your affairs, set about to redesign everything on your body, from skin, to teeth to toe nails, then, as you showed signs of succumbing to these gentle ministrations, decided that what you needed was an even bigger whopping does of "Graeme-engineering" so you start working the way you were supposed to (which really always means to the greatest benefit of the manipulating partner), all the time continuing to abuse and 'modify' you in all kinds of unspeakable ways.

This is the basic mentality behind nearly all geo-engineering and carbon sequestration schemes.

[Graeme]

Dohboi, Well, it appears that CC or geoengineering is still a realistic prospect BUT as the following article indicates it is years away.

Ideal carbon capture solution years off -study

LONDON, July 21 (Reuters) - A dream climate change cure to turn planet-warming greenhouse gases into useful products from jet fuel to plastics will take years to develop from the lab and pilot projects, a report found on Thursday.

Pilot projects already use carbon dioxide (CO2) to feed plants, for example to boost tomatoes in glasshouses, while laboratories have tested the manufacture of concrete, plastics and oils, but costs are high and projects depend on concentrated streams of CO2.

Scaling up depends on applying the technology to fossil fuel power plants, trapping the greenhouse gas from a diluted mixture of other flue gases.

Converting the trapped CO2 into useful products and minerals would avoid the cost of burying it underground in empty oil wells, as planned under another untested process called carbon capture and storage (CCS).

"At the moment it's a relatively new technology in the shadows of CCS," said Sheffield University's Peter Styring, co-author of the report, "Carbon capture and utilisation in the green economy", commissioned by the UK-based Centre for Low Carbon Futures.

Possible applications centre around chemical conversion of CO2 to make plastics or fuel, or else feeding the gas to algae to make bio-oils, or combining it with minerals to make construction materials.

reuters

[dohboi]

Graeme, are you throwing me bones now?? Are we suddenly going to switch personalities or something? This is getting too weird.

What we know is that planting native grasses in the mid and upper latitudes and (re-)planting trees in the tropics can help 'naturally' sequester CO2. Pretty much all other approaches should be treated with great caution, at best.

Of course, if you could arrange to have two continents collide, as happened with the Indian (sub-) continent and Asia some millions of years ago, then we may be on to something. But it would have to happen in fast motion this time, since our release of CO2 is in fast motion.

[Graeme]

Dohboi, I'll continue to throw the odd bone toward you as I also find surprises in the media. I'm sure there will be more to come. Everyone gets down now and again. I hope I (or you) don't get too discouraged. I'd like to see you post a major breakthrough though. That would be a change. Will it affect your disposition?

I like the natural approach to sequester CO2. It has been shown recently that all forests store about 2.4 gigatons of carbon per year, not just tropical forests. I think artificial means to remove carbon from atmosphere will also be required too. Just wait.

[dohboi]

Yes, forests can store a lot of CO2. My understanding is that in regions that get snow, the sequestration effect is largely canceled out by the change in albedo--dark tree bark or needles warm the surrounding air as the winter sun hits them much more than if there were just ground or grass covered over with snow. IIRC, there have been a few studies on this.

[dohboi]

More bones for G to chew on:

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2011/%20/25/scientists_try_to_capture_greenhouse_gases_before_they_make_it_to_the_atmosphere/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/25/carbon-capture-utilisation-economic-sense

[Graeme]

Couldn't read Boston ref. Yes. CCS will be used. Here's some modelling to support this view:

Human influence on the 21st century climate: 1 possible future for the atmosphere

New computer modeling work shows that by 2100, if society wants to limit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to less than 40 percent higher than it is today, the lowest cost option is to use every available means of reducing emissions. This includes more nuclear and renewable energy, choosing electricity over fossil fuels, reducing emissions through technologies that capture and store carbon dioxide, and even using forests to store carbon.

physorg

sciencedaily

environmental-finance

And here's a bone for you. Iron filings!

Could iron dust stop global warming in its tracks?

The Ice Age can be explained by some well-placed specks of iron. Adding dust to the waters around Antarctica can supercharge plankton growth, causing global temperature drops. To stop climate change, we need a whole lot of iron filings.

io9

[dohboi]

In the some of the early posts here

http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=8405

they discuss the efficacy of grasses for carbon sequestration. They don't seem to have played a major role in drawing down atmospheric carbon levels in the past, but perhaps they could in the future?

[Graeme]

How to fight warming? Just lock CO2 in rocks

Sometime next month, on the steaming fringes of an Icelandic volcano, an international team of scientists will begin pumping "seltzer water" into a deep hole, producing a brew that will lock away carbon dioxide forever. Chemically disposing of CO2, the chief greenhouse gas blamed for global warming, is a kind of 21st-century alchemy that researchers and governments have hoped for to slow or halt climate change.

The American and Icelandic designers of the "CarbFix" experiment will be capitalizing on a feature of the basalt rock underpinning 90% of Iceland: It is a highly reactive material that will combine its calcium with a CO2 solution to form limestone - permanent, harmless limestone. Researchers caution that their upcoming 6-to-12-month test could fall short of expectations, and warn against looking for a climate "fix" from CarbFix any year soon.

timesofindia

[dohboi]

Good to see you're still at it, G.

The problem is that most people don't make it past the headline, or if they do, not past the first few sentences. So they never get to the line about it being an unproven technology and that it is not a 'fix.'

So people just get the happy feeling that those clever scientists have finally and for all time solved that pesky GW problem, so now they don't have to worry their pretty little heads about a thing and can get back to their happy motoring ways.

[Graeme]

Dohboi, I was just indicating that somebody is trying something different (making limestone from basalt!). They are not there yet. The concept has not been proven. It's early days. Please give them a chance.

[kiwichick]

luv your optimism graeme

too many crisis at the same time in my opinion