An academic friend of mine is pushing to publish a paper on this soon. It seems credible as a way to slow global warming, but there will be side effects (as there has to be with such significant modification of our environment) that are hard to predict, and probably some of those side effects could be harmful. The question is which path is the less harmful, and whether we have to risk unpredictable side effects (could be minor or large) in order to avoid global warming.
> It seems credible as a way to slow global warming, but there will be side effects (as there has to be with such significant modification of our environment) that are hard to predict, and probably some of those side effects could be harmful.
I think it's certain that some of the side-effects will be harmful, and it's largely a question of magnitude. Because sulfur dioxide has a limited lifetime in the atmosphere, however, it can be tested safely(1) at scale. From the article:
The data from the Mount Pinatubo eruption tells us that sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere can cause cooling comparable to the global warming we've seen so far. But it tells us something else as well: The effects of stratospheric sulfur dioxide have a limited lifetime, on the order of just a couple of years. This is bad in the sense that to be useful, the injection program has to be sustained. But it is good -- very, very good -- in the sense that it reduces risk. The program could be scaled up, the impact could be measured, and, if the side-effects are too serious, it can be scaled back down again very rapidly. This greatly reduces the risk of the undertaking.
(1) The side-effects shouldn't be any more harmful that what we've already lived through with the Mount Pinatubo eruption.
I strongly recommend that anyone interested in geoengineering read Oliver Morton's excellent book, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World. I found it engagingly written, chock full of interesting science, and open-minded without being credulous.
I think we're going to have to try stratospheric sulfur aerosols within the next decade or so. Yes, I know it doesn't solve the ocean acidification problem. I think we should be experimenting with iron fertilization for that purpose. It might not work, or the side-effects might be too severe, but the attitude of the scientific community has been to actively suppress any such research, and I think that's a serious mistake.
It is not a choice of whether we dare to modify the biosphere, or not. We are already modifying it! That genie is not going back in the bottle. We should be learning how to modify it intentionally as well as unintentionally.
Let me say a little more to give you a taste of the book. Morton opens the Introduction with two questions:
(1) Do you believe the risks of climate change merit serious action aimed at lessening them?
(2) Do you think that reducing an industrial economy's carbon-dioxide emissions to near zero is very hard?
I'll quote snippets:
To judge by what they say, and by what policies they support, most people in favour of action on climate change are in the Yes/No camp: they want to act on the risks; they don't think that getting off fossil fuels is a terribly hard problem. [...] Most of those against action on climate are in the No/Yes camp: they don't think climate is very much of a worry; but they do think that getting off fossil fuels is very difficult, even impossible. [...] Neither of these approaches works for people like me in the Yes/Yes camp.
[Added in edit] Morton goes on to support both positions. The argument for (1) is not that climate disaster is inevitable on our current course, but that the risk is too great to ignore. The argument for (2) is more involved; he lays out numbers showing how little progress has been made and pointing out how billions of people still have little or no access to energy at all. As their standard of living rises to what we in the rich world would consider the poverty level, they will inevitably burn more carbon.
I didn't cover it in the blog post, but the amount of sulfur dioxide needed is less than what we're already emitting into the lower atmosphere.
From Wikipedia[1]:
According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency,
the amount of sulfur dioxide released in the U.S. per year was:
Year SO2
1970 31,161,000 short tons (28.3 Mt)
1980 25,905,000 short tons (23.5 Mt)
1990 23,678,000 short tons (21.5 Mt)
1996 18,859,000 short tons (17.1 Mt)
1997 19,363,000 short tons (17.6 Mt)
1998 19,491,000 short tons (17.7 Mt)
1999 18,867,000 short tons (17.1 Mt)
also[1]:
As of 2006, China was the world's largest sulfur dioxide polluter, with 2005 emissions estimated to be 25,490,000 short tons (23.1 Mt).
Presumably we can reduce sulfur dioxide pollution in the lower atmosphere enough to completely offset any that we're releasing into the stratosphere. Is that better or worse? I don't know. But it would seem like right now the Mountain pine beetle is a much greater threat to trees than acid rain is.
The rate of mixing between the stratosphere, where the sulfur aerosols would be placed, and the troposphere, where we live, is relatively low. The half-life of these aerosols in the stratosphere is on the order of months -- short enough, as Curtis points out, to limit the risk of any such experiment, but long enough that the quantities required are small compared to the amount of sulfur we are already putting into the troposphere.
No, the article doesn't mention ocean acidification. Yes, that's a big deal. I'm personally concerned that it's much more dangerous than sea level rise. However, the article does acknowledge that there are big limits to what stratospheric sulfur injection can do:
Stratospheric sulfur dioxide injection is not a panacea. But what it can do is buy us time. ... It can buy us time to deploy large scale climate engineering projects that do remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere...
I didn't discuss other climate engineering proposals because I was trying to keep the post short.
The point is that climate engineering should be revealed by the scientists only after the mathematically challenged, climate change naysayers are literally defecating in their pants watching a tsunami wave washing towards New York city.
Otherwise, they'll just start doing that & continue burning the coal.
We'll use Snakes to solve the Rat problem, then we'll send in Boars to take care of the Snake problem. Of course, we'll need Bears to deal with the Boars when they get out of control.
However, assume it did. Then ocean acidification is still a first world problem. If you're the government of a developing country (India, China, Brazil, ...) where most people don't even have reliable electricity, and you get to choose between washing machines for your people and a more basic ocean, you go for the washing machines. And you will burn gigatons of coal to enable those washing machines.
Globally speaking, government action will not work, because most governments don't care (for good reasons, arguably). On top of that, international agreements are mostly concerned with non-solutions like a reduction of carbon emission by some irrelevant fraction by a time when it's too late (like 50% by 2050 or some such nonsense). Even if the first world managed to do that, the growth of the developing countries annihilates any such progress within a decade. And even if the whole world was on board and reduced global emissions by 50%, we'd just fuck up the planet half as quickly, but every bit as reliably. The reality is that if global climate change really is such a big problem, we need to get to zero carbon emissions, actually negative carbon emissions, fairly quickly.
Your dream of a world police enforcing zero carbon emissions collides with the reality that they (the UN or whoever else is closest to a "world government") aren't even trying, and that they don't actually have an alternative plan.
That's never going to happen. Americans will never give up their trucks. The Chinese won't give up their coal fired power plants. Developing nations won't give up slash and burn forestry programs. Why? Because we're all motivated by greed. Instead I think the solution is to make pollution expensive: some have proposed a carbon tax as one way of dealing with this. Perhaps there are other ways involving behavioral economics or something that could also be attempted.
There are some encouraging trends, but the progress they've made to date is still very small compared to the size of the problem.
Perhaps the most encouraging trend is the exponential growth of the photovoltaic solar panel industry. If that continues, it will certainly be a huge help. But you have to weigh that against the fact that there are still a couple of billion people with no access to power at all. All together, world carbon emissions are not likely to fall anytime soon.
A 40% decline in licenses is not "very small". It's enormous.
Likewise China realized it couldn't double down on coal indefinitely, they had to back off. When your pollution becomes so bad planes can't take off you have to re-think your strategy.
China used coal because it was cost-effective, but now the costs of coal are too high to sustain its use. They're just going where the money is, and right now that's solar.
China itself doesn't have a lot of fossil fuels other than oil so naturally they're interested in something that makes them energy independent. Energy is, after all, power.
I agree: taxing of pollution will change behavior of polluters while also will gather money for ecological programs. European Union is already doing that:
The total revenue from environmental taxes in the EU-28 in 2014 was EUR 343.6 billion; this figure equates to 2.5 % of gross domestic product (GDP) and to 6.3 % of the total revenues derived from all taxes and social contributions (see Table 1).
I think you're right in that any lasting solution must come about because it's in our best short term economic interests - because, by and large, it's how we make our decisions
I first came across this idea in an excellent book by Olle Haggstrom: "Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity", which talks more generally about large scale/long term problems for humanity.
It is the only book I know of that takes a comprehensive view of a variety of such issues (climate change, extraterrestrials, strong AI, etc) and is written in a scientific manner with numerous citations, and little to no empty statements as is typically found in "popular" books.
Are you suggesting the solution is a Sacred Engine running on... uhhh... magic and small children, I guess?
(I get it, you're implying that the release of some "cooling compound" might cause an ice age. I'm just not convinced that a 2+ hours long string of plot holes and terrible acting can teach us anything.)
That's an exaggeration. As of the 2014 per capita CO2 emissions in the US was 2.2 times Chinese (16.7mt vs 7.6).
And this gap is rapidly closing: Chinese per capita emissions are up 150% in the past 10 years while US are down 15%. China could easily exceed the US by this metric inside of a decade. Keep in mind that China already emits twice as much CO2 in total as the US.
I'm not sure those number take into account all the stuff that China is manufacturing for the US, that is not consumed locally. Yes, that CO2 is released in China but it's paid for by USD.
It's all pointless. Massive photovoltaic infra could have been deployed decades ago but it would have harmed wealthy interests so they injected tens of billions of dollars into disrupting and controlling the political system of the US. Putting the continuation of this civilization as we know it at risk, all for a bit of money in a single person's lifespan. And it worked. In bad moments one wonders if it's better off they succeed.
"People will downvote a throwaway account much more aggressively than a non-throwaway. Liberating, but a little disappointing."
You're meant to use it briefly and then, you know, throw it away. The clue is in the name! You've had your account for 1077 days, that's hardly temporary. All your account is is anonymous, not temporary.
> How close is 1500GW solar generation from 5e9 MWh [per year]?
Almost six orders of magnitude too low.
1GW nameplate capacity is about 100MW actual generation, so 1500GW[nameplate] x 8600h = 13GWh = 13000 MWh, comparable to 5e3MWh in round numbers. (This is such a t
terrible result, I'm inclined to think you got your numbers wrong.)
I was a little off with the 1.5e12 W. More like 1.333e12 W capacity or 1,333 GW capacity.
googling a bit shows that solar capacity factor is between 13 & 30% Say 18% for a variety of geographies.
1333 GW x 8760 hours * 18% = 2,100,000 GWh
2.1 e6 GWh = 2.1e9 MWh
5e9 MWh is what the US uses now.
Solar is still maybe 1.5 or 2x more expensive than wind. By combining wind and solar, with 2 trillion investment, you'd get most of the way towards a major greening of the grid. (of course batteries, etc will make it more expensive & EVs may double or more electric demand)
So instead of that war & it's bloodshed, we could have gone a very long way towards solving the energy problems & uncertainty facing the US for decades and maybe even establish a system that could last us into perpetuity.
I'm saying that instead of beginning a war to protect US citizens from terrorists attacks, US can just make something useful for a fraction of the cost, e.g. develop and install 100% ecofriendly light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfate_aerosols...
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/511016/a-cheap-and-easy-p...
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060804-globa...
An academic friend of mine is pushing to publish a paper on this soon. It seems credible as a way to slow global warming, but there will be side effects (as there has to be with such significant modification of our environment) that are hard to predict, and probably some of those side effects could be harmful. The question is which path is the less harmful, and whether we have to risk unpredictable side effects (could be minor or large) in order to avoid global warming.