Yesterday, in "Losing the 'war on terror' via the Pakistani Monsoon", I wrote about current news on the global warming front, and how its impacting the ongoing "war on terror," quoting from Democracy Now! among other sources. Today, I want to start off looking back a month to another Democracy Now! program, which began with a segment with geopolitical analyst and columnist Gwynne Dyer talking about his new book, Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats. Dyer painted a very dire picture, arguing that goengineering was the only way to avoid catastrophe. Then in a followup segment with Vadana Shiva, they debated whether this was a sensible approach. Philosophically, I've always been deeply skeptical of geoengineering. But Dyer made about the strongest impression on me of any geoengineering proponent I've ever listened to. Then, last week, I saw a summary of three recent studies, which not only revealed seemingly fatal flaws--such as regional impacts that will persist, even if global mean temperature can be controlled--but that also served to show that global warming is a much more serious, more intractable problem than even I believed.
Let's start by going back a month. First Dyer paints a picture of the possible world to come--one of deep conflicts:
AMY GOODMAN: Your book begins to say the least, a nightmare scenario, the year 2045. I was wondering if you could just read us the scenario.?
GWYNNE DYER: Since the final collapse of European Union in 2036 under the stress of mass migration from the southern to northern members, the reconfigured Northern Union (France, Denmark, Luxembourg, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland) has succeeded in closing its borders to any further refugees from the famine stricken Mediterranean countries. Italy south of Rome, has largely been overrun by refugees from even harder hit north African countries, and is no longer part of the organized state. Spain, northern Italy and Turkey have all acquired nuclear weapons and are seeking to enforce food sharing on the better-fed countries of norther Europe. Britain, which has managed to make itself just about self-sufficient in food by dint of a great national effort, has withdrawn from the continent and shelters behind its enhanced nuclear deterrent.-I think that is why they're renewing their deterrent, by the way, right now--. Russia, the greatest beneficiary of climate change, in terms of food production is the undisputed great power of Asia. However, the reunification of China after the chaos of the 2020's and 2030's poses a renewed threat to its Siberian borders for even the much reduced Chinese population of 800 million is unable to feed itself from the country's increasingly arid farm land, which was devastated by the decline of rainfall over the north Chinese plain, and the collapse of the major river systems. Southern India is reemerging as a major regional power, but what used to be northern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, remain swept by famine and anarchy due to the collapse of the flow in the glacier-fed Indus, Ganges, and Bramaputra rivers. Welcome to 2036.
Then Dyer describes geo-engineering:
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what geo-engineering is?
GWYNNE DYER: It is the hole card, the get out of jail free card, the only one I know of, its the only one I know of frankly. I don't know a single scientist nor do I know many policymakers, who in their honest moments think we are going to get our emissions down in time to avoid tumbling into potentially runaway climate change. The two degrees Celsius average global temperature, after that we lose control. Natural factors, feedbacks from the permafrost melting and so on, takeover and carry us to really devastating levels of warming 4-5-6 degrees. You're trapped on this escalator and you can't get off. So, if that's where we are heading, what do you do? We'll do the best to cut the emissions but its not going to happen in time. And the answer is geo-engineering. You cheat. You find ways to hold the temperature down while you go on working at the project of getting your emissions down. It is a long-term solution, but if waiting, just getting your emissions down is your only technique, sorry, you're going to trigger the feedbacks, you're in run away. So cheat. The phrase we're all going to know in two years time is SRM, and that stands for Solar Radiation Management....
Although I'm philosophically sympathetic to Shiva, I found this response rather sloppily argued, particularly trying to connect Iceland's volcanic eruption to its economic woes:
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, three thoughts. The first is, it is the idea of being able to engineer our lives on this very fragile and complex and interrelated and interconnected planet that's created the mess we are in. It's an engineering paradigm that created the fossil fuel age that gave us climate change. And Einstein warned us and said you can't solve problems with the same mindset that created them. Geo-engineering is trying to solve the problems of the same, old mindset of controlling nature. And the phrase that was used, of cheating, let's cheat-you can't cheat nature. That's something people should recognize by now. There is no cheating possible. Eventually the laws of Gaia determine the final outcome. But I think the second thing about geo-engineering is, we've just had the volcano in Iceland, yes it was Iceland. And look at the collapse of the economy. And here are scientists thinking that's a solution? Because they are thinking in a one dimensional way. Linear issue of global warming, anything to do with global cooling. I work on ecological agriculture. We need that sun light for photosynthesis. The geoengineers don't realize sunshine is not a curse on the planet. The sun is not the problem, the problem is the mess of pollution we are creating. So again we can't cheat.
Now, though, there are a set of three new studies of geoengineering, and their results not only cast it in a bad light, they deeply intensify the sense of urgency and seriousness. They show that even if global impacts can be mitigated, it's only temporary, and sever regional effects will still occur. And, of course, that's assuming that things are done responsibly--something there's absolutely no evidence of so far.
The results of three different geoengineering studies were recently published, and all three found that geoengineering would be fraught with unintended and unexpected consequences.
The first two studies looked into the effects of pumping gigatonnes of sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the stratosphere. This method of geoengineering works by decreasing the amount of energy that reaches the Earth's surface by increasing how much light reflects off the upper atmosphere. Scientists know that this would work because the Earth cooled for a few years after the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo blew large amounts of SO2 into the stratosphere in 1991. But what scientists don't know is what the side effects of using SO2 in a long-term geoengineering project would be.
The first study was performed using two different climate models to project what would happen as a result of pumping 5 Tg per year (5 Mt per year) of SO2 into the stratosphere. The scientists ran the models over several decades and compared the results to a baseline CO2 emissions scenario (A1B) assuming rapid economic growth and spread of new energy technologies, a maximum global population of about 9 billion people, and reduced disparities between wealthy and poor nations.
The results showed a number of things that Angliss describes specifically, but all can be summarized broadly under two points: (1) Aimply controlling the global mean does not put an end to regional climate change, which will still occur and have significant impacts. (2) You have to keep pumping SO2 into the atmosphere, or else the global impacts continue as they would have anyway:
The simulations showed several things. First, continuous pumping of SO2 into the stratosphere cooled the average global surface temperature in less than a decade to approximately pre-industrial temperatures. Second, injecting the simulated amount of SO2 delayed the increase in global mean temperature approximately 30 years. Third, when the temperature returned to approximately the same level as the simulation starting point, the injected SO2 had significantly altered the global temperature pattern from the 1990-1999 means. For example, the Amazon basin was about 1 K hotter, the Arctic still showed polar amplification due to losing very reflective sea ice, while Australia was actually cooler and sub-Saharan Africa were generally cooler. As the authors pointed out, this means that
increases in GHG concentrations can still have a profound impact on regional climate even if geoengineering is successful in counteracting any change in global-mean temperature.
Fourth, along with changes in average global surface temperature, there are also changes predicted in global precipitation. For example, the simulation projected that much of the US Midwest would dry out along with the Texas and Mexican Gulf coasts and the northern area of South America. On the other hand, inland areas of sub-Saharan Africa would get wetter along with northeastern Australia and the Siberian coast.
The second study ran different scenarios involving continuous pumping of SO2 into the atmosphere, trying to stabilize the global mean. It found that there was no optimal outcome: some regions would always be impacted more than others, making the engineering choice inherently and tragically political, with dire outcomes for some. First the basics:
While the first study found that average global surface temperatures could be delayed by about 30 years by pumping 5 Tg per year of SO2 into the atmosphere, the second study used a different simulation to determine what would happen if the amount of SO2 was increased continually to keep the average global surface temperature stable.
Like the first study, the second study started from the A1B emissions scenario, but then ran 54 different simulations where differing amounts of SO2 were pumped into the stratosphere in order to counteract and then stabilize the average global surface temperature at various points. In addition, the researcher divided up the world's land area into different regions in order to estimate what the overall effects of geoengineering would be on each region.
Then what it tells us:
What the researchers found was that there appeared to be a fundamental trade-off involved in using SO2 to stabilize the average global surface temperature. Specifically, the results appeared to show that more stability in global temperature meant less stability in regional precipitation. In addition, the researchers determined an "optimal" climate where the changes in both temperature and precipitation were held as low as possible, and then they mapped those climates into Figure 2 (Fig. 4 from the paper, at left [below]). Fig 2a & b show the optimal climate in the 2020s vs. the 2070s respectively, following 15 or 65 years of non-stop SO2 injection into the stratosphere. The red and orange regions represent those areas where "optimal" is achieved using less SO2 pumping while the blue and dark green regions are those areas where more SO2 pumping is "optimal."
Figure 2
What Figure 2 shows us is that there's a number of clear differences between those areas where more SO2 pumping would be preferred vs. those areas where less SO2 is better. For example, the northern hemisphere generally wants more SO2 than the southern hemisphere. But perhaps the most significant is that the developing world, especially western Africa, India, and the island nations of south-east Asia are all going to want less SO2 pumping, while the developed world (the US, Europe, China, Russia, Japan) will all want more SO2 pumping.
This split between north and south, developed vs. developing is very likely to cause conflicts between regions and nations that will complicate any SO2-based geoengineering system. As the researchers point out, these results
suggest that as our understanding improves, serious issues of regionally diverse impacts and inter-regional equity may further complicate what is already a very challenging problem in risk management and governance.
Summarizing these two studies, Angliss notes:
The results of the two SO2 studies agree broadly with each other - pumping SO2 into the stratosphere will cause unintended changes in precipitation globally but with some regions faring better than others. The second study, however, only ran their simulations until 2070. In reality, unless some method of accelerated CO2 removal was implemented, the geoengineering of the stratosphere with SO2 would have to go on for centuries.
Finally, the third study posited an unknown ideal system that could remove all the CO2 in the atmosphere at once. There were three variants:
The third study investigated the effects of an ideal system that was able to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to project what effect it would have on average global surface temperature.
The researchers ran three different simulations. The first, baseline simulation followed a high CO2 emissions scenario until 2049 and then, in 2050, dropped the emissions instantly to 0 but did not otherwise reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere. In the second simulation, the emissions not only dropped to 0 but all the excess CO2 already in the atmosphere was also instantly removed, but any extra CO2 later released into the atmosphere by the ocean or the biosphere were not removed. The third simulation also removed any extra CO2 added to the atmosphere by the oceans and biosphere as it was added, simulating continued CO2 removal by some geoengineering technology.
Referring to the following graph:
he then identifies four "key features":
The first key feature is that CO2 concentration doesn't fall rapidly even after CO2 emissions have been reduced to 0 (top graph, black dashed line). This is because the lifetime of CO2 emitted into the environment is thousands of years, so the CO2 concentrations fall about 100 ppm over the course of 450 years unless the CO2 is actively removed from the atmosphere. The second key feature is that temperature continues to increase even after all CO2 emissions are stopped (bottom graph, dashed black line). This is because the ocean stores massive amounts of energy and it responds relatively slowly. As a result, the global mean surface temperature in 2500 is simulated to be about the same as in 2050.
The third key feature is that even after all the anthropogenic CO2 is removed from the atmosphere in 2050, the CO2 concentration rebounds within a decade or so to around 360 ppm, restoring almost half of the CO2 back into the atmosphere (top graph, gold line). As a result, the effect of the one-time CO2 removal on global mean surface temperature is to only cut the temperature by about half instead of fully back to the pre-industrial level (bottom graph, gold line). The reason this happens is that much anthropogenic CO2 is absorbed by the ocean and the biosphere, and when the atmospheric CO2 concentration drops, the oceanic CO2 comes out of solution and the excess CO2 held in the biosphere gradually re-enters the atmosphere as the fertilization effects of excess CO2 fall.
The fourth key feature is how fast the temperatures respond to CO2 removal. If it were physically possible to remove all the anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere, then the global temperature would fall by about a degree Celsius within less than a decade (bottom graph, gold line). And if the excess CO2 being emitted by the oceans and biosphere back into the atmosphere were also removed via some technology as they were released, then the temperature would fall to nearly pre-industrial levels within 70 years (bottom graph, red line).
Leaving aside the fact that no such technology exists, he draws two conclusions:
First, merely transitioning to zero CO2 emissions by capturing CO2 from power plants and switching to renewable energy sources won't enough.
This is what we're trying to achieve by transitioning out of the carbon age. It's the standard, non-geo-engineering approach. And without also removing the CO2 already present in the atmosphere, it won't be enough.
How much will be enough? Funny you should ask:
Second, in order to return the global mean surface temperature to about pre-industrial levels, the total amount of CO2 that would need to be sequestered is almost equivalent to the total amount of CO2 that was emitted in the first place. That's a LOT of CO2, and so CO2 removal will be a long-term and difficult process.
Finally, Angliss summarizes the revealed inadequacies:
Combined, these three studies paint a bleak picture of geoengineering that runs counter to some proponents' claims. Pumping SO2 into the stratosphere can generally delay or counteract the increase in average global surface temperature, but at the cost potentially serious changes in precipitation and the accompanying changes in various regions' ability to sustain ecosystems and civilization. There will be other unintended and unexpected consequences from using SO2 to geoengineer the climate, and given the inability of international bodies to presently manage conflicts over climate disruption, it's unlikely that those same bodies will be able to manage the regional problems that will occur as a result of geoengineering.
There are other propblems as well--such as ocean acidification--since temperature and precipitation aren't the only factors we face. But one thing's for certain:
Climate disruption is a hole, and before we consider how best to use geoengineering to build us a ladder out of the hole, we have to stop digging ourselves even deeper.
Reading through the results of these studies, it becomes quite clear that--just as with health care or financial reform--the entire political spectrum is almost completely de-coupled from reality. You may think that James Inhofe is in a state of deep denial. And you're right. But that's only compared to recognizing that a problem exists. Compared to actually doing something that would actually solve the problem, the difference between Inhofe and Obama is surprisingly negligable.
Houston, we have a problem. The spaceship in trouble is Spaceship Earth.
Maybe we can get Robert Gibbs to tell the laws of physics how stupid they are. That should solve everything.
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Figure 2
