The cost of engineering projects on this scale would be astronomical.
Surely there would be a better ROI if that money were spent on efforts to replace fossil fuel power with low-carbon alternatives, electrification of ground transport, etc?
If we can reduce carbon emissions by 90% or so, quickly enough, then the climate should stabilise. If that fails, then we can build the mega-projects as a desperate last stand.
There's a company that makes kite sails for cargo ships, which have proven effective [1]. However, as the fuel costs are payed by the shipper, there is a lack of economic incentive for ship owners to purchase them.
Hmmm, so what's a good mechanism for routing around moral hazards like just making the customer pay for the fuel?
We see lots of models for corporate raiders using loss leaders to attack bloated industries, but not much else. Also, with technology, the actual cost of development is extremely murky and variable. The only things that seem to motivate loss leader tactics is the end game of cornering a market.
In the case of SkySails, ship owners are averse to the up front cost, even if it means leaving money on the table, long term, by keeping their prices the same, but saving the fuel money with the sail, and pocketing the difference.
So, push to integrate with newly built ships, and then what? Offer freebie/rebate deals? But then they never get used because crew are lazy, and bored, but not that bored, and lazy wins. Plus dealing with tangled lines means the kite is all but ruined without a rigger available. So does that mean training at least one crew member to rig the kite?
It seems like maybe SkySails would need to operate a consultancy, where they supply a crew member who operates the kite on commission, collecting a cut of the savings in fuel costs. Then it becomes not unlike the vending machine model.
Companies permit vending machines on the premises, because they know employees want snacks, so they let a coin-op company install soda and candy machines, and they get a cut of whatever the machine pulls in.
So now, if that works, and then SkySails attacks the ship building angle, they've grown an ecosystem of consultant experts, and some of them can operate as free agents, once ship builders normalize SkySail integration as a common well-known add-on to maritime operations.
Sounds like a business odyssey, thinking it over, but with decades of quiet patience and dedication, maybe it'd work.
There's also currently a lack of incentives for ship owners to invest in emissions-reducing technologies, even if the cost per voyage is reduced - see SkySail's troubles [1].
The real issue that fuel oil is so cheap. If customers are paying for the fuel, and fuel was a significant cost, then they'd certainly be interested in shopping around for a ship that can offer lower fuel consumption.
But fuel oil is really just a byproduct of refining crude. It's the muck left over when you've extracted everything else that's useful. And of course, it is not taxed, so prices don't account for it's environmental externalities.
If we can reduce overall demand for petroleum products, this should eventually cause fuel oil prices to rise because there'll be less crude being refined, and thus reduced supply.
Air traffic alone accounts for about 3.5% of our climate impact [1]. How many major carbon emitters can you afford to ignore before a reduction of 90% becomes impossible?
Time to revive dirigibles. And tell people that we're sorry, but those extravagant vacations on another continent now come with a couple days of stay in a luxury hotel flying above the ocean.
Air travel is actually not that hard, just very energy inefficient. A turbine will work with almost anything that burns, that is the reason why airplanes use kerosene, it is the cheapest fossil fuel. To get green airplanes you just need to replace the kerosene with something else that burns, most vegetable oils should work fine after a bit of refinement.
The real problem is, you need lots of oils and there synthesis and using chemical fuel as energy storage seems a certainly feasible path, however it is again quite a bit more complicated than just drilling a hole in the ground.
This would imply a vast additional amount of biomass production, which would place its own load on the environment in loss of biodiversity, run off pollution etc.
We're already kind of doing this. It just needs to be on a much larger scale maybe. I'm not sure of the complete process of how much CO2 is captured by a tree, so it might not make sense.
Yes. Old dead trees who's carbon has been removed for millions of years from the system. What happens when you dump a bunch more of anything into a system. Usually the system blows up.
Not unless you stop them rotting after they die. I’m sure there are actual experts with better proposals but turning them into charcoal/terra preta and using that as a soil growth promoter works as dies leaving wood in salt water until it ceases to be buoyant and then dumping it in the deep ocean.
The costs are astronomical because we've been taking on massive amounts of environmental debt for over a century. Mostly over the last 25 years. It's payback time.
According to the IPCC, even their conservative estimates indicate a requirement for some kind of atmospheric carbon removal to avoid severe climate related problems. Even if we could somehow reduce carbon emissions by 100% tomorrow we'd still need mega-projects.
The time for reduction was perhaps 30 years ago when James Hansen testified before the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
> According to the IPCC, even their conservative estimates
Which still overpredict the actual warming which has taken place.
What I like about the proposal in the subject article is that it actually focuses on a measurable impact--sea level rise--and a remedy targeted at that specific impact. It doesn't drag in speculative scenarios based on models that have been falsified by the data.
According to NASA[1] we're already at a 0.9 degree anomaly for 2017. The IPCC prediction[2] is 1 degree anomaly in 2020 for the worst case prediction in the worst case scenario.
The NASA anomaly is relative to 1951-1980 average while IPCC is 1986-2005 average. So it's not a perfect comparison. But if you want to look at IPCC's best case scenarios, the prediction is about 0.1 degree, which certainly refutes your claim that they overpredict.
Note that this actually understates the overprediction, because the models whose average is shown included three sets of models that made three different assumptions about how CO2 would rise. But CO2's actual rise over the period where we're comparing models with data was about the same as the assumption of the "worst case" (or "business as usual") scenario, so that scenario is the only one that's relevant to the comparison between models and data. And when you compare just that sheaf of models with the data, the divergence between model and data is even larger.
For the reasons why the upper troposphere temperature comparison is more relevant than the surface temperature comparison (which is what is shown in the IPCC AR5), see the article.
> According to NASA[1] we're already at a 0.9 degree anomaly for 2017. The IPCC prediction[2] is 1 degree anomaly in 2020 for the worst case prediction in the worst case scenario.
But, as you note, the two anomalies are relevant to two different baselines. That means the comparison is invalid, not "not perfect".
> if you want to look at IPCC's best case scenarios, the prediction is about 0.1 degree
That's for future temperature change under the future best case scenario. It has nothing to do with past temperature change under the actual scenario that actually happened.
> See page 11
Those graphs don't show models vs. data. They show models only (and with the actual time period for which we have data compressed on the far left of the graphs so you can't extract any useful comparison with data from them).
The Summary for Policymakers, which is what you linked to, does not show any direct comparison between models and data for a period for which we have data. Previous reports did, but in this one they decided not to--it's only buried in the WG1 report, in Chapter 9, p. 768:
The divergence between the CMIP5 mean (red) and the actual temperatures (black) in the upper graph in the 2000s is visible; the EMIC mean in the lower graph only appears to go up to 2000 so it doesn't provide a useful comparison. Also, both of these graphs show all of the models, not just the ones whose CO2 rise assumptions matched reality over the data period, so they understate the actual overprediction for the reason I gave above.
It looks like we are already about at 400ppm if we cut emissions down to 20% of current amount we'd still see a 50% chance of 2 degrees Celsius rise in avg temp.
Geoengineering seems like a foregone conclusion to me.
We should build a huge robot first, and use that to build these megaprojects. If worse becomes worst, we could all upload our consciousnesses into the robot, let it weather the apocalypse, then have a tortured yet spineless teenage boy trigger our literal post-apocalyptic reincarnation.
For another big geoengineering project, check out "Atlantropa", an early 20th century German proposal to dam the Strait of Gibraltar and lower the Mediterranean Sea by 100 meters to generate hydroelectricity and create more arable land.
"First, they should construct them in the outlet fjords of Greenland’s largest glaciers, like Jakobshavn. These fjords are often only a mile or two wide, and an underwater dredging project there would resemble successful large-scale civil engineering projects, like the Palm Islands in Dubai. Greenland is also under the shared control of Denmark and the Greenlandic national government, two entities that might decide to undertake the construction project together."
Even if the later stages (building 60-mile-long sills beneath floating ice) seem unlikely to be cost-efficient, this part definitely sounds like it could be feasible; It's especially notable to me amongst climate-related megaprojects in that it does not require any new developments, but rather uses extant, mature technologies. Building the sills would require "only" time and money.
In short: the proposal to build loose walls that prevent warm ocean water from coming close to the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. This will slow down their melting enough so they won't produce the enormous icebergs at a fast rate any more.
Unlike many global geo-engineering projects to prevent global warming, this one looks somehow realistic.
Any estimation on the co2 output building said walls and surrounding Greenland and Antarctic with them. What about animals the navigate through these waters. This just doesn't seem like a well thought idea to me.
> What about animals the navigate through these waters
This is going to sound mighty unpopular - it already does to me while I try to formulate the right way to say this in my head...
But at what point do we need to conclude that saving the nearly 8-billion human beings and the overall habitability of the Earth is of greater importance than certain animals living in individual biomes?
I know it's not the contemporary, popular thing to think about. But if the alternative is the mass displacement and deaths of humans, it feels like it's something we're going to have to make a decision on.
I feel if this problem was tackled in the 1950s our ancestors would have solved it and not thought twice about the animals.
But here we are almost in the year 2020, and our sense of moral obligation holds us back from using our advanced technology to its maximum potential, even to save our own lives or pursue new horizons.
You are an animal. You breath the same air and eat the same food other animals eat.
Our species won't even be the last species left when resources become severely restricted due to one species' hyper-abundance and destructive environmental adaption.
But is the alternative mass displacement and deaths? How about reducing carbon footprint? For example - wash our dishes in cold water? People live in deserts too, and they eat from clean dishes using maybe 5% the water we do in cities. How about reducing our dependency on private cars. We humans are responsible for our lavish lives, and therefore rising temperatures. We could stop eating beef but we don't care enough about our planet's future. Try these for unpopular opinions. Do we really have to live such carefree lives?
> How about reducing carbon footprint? For example - wash our dishes in cold water?
I've never lived in the US, so anyone, please correct me if i'm wrong, but anecdotally I have heard that Americans don't generally have (or use) outdoor clothes lines to dry their washed clothes, rather they just use a dryer. I live in Australia and when I learned this I was floored. That approach is unthinkable in Australia due to our astronomical energy costs (South Aus, where I live has the highest energy cost in the world).
With our high prices, we only very occasionally use dryers which are a horribly inefficient way to dry clothes.
Maybe the solution to affect peoples' behaviour is to dramatically increase the cost of (dirty) energy.
> dramatically increase the cost of (dirty) energy
That is called a carbon tax. It is supported by every serious economist on the left and right, as well as by the majority of the US population. It is also in place in most EU countries, most Canadian provinces, Japan and India.
Depending on the season, many, many americans hang their wash out to dry. Certain things affect this; for instance much of the US is too rainy/cold/humid to effectively dry clothes outdoors in a reasonable amount of time all year round.
South Australia isn't Buffalo in February, nor is it Seattle in every month not ending in -gust.
Well, I can sympathise with the “this is going to be unpopular but...” cos that’s where I’m going too, though a bit different to you.
A very large number of human beings, even among those that accept the science of climate change and it’s likely consequences, have proven remarkably resistant to ANY persuasion to voluntarily moderate their lifestyles even a little to make the kind of changes that, if they were made en-masse, could mitigate the worst impacts. They are even MORE resistant to even mild attempts to impose change by way of a carbon pricing mechanism. God forbid I may have to pay 5% more for certain goods, or that I should sacrifice one of my SUVs.
My main gripe therefore with these geoengineering proposals is twofold.
1. On what planet where we we’re not willing to pay even a modest price on carbon, are we going to be willing to pay trillions for geoengineering projects?
2. Geoengineering is yet another reflection of that innate human desire to externalise costs as much as possible. Whether that be the cost of labour, pollution, or climate change. It’s always the ‘other’ that should bear the worst costs - the third world, the whales, the forests, whatever.
The attitude of placing greater importance on ‘us’ over everything and everyone else is exactly what got us into this fine mess, AND STILL IS. You may think your view is unpopular but only insofar as people don’t actually want to hear the truth about themselves.
Note: I’m already aware that my two points may be slightly contradictory.
> 1. On what planet where we we’re not willing to pay even a modest price on carbon, are we going to be willing to pay trillions for geoengineering projects?
So. Much. Fucking. Carbon. Trillions is nothing if it means no consumer-level caps on carbon output for the next generation or two.
> ...it means no consumer-level caps on carbon output for the next generation or two.
So not a permanent fix then. Just kick that can down the road and let your grandkids sort it out. That’s exactly what I meant by externalising costs and getting someone else to pay, in this case the future.
There is a very simple way to make people pay for CO2 they produce by e.g. burning things: add a tax on it, so that the price increases. Tax oil-based fuels, firewood, coal. This will send the signal down every industry, adjusting price of goods accordingly. Use the money for the anti-warming geoengineering.
How popular might it be? Like, kill the whole coal industry around the world; who would mind? Make fuel, say, 2x as expensive; who would mind? Make barbecue coals as expensive as the meat; would anyone notice? Also, enforce it globally, including places like India, Russia, or China, the latter critically dependent on coal-based electricity.
Now compare to building some walls around glaciers, maybe mere thousands of miles.
I heard somewhere a great parable. Imagine that some aviation specialist would analyze plane hijacking data and recommend to install strong locked doors to pilot cabins on airliners. It would have prevented 9/11, saved thousands of lives, and would have been incomparably cheaper than all those security measures implemented in the aftermath. But likely every airline would be against this unneeded expense, and it would be very hard to push this measure.
Same thing with the global warming, wars, and various other (impending) catastrophes: people hope that they'll get by somehow; how bad it can really be? You see, nothing is happening! When it hits, the view changes drastically, but it's too late already.
The meme that an effective carbon tax would ruin entire economies is pretty much just scaremongering. For a brief period in Australia's recent history, we had a carbon tax with quite a moderate impact economically which measurably reduced our carbon output.
The other point I'll make about huge big-bang projects is that in recent decades they've only ever been achieved by authoritarian regimes that don't need the kind of consensus that kills such projects in western democracies. We live in a world where a significant fraction (perhaps majority?) of the citizenry is largely ignorant, anti-science, distrusts authority, believes in outrageous conspiracy theories and lacks the ability to form coherent thoughts about most things. I put it to you that your chance of getting a large-scale geo-engineering project supported by that majority at a direct cost to them (a cost that can't be moderated by behaviour changes by the way) is practically zero outside an outright dictatorship.
> The attitude of placing greater importance on ‘us’ over everything and everyone else is exactly what got us into this fine mess, AND STILL IS. You may think your view is unpopular but only insofar as people don’t actually want to hear the truth about themselves.
I certainly don't disagree with you. I should make note that while I am a conservationist at heart, this was more a 'devils advocate' position I was bringing up.
The thing we've been learning over the last 50 years is that catastrophic failure of one biome usually causes failure of other biomes.
Even discounting feeding 8 billion humans, just the maintenance required in keeping Spaceship Earth in a state (reliably) hospitable to humans is a surprisingly extensive task.
Nitpick: It's specifically surrounding major glacier outlets, not all of (or even a significant portion of) the landmasses. A complete surround would be effectively impossible.
Any review of geoengineering projects to combat climate change should also include an analysis or description of iron seeding of oceans to promote plankton growth. In addition to sequestering carbon such work results in abundance in the marine food system. A pilot project completed off the Alaskan coast may have resulted in record salmon runs in 2017 as juvenile fish found plenty to eat.
Leading to rapid population growth in marine ecosystems and then a ton of decaying biomass afterwards which releases the CO2 back into the ocean, asphyxiating the marine life and undoing the benefits.
Did that happen in the trial? Because I thought that anything that died in the ocean sank to the bottom, gets incorporated into the sediment and turned into oil.
Indeed. We need to get the CO2 out of the atmosphere, or else we still end up with ocean acidification. Higher base CO2 level will also soon begin to impact human cognition - it only takes 1000ppm for CO2 to begin to have an impact on our mental performance. If outdoor CO2 levels are high, ventilating buildings will become less effective.
My biggest concern with these single attribute solutions is that they might lead to a sense of complacency about CO2 emissions. This could lead to an even bigger problem with ocean acidification than there would have been otherwise.
Exactly. While "the scientists" are working on the problem, we can just continue pumping billions of tons of CO2 into the air and sea and millions into our bank accounts.
We know what to do: stop burning carbon, we have the technology today to replace carbon energy, we just want to do it as cheaply as possible without disrupting the Koch brother's revenue stream.
Unfortunately these solutions might just be what we need given that people don't seem to be sufficiently slowing down any of their heavy CO2 production processes, and globally we are definitely not taking this as seriously as we should be. By the time we do, it will most likely after seeing the horrific effects, in which case solutions like these are needed.
If the ice sheets melt, it won't just raise sea levels, it'll lower the planet's albedo, directly raising the temperature. That'll bring us further along feedback loops that cause the planet to release greenhouse gases by itself: CO2 and methane from melting permafrost, CO2 from forest fires, methane from hydrates, etc. That will quicken ocean acidification.
As for making people complacent: they're already complacent. I include almost everybody in that. The Paris agreement is unrealistic, lacks enforcement, and most countries are well behind their modest targets. Germany is increasing CO2 emissions because they're shutting down their nuclear plants. Etc, etc.
Maybe what makes good people complacent is watered-down, sugar-coated plans for fixing the climate. Just plant trees, put some solar on your roof, turn down your thermostat, we'll be fine. Maybe it would shake them out of complacency if we showed them what it would actually take to get us out of the mess we're in.
I suggest building more Tsar Bombas and dropping them into the Marianas trench. If we make the ocean deeper by making huge craters, then the sea levels will fall!
What I’m missing in these kind of articles is an overview of different schemes to prevent damage causes by climate change, and, then a discussion of the ROI of each scheme.
What are the downsides of this? Imagine the earth is getting warmer, but we have walls holding back melting ice. What is the implication to the earth of a warmer planet with lower sea level ? Historically, temperature of earth and sea level have been very correlated. What happens when we interfere with that?
I am thinking about things like mass desertification, changing currents, etc.
This doesn’t tackle acidification which is the second side effect of climate change. Also if the glaciers melt from the ocean getting warmer they will release carbons
Every time I read something like this I think; What would it take to actually block the sun like Mr. Burns? And, would there be any downsides to attempting this?
Partially block of course. I was in Maine last year during the big solar eclipse (in the US); I don't remember how much percent of the sun was blocked in that location but the temperature dropped several degrees and outdoors it only visibly got slightly darker in mid-day.
I'm completely naive and ignorant about the practicalities of space stuff and climate science. But it does always pop in my mind as the obvious way to cool things down.
> What would it take to actually block the sun like Mr. Burns?
Put a small concentration of aerosols (microscopic dust particles or other light absorbers/reflectors) in the upper atmosphere. Basically a scaled down version of what happens during a volcanic eruption. The impact of that is one of the (few) areas where we actually have good predictive power in climate science.
> would there be any downsides to attempting this?
Depends on how you feel about putting a small concentration of aerosols in the upper atmosphere. Also, you would have to do very small increments to avoid having more impact than you want.
A partial eclipse from a sunshade in space sounds fun until the size and cost racks up. Even with lightweight materials and cheap launches and adding in Archinaut-type construction, it's still totally gonzo money. And the orbit is non-trivial: to stay over (or near) one area it needs to be further away from the Earth so it has less shadow so it needs to be bigger...
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadSurely there would be a better ROI if that money were spent on efforts to replace fossil fuel power with low-carbon alternatives, electrification of ground transport, etc?
If we can reduce carbon emissions by 90% or so, quickly enough, then the climate should stabilise. If that fails, then we can build the mega-projects as a desperate last stand.
we might well be at “desperate last stand” right now.
Large ships are large, and, unlike aircraft, have sufficient room and carrying capacity to install reasonably efficient carbon-capturing devices.
It will cost a lot, of course.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails
We see lots of models for corporate raiders using loss leaders to attack bloated industries, but not much else. Also, with technology, the actual cost of development is extremely murky and variable. The only things that seem to motivate loss leader tactics is the end game of cornering a market.
In the case of SkySails, ship owners are averse to the up front cost, even if it means leaving money on the table, long term, by keeping their prices the same, but saving the fuel money with the sail, and pocketing the difference.
So, push to integrate with newly built ships, and then what? Offer freebie/rebate deals? But then they never get used because crew are lazy, and bored, but not that bored, and lazy wins. Plus dealing with tangled lines means the kite is all but ruined without a rigger available. So does that mean training at least one crew member to rig the kite?
It seems like maybe SkySails would need to operate a consultancy, where they supply a crew member who operates the kite on commission, collecting a cut of the savings in fuel costs. Then it becomes not unlike the vending machine model.
Companies permit vending machines on the premises, because they know employees want snacks, so they let a coin-op company install soda and candy machines, and they get a cut of whatever the machine pulls in.
So now, if that works, and then SkySails attacks the ship building angle, they've grown an ecosystem of consultant experts, and some of them can operate as free agents, once ship builders normalize SkySail integration as a common well-known add-on to maritime operations.
Sounds like a business odyssey, thinking it over, but with decades of quiet patience and dedication, maybe it'd work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails
But fuel oil is really just a byproduct of refining crude. It's the muck left over when you've extracted everything else that's useful. And of course, it is not taxed, so prices don't account for it's environmental externalities.
If we can reduce overall demand for petroleum products, this should eventually cause fuel oil prices to rise because there'll be less crude being refined, and thus reduced supply.
[1] http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc/aviation/index.htm
The real problem is, you need lots of oils and there synthesis and using chemical fuel as energy storage seems a certainly feasible path, however it is again quite a bit more complicated than just drilling a hole in the ground.
Planting trees ought to do it.
It was "easy" when tree trunks kept falling into ancient swamps for millennia. Right now it's not as feasible.
It’s hard to imagine any carbon capture technology that has a better ROI compared to technologies that reduce emissions.
Or to put it another way, it’s much cheaper to not emit carbon in the first place than to try and recapture it.
According to the IPCC, even their conservative estimates indicate a requirement for some kind of atmospheric carbon removal to avoid severe climate related problems. Even if we could somehow reduce carbon emissions by 100% tomorrow we'd still need mega-projects.
The time for reduction was perhaps 30 years ago when James Hansen testified before the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
Which still overpredict the actual warming which has taken place.
What I like about the proposal in the subject article is that it actually focuses on a measurable impact--sea level rise--and a remedy targeted at that specific impact. It doesn't drag in speculative scenarios based on models that have been falsified by the data.
Overpredict? According to what?
According to NASA[1] we're already at a 0.9 degree anomaly for 2017. The IPCC prediction[2] is 1 degree anomaly in 2020 for the worst case prediction in the worst case scenario.
The NASA anomaly is relative to 1951-1980 average while IPCC is 1986-2005 average. So it's not a perfect comparison. But if you want to look at IPCC's best case scenarios, the prediction is about 0.1 degree, which certainly refutes your claim that they overpredict.
[1]: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
[2]: https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FI... See page 11
See, for example, here:
https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/climate-models-versus-cli...
Note that this actually understates the overprediction, because the models whose average is shown included three sets of models that made three different assumptions about how CO2 would rise. But CO2's actual rise over the period where we're comparing models with data was about the same as the assumption of the "worst case" (or "business as usual") scenario, so that scenario is the only one that's relevant to the comparison between models and data. And when you compare just that sheaf of models with the data, the divergence between model and data is even larger.
For the reasons why the upper troposphere temperature comparison is more relevant than the surface temperature comparison (which is what is shown in the IPCC AR5), see the article.
> According to NASA[1] we're already at a 0.9 degree anomaly for 2017. The IPCC prediction[2] is 1 degree anomaly in 2020 for the worst case prediction in the worst case scenario.
But, as you note, the two anomalies are relevant to two different baselines. That means the comparison is invalid, not "not perfect".
> if you want to look at IPCC's best case scenarios, the prediction is about 0.1 degree
That's for future temperature change under the future best case scenario. It has nothing to do with past temperature change under the actual scenario that actually happened.
> See page 11
Those graphs don't show models vs. data. They show models only (and with the actual time period for which we have data compressed on the far left of the graphs so you can't extract any useful comparison with data from them).
The Summary for Policymakers, which is what you linked to, does not show any direct comparison between models and data for a period for which we have data. Previous reports did, but in this one they decided not to--it's only buried in the WG1 report, in Chapter 9, p. 768:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chap...
The divergence between the CMIP5 mean (red) and the actual temperatures (black) in the upper graph in the 2000s is visible; the EMIC mean in the lower graph only appears to go up to 2000 so it doesn't provide a useful comparison. Also, both of these graphs show all of the models, not just the ones whose CO2 rise assumptions matched reality over the data period, so they understate the actual overprediction for the reason I gave above.
Geoengineering seems like a foregone conclusion to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa
Even if the later stages (building 60-mile-long sills beneath floating ice) seem unlikely to be cost-efficient, this part definitely sounds like it could be feasible; It's especially notable to me amongst climate-related megaprojects in that it does not require any new developments, but rather uses extant, mature technologies. Building the sills would require "only" time and money.
Unlike many global geo-engineering projects to prevent global warming, this one looks somehow realistic.
This is going to sound mighty unpopular - it already does to me while I try to formulate the right way to say this in my head...
But at what point do we need to conclude that saving the nearly 8-billion human beings and the overall habitability of the Earth is of greater importance than certain animals living in individual biomes?
I know it's not the contemporary, popular thing to think about. But if the alternative is the mass displacement and deaths of humans, it feels like it's something we're going to have to make a decision on.
But here we are almost in the year 2020, and our sense of moral obligation holds us back from using our advanced technology to its maximum potential, even to save our own lives or pursue new horizons.
Our species won't even be the last species left when resources become severely restricted due to one species' hyper-abundance and destructive environmental adaption.
I've never lived in the US, so anyone, please correct me if i'm wrong, but anecdotally I have heard that Americans don't generally have (or use) outdoor clothes lines to dry their washed clothes, rather they just use a dryer. I live in Australia and when I learned this I was floored. That approach is unthinkable in Australia due to our astronomical energy costs (South Aus, where I live has the highest energy cost in the world).
With our high prices, we only very occasionally use dryers which are a horribly inefficient way to dry clothes.
Maybe the solution to affect peoples' behaviour is to dramatically increase the cost of (dirty) energy.
That is called a carbon tax. It is supported by every serious economist on the left and right, as well as by the majority of the US population. It is also in place in most EU countries, most Canadian provinces, Japan and India.
South Australia isn't Buffalo in February, nor is it Seattle in every month not ending in -gust.
A very large number of human beings, even among those that accept the science of climate change and it’s likely consequences, have proven remarkably resistant to ANY persuasion to voluntarily moderate their lifestyles even a little to make the kind of changes that, if they were made en-masse, could mitigate the worst impacts. They are even MORE resistant to even mild attempts to impose change by way of a carbon pricing mechanism. God forbid I may have to pay 5% more for certain goods, or that I should sacrifice one of my SUVs.
My main gripe therefore with these geoengineering proposals is twofold.
1. On what planet where we we’re not willing to pay even a modest price on carbon, are we going to be willing to pay trillions for geoengineering projects?
2. Geoengineering is yet another reflection of that innate human desire to externalise costs as much as possible. Whether that be the cost of labour, pollution, or climate change. It’s always the ‘other’ that should bear the worst costs - the third world, the whales, the forests, whatever.
The attitude of placing greater importance on ‘us’ over everything and everyone else is exactly what got us into this fine mess, AND STILL IS. You may think your view is unpopular but only insofar as people don’t actually want to hear the truth about themselves.
Note: I’m already aware that my two points may be slightly contradictory.
So. Much. Fucking. Carbon. Trillions is nothing if it means no consumer-level caps on carbon output for the next generation or two.
So not a permanent fix then. Just kick that can down the road and let your grandkids sort it out. That’s exactly what I meant by externalising costs and getting someone else to pay, in this case the future.
How popular might it be? Like, kill the whole coal industry around the world; who would mind? Make fuel, say, 2x as expensive; who would mind? Make barbecue coals as expensive as the meat; would anyone notice? Also, enforce it globally, including places like India, Russia, or China, the latter critically dependent on coal-based electricity.
Now compare to building some walls around glaciers, maybe mere thousands of miles.
I heard somewhere a great parable. Imagine that some aviation specialist would analyze plane hijacking data and recommend to install strong locked doors to pilot cabins on airliners. It would have prevented 9/11, saved thousands of lives, and would have been incomparably cheaper than all those security measures implemented in the aftermath. But likely every airline would be against this unneeded expense, and it would be very hard to push this measure.
Same thing with the global warming, wars, and various other (impending) catastrophes: people hope that they'll get by somehow; how bad it can really be? You see, nothing is happening! When it hits, the view changes drastically, but it's too late already.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/carbon-pric...
The other point I'll make about huge big-bang projects is that in recent decades they've only ever been achieved by authoritarian regimes that don't need the kind of consensus that kills such projects in western democracies. We live in a world where a significant fraction (perhaps majority?) of the citizenry is largely ignorant, anti-science, distrusts authority, believes in outrageous conspiracy theories and lacks the ability to form coherent thoughts about most things. I put it to you that your chance of getting a large-scale geo-engineering project supported by that majority at a direct cost to them (a cost that can't be moderated by behaviour changes by the way) is practically zero outside an outright dictatorship.
I certainly don't disagree with you. I should make note that while I am a conservationist at heart, this was more a 'devils advocate' position I was bringing up.
Even discounting feeding 8 billion humans, just the maintenance required in keeping Spaceship Earth in a state (reliably) hospitable to humans is a surprisingly extensive task.
We know what to do: stop burning carbon, we have the technology today to replace carbon energy, we just want to do it as cheaply as possible without disrupting the Koch brother's revenue stream.
As for making people complacent: they're already complacent. I include almost everybody in that. The Paris agreement is unrealistic, lacks enforcement, and most countries are well behind their modest targets. Germany is increasing CO2 emissions because they're shutting down their nuclear plants. Etc, etc.
Maybe what makes good people complacent is watered-down, sugar-coated plans for fixing the climate. Just plant trees, put some solar on your roof, turn down your thermostat, we'll be fine. Maybe it would shake them out of complacency if we showed them what it would actually take to get us out of the mess we're in.
I am thinking about things like mass desertification, changing currents, etc.
Partially block of course. I was in Maine last year during the big solar eclipse (in the US); I don't remember how much percent of the sun was blocked in that location but the temperature dropped several degrees and outdoors it only visibly got slightly darker in mid-day.
I'm completely naive and ignorant about the practicalities of space stuff and climate science. But it does always pop in my mind as the obvious way to cool things down.
Put a small concentration of aerosols (microscopic dust particles or other light absorbers/reflectors) in the upper atmosphere. Basically a scaled down version of what happens during a volcanic eruption. The impact of that is one of the (few) areas where we actually have good predictive power in climate science.
> would there be any downsides to attempting this?
Depends on how you feel about putting a small concentration of aerosols in the upper atmosphere. Also, you would have to do very small increments to avoid having more impact than you want.
Aerosols need to be topped up.
How about a radical plan to stop stealing and wasting our money for change?
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/10/06/1510856112?sid=...