KaiserJeep wrote:Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?
By The Editors of IEEE Spectrum
Do you believe that climate change is a vast left-wing conspiracy that does little more than create jobs for scientists while crippling businesses with pointless regulation? Or, quite the contrary, are you convinced that climate change is the biggest crisis confronting the planet, uniquely capable of wreaking havoc on a scale not seen in recorded history?
Many of you are probably in one camp or the other. No doubt some of you will tell us how disappointed/angry/outraged you are that we (a) gave credence to this nonsense or (b) failed to convey the true urgency of the situation. We welcome your thoughts.
In crafting this issue, we steered clear of attempting to change hearts and minds. Your views on climate change aren’t likely to be altered by a magazine article, or even two dozen magazine articles. Rather, this issue grew out of a few simple observations. One is that massive R&D programs are now under way all over the world to develop and deploy the technologies and infrastructures that will help reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Governments, corporations, philanthropies, and universities are spending billions of dollars on these efforts. Is this money being spent wisely?
That question brings us to the next observation: The magnitude of the challenge is eye-poppingly huge. In 2009, representatives of industrialized nations met in Copenhagen and agreed on the advisability of preventing global average temperatures from rising more than 2 °C above their preindustrial levels. In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1) declared that doing so would require cutting greenhouse gas emissions 40 to 70 percent from 2010 levels by midcentury. These targets then guided the Paris Agreement (2), in 2015.
Even before Paris, Bill Gates had declared his belief that only a series of “energy miracles” could make meaningful progress in reducing greenhouse gases (3).
That got us thinking: What might those “miracles” be? If they were going to enable substantial cuts within a couple of decades, they would have to be in laboratories now.
So we started looking around for these miracles. We focused on three of the largest greenhouse-gas-emitting categories: electricity, transportation, and food and agriculture. We considered dozens of promising projects and programs. Eventually we settled on the 10 projects described in this issue (and two others covered on our website).
We picked most of these projects because they seemed to hold unusual promise relative to the attention they were getting. And we threw in a couple for, well, the opposite reason. Our reporters went to see these activities firsthand, fanning out to sites in Japan; Iceland; Hungary; Germany; the Netherlands; Columbus, N.M.; Schenectady, N.Y.; LaPorte, Texas; Cambridge, Mass.; and Bellevue, Wash. They trooped up and down vertical farms. They flew in electric airplanes. They viewed entirely new microorganisms—genetically engineered with the help of robots—growing in shiny steel fermentation chambers. An algae-growing tank burbled quietly in our mid-Manhattan offices, sprouting the makings for a green-breakfast taste test.
After six months, we had soaked up some of the best thinking on the use of tech to cut carbon emissions. But what did it all suggest collectively? Could these projects, and others like them, make a real difference? We put these questions to our columnist Vaclav Smil, a renowned energy economist, who responded with an essay (4). Without stealing Smil’s thunder, let’s just say that they don’t call them “miracles” for nothing.
The entire June 2018 issue:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/References:
(1)
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/major-greenhouse-gas-reductions-needed-to-curtail-climate-change-ipcc-17300(2)
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/what-is-the-paris-agreement-on-climate-change/(3)
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Energy-Miracles(4)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/a-critical-look-at-claims-for-green-technologies
KJ as a computer development expert I am sure you are familiar with mathematics as a subject, specifically the case of bifurcated hysteresis.
Climate and weather systems demonstrate that they follow a bifurcated hysteresis flow model when you are putting the numbers in. For those who were not well versed in mathematics you can think of bifurcation being a condition where two graph lines move in parallel like the rails of a train track. When one curves left the second matches its curve and so on. The hysteresis part of the statement means that climate or weather patterns will stay on one track for a long distance worth of conditions. When a changing condition puts force on the system to drive it toward the parallel track it resists for a long time, then suddenly jumps 90 degrees over onto the other track at the same set of conditions.
Once the system has hopped from one track to the other it will stay on that track going back and forth just like before until a considerable perturbation causes it to jump back to the first track. You can see this behavior for yourself if you look at the major glaciation climate record. Conditions pass the perturbation threshold and suddenly ice sheets start growing and expanding away from both geographic poles even though conditions from year to year are nearly identical. The tiny change that caused the climate to jump from a minor glaciation condition like we have today to a major glaciation condition where the ice sheets were a couple kilometers thick where I am currently sitting 20,000 ybp is indistinct in the geological record. For weather you can map the same thing in clouds that are precipitating or not with nearly indistinguishable conditions. A cloud formation will go from wet mist to rapid precipitation almost instantly over a wide geographic area as some crucial threshold is crossed, then just as suddenly cease when conditions shift back far enough.
The thing most people seem to have a hard time with is the knowledge that the perturbation once it sets of the track jump requires an opposite perturbation of at least the same order of magnitude to cause the climate or weather to jump back to the first track. If this were not so then the rain cloud would suddenly downpour for a few seconds or minutes and then relieved of a few percent of its stored moisture it would stop raining. This however is not what happens, once the rain starts falling the cloud doesn't just give up 1% or 5% of its moisture, it loses more like 40% and sometimes as much as 60% before the perturbation in the other direction is strong enough to halt the precipitation. In the same vein if you look at the climate record during the major glaciation of the most recent cycle you can see period on a 21,000 and 44,000 cycle and 100,000 year cycle plus others that all interacted in such ways that global temperatures actually fluctuated significantly, without ever quite breaking through into a minor glaciation cycle. Then enough of the cycles lined up close enough together after about 105,000 years of major glaciation to break through the perturbation threshold and dump us into the current minor glaciation track.
Point being, if humans manage to perturb the climate enough to hop us over to the next parallel track, the one where the northern hemisphere is nearly ice free while the Antarctic glaciation is reduced about 30% from where it stands today, the counter perturbation to put us back into the current minor glaciation is not an easy fix. think of it like this, if we hop tracks at 450 ppmv CO2 simply returning to 425 ppmv will not drop us back into minor glaciation climate track. The fact of the matter is the northern hemisphere stayed almost ice free all the way down to around 315 ppmv when the Miocene transitioned into the Pliocene and suddenly ice started appearing in the Northern Hemisphere on the 100,000 year cycle. Even then the ice was mostly seasonal for another few million years until CO2 fell low enough to cause the transition into the Pleistocene at which point ice became permanent glacial formations in northern Greenland that would from time to time spread out in a major glaciation to cover most land north of 41 degrees latitude where moisture was adequate.
IOW if we manage to flip the climate to the next track warmer it will take an extremely large reduction in solar energy input or greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere to perturb us back. Even worse, if you push that hard a simple miscalculation might cause us to skip the track we are on now and jump two tracks to the major glaciation status.
Can technology reverse climate change? With enough energy, time and effort you can change the climate. However if we have already survived the climate jumping from the minor glaciation track to the minor southern hemisphere semi tropical northern hemisphere track would any of the surviving people actually have the energy, time and extra effort to risk perturbing the earth back to say 1980 conditions? If you are a survivor after the transition you are going to be very busy the first few years/decades just surviving and figuring out how to sustain that survival strategy. Does anyone realistically expect people who are struggling to keep their version of civilization viable to be willing to expend the time/money/effort to transition back? Even if that is the case, do you honestly think a large majority of the survivors would be in favor of such a plan?