In reality, there is no climate reset button. But climate models, unlike the real world, allow do-overs. Scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Caltech and Lancaster University took advantage of this "what-if" proving ground by inserting a unique feedback loop into a climate model to react to theoretical climate engineering techniques. Like using a steering wheel to keep a car on course, their feedback technique reacts and adjusts to conditions resulting from designed climate engineering. And, it is much better at achieving climate objectives—whatever those might be—compared to predicting the amount of geoengineering required ahead of time. In this way, researchers can manage a large set of uncertainties inherent in understanding how these techniques may work in the real world.
The research team used two climate models in the study: one to design a geoengineering strategy, and one in which geoengineering was implemented (a real-world proxy). They implemented the design model as often as they wished, but conducted each simulation in the real-world proxy exactly once. This process parallels the situation that society might face if geoengineering is used to achieve climate goals. Through "what-if" scenarios, they turned up the sun's energy if the climate got too cold or dialed it down if the climate got too warm. Their research showed how using a deliberate feedback mechanism was effective in helping manage some of those uncertainties.
Changing cattle fields to forests is a cheap way of tackling climate change and saving species threatened with extinction, a new study has found. Researchers from leading universities carried out a survey of carbon stocks, biodiversity and economic values from one of the world's most threatened ecosystems, the western Andes of Colombia. The main use of land in communities is cattle farming, but the study found farmers could make the same or more money by allowing their land to naturally regenerate.
Clive Hamilton is an Australian academic and author... [of] Earthmasters: the dawn of the age of climate engineering. It is both a chilling and a fascinating read, an insight into...engineering the climate in response to climate change...
It is unlikely to be a democratic decision, perhaps through the UN.
It’s much more likely to be a technological system of control in the hands of one or a small number of powerful nations such as China, Russia or the United States. If one government has the power to instruct a group of scientists or engineers to turn the earth’s thermostat down a bit, down a bit more, no up a bit more, whose interests are they going to be thinking of when they adjust the temperature?
Not the interests of the Bangladeshi peasants facing rising sea levels.
Not the Indian or Pakistani rice farmers who may soon be severely affected by some shift in the monsoon, which is one of the possible impacts of sulphate aerosol spraying.
We also must remember that generals have always dreamed of controlling the weather. Here we’re going from weather, which is a local phenomenon, to the climate of the earth as a whole. So we can expect the whole process to be militarised or at a minimum have profound geo-strategic implications.
One further ethical dilemma within a terrible tangle of ethical dilemmas is the role of expert scientists, those who possess a highly specialised knowledge at the disposal of their political masters. Those masters will use it to make decisions about where to set the earth’s thermostat. So we have a situation in which the wellbeing of everyone on the planet would potentially lie in the hands of a group of technocrats based in the Arizona desert or in some nondescript facility on the outskirts of Shanghai.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released its last report in a three-part series assessing the latest data and research on climate change. The new report discusses actions we can take to limit the magnitude and rate of climate change, while previous reports focused on the scientific basis for climate change, and on potential ways to reduce vulnerability to the risks presented by our rapidly changing climate.
For the first time, these IPCC reports also include significant attention to the topic of “solar radiation management” or SRM. Also known as “solar geoengineering,” SRM describes a controversial set of theoretical proposals for cooling the Earth, and thereby potentially counteracting the temperature-related impacts of climate change, by reflecting a small amount of inbound solar energy back into space.
With the impacts of rising temperatures already being felt and the IPCC drawing into sharper focus the range of impacts expected in the coming decades, SRM is attracting increasing attention as a potential cheap, fast-acting, albeit temporary response to some of the dangers of climate change.
SRM’s potential effects are only poorly understood, however. And most discussions to date on SRM research governance, as well as most research activities, have taken place in developed countries. Yet people in developing countries are often most vulnerable both to climate change, and any potential efforts to respond to it. The scientific, ethical, political, and social implications of SRM research are necessarily global. Discussions about governance of SRM research should be as well.
Recognizing these needs, in 2010 the Royal Society, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and TWAS (The World Academy of Sciences) launched the SRM Governance Initiative (SRMGI), an international NGO-driven initiative, to explore how SRM research could be governed. SRMGI’s activities are founded on a simple idea: that early and sustained dialogue among diverse stakeholders around the world, informed by the best available science, will increase the chances of SRM research being managed responsibly, transparently, and cooperatively.
Federal government documents received by former B.C. premier Bill Vander Zalm through a freedom of information request define geo-engineering as the modification of Earth systems.
“This approach is increasingly discussed in the scientific and policy communities because global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue to grow while science is converging on the need to reduce such emissions immediately in order to limit global warming to 2 [degrees Celsius] above pre-industrial levels (i.e. Copenhagen Accord),” states a 2012 Environment Canada briefing paper.
The document notes that geo-engineering methods are classified into two groups: solar radiation management, and carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere.
It also indicates that government scientists are involved in the internationally-coordinated Geo-Engineering Model Intercomparison Project or GeoMIP. The modeling program seeks to improve understanding of the “efficacy and unintended consequences” of solar radiation management.
The briefing paper was prepared in advance of a top-level inter-agency meeting convened by Environment Canada to discuss matters about geo-engineering options to address climate change.
A Natural Resources Canada memorandum notes that among those scheduled to attend were Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s national security advisor Stephen Rigby, and Richard Fadden, who was at that time director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
A report published by the “Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions” entitled “Industry and Market Development of Biochar in B.C.” showed that substituting coal and natural gas with biochar could help the province reach its 33 per cent emission reduction goal by 2020.
This report published in February of 2014 is one of the few recent articles that looks into the economic limitations of producing bioenergy products that can compete with conventional fuels. For example, the lowest-cost feedstocks (about $20 per tonne) are mill residues which account for about 20 per cent of harvested round wood.
Most of this product is now being used by existing facilities close to the mills. The cogeneration plant and pellet plant are two good examples in Williams Lake.
The more expensive biomass products are primarily forestry residues from logging operations, commonly called slash piles. They are mainly burned on site at a cost to both the industry and air quality. Therefore, using cull piles to produce biochar offers an environmental positive and possibly economic returns in some locations.
In recent years, some researchers have proposed massive technological fixes to combat global warming, attempts to "geo-engineer" the climate to counteract the build-up of greenhouse gases. A new study led by a professor at UCLA concludes there's no silver bullet to stop climate change.
Some researchers envision seeding the oceans with iron filings to grow massive blooms of carbon-eating algae. Others see scattering the atmosphere with aluminum oxide particles to reflect solar heat back into space. But UCLA geology professor Daniela Cusack says those ideas are mostly pie in the sky.
“Climate engineering is not going to provide a quick fix,” Cusack says.
She and professors from five other universities – including an ethicist and a political scientist – spent two years evaluating various geo-enginnering proposals and found most were either too expensive, too unproven or too risky.
Less than a year after patenting a process that could improve stripping greenhouse gasses from industrial emissions, a professor was recently granted another patent with a different solvent to accomplish the same goal. The newest method uses a form of liquid salt that could be swapped with chemicals currently used to scrub harmful emissions, such as carbon dioxide, or CO2, from industrial emissions.
But what if we could take CO2 emissions from factories, refineries, and power plants and turn them into value-added byproducts that generate cash? What if we could mimic nature’s process of reusing waste streams, but with turnaround times in minutes instead of months, years, decades, or centuries? One company, Austin, Texas-based startup Skyonic, claims it is just months away from cracking this code.
The company's initial effort, a $125 million commercial-scale facility located at a San Antonio, Texas cement factory, is scheduled to open later this year. Skyonic plans to capture CO2 from the cement plant’s exhaust stream, convert the gas into solids in a process called “mineralization,” and process it into bicarbonate (baking soda) and hydrochloric acid. For its next act, the company is aiming to take carbon emissions and turn them into limestone (an approximately $400 billion annual global industry, according to the company), and use it for making everything from paper and glass to paint and cement.
What’s the payback time for such a plant? Skyonic CEO Joe Jones estimates that the company’s first facility will produce around $50 million per year in saleable product, split among acid and bicarbonate. The company is projecting an internal rate of return of 30 percent on its first plant and expects that future plants can be built with similar returns. Additionally, the San Antonio plant will reportedly strip more than 90 percent of the CO2 from the factory’s emissions, with future plants projected to perform similarly.
Technologies that are discussed controversially today may be needed to keep the future risks and costs of climate change in check. Combining the production of energy from fossil fuels and biomass with capturing and storing the carbon dioxide they emit can be key to achieving current climate policy objectives such as limiting the rise of the global mean temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius.
Imagine if someone invented machines to suck carbon out of the atmosphere — machines that were absurdly cheap, autonomous, and solar powered, too. Wouldn’t that be great? But we already have these gadgets! They’re called plants.
The problem is, plants die. So there’s one hurdle remaining: We have to figure out how to lock away the carbon in dead plants so that it doesn’t just return to the atmosphere. The obvious place to put that carbon is into the ground. And so, for years, scientists and governments have been urging farmers to leave their crop residue — the stalks and leaves — on the ground, so it would be incorporated into the soil. The trouble is, sometimes this doesn’t work: Farmers will leave residues on a field and they won’t turn into carbon-rich soil — they’ll just sit there. Sometimes, the whole process ends up releasing more greenhouse gasses than it locks away.
This has left people scratching their heads. But now a simple idea is spreading that could allow farmers to begin reliably pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and into their soil.
Since the 1980s, Smetacek has taken regular expeditions from his home port of Bremerhaven to the Southern Ocean aboard the sturdy icebreaker Polarstern. He goes to study the plankton that fill the sea from top to bottom, extending even into the sediments of the sea floor. Plankton is our planet’s most prolific life form, and the food it generates makes up the base layer of the global food chain. The variety of shapes among plankton species shames plants on land, showing more range in size than the difference between moss and redwood trees. There are more plankton cells in the sea than our current count of stars in the entire universe. Indeed, it is precisely this abundance that leads Smetacek to suspect that plankton could be used to change Earth’s environment.
That these tiny creatures could affect such massive change is not as unreasonable as it sounds. Much of the oxygen we breathe comes from just one species of cyanobacteria, Prochlorococcus. This species was not even discovered until the 1980s: it is so tiny that millions can fit into a single drop of water and no one had produced a sieve small enough to catch it. The oxygen made by these tiny marine plants dwarfs that produced by the Amazon rainforest and the rest of the world’s woodlands combined. By taking in CO2 and exhaling oxygen, these tiny creatures serve as the planet’s lungs, whose steady breathing is limited only by nutrition. Just as land plants need nitrogen, phosphorus and other elements to thrive, missing nutrients restrain planktons’ growth. Add enough of those missing elements – via dust blown off a continent or fertiliser run-off from farm fields – and the oceans will produce blooms that can be seen from space.
Injecting particles into the stratosphere to shade and cool the Earth will never stop climate change. This is the shocking claim made in the July issue of Nature Climate Change by an international group of prominent scientists, including Dutchmen Marten Scheffer from Wageningen University and Aart de Zeeuw from Tilburg University.
Furthermore, geo-engineering is not without risk. For example, there is much uncertainty about the effects on the distribution of precipitation and heat around the world. Its application to solve a regional problem (to extend the monsoon season, for example) can lead to unpredictable, new problems for other countries. Achieving political consensus is most likely if the world as a whole is faced with a major disaster, such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. However, even then politicians will ask themselves – given the risks involved in geo-engineering – whether adaptation to climate change is not a better solution.
This is a blow to technocrats, acknowledge the researchers. 'In any case, geo-engineering is not going to be the breakthrough that some had expected.'
The first success of the environmental movements of the 1960s was to save the whale. Now, with deep irony, whales may be about to save us with their poo. A new scientific report from the University of Vermont, which gathers together several decades of research, shows that the great whales which nearly became extinct in the 20th century – and are now recovering in number due to the 1983 ban on whaling – may be the enablers of massive carbon sinks via their prodigious production of faeces.
Not only do the nutrients in whale poo feed other organisms, from phytoplankton upwards – and thereby absorb the carbon we humans are pumping into the atmosphere – even in death the sinking bodies of these massive animals create new resources on the sea bed, where entire species exist solely to graze on rotting whale. There's an additional and direct benefit for humans, too. Contrary to the suspicions of fishermen that whales take their catch, cetacean recovery could "lead to higher rates of productivity in locations where whales aggregate to feed and give birth". Their fertilizing faeces here, too, would encourage phytoplankton which in turn would encourage healthier fisheries.
Such propositions speak to our own species' arrogance. As demonstrated in the fantastical geoengineering projects dreamed up to address climate change, the human race's belief that the world revolves around it knows no bounds. What if whales were nature's ultimate geoengineers? The new report only underlines what has been suspected for some time: that cetaceans, both living and dead, are ecosystems in their own right.
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