Steven Levitt, at the end of a long post on his freakonomics blog about Superfreakonomics and geoengineering:
For all the blogosphere shouting against our chapter, I have to be honest and say that I just don’t get it. I can’t understand why any environmentalist who really cares about the Earth’s future could say with a straight face that geoengineering doesn’t deserve a seat at the table as the global-warming debate heats up.
This mischaracterises the debate/furore/ritual clubbing/whatever (see previous posts). Quite a lot of the people attacking superfreakonomics — eg Brad Delong — *do* want geoengineering to have a seat at the table. It’s just that they don’t like the superfreaks’ treatment of the subject — and may, as I do, think such treatment is going to make it harder to get that seat, not easier. They, and I, are criticising the chapter not because geoengineering shouldn’t be taken seriously, but because Levitt and Dubner don’t seem to be trying to take it seriously: their handling of the issue is partial and unsatisfactory. It mixes a poorly tempered enthusiasm for geoengineering with some tired tropes of global warming denialism (which serve no clear purpose in the argument), and it frames the idea specifically as an alternative to emissions reductions (“Mt Pinatubo versus Al Gore”, “solve the whole global warming problem”) rather than as an additional strategy should there be a need for prompt cooling.
From the evidence of his post Levitt sort-of-gets some of this: that is why he says that the chapter in question is really about “how could we most efficiently cool the earth fast”, rather than other questions such as “how can we most equitably manage the risk of climate change”. But: a) while it may well be that a close reading provides textual support for the idea that the superfreaks acknowledge the narrow focus of their question, the chapter sure gives the impression that it is about climate change in general; b) asking “how can we most efficiently cool the earth fast” without asking broader questions about climate change is intellectually shallow; c) even in the narrow frame, surely “how could we most efficiently cool the earth fast and keep it cool” is a better question, with a more complex answer.
Generosity dictates, though, that we should also look more generally at the real phenomenon that Levitt points to: people who don’t want geoengineering discussed at all, or only under the strictest of limits. I disagree with these people. But I don’t find it very hard to understand where they are coming from. Here are five components to their arguments, as I see them.
- Geongineering adds to the climate risks unconscionably. Volcanoes, and by implication other stratospheric-veil schemes, screw with hydrology; cloud brightening can change ocean currents; ocean fertilization radically rearranges ecosystems: we don’t know how to do any of these things well, and if we sanction the general idea that geoengineering is plausible we are prohibitively unlikely to retire all these risks before going ahead with a scheme. As applied to geoengineering research this is partly an epistemological argument (the impossibility of getting knowledge of a high enough quality) and partly a slippery slope argument. I think in general slippery slope arguments are overblown, but I can see where this line of reasoning is coming from. (There is also a linked concern about crowding out research money for other aspects of climate, but I think that’s a sceond tier argument)
- It is reasonable to distrust a priori the motives of anyone who tries to argue for any approach to global warming other than emissions reduction. People feel this because they know, from experience and analysis, that that there are extremely powerful lobbies which want to slow or derail emissions reduction, and assume that pretty much anyone saying anything along those lines is doing so as either a dupe or a tool of those lobbies. There is an element of cognitive miserliness in this; but where one person says cognitive miser another might say cognitively prudent, and ask why he or she should bother wasting cognition on a subject when past experience has given them a pretty damn good inductive basis for thinking such an investment of thought will be wasted.
- I think its clearly true that many environmentalists have a pre-existing desire for people to live low-impact, low-consumption lives, often because they sincerely believe that this will make everyone happier. To some extent, and with various levels of awareness that they are behaving in this way, some of these people see concern about global warming as an instrumental way to bring a low-consumption low-impact work of some sort about. This is not to say they are insincere in their concern about global warming: merely that it is overdetermined. I personally would rather people separated out these two strands of their thought, but I can see as a matter of fact that they frequently don’t, and I’m sure if Steve Levitt was really trying to “get” things he could see that to.
- The first moral argument. At an everything-I-need-to-know-I-learned-in-kindergarten level people think that when you make a mess you should clean it up, not paint over it, even if painting over it is much easier. This is not a particularly good argument, and will have little if any traction with people who see the world in terms of costs and benefits — but it is an argument that people can feel easily and clearly, and feelings about the morality of pollution run deep.
- The second moral argument: the purpose of environmental action is to restore nature. This means getting back to a preindustrial sort of a climate, with lower greenhouse gases and no permanent high-altitude smogs. For me, this is a flawed argument, a planet-wide application of the naturalistic fallacy; I think correct environmental action is much more complex, and that increasing the possibilities for human happiness matters more than an idealised concern for nature. But I understand that other people don’t feel this way.
There is doubtless more to geoengineering opposition than this, but these five points seem to me to cover a great deal of it. The important thing is to grasp that geoengineering is at some level just another form of climate change, that there are a great many of ways in which people disagree about climate change, and that it helps to understand them. If Steven Levitt wants to understand all this better, then he ought to buy a copy of Mike Hulme’s “Why we disagree about global warming” (Amazon US|UK), as discussed in the Copenhagen reading list post.
PS: Recent useful contributions to the superfreakonomics debate: an interview with Ken Caldeira by Jeff Goodell, whose book on all this is going to be way better than Superfreakonomics, and Daniel Davies on what contrarians should expect.
Filed under: Geoengineering
A swimming pool pump, geoengineering potential unknown
It’s clear that there are real problems with Levitt and Dubner’s take on geoengineering in their book Superfreakonomics (see past two posts Update: or more concisely, see Eric Pooley’s piece on Bloomberg, reposted here with added Joe Romm). I thought it might be interesting to see if those problems necessarily reflect mistakes made by Nathan Myhrvold, who is one of their sources (more on Nathan and some of his geoengineering ideas in this post).
Here are the things that Nathan says or is reported to believe in the relevant chapter — not necessarily a comprehensive list, but I think I got most of them:
That people who suggest global warming will lead to the extinction of humanity are probably wrong; that an Inconvenient Truth was meant to scare people; that Al Gore doesn’t lie in An Inconvenient Truth, but some aspects of the film are misleading, in that they lead people to believe significant problems such as the flooding of Florida are near at hand when they are not; that it will take decades for computer software/hardware to be good enough to implement models that do a really good job on climate; that while global warming is a real phenomenon most of the warming of the past decades may be due to a reduction in aerosol pollution (“global dimming”); that most commercial greenhouses run under high CO2 coniditions in order to benefit from CO2 fertilization; that current attempts to replace fossil fuels are insufficient to the task; that transportation is not a big sector; that doing without coal is economic suicide (though that phrase is not in quotation marks); that cap and trade will not deliver large enough carbon cuts in time; that “a lot of things people say would be a good thing probably aren’t”; as an example of that, that the reradiated heat from solar panels, which is a lot more than the electricity they generate, will warm the planet; that the building of a planet’s worth of solar panels would itself require a lot of energy which would mostly not be generated by solar panels; that Mt St Helens kicked up a lot of dust; that his dorm room at college was messy; that “big-ass” volcanoes have climatic effects; that the ideas for implementing a stratospheric aerosol that would cool the world included in the chapter on geoengineering of the NAS 1992 report on policy implications of climate change were not very practical; that putting sulphates into the stratosphere as opposed to the troposphere gets you an extra level of cooling in a way that can be seen as leverage; that the pumps on a pipeline taking sulphur gases from ground level to the stratosphere (where it would be moored to a blimp) could be smaller than the pumps in his swimming pool; that there is a lot of stockpiled sulphur in Canada; that one sulphur-aerosol project using that stockpile could “solve the whole global warming problem for the northern hemisphere”; that in view of fossil fuel use (and possibly other things) “we’ve already engineered the earth”; that geoengineering could be “an excuse to pollute”, but that that is not necessarily a reason not to do it (the analogy is to not refusing care to a heart patient because she doesn’t have a healthy lifestyle); that unilateral geoengineering “would freak people out”; that he doesn’t dismiss global warming; that he wants to see geoengineering technology ready for use if the worst climate predictions come true, but not fielded as a matter of course; that a slow down in world GDP growth due to stringent carbon emission reductions would fall particularly hard on the legitimate aspirations of the poor; that “if you believe the scary stories are true, you should also admit that relying on reducing carbon dioxide emissions is not a very good answer”; that the scary scenarios could come about even if there are herculean efforts towards carbon dioxide emissions reduction.
So what’s to disagree with here?
The claim that a geoengineering scheme in Canada would “solve the whole global warming problem for the Northern Hemisphere” is wrong. It might at best be true only for an absurdly limited definition of global warming that was purely in terms of radiative forcing; I doubt if it is true in any other — that is to say meaningful — sense. (Even if it were true, it is certainly not knowably true; as Nathan says, climate models aren’t good enough to tell one such things.) Most obviously, if you cool the northern hemisphere while leaving the south to warm you will move the thermal equator; as a result the pattern of northern hemisphere climate in a world with greenhouse warming and a cooling cap on the north will not be the same as the pattern in a world that in which there was neither. A recent study by Ken Caldeira and Lowell Wood (Global and Arctic climate engineering: numerical model studies, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2008) doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0132), who both attended the meeting where the Superfrakonomics discussion is set, looked at idealised geoengineering schemes aimed at the Arctic; it found that they could not recreate a preindustrial climate in a doubled-carbon-dioxide world, but that they did do quite a lot to ameliorate such a world. That’s the most you can say, and it seems to me a very long way from saying “abracadabra, problem solved”. In general, anything aiming to be a long term solution to global warming would have to include flat carbon dioxide levels, though I would be willing to accept that it might also include some geoengineering. This sort of “geoengineering can be a solution in and of itself” stuff is really misleading, and needs to be rejected as such.
Then there’s “we’re already engineering the earth”. Again, no. David Keith nailed this trope, popular with geoengineering enthusiasts, ages ago: “Making a mess is not engineering”. Engineering is purposeful; what humanity has done to date, great though its impact has been, has not had any purpose at the level of the earth system (it has had other purposes, of course, but engineers have to mean to change the thing they are changing, and to make changes directed at a given and pre-specified goal)
“Transportation is not a large sector”: no, it is a large sector — in the US second only to electricity generation in carbon emissions. That said, in context, he was talking about Priuses, and private road transportation for passengers is a subset of transportation as a whole. But as it stands I think it’s fair to mark that as wrong.
The claim that reduced scattering of sunlight by aerosols, through direct and indirect effects, has had a greater effect on global warming than greenhouse gases in recent decades is also, as far as I know, wrong. Something similar is probably true for some areas, such as western Europe and the eastern US, but I know of no evidence for it being a worldwide phenomenon and would be surprised to hear of such evidence.
Doing without coal is economic suicide: as Tim Lambert has pointed out, tell it to the French. (again, Nathan may not have said this — it could be the Superfreaks’ point). Coal is very abundant and cheap and it will take a lot to make people give it up; but a lot can be done (as can CCS, though that, too, is hard.)
That’s about it for flat out disagreement.
There’s another claim — solar cells warm the world — that needs further unpacking and which I think I will leave for a later post.
There are some more which are judgment calls. It is true that building new energy infrastructure will require energy from the old infrastructure. But it’s not clear that the amount of energy needed to create new low and zero carbon energy infrastructure will be significantly grater than the energy that would be needed to recreate the old energy infrastructure, a process that is continuously ongoing. As replacement is just business as usual, it’s already be in the figures. So it seems a bit strange to treat this is as an extra burden, and a little unnecessary, in that the burdens of business as usual are heavy enough.
The 1992 NAS geoengineering schemes, such as artillery guns for lofting aerosols into the sky, may well have been fanciful; to those not acquainted with the details it’s not clear that a great big hosepipe sticking into the stratosphere is less so. If you’ve seen detailed engineering trade offs, though, you might be convinced of such a thing. You might also know whether the pumps needed are larger or smaller than those which service Nathan’s pool. On that, I must admit, I have no clue at all.
Lumping together the other claims, I find myself in broad agreement. First, on climate: Yes, I agree that global warming is real and needs addressing, but I too don’t think climate change is likely to lead to the extinction of the human race. I do think that An Inconvenient Truth (which I have not seen, but I have seen Gore’s presentation) is designed to scare people — which is a fair goal for someone raising an alarm — and when I saw him talk I felt he skirted close to the edge on sea level stuff. Volcanoes of large ass do have effects, and there may be a (very small) possibility of very bad events even after massive reductions in carbon emissions. If the sort of climate model one really wants is one that produces projections with a sub-kilometre grid, and does so fast enough that one can run large ensembles in reasonable periods of time — and that is indeed the goal of soem respectable people in the field — then expect to wait a couple of decades for the many exaflops required. Carbon dioxide is indeed used for its fertilization effect in greenhouses (can’t say that I know it’s used in most of them, but it is in a lot).
On emissions reduction it is clear that what has been done to date is insufficient, and though I know and respect people who think that cap and trade will do much to solve the problem I do not think their case is proven, in that I do not think that a cap and trade system of sufficient scope is necessarily politically achievable. It is true that “a lot of things people say would be a good thing probably aren’t”, though in the field of climate I would point to corn ethanol as the best example. There is definitely a risk that a slow down in world GDP growth due to stringent carbon emissions would fall particularly hard on the legitimate aspirations of the poor (I think that risk could be mitigated by the right policies, but I wouldn’t bet that it would be). There are also imaginable circumstances where one might want more options than emissions control alone.
On geoengineering I think leverage is a petty useful concept and use it myself, and I know there are mountains of sulphur in Canada. I agree that geoengineering, unilateral or otherwise, “would freak people out”, and that supporting research aimed at understanding what the technology might do and how it might work, as I do, does not mean endorsing deployment. I also agree that geoengineering could all to easily be seen as “an excuse to pollute” but that there would be circumstances in which that was not a good reason for not doing it.
So I think there are some factual claims that are wrong, some things which are dubious, and a lot to agree with. Getting things wrong is bad, but it happens. Letting them stay wrong in a chapter you have agreed to read over for accuracy is worse, and shouldn’t happen. That said, most of what is wrongest about the chapter does not seem to stem directly from Nathan, at least as represented in the finished product.
My overall feeling is that Nathan, who I’ve met a few times and liked, is convincing to himself and others, brash, capable of making mistakes, biased (as we all are). He is committed to particular technological approaches and overclaims for them (the besetting sin of the technologist); he does so in a big way here when he says a particular piece of geoengineering is a solution to the whole problem. This is reflected in the fact that it seems unclear, and may indeed be unclear to him, how much he thinks of geoengineering as a research project and how much as a truly likely option. He clearly likes to be contrarian, and a critical outlook and quick intelligence may make him unwilling to dig into and understand the basis of widely held positions in which he sees some immediate flaws. He could be more careful. But I can’t say I agree with Joe Romm that this all makes Nathan an “idiotic savant”.
Image from Flickr user SirWiseowl, used under a creative commons licence
Little of science or policy import in this post: mostly process.
Brad DeLong (all right one more i gotta correct the record) has used the Google cache to come up with pretty clear evidence that, pace Dubner (who may have been misinformed), there was originally a look-inside-the-book option for Superfreakonomics which has subsequently been withdrawn.
Joe Romm (anatomy of a debunking) posts quite a lot of correspondence with Ken Caldeira, some of which was in Dubner’s earlier post. One specific point to stress: Ken is in this email as elsewhere very clear that he supports geoengineering research and not geoengineering implementation under current conditions. That crucial subtlety does seem to be missing from the Superfreakonomics account of his work. In general, reading this through, it seems to me that my impression of the chapter last night is one I broadly still hold.
Paul Krugman looks at some lessons learned and points well enunciated in superfreakingmeta.
I note, by the way, that Google is currently of the opnion that no-one is using the term superfrakonomics, or for that matter superfrak’donomics. Given the number of BSG fans in the better parts of the blogosphere this surprises me…
Those interested in more on geoengineering from this blog, rather than a load of links to today’s controversy, might want to browse further in the geoengineering category; a nice start is this post and the article it links to, and the IMO post is quite fun too.
Update: missed this, an email exchange with Superfreakonomics author Steven Levitt. He doesn’t really get some of the issues, but does say:
I do think also that there is something to be said for raising some skepticism about the current climate models and predictions…they are stated and restated as if they are fact, when in practice I suspect, and good scientists agree, that there is enormous uncertainty and things we cannot or at least could not know.
Probably, though, our message on geoengineering would have come through better if we had written the chapter differently.
[Updated Monday morning to include Brad's last post and Gavin's take on Real Climate, an update I take note of up here because they're both worth your time: More in subsequent post Monday pm]
As someone interested in geoengineering, and writing about it myself, I look forward to actually reading what Levitt and Dubner say on the subject in Superfreakonomics (Amazon US|UK) (you can download a copyright-challenged scan of the chapter here as of the time of writing). Once I’ve done so I may, if so moved, comment on it further, but I’ll try to keep this short [update: as you can see from the bottom of this post I did read it -- and at the time of posting the xkcd cartoon at the top looks more apposite than ever]. From what I can gather: a) they make a case that geoengineering is a serious option and should be considered as such; b) they do so in a way that spectacularly fails to convince — and indeed enrages — a lot of people who are of a different opinion on this matter, partly because some of their material seems to be the sort of thing that denialists/sceptics/whatever say a lot, and wrong. Anyway, because I feel I should post something, I haven’t read the material and don’t really want to get into this in depth right now, here is a guide to what’s out there for those who want to track it.
Outrage central (how surprising) is Joe Romm’s Climate Progress. Gists follow (nb there’s a fair amount of overlap and repetition):
Post one: Seeing belief in climate change as being akin to religion is wrong, economics not a science, Nathan Myrhvold not all he’s cracked up to be [not fully convinced by JR on this]; Ken Caldeira, a major source for the relevant part of the book, feels misrepresented. This post originally came with a pdf of the chapter, but the publishers asked for it to be removed. It is also apparently the most trafficked post on Climate Progress this year
Post two: Evil geoengineering ideas of Myrhvold’s have corrupted Bill Gates and Warren Buffett; Pinatubo cooling, which lasted for a year or so, does not validate the idea that permanent stratospheric sheidls might do better.
Post three: Amazon feature that allows you to read relevant pages of the book has been disabled. Superfreaks wrong to say the world is cooling now, and that it was feared to be cooling catastrophically in the 1970s. Union of Concerned Scientists lists problems with the climate science in the chapter.
Post four: Superfreaks have denied be “deniers” — but JR has not accused them of this. Superfreaks appear, as Paul Krugman has pointed out, to have mischaracterised/misunderstood Martin Weitzman’s argument about catastrophic risks in the low probability part of the climate sensitivity distribution.
Post 5: Outsourced in large part to Brad Delong (see below). Disputes Dubner’s claim that the book was never readable on Amazon.
There will be more from Joe over the next few days. Dubner’s main response to critics (there was an earlier I-am-not-a-denier placeholder) came out after the fifth of these posts. Gist of the main post: Not a denialist. Disputes some of Joe’s specific points, promises more to come on some, notes Joe’s ideological stance. Key point: Ken Caldeira saw the draft twice, was asked for comments, mostly didn’t object. Quotes Ken in an email to Joe and since forwarded by Ken to Dubner:
I f&@?ed up. They sent me the draft and I approved it without reading it carefully and I just missed it. … I think everyone operated in good faith, and this was just a mistake that got by my inadequate editing
In a later email Ken expanded on his interactions with Romm
Rather than acting deliberately, I panicked and commented on things that I now wish I would have been silent on. It was obviously a mistake to let myself get drawn into this, and I learned a quick and hard lesson in public relations.
Dubner goes on to say that the relevant text was never searchable on Amazon. Its noticeable that this post focuses entirely on Romm, treating him as fons et origo of all other criticism. It doesn’t address the fact that the chapter has also been criticised by economist and colleague on fellow New York Times blogger Paul Krugman. Gists:
Krugman post 1: I trust Joe Romm, and I worry that superfreakomics guys love contrarianism for the sake of it. Fate of the planet too important for that.
Krugman post 2: Starting off with the global-believed-in-the-1970s story cuts credibility. They missed the point of Weitzmann’s analysis.
Krugman post 3: More on what Weitzmann actually said. Notes Dubner’s not-a-denialist post, doesn’t think it cuts it.
Elsewhere
Diagnosis, in brief: (1) they write about stuff they clearly don’t understand (2) they pick a catchy reverse-common-wisdom nugget as a headliner without the having the slightest interest in whether it is true or not
William also offers chapter and verse on global cooling and other rhetoric borrowed from skeptics that the superfreaks use (rather confusingly, since they and their sources genuinely don’t seem to be deniers). He also has excellent taste in cartoons.
Levitt and Dubner do not understand the climate science literature. This by itself would not be fatal, but what has taken them off the cliff is the Freakonomics formula: “What you thought you knew about X is wrong!”
There follow some mostly good points, made more concisely than Joe Romm does.
Brad Delong has taken various shots on the subject. Here is an exchange of emails with Dubner, and here are six specific questions. He also helpfully points readers towards 4 more favourable blog posts on the book from Bryan Caplan:
Overall, [the book]’s better than the original. It’s still cutesy, but stronger in the “who cares?” factor.
[The geoengineering chapter] is a strong story, but it is also one-sided, portraying the geo-engineers as brilliant iconoclasts, dismissing the objections to geo-engineering as the knee-jerk reaction of the unreflective, and failing to convey the views of a single credible geo-engineering sceptic. A well-deserved swipe at Al Gore does not really count.
There is nothing too wrong with [the geoengineering chapter]. Not enough for name calling. What the authors are doing is identifying the ‘economist’s angst’ in this whole discussion.
and Robert Waldmann
As far as I can tell, [the superfreaks' critics] really don’t have very much to say against [geoengineering]. Rather they mainly object to the Steves’ proposal that we use [it] as an alternative to cap and trade. The argument against doing both seems fairly weak to me.
[Update: Then, in the optimistically entitled *sigh* last post on superfreakonomics I promise, Brad gives a full list of issues he and others have with the chapter (you need to have the pdf or a copy of the book to go through these properly). This is probably the best single place for a list of the problems that have been raised. His take home message:
It really does look to me like Levitt and Dubner:
- went to Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures.
- got wowed.
- excitedly wrote up what they heard.
- and then failed to do their intellectual due diligence about what they were told there.]
[Further update: Gavin has a post at Real Climate, which tends towards the straw-mannish, in that it suggests that geoengineering might be treated as a strategy for a world with no emission reductions, which I don't think many people, if any, are really advocating (though people might argue it could come about anyway). But it is definitely worth reading. And it points to this very good post on the topic by Michael Tobis, which puts geoengineering, mitigation and adaptation into the context of interventions which are not mutually exclusive -- a good place to put them]
Ezra Klein looks at other aspects of the book and the authors’ MO
The problem with Super Freakonomics is it prefers an interesting story to an accurate one. This is evident from the very first story on the very first page of the book.
After all this I gave in and skimmed the chapter. It has some interesting discussions in it, but I think quite a few of the criticisms are well founded: there are what I take to be some errors, some suggestio falsi, and some serious omissions. I think there’s a structural delight in the contrarian which gets irksome, and I think building your understanding of geoengineering out of what is heard at an Intellectual Ventures meeting is not likely to give you a fully rounded view of the issue. I wish they had gone deeper. That said I am not convinced by all the criticisms, and I do think wider discussion of geoengineering — and indeed frank advocacy — is something to be hoped for. People need to say what they think should be done.
That said, last word for now to dsquared’s take on freakonomics in general:
My intuition is that Freakonomics has had its moment in the sun. The central selling point was always, basically, academic machismo; the presumption on the part of economists that because they were “smart” in the Larry Summers sense, they could turn their hand to anything and the rest of the world was bound to listen to them. Those days, to put it mildly, are gone.
Image from the wonderful xkcd, used under creative commons licence
Filed under: Geoengineering, Interventions in the carbon/climate crisis, Published stuff
It is time again for the annual feast of fun that is Time’s Heroes of the Environment list. As always it is a thought provoking reminder of how narrow my environmental issues are. Climate and energy issues dominate what I think of under that rubric but here there is lots of room for good old fashioned pollution: mines, dirty rivers, rubbish and the like. Not to mention bloody organic farmers, and various people who would not really make my list (Pen Hadow? Really?)
But climate and energy do top the bill: Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives leads off the whole package, and there’s a nice spread about Joe Romm, who gives his take on the honour here. (Nice note of irony: the piece on Joe Romm is written by Bryan Walsh, eviscerated by Joe earlier this year for a piece that took the Breakthrough Institute’s line on energy R&D; in last year’s Heroes Bryan profiled the Breakthrough Institute’s founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger.)
My contribution this year (following Jim Lovelock in 2007 and Kim Stanley Robinson in 2008) is on David Keith, who I imagine is probably suitably embarrassed by the whole thing; but to my mind deserves the recognition. His heroism consists of thinking hard and clearly about things other people are hardly thinking about at all. That has let him do a great deal to help frame and further the debate on geoengineering, which needed to be done, and now he’s pursuing ideas about direct air carbon captur, which again can but benefit from the serious attention. It also makes him one of the best people to talk to about climate and energy issues, bar none. Excerpt:
The brains have arrived, Master (©2008 Ewan Nicholson)
Early success in pure physics (his graduate project, supervised by a professor noted for his mentoring of future Nobelists, was a long-awaited experimental breakthrough in atomic optics) did not satisfy him. Climate work promised a greater opportunity to do good while at the same time throwing up what ambitious physicists always want most: questions no one yet knows the answers to.
Soon he was working on nitty-gritty climate-modeling problems while learning economic and policy analysis. That breadth has helped him communicate climate concerns to the often skeptical energy industry; it’s also part of why he is listened to by people like Bill Gates, who relies on meetings organized by Keith to stay up-to-date on climate science. “While he’s got informed and strong opinions,” Gates says, “he’s also incredibly open-minded, pointing out the unknowns in his opinions and just as readily pointing out the merits of others’ opinions.”
It’s been a good press weekend for David. He has a Perspectives piece on air capture that’s part of a package on CCS in last Friday’s Science; that got picked up on John Tierney’s NYT blog.
Image of David Keith by Ewan Nicholson, used with permission, all rights reserved
Filed under: Geoengineering, Global change, Interventions in the carbon/climate crisis, Trees
Spot the dune...
An interesting paper in Climatic Change: Irrigated afforestation of the Sahara and Australian Outback to end global warming by Leonard Ornstein, Igor Aleinov and David Rind Doi: 10.1007/s10584-009-9626-y. (Mason Inman has a nice write up with some background and comment over at ScienceNow; [update] and corresponding author Len Ornstetin chronicles the idea’s rocky research road on his own site). The central idea is that with enough irrigation you can turn big deserts into big forests: forests big enough to suck up a large part of total carbon dioxide emissions for decades or even centuries. I think that you can take this notion as a serious plan, a thought experiment, a jeu d’esprit, a warning or a jumping off point, depending on predisposition. Aspects of all that in what follows.
Here are the basic numbers: The Sahara is about a billion hectares in area, on which you could fit a trillion eucalyptus trees. Those trees, if working flat out, could each put on twenty kilos of biomass a year. If roughly half that biomass is carbon, that would mean a net annual sink on the order of ten billion tonnes of carbon. That’s about the amount that humans currently emit.
To create such a forest in a century, you would have to plant as many hectares of trees every year as are currently lost to deforestation worldwide. And, even harder, you’d have to provide them with what they need to order to grow. You need a great many things to turn a desert into a forest — soil nutrients, microbiota, possibly pioneer plants, a compelling reason for doing the work, and so on — but the biggest hurdle, pretty obviously, is water. Eucalyptus, the authors say, needs about a metre of rainfall a year. For a billion hectares, that’s 10 trillion tonnes of water. The authors assume, reasonably for all that I know, that if you have smart irrigation getting the water to just where it is needed you can get away with half that amount. Even so, even the vast aquifers beneath the Sahara don’t contain the amount of water required, so it will have to come from desalination plants on the and be pumped it up to where it is needed (the average elevation of the Sahara is about 450m). The size of this undertaking — more than 50 new Niles, flowing in reverse — may explain why the authors feel they need to use that fine old-school term “terraforming” for their undertaking. The power requirement, if I’m reading their figures right (4.04kWh/m^3 fresh water delivered), is a bit to the north of 2.2 terawatts, about 40% of it for desalination by reverse osmosis and about 60% for pumping.
The world’s electricity generators currently provide about 18,000 TWh of energy, which averages out at 2TW of constant supply. So in energy terms the desalination and pumping needed for the Sahara forest would use a bit more electricity than the world currently generates for every other purpose. This unavoidably sounds nutty. But that is at least in part because of the nuttiness of the situation, rather than its proposed solution — the nutty situation in which we burn fossil carbon at tens or hundreds of thousands of times the rate at which it is sequestered over geological time. If humanity insists on putting so much carbon dioxide into the air every year that it would take a brand new forest the size of the Sahara to suck it all up, then that’s where the madness starts. That creating such a forest would have to be a large undertaking — large in terms of the whole world economy — is just a consequence of the initial folly.
And in practice the investment would be smaller. A nice thing about forests is that they can go some way to creating their own weather, and the authors have looked at this effect with some climate modelling work. If a forest with irrigation dampened soil is imposed on the Sahara, rain begins to fall, in some places as much as a metre of it every year. This rainfall doesn’t obviate the need for irrigation, because it is strongly seasonal — basically an extension of the West African monsoon of April to November. But it might significantly reduce the irrigation requirements. Maybe you could get away with just a terawatt…
The Sahel, to the south of the Sahara, also gets damper in those enhanced and extended monsoon rains, which is definitely a plus, I’d guess, and the African Easterly Jet, a feature which is driven in large part by the temperature contrast between the desert and surrounding land, seems to more or less vanish. Since a large number of Atlantic hurricanes get their starts as kinks in the AEJ, that might be a pretty significant change, too. Beyond that, the rest of the world seems pretty much unaffected. In particular, the authors say that their models show no additional warming that might be laid at the door of the change of albedo which comes with replacing light desert with darker trees. (I think this fits with the 2007 Bala et al paper in PNAS, which suggested that warming associated with afforestation would be due to changes in boreal, rather than tropical, forest cover).
The Bodélé depression (pic by Charlie Bristow)
There is, however, a fly in the ointment. The Bodélé depression in Northern Chad is only a small part of the Sahara, but it is the world’s greatest source of mineral dust, with the winds drawing some 700,000 tonnes a day off the surface. According to Koren et al in ERL, 2007 40 million tonnes of dust a year travels from the Bodélé to the Amazon rain forest, half the total annual mineral inputs into the forest basin (the dust fertilises the mid Atlantic, too, and it may play a role in abating hurricanes too — Jim Giles wrote a lovely piece on this for Nature some time back). There’s a real chance that this dust is crucial to maintaining the soil fertility of the forest, and even if the Bodélé itself were left unirrigated and unforested, the increase in precipitation all round it, and the wetter atmosphere downwind of it, would probably shut it down as a dust producer. If growing a forest in the Sahara hurts the one we already have in the Amazon it obviously becomes a less attractive proposition (though if we are going to lose the Amazon forest anyway, things might look different…). That said, if you are pumping trillions of tonnes of water across continental scales, thenpaying to air dump a few tens of millions of tonnes of fine-particle mineral fertiliser upwind of where you want it is hardly going to break the bank.
Something the authors don’t look into is that the higher the CO2 level in the atmosphere gets, the easier this all becomes. Higher carbon dioxide levels make plants more water efficient, all other things being equal. All other things are not, necessarily, equal — higher CO2 also makes things hotter, which plants don’t much care for. In a world with some solar radiation management, though (such as aerosols in the stratosphere) all things might indeed be kept equal, or at least temperature might be. Martin Claussen has been working for some time on the idea that the Sahara is a “tipping element” in the climate regime, one that can be pushed from a dry state to a wetter one relatively easily. In a more carbon rich but not-too-hot world the circumstances might be right for it to tip the other way, and it might take rather less than a 50-Nile terraforming project to nudge it over.
In the final analysis, I don’t think I take this paper very seriously as a practical proposition. Doubling global electricity generation for a single project seems far fetched. For such a thing to be put anywhere near the top of one’s list of African infrastructure investments would require that a great many other large and important development initiatives (provision of power, water, roads, cold chains, vastly improved agronomical advice, etc to the vast majority of the population, for starters) would already have had to have been put in place. But it’s kind of nice to imagine a world in which we were wealthy and together enough to have actually taken the pressing need for those changes to heart, and were thus in a position to consider greening a great desert too.
Bahrain's Tree of Life -- a limited pilot project?
And regardless of practicalities I think there’s real value in taking the analysis further. A big idea like this throws off many fascinating questions that force you to look at the earth, and what we know about it, in new ways (or old ways but with a new twist):
What polycultures would you build the new forest with? (all-eucalyptus-all-the-time is fine for first calculations, but doesn’t sound like anyone’s idea of a proper landscape. Baobabs? Laurels? And what fauna might be good, or bad?)
What genetic engineering — reduced flammability, higher albedo leaves, more refractory soil carbon, who knows what else — might help?
How much bioenergy with carbon capture could be built into the scheme, perhaps initially to power some of the inland the pumping stations?
Can biochar help? (and a million other soil-creation questions)
What are the best silvicultural ways to make the new woodlands pay, as that is something people by and large like their environments to do, and can there be room for some agriculture too?
How could local people best be convinced this was a good idea? And what are the property title reforms that would be prerequisite?
If the AEJ stops, do hurricanes stop too? Or does some other mechanism initiate them, maybe somewhere else? And does the dust really have an effect?
When the Sahara was wetter and less dusty in the past, did the Amazon actually suffer from lack of nutrients? (I think there is actually some research already out there on that — but can’t offhand think where)
How can the transformation be made stunningly beautiful?
What regions and landforms do you want to keep as monuments/heritage sites/national or world parks? There would undoubtedly be a real aesthetic/biodiversity loss in the removal of the desert, not to mention risks to some utterly wonderful buildings.
How to stop the Fremen becoming soft and decadent now that Arrakis has become a land of milk and honey?
and so on.
In particular, it would be nice to see some analysis of halfway houses; where in the Sahel and points north might merely huge, as opposed to planet-sized, afforestation be attempted, and what would be the costs and benefits? It is possible to transform land on very large scales, if not quite this large: 40m hectares of the Brazilian cerrado have been brought into agricultural production over the past fifty years. Can afforestation/silvicultural interventions on such scales ever make sense? And where else might be suitable for such things?
And on the topic of where else: My apologies to any Australian readers for not going into the paper’s analysis of foresting the Outback in addition, or as an alternative, to the Sahara. Basically the arguments are largely the same but the costs and effects are a bit smaller. There’s also a risk of interfering with El Nino that would definitely merit further attention. If anyone wants to blog more on that aspect of the subject send me a link and I’ll post it up here.
Image credits: Eucalyptus trees at the top from Big Lands Brazil, who would like to sell you some…; Bodele from Charlie Bristow, reused with permission; Tree of life from Flickr user Solvo under Creative Commons license
Filed under: Geoengineering
At roughly the same time as the Royal Society was weighing in on geoengineering last week, so was Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus project, considerably less convincingly. The context here was a process by which a panel of five economists was briefed on a range of investments that might be made to do something about climate change: for each intervention there was a briefing paper and a pair of discussion papers analysing that briefing. After reading all this and hearing oral arguments the panel voted on which of the interventions was considered the best investment.
The intervention portfolio on offer featured carbon taxes of various strengths, R&D into new energy technologies, carbon sequestration and direct-air carbon capture, planning for adaptation, measures to control methane and black carbon, geoengineering of various types, forest management and expansion and north-south technology transfer. The final ranking was cloud-whitening geoengineering first, energy R&D second, aerosol geoengineering third, then carbon storage, adaptation planning, air capture, forests, methane and black carbon measures and, at the bottom, the four tax options.
Copenhagen Consensus rankings
Roger Pielke Jr, who was involved as one of the geoengineering discussants, comments on some of the oddnesses and inadequacies of the process on his blog. As he pointed out in his written submission to the Copenhageners (you can get all the papers involved from Lomborg’s site), the Copenhagen Consensus briefing on the costs and benefits of geoengineering, by Eric Bickel of the University of Texas, Austin and Lee Lane of the American Enterprise Institute, presented a very positive result with a rather spurious aura of accuracy. Obviously Roger’s arguments did not sway the panel, but I think they are pretty good.
The apparent accuracy comes from using a numerical model to link the economy and climate, a model called DICE developed by William Nordhaus. Bickel and Lane looked at solar radiation management (stratospheric haze or cloud whitening) with this model in the context of three strategies: doing nothing else at all, following the “optimal” abatement strategy (a strategy in which DICE sets the amount of money spent on emissions reduction so as to minimise the sum of damage done by warming, expressed in dollars, and the costs of that emissions reduction), and limiting warming to 2ºC. In all those contexts, they look at the effects of adding 1, 2 or 3 W/m^2 of cooling to other measures, if any. Much of what follows is unsurprising; the no-control world gets warmer slower with solar radiation management, and the costs of the “optimal” strategy are reduced, because there is less harm done by warming while emissions are reduced.
One result that’s worth noting is that left to itself, DICE doesn’t like the 2ºC limit at all — it is seen as more costly than doing nothing because, within the constraints of the model, the costs of emissions control are greater than the economic damage done by going over 2ºC. With just 1 W/m^2 of geoengineering, though, the situation changes: a strategy aimed at limiting temperature change to 2ºC that makes use of this relatively small amount of solar radiation management works out cheaper than either following the “optimal” path or doing nothing. As the authors put it:
This result is obtained because SRM holds temperatures in check, avoiding climate damages, while society builds the capital and technology necessary to achieve emissions reductions at lower cost. The policy lesson, of course, is that SRM can lower the costs of pursuing non-optimal greenhouse gas control strategies [such as a 2ºC temperature cap], not that non-optimal strategies are harmless.
Since, outside the world of the model, there is a pretty much sure-fire guarantee that greenhouse gas control strategies will be non-optimal (and would be even if there were any real world way of defining that optimum) that seems to me an insight worth taking away.
But in general, the paper fails to convince. The degree to which the watts per square metre removed by solar radiation management cannot really be equated with the watts per square metre added by greenhouse gases is not considered in depth, and while the authors address some of the possible indirect costs of geoengineering — rainfall pattern changes, political strife, risk of intermittency, etc — in their discussion they do not do so, as far as I can see, in their explicit numerical modelling. So they basically end up saying that the up-front costs of geoengineering look likely to be very small in comparison to the costs of greenhouse warming, which is true, but insufficient. Reading the paper you feel that doing the modelling differently, and caring about the uncertainties more, might give you a very different answer . Roger very helpfully shows that this is indeed true by pointing to an analysis by Klaus Keller and colleagues at Penn State recently submitted to the journal Climate Change. This too uses the DICE model, but with somewhat different add-ons and assumptions — as a result it gets radically different and less favourable results (pdf). This makes it hard to see the Bickel and Lee results as robust.
But though to my eyes the paper oversimplifies the issues, fails to be explicit about costs or reasonable about uncertainties, and is constrained by assumptions, Lomborg — who I have frequently enjoyed talking to and with whom I’ve agreed on at least some things in the past — contrives to put an incredibly positive gloss on the results (pdf). This is in large part because, unlike almost everyone else I’ve talked to on the matter, he seems to be happy seeing geoengineering and emissions control as an either/or proposition, rather than, at best, a both/and.
Bickel and Lane offer compelling evidence that a tiny investment in climate engineering might be able to reduce as much of global warming’s effects as trillions of dollars spent on carbon emission reductions.
First, there’s the “might”; it might — it might not. That’s why the research is needed (see below). And then there’s the willingness to ignore the other effects of carbon dioxide. If CO2 levels continue to rise unabated, with solar radiation management counteracting their warming effects, they still result in ocean acidification, massive ecological shifts towards C3 plants which will disturb many tropical ecosystems, and changes in the hydrological cycle. Bickel and Lee make the point that one should compare the hydrological changes in a model with the hydrological effects of unabated warming, which look greater. But why? Why not compare them with the effects of mitigated warming?
Ken Caldeira made the “it’s not either/or” point in a piece on the Copenhagen results in the Washington Post. He amplified his position in email to Joe Romm, who put his comments up on Climate Progress.
If we keep emitting greenhouse gases with the intent of offsetting the global warming with ever increasing loadings of particles in the stratosphere, we will be heading to a planet with extremely high greenhouse gases and a thick stratospheric haze that we would need to main more-or-less indefinitely. This seems to be a dystopic world out of a science fiction story. First, we can assume the oceans have been heavily acidified with shellfish and corals largely a thing of the past. We can assume that ecosystems will be greatly affected by the high CO2 / low sunlight conditions — similar to what Earth experienced hundreds of millions years ago. The sunlight would likely be very diffuse — maybe good for portrait photography, but with unknown consequences for ecosystems.
We know also that CO2 and sunlight affect Earth’s climate system in different ways. For the same amount of change in rainfall, CO2 affects temperature more than sunlight, so if we are to try to correct for changes in precipitation patterns, we will be left with some residual warming that would grow with time.
On top of this Bjorn seems to me to underestimate the scientific and technological uncertainties quite markedly
Many of the risks of climate engineering have been overstated. The biggest challenge is public perception. Many environmental lobbyists oppose even researching climate engineering. This is startling given the manifold benefits. If we care most about avoiding warmer temperatures, it seems that we should be elated that this simple, cost-effective approach shows so much promise.
Public perception may well be a problem for geoengineering research. But to think that it is a greater problem than the science (what do these techniques actually do? how much do they effect ocean currents/precipitation/ozone etc?) the technology (how do you spread aerosols without coagulation at just the right particle size; how do you filter seqwater well enough to pump out ultrafine sprays?) and the governance (whose hand is on the thermostat?) seems daft to me.
It’s hard not to see this sort of over-enthusiasm as at least in part a stick with which to beat greens. There may be some need for such chastisement — the “don’t even think about geoengineering” stance, while understandable as both a statement of a worldview and as a piece of practical politics, is still one to avoid. But in getting so close to the “geoengineering means we don’t have to worry” position, it seems to me that Lomborg does the current debates in the field some disservice.
Incidentally, Roger strongly recommends the analysis paper on energy R&D; I haven’t read it, but look forward to doing so.
Update: I meant to mention Alan Robock’s critique of the Bickel and Lane paper on Real Climate, but forgot.
Further update: Lee Lane responds at length in the comments
Filed under: Geoengineering
Some more discussion and fall out from Tuesday’s report.
Peter Cox (a member of the Royal Society working group) and Hazel Jeffery have a feature in Physics World that effectively recaps the report, but puts a more pro-geoengineering spin on it.
Given that conventional mitigation now appears insufficient to avoid dangerous climate change, do we have a plan B? This is the motivation for geoengineering, a term that describes deliberate intervention in the climate system to counteract man-made global warming … For scientists who want to save the planet, there should be no more attractive research field than geoengineering.
This also includes a rather more easily understood, and I think generally better, summary diagram than the one included in the report (“Figure 5.1″, as gently mocked by my friend Geoff), which leaves out some of the modalities that Cox and Jeffery don’t think so much of, and which puts everything in the context of conventional mitigation.
The Cox and Jeffery plot
And here’s 5.1.
Geoengineering the climate, figure 5.1
One interesting thing is that Cox and Jeffery don’t give any diagram space to enhanced weathering: I wonder why not?
Speaking of enhanced weathering, this comment on a post by Joe Romm provides a bunch of references in the context of ocean de-acidification, including stuff which fed into the RoySoc report. Joe’s post is on ocean acidification and reefs, with a side swipe at geo-engineering, of which he generally disapproves; as it happens, half the front page and an inside spread of the Guardian are devoted to a report by David Adam on the same topic. The piece doesn’t mention geoengineering, but it does say that the only solution is an atmospheric CO2 level a lot lower than today’s, and there’s no route to that without some sort of carbon dioxide reduction. (On the topic of the Guardian, The Yorkshire Ranter has some harsh things to say about the 10:10 campaign…)
Meanwhile Roger Pielke Jr greets the RoySoc report with a modicum of snark
The UK Royal Society committee on geoengineering has put out a report (PDF) that reads, well, like it was put together by a committee … The Committee expresses considerable ignorance about the costs of air capture … [and] was either unaware of or chose to ignore (I’m not sure which option is worse) the only peer-reviewed paper that compares … costs of air capture to other approaches
That only peer reviewed paper to which he refers is, by happy chance, Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2009. An Idealized Assessment of the Economics of Air Capture of Carbon Dioxide in Mitigation Policy, Environmental Science & Policy, 12, pp 216-225. And I tend to agree that it is an odd thing to leave out, since the report’s references do include this blog post of Roger’s that make similar points. The paper is definitely worth a look.
Meanwhile, in the world of whacky, Gerard Wynn at Reuters brings us “Sweet dreams are made of geoengineering“, which is devoted in large part to the remarkable claims of a company called Blacklight. You should feel free, if you believe yourself to live beyond the reach of English libel law, to substitute “crazy” or possibly indeed “fraudulent” for the term remarkable, should googling around the subject of Blacklight’s claims of near unlimited energy based on a completely new (but not, apparently, complete) formulation of quantum mechanics lead you to form such an opinion. The man claiming that increased use of paddocks can store billions of tonnes of carbon in grassland seems reasonable by comparison…
Though not written in response to the Royal Society report, this NYT piece by Felicity Barringer seems to me one of the better things I’ve read on white roofs (via FT Energy Source), though its a little light on costs. In another post at FT Energy Source, Kate Mackenzie goes through the Royal Society’s numbers on the various different methods (figure 5.1 again), and also includes a Google Trends plot showing how interest in geoengineering has shot up this year in terms of search traffic. (FWIW, the highest-google-ranked piece of geoengineering journalism turns out to be this from a few years ago, which is nice…)
Over on China Dialogue there’s a rather good Q&A with Ken Caldeira, another of the Royal Society authors, in which he muses on the possibility that, in a world where things were rum enough for geoengineering to be an urgent need, concerns about governance might prove a touch academic
It’s easy to say that nobody should ever deploy one of these systems without getting global consensus – and in measured times that is what we would do. But let’s say we had a situation where climate change was causing massive crop failure in China: what if Chinese scientists figured that if they intervened in the climate system by putting particles in the stratosphere, and this would likely restore the rains to China and allow China to feed its people once again? If the Chinese leaders thought that they would be saving many millions of lives by putting particles in the stratosphere, it’s hard to imagine that a Chinese leader would say: “No, I’m going to let my people starve because I can’t achieve international consensus.” I think in the case of an emergency, where a political leader thinks it could potentially save many millions of lives, it’s hard to see how that leader could allow their people to starve or die. I could envision a situation where political leaders might deploy these systems in the absence of a worldwide consensus.
That said, I think that it’s important for us to get our governments to start discussing these issues and develop governance and regulation over these technologies to try to make sure that as much as possible there are international controls and consensus over how these tools are used. But I think when push comes to shove and a political leader has their back against the wall, they may feel compelled to deploy these things unilaterally.
As it happens, this is much the same point as Eric Posner made on The Volokh Conspiracy in the context of the lack of tort law in international relations.
Filed under: Geoengineering
Decided I would immerse myself in the British press this morning in order to see what impact yesterday’s Royal Society geoengineering report had, and how it ranked against what else is going on out there. Besides, it’s good to actually look at all the papers once in a while, so as to know what’s going on in the national psyche.
The FT has climate on the front page, but it’s a report on activists targetting the Royal Bank of Scotland for its financing of oil and gas projects. Fiona Harvey’s report on page 4 plays up the negative aspects of the report under a somewhat over-dramatic headline: “Hopes dashed for geo-engineering solutions“. On the next page she and Kathrin Hille have a startling piece on Chinese estimates of the cost of emissions reduction, which a new report from the People’s University of Beijing puts at $438 billion a year by 2030. The same report says that for emissions to peak by 2030 much of these costs will have to be met from overseas, and that halving emissions by 2050 isn’t on the cards. This seems to me a pretty strong news story, and I haven’t seen it anywhere else.
The Sun has 2 paras of geoengineering on page 2: “Shield to save us”. One mistake in this — the society did not recommend a £100m world fund for the work. Can’t find the piece online. “Wills’ bid to save the Earth” gets 5 paras and a pic on page 21 — Prince William is opening the Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre later this month, apparently. In other news there’s a terrific picture of a 747 dousing the Station fires in LA, a scandal over attacks on vegetables in Torquay headlined “The Vegilantes”, the excellent Stu Clark warning of the dangers of a coronal mass ejection pegged to the 150th anniversary of the Carrington Event (good work fella), a great many lightbulb jokes scattered through the paper (pegged to new regulations banning incandescent 100W bulbs, I guess) and an editorial praising social workers. Who knew? The Mirror, meanwhile, has two thirds of a page: “Global Warming? We’ll be all white!” This is mostly pictures of world landmarks (the pyramids, Angel of the North, Kremlin, Empire State Building, Clock Tower at Westminster and the Golden Gate Bridge) photoshopped into whiteness: geddit? Snark apart, the story by Mike Swain is pretty much spot on, though it doesn’t mention that painting buildings white comes more or less at the foot of the report’s list. I can understand that: there aren’t many illustration options, so undercutting the one you have thought up would be dumb.
I can’t find any report in the Daily Express; in terms of climate there is a large op-ed on the expected shortfall in UK energy supply, following up something splashed on the front page of the Telegraph yesterday (and which was a cover package at The Economist a month ago). There’s also pretty much direct steal from yesterday’s Telegraph on the fact that you can still buy 100W incandescent bulbs if they’re for industrial use (the Telegraph had this at the top of the front yesterday, “Beat the Bulb Ban”). And there are all the stories getting ink elsewhere. Today’s more or less obligatory news seems to be Demi Moore’s degree of plastic surgery, Katie Price talking about having been raped, the Antioch nastiness, retrospectives on wartime evacuation of children from London 70 years on, the Megrahi compassionate release, the murder of Stacey Lawrence, something about Gordon Ramsey, a woman with cancer who was sacked by email, and so on. The Mail also has a near-full page op-ed on the lights going out in 2017, or whatever, this time by never-knowingly-out-frothed-at-the-mouth Christopher Booker. There’s a little on the Royal Society report on p25, which includes the line “All the proposals could have dangerous unintended consequences”. That is indeed an impression you could have got at the event yesterday, but the report doesn’t seem to me to bear it out: direct air carbon capture doesn’t, I think have any identified dangerous consequences. The version on page, without byline, is a cut back version of David Debyshire’s better piece online. This comes garnished with a great many comments, almost all from global-warming-is-a-scam people. How happy this must make Christopher Brooker. The Mail also has the Torquay vegetables story, by the way, again under a Vegilantes headline (so did the Mirror).
The Telegraph has half a page of climate (and as the only remaining broadsheet, other than the FT, that’s a fair amount) divided between five stories. The geoengineering one is short, and stresses the possibilities more than the risks, though it has both. On the same page we have some more activists (this time with no clothes on), more bloody light-bulb news, a report on the new 10:10 campaign seeking to get people to cut their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010 — a pretty straight and fair piece considering that The Guardian is playing a big role in the campaign — and a commentary by Geoff Lean endorsing it (online his colleague James Delingpole takes a predictably different line). There’s also an op-ed by Irwin Stelzer on the 2017 powercuts, which generously admits that “this is not the place to argue whether the data support the warming thesis” (presumably the right place would be chez Delingpole, or in the comment threads, or some similar slough of ignorance). Over at The Guardian, which had the 10:10 campaign on its front page and all through its daily G2 supplement yesterday, the campaign is front page news again today (“Guilty greens admit they could do more“) and has an op ed and two spreads inside (!), on one of which there’s room for a piece by Alok Jha on the Royal Society report: “Scientists urge investment in geoengineering as safety net”. This too has the all-techniques-have-uncertainties-about-their-own-impacts line which I don’t think is true to the report’s conclusions on air-capture. Online, Brendan O’Neill invokes the geo-engineering report as a piece of good news in a scathing dissent from all the paper’s 10:10-ery,
The Times — which has the Torquay vegetables on the front fracking page, though with a vegicide headline not a vegilante one — has a fine piece by Ben Webster under the headline “Catch-22: save the planet, cause a global catastrophe” (unfair hed: catastrophes associated with cloud whitening, for example, are local/regional more than global). The Independent gives Steve Connor all of page 2 to do much the same thing. Like some other reports Steve quotes Doug Parr of Greenpeace, who spoke at the launch event, being sceptical: “Geoengineering is creeping up on to the agenda because governments seem incapable of standing up to the vested interests of the fossil fuel lobby, who will use it to undermine the emissions reduction we can do safely”. The Independent also, uniquely, has an editorial on the subject: responsible to think about such things, vital not to be side tracked.
That’s quite enough press rounding-up — though the experience of looking at all the main papers is a salutary one every now and then, if one can avoid Marcus-Brigstocke-alike paroxysms. I was planning to do overseas and online news sources and the blogosphere too, but time has got away from me and there is nothing that stands out as egregious that I have seen as yet. It’s worth noting that David Keith and Ken Caldeira get quoted a fair bit (eg here in the Globe and Mail), which may be because their home institutions sent out their own press releases. It’s interesting that as far as I can see none of the papers mentioned the ETC group’s overdone pre-report condemnation, perhaps in part because it was fairly evident to anyone at the launch that Shepherd and his team aren’t “tricksters”, in part because a rebuttal launched beforehand in ignorance of what the report says carries relatively little weight.
Overall: nothing too wrong or misleading, a pretty consistent framing, but no evidence of great impact. That FT China story may live longer in my mind.
However, last but best, a frustrated rant on the topic from the inimitable Wandering Gaia, next to whom I had the pleasure of sitting at the launch.
Update: Over at Nature News Geoff has a nice post on the wide variance in headlines in the reporting
So yesterday the Royal Society’s report on geoengineering came out, with a launch event and a press conference. It (82pp PDF, press release) is undoubtedly the best overall briefing on geoengineering technologies and their policy/governance implications that you can find right now; John Shepherd and his team did a comprehensive and thoughtful job.
I’m sure that when I get into it in depth I’ll find lots of interesting gems, but here are some highlights
- The overall frame is that none of these options in any way takes the place of emissions control.
- The report makes a clear distinction between carbon dioxide reduction (CDR) techniques — afforestation, burning biomass with carbon capture, biochar, “artificial trees” (possibly the most misleading label any technology is currently labouring under) and so on — and “solar radiation management” (SRM) techniques — sulphate aerosols, cloud-whitening, mirrors in space, etc. CDR interventions will always be very slow to have their effects, while some SRM techniques could be very quick.
- Some of the CDR techniques — those that involve no major interventions in ecosystems — are seen as pretty much unproblematic, if not currently affordable; transnational issues only arise if they start to reduce the carbon dioxide level too far (whatever that might be). CDR that gets into major ecosystem issues — eg ocean fertilization techniques — give greater cause for concern.
- Pretty much all of the SRM techniques are seen as having significant risks, except for painting roofs white, which simply doesn’t do much good.
- In CDR, two technologies stand out: direct-air carbon capture and BECS, biomass energy with carbon sequestration. Both cost a fair bit, but a decent carbon price would help sort that out. BECS has the advantage of producing energy rather than using it; but though direct captureuses quite a lot of energy has the advantage of a footprint that is hundred or thousands of times smaller per tonne of carbon sucked up. Both assume that there are places to put the carbon once it has been purified.
- There’s also more discussion than I’ve seen elsewhere of “enhanced weathering” — reacting carbon dioxide with rocks ground into the soil and things like that. Low on affordability and readiness, and requires a massive new global mining industry, but since it can scale up in a big way worth keeping an eye on…
- In SRM, stratospheric aerosols are the most impressive option, ranking as high as or higher than anything else with comparable potential. The impacts on other things, though, most notably the hydrological cycle, are a worry. In the 1990s the sulphates from Mt Pintaubo not only dimmed the sun — the also dried the world’s rains and reduce the flow of its rivers. Working out how much this effect matters is probably the most important open scientific question in geoengineering (that’s my opinion, not something the report says).
- Cloud-whitening proponents will be disappointed, possibly a little aggrieved, at being seen as consierably less effective than aerosols; proponents argue that they can offset a doubling of CO2. On the other hand the report is kinder than one might expect to space-based systems. “Kinder” here means saying someone should go and think about everything so far proposed in that arena a bit more seriously for a few years and then come back and make a case, rather than simply laughing.
- There needs to be a thorough audit of the many international agreements currently in place for other reasons — the UN framework convention on climate change, the London convention, the Montreal protocol, the law of the sea, the convention to combat desertification, the outer space treaty, the convention on biological diversity, and various others — to see which currently have bearing on any of these techniques, and how they could be used to exert control or to provide incentives.
- The UK should commit to £10m a year for ten years in research; worldwide a suitable figure might be ten times that. As John Shepherd put it, this would be ten times current spending on such things, a tenth of total climate research spending and a hundredth of spending on energy technologies.
All reasonable stuff, it seems to me, and well referenced if not well illustrated. The launch event and press conference, though, did feel a little stifled by worries about being seen as championing the technologies under discussion. The press release was actually headed “Stop emitting CO2 or geoengineering could be our only hope”, framing geoengineering principally as a threat. A little more of a sense that some or more of these technologies might be useful adjuncts to emissions reduction rather than a dread alternative could have been helpful — a little less of a sense that they all must be bad. Interestingly, one of the people discussing the issues at the launch event did go further than others in this, pointing out that if you want to get carbon dioxide levels low enough to do something about ocean acidification you are undoubtedly talking about CDR, not as a “plan B”, but as part of the basic strategy. That was John Beddington, the UK government’s chief science adviser.
