An attempt at balance...

OK - so, hopefully a calmer reflection on ETC's blog (as promised 'tomorrow' (hah) in the last piece)...

So, ignoring the nonsense (see last post if interested) there are some interesting ideas here.

Firstly, I'm not sure I completely buy the 'plowshares into swords' argument. Weren't the ambitions of Lyndon Johnson somewhat noble and altruistic? I'm sure we can all agree what followed was abhorrent but there are two separate issues here. By this logic, you could also argue ENMOD was a function of the first effort, which is a good thing, right? I worry that the inevitability of bad usage is too readily accepted. Or it could be that any intervention is perceived as bad, even with good intentions (I suppose the argument here is economic - how much more aid could have been given without attempts at weather modification?). I still think this is harder to argue for - as a member of Friends of the Earth once said, 'doing nothing is an ethical position'. To protect 'naturalness' to that extent (i.e. not intervening when you could) is perverse, and on a par with refusing your child a blood transfusion on religious grounds. It's simply disgusting. BUT, and it is a big but indeed, why should we trust people in power to do the right thing with climate engineering when they are failing so spectacularly on climate change? (a point raised by Peter Irving at a meeting in 2010). This is harder to knock down - you can point at the conspiracy theorists who claim geoengineering is already happening on a massive scale but, ignoring those loonies (as ETC now do I think) this question still alarms me. Peter, and others, are right - (1) governments regularly do appalling things in our name and (2) even well meaning efforts at SRM could worsen the situation, at least for some. It's also clear to most that nuclear power [paragraph 8] must play a role (at least in the short term) in reducing carbon dioxide emissions - swords into plowshares again ?

Secondly, of course, Jim is right. Plan A all the way. But, and it's a big but again, would it really work? Can you really plant your way out of food poverty in Northern Africa? I seriously doubt it, not with the amount of water stress and the increase in populations predicted over the next fifty years. If it were that easy, why hasn't it been done? Don't wheel out the old 'global powers' conspiracy theory nonsense again, please. Billions of dollars of aid have been pumped into the most needing parts of the world with very limited effect. If there was a solution as simple as ETC propose why wouldn't people just have done it? Answer, it's not that simple and it's an idealistic and unrealistic solution. A victory for idealism for pragmatism. By the way, I am all for idealism - if carbon dioxide levels start coming down, temperatures stabilise and global poverty is reduced/eliminated, those proposing climate engineering schemes look immensely stupid. Let me know when that happens....

Thirdly, thanks for the credit... Morton and the geoengineers might spare a little artificial intelligence to figure out what to do if a real or second “inevitable” volcanic eruption overlaps the manufactured kind. How would a triple-whammy of sulphates (a north injection, a south injection and then an unexpected volcanic addition) shift the climate. Would you need to double the artificial injection? How can you then scale back afterwards?'.  That's pretty much exactly what I've been working on. As a ball park estimate the odds of another Pinatubo-scale eruption over the next 50 years are (roughly) 1 in 3 (not quite inevitable). Those aren't good odds. As I've said in *many* meetings, including those attended by ETC, volcanoes may teach us much about climate engineering but may well turn out to be the greatest single uncertainty when considering such schemes.

Lastly, the normalisation of geoengineering and public acceptance is not something 'we' should covet. Make no mistake, if SRM is undertaken it will be the clearest indictation yet of our failure as a species. That should not be 'normal'...

An inconvenient truth

Jim Thomas from ETC group has written a blog post on the Haywood paper: 

http://www.etcgroup.org/content/normalizing-geoengineering-foreign-aid

In the interests of fairness I should say there are some fascinating points in there. Maybe I'll come back tomorrow and try to go through the positives of this article - for now I'm a little irritated to do so. It's the first paragraph that really got my blood pressure up:

'Climate Drift: Geoengineers have a problem. Computer modeling suggests that blocking solar radiation in the temperate zone (to preserve Arctic ice or to forestall massive methane releases) could cool the Northern hemisphere but its impact could also drift South, creating severe climatic disruptions by dampening down Asia’s monsoon while drying out Africa’s Sahel. Not a popular proposition.

Now, geoengineers may hope they have a solution. A new study in Nature Climate Change[i] by the UK Government’s Meteorological Office suggests that some form of solar radiation management could mitigate the conventional vicissitudes of nature. According to the report, volcanic eruptions north of the equator in the 20th century either contributed to – or caused – droughts along the African equator and further South. The Met Office guys reason that if the North (home to most volcanoes) were to have another major (and, ultimately inevitable) eruption, drought might be prevented by unleashing counter (artificial) volcanoes below the equator.  The sulfuric blasts could even increase precipitation in sub-Saharan Africa, increase  biomass growth and benefit regional food security.'

Wow! So, who are these heroes? Those clever chaps with their computer models who have pointed out the problems with asymmetric deployment of sulfates? Hang on, oh no! You're not going to believe this, it's only the same people who wrote the Nature Climate Change paper, and, I know you're going to laugh, it's the same paper! Well, that is awkward. I tell you what, let's ignore that part, make the authors out to be 'geoengineers' and the cherry pick the bits we don't like. What we absolutely shouldn't do is given the authors any sort of credit for pointing out (yet more) problems with a dash towards deployment in the Northern Hemisphere.

New article from Science reporter in the Guardian on Jim Haywood's recent paper...

From Ian Sample at the Guardian....

Controversial geoengineering projects that may be used to cool the planet must be approved by world governments to reduce the danger of catastrophic accidents, British scientists said.Met Office researchers have called for global oversight of the radical schemes after studies showed they could have huge and unintended impacts on some of the world's most vulnerable people.The dangers arose in projects that cooled the planet unevenly. In some cases these caused devastating droughts across Africa; in others they increased rainfall in the region but left huge areas of Brazil parched."The massive complexities associated with geoengineering, and the potential for winners and losers, means that some form of global governance is essential," said Jim Haywood at the Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter. The warning builds on work by scientists and engineers to agree a regulatory framework that would ban full-scale geoengineering projects, at least temporarily, but allow smaller research projects to go ahead.

Geoengineering comes in many flavours, but among the more plausible are "solar radiation management" (SRM) schemes that would spray huge amounts of sun-reflecting particles high into the atmosphere to simulate the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions.

Volcanoes can blast millions of tonnes of sulphate particles into the stratosphere, where they stay aloft for years and cool the planet by reflecting some of the sun's energy back out to space.

In 2009, a Royal Society report warned that geoengineering was not an alternative to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but conceded the technology might be needed in the event of a climate emergency. Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, Haywood and others show that moves to cool the climate by spraying sulphate particles into the atmosphere could go spectacularly wrong. They began by looking at the unexpected impacts of volcanic eruptions.

In 1912 and 1982, eruptions first at Katmai in Alaska and then at El Chichón in Mexico blasted millions of tonnes of sulphate into northern skies. These eruptions preceded major droughts in the Sahel region of Africa. When the scientists recreated the eruptions in climate models, rainfall across the Sahel all but stopped as moisture-carrying air currents were pushed south.

Having established a link between volcanic eruptions in the northern hemisphere and droughts in Africa, the scientists returned to their climate models to simulate SRM projects. The scientists took a typical project that would inject 5m tonnes of sulphate into the stratosphere every year from 2020 to 2070. That amount of sulphate injected into the northern hemisphere caused severe droughts in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Chad and Sudan, and an almost total loss of vegetation.

The same project had radically different consequences if run from the southern hemisphere. Rather than drying the Sahel, cooling the southern hemisphere brought rains to the Sahel and re-greened the region. But Africa's benefit came at the cost of slashing rainfall in north-eastern Brazil. The unintended consequences of SRM projects would probably be felt much farther afield. "We have only scratched the surface in looking at the Sahel. If hurricane frequencies changed, that could have an impact on the US," said Haywood.

Matthew Watson, who leads the Spice project at Bristol University, said the study revealed the "dramatic consequences" of uninformed geoengineering. "This paper tells us there are consequences for our actions whatever we do. There is no get-out-of-jail-free card," he told the Guardian. "Whatever we do is a compromise, and that compromise means there will be winners and losers. That opens massive ethical questions: who gets to decide how we even determine what is a good outcome for different people?

"How do you get a consensus with seven billion-plus stakeholders? If there was a decision to do geoengineering tomorrow, it would be done by white western men, and that isn't good," Watson said.

Exactly...

I'd been meaning to write something along these lines (sort of) about how we should be ignoring the 2% at either end of the climate debate when I stumbled across this. I am still laughing and I actually pulled a muscle while crying when I read it the first time...

The most depressing thing about the climate of endless, instant outrage isn't just the sheer futility of it all – because nothing actually changes apart from a few keys being bashed on the head by angry fingers – but that this very futility allows strange and frightening new creatures to thrive: weird specimens such as the "James Delingpole", which as far as I can tell is a sort of stick insect whose sole function is to irritate passing liberals. Their cries of dismay are his oxygen. Without them he will die. Consequently, there isn't a week that goes by without Delingpole causing some sort of kerfuffle, then running away laughing like a naughty boy who has just blown off through the headmaster's letterbox.

This is every day on Twitter, for ever. 9am: James Delingpole says trees are lesbians so we should saw their flat ugly tits off and fire them at Muslims using a petrol-powered catapult. 9.03am: An enraged section of Twitter spends nine hours ceaselessly promoting James Delingpole, to the delight of James Delingpole. 6pm: James Delingpole triumphantly closes his laptop and strolls away whistling, clicking his heels as a cartoon vignette closes around him.

Q: Who has won here? A: James Delingpole. Q: What's more offensive than that? A: Nothing.

Full article, by Charlie Brooker here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/13/django-unchained-jack-whitehall-james-delingpole

Mark Lynas - why all the fuss

Wow! Just wow! Ladies and gentlemen, we have a polemic. Some green-on-green! OK, it's related to GMO but clearly foreshadows the burgeoning debate on climate engineering. Most of you probably know about the punch up already: Mark Lynas (a 'neo-enviro') stood up in Oxford and admitted he had a Monbiotian conversion, had (shock) looked at some evidence and come out in favour of GMOs. This prompted a robust  response from the 'trads' especially eco-feminist Vandana Shiva, who's twitter rebuttal included an ill-timed (sickening, actually) comparison to encouraging rapists. I suspect several things have pissed off the old school, not least that he was one of their own. It's a bit like those poor folks who leave the scientologists and go public; everyone hates a splitter. The point is this - I'll embolden it for emphasis - they're on the same bloody side. Lynas's credentials as an environmentalist are clear. I'm quite sure Shiva's are too.

Neo's are characterized as traitors, shallow, quick-fixers, all too willing to embrace technology often associated with globalization and power. They see themselves as realists - pragmatists with solutions. Trad's are presented as 'fire and brimstone', pious, sanctimonious anti-science idealogues - out of touch, losing the fight and bereft of realistic ideas. They seem themselves as bastions (ahem, Guardians if you will), fighting the good fight, and the only real lovers/understanders of nature. If you think this schism is deep for GMO, imagine what CE will do. Lynas has already pinned his colours to the mast here, I suspect I could predict Shiva's! The current episode will look like a minor skirmish compared to what's ahead, I guarantee it. Why does this matter? Because we (yes, I count myself as an 'enviro', sorry) are in the minority here. Don't worry, so are those that do not value the environment and put their own greed above everything (we all know where they are), it's those that either don't understand or who don't care enough who make up the vast majority. When we do this to each other, we switch people off. We allow those that are wrong about climate change to flourish.

Environmentalists are incapable of admitting or embracing uncertainty - everything is black and white. Lynas's conversion was a complete one, from passionately opposed to worryingly advocative. I'm not calling for us to all kiss and make up, that would be pointless, unhelpful and impossible. I simply believe that basic standards of decency, thoughtfulness and objectivity should be applied to an evidence-based discussion.

Apologies for the hiatus....

It's been quite a hectic few months and I've stopped blogging due to a combination of a family holiday (OK, not all hectic), a mountain of marking in September and teaching starting in October. I'm also feeling a little weary from the efforts of managing SPICE, and being involved in several other large projects focused on geoengineering (EuTRACE) , volcanic ash clouds (VANAHEIM, CREDIBLE) and increasing resilience for those vulnerable during volcanic crises (STREVA). They are all interesting in different ways and very time consuming.

I'd like to write a little on two recent events that have happened that are of interest to me. One is obviously related to climate engineering, one less so but a salutary lesson nonetheless. The lesson comes from the recent verdict from the L'Aquila trial of seven eminent seismologists who were challenged to assess the likelihood of an earthquake happening in the near future near L'Aquila in Italy.  They 'failed' to predict the earthquake and have been jailed for manslaughter. This is a lengthy overview. I am most interested in the points raised here by Prof. David Speigelhalter (whom I know from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) that both of us were on during the volcanic ash crisis of 2010).  The question, of course, is this: if scientists are accountable for not predicting natural disasters (wholly unfairly in my opinion) that what becomes of those who sanction climate engineering. If we undertake large-scale engineering, particularly those that have trans-boundary effects (including SRM and iron fertilization), who will carry the can? More importantly, how will we disentangle 'our' signature from that of 'nature' (a quite ridiculous construct at ca. 400 ppm carbon dioxide) - how can we ever know what would have happened?

Secondly, the recent iron fertilization 'experiment' also leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth. I agree wholeheartedly that it undermines legitimate research and I believe, as I think my actions have demonstrated, that profit, or even the perception of profiteering, have no place in research in climate engineering. I happily accept that the commercial sector is not the innermost parts of the seven circles of hell it is often compared to, but, in terms of trust I believe that those who refuse to even consider personal gain as a motive for improved understanding are those best placed to act for the greater good.

I'd also like to report briefly on two events that I have enjoyed significantly more than reading about the above. The first was a public meeting at the University of East Anglia to assist with the work of a PhD student garnering opinion about climate engineering - I undertook this with Jon Talyor, head of climate at WWF. On paper this might look like a adversarial set up, but far from it. It was a fascinating experience that restored some of my faith in human nature. The second was a stakeholder meeting for SPICE, with Hugh, Kirsty and Chris (from CUED) with representatives of civil societies. It was under Chatam House rules (a report is imminent from the facilitator) but suffice to say it was a challenging, difficult, fascinating, illuminating and exceptionally worthwhile effort. I'd like to praise all concerned for the spirit in which the meeting was held and for the frankness of the discussions. I hope we will continue with this process.

My current bugbear, which I was allowed to air during the meeting is the point scoring that more extreme NGO's seem to feel the need to entertain. Despite what anyone tells you, the SPICE testbed was postponed solely by the stategate panel (a group of five thinkers with backgrounds in social science, atmospheric science, engineering and environmentalism) before NGO objection and called off by SPICE. Anyone who claims to have got it 'cancelled' or 'shut down' is either deluded, or, more likely, knowingly claiming to have influence where they had none. Privately, I bet they'd be willing to admit this; publically, they feel the need to 'fight their corner'. This posturing does a huge disservice to both the stagegate panel and to me and Hugh who agonised about these decisions.

Trouble ahead

Horribly inaccurate/leading Guardian article -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/17/us-geoengineers-spray-sun-balloon

SPICE was not cancelled  - the testbed was called off.
Thousands of tonnes (in the intro) turns out to be 10's-100's kg in the body of the article

Still captures some interesting issues (I will post on after consideration).

Governance?????