What is Geoengineering? (5 articles, 2 videos, 2 links to scientific studies)

(Even though I consider man-made climate change a threat, geoengineering doesn't seem like it's going to work, and the methods proposed seem like they would do more harm to people than good to the earth, especially spraying sulphate aerosols or anything else into the stratosphere. According to one of the news reports, it's a common Air Force practice to release clouds of reflective "chaff" into the air to hinder enemy radar from picking up our planes. The chaff is routinely composed of brightly shiny aluminum bits or a plastic version.This is a routine practice in the Northwest where even the weathermen mention it on the weather reports.  Why they do it over our domestic skies is sort of a mystery.--jef)

First up, a House of Representatives Report on Geoengineering:

ENGINEERING THE CLIMATE:
RESEARCH NEEDS AND STRATEGIES FOR INTERNATIONAL COORDINATION

CHAIRMAN BART GORDON
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
OCTOBER 2010 

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Next a Belgian scientific study:

 

Case Orange:
Contrail Science, its impact on climate and weather anipulation programs conducted by the United States and its allies

Compiled for the Belfort Group

May 10, 2010

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Geoengineering aims to tackle climate change by removing CO2 from the air or limiting the sunlight reaching the planet
guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 February 2011

Geoengineering schemes are projects designed to tackle the effects of climate change directly, usually by removing CO2 from the air or limiting the amount of sunlight reaching the planet's surface. Although large-scale geoengineering is still at the concept stage, advocates claim that it may eventually become essential if the world wants to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Critics, by contrast, claim that geoengineering isn't realistic – and may be a distraction from reducing emissions.

The first category of scheme – those designed to remove CO2 from the air – include machines (sometimes called "artificial trees") that pull the gas from the atmosphere using plastic polymers. Other proposals seek to increase the amount of CO2 absorbed by the oceans – for example by adding large quantities of lime to the water.

Other related schemes – sometimes but not always described as geoengineering – involve harnessing the capacity of trees and plants to absorb CO2 from the air. These include burning large quantities of wood in power plants with carbon-capture technology; making and burying large amounts of charcoal to lock carbon into the soils; and grazing cattle in a way designed to turn grasslands into giant carbon sinks.

In the second category – schemes designed to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth – proposals include spraying sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere by airplane to reflect sunlight back to space; using unmanned ships to increase above-ocean cloud cover by spraying sea water into the air; painting the world's roofs white to increase reflectivity; and even floating thousands of tiny mirrors in space between Earth and the sun.

Some geoengineering schemes, such as adding aerosols to the stratosphere, have attracted heavy criticism for their possible side effects. Even if these side-effects weren't severe, schemes that "mask" the temperature rise rather than removing the CO2 come with some serious disadvantages, such as the fact that they don't deal with CO2's other major impact: ocean acidification. Administering any such scheme would also raise obvious issues of geopolitics and global governance.

Other schemes, such as the machines designed to suck CO2 directly out of the air, are far less controversial, since all they aim to do is remove a pollutant that humans are adding to the air. The main challenges in this case are reducing manufacturing and running costs to make the devices commercially viable, and finding reliable and inexpensive ways to store the captured gas.

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vidlink

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Geoengineering Is ‘A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come’
By Alexis Madrigal March 23, 2010 Wired.com

While humans have unintentionally been altering Earth’s climate for centuries, some scientists have begun to study how to intentionally hack the globe to cool the overheated planet.

Eli Kintisch’s new book, Hack the Planet provides a thorough and nuanced portrait of the development of geoengineering. Through long acquaintance with the field’s biggest names, Kintisch, a staff writer for Science, paints a deep sociological portrait of a radical new scientific discipline bursting messily into the world.

He reminds us that even though the techniques may be wild and global, many of the people dreaming them up are regular scientists trying to deal rationally with a carbon problem that they don’t see society solving. Faced with a warming world, they are torn between watching nature die or trying to surgically kill it themselves.

Wired.com: What are some of the basic geoengineering options being discussed?

Eli Kintisch: The main geoengineering techniques fall into two basic categories: One, the ways to block sunlight at different points in the atmosphere and earth system to lower the temperature rapidly in that way, and the other is enhancing the planet’s ability to take up carbon dioxide through a variety of techniques. So, sun-blocking and carbon-sucking are the two main ways.

With sun-blocking, what you are essentially doing is brightening the planet, increasing the earth’s albedo. That can change the amount of total radiation that the planet experiences. Scientists have proposed ways of intercepting solar radiation at every single point from the surface of the earth by whitening roofs or brightening the ocean’s surface itself with tiny bubbles, to brightening low-lying and high clouds, to one of the most radical and discussed geoengineering techniques: adding particles called aerosols to the stratosphere. That technique has many names, but I like to call it the Pinatubo option, because it was influenced by the rapid cooling that follows volcanic eruptions.

The Pinatubo option involves spraying some kind of particles (usually people talk about sulfur) into the upper atmosphere to form a kind of haze that blocks a small percentage of the sun’s rays before they can enter the lower atmosphere.

The carbon methods involve generally enhancing natural systems to take in more carbon, perhaps genetically modifying plants so they have more carbonaceous cells or growing large blooms of algae in the ocean by using some sort of key nutrient that can catalyze and fertilize their growth. The main way has been to use iron. You could also build machines to suck in the carbon dioxide.

Wired.com: You pinpoint one moment as really touching off the latest interest in geoengineering: a paper by Paul Crutzen. Why was that paper so influential?

Kintisch: Scientists had considered mimicking the cooling effect that volcanic aerosols have on the planet for decades before Crutzen’s paper. The scientist who first published on it was the Soviet scientist Budyko. But Crutzen came at a time where many scientists felt that the climate crisis was accelerating and he had the stature of a Nobel Prize. As an atmospheric chemist, he certainly had knowledge in this particular field.

And while he does have a reputation as a bit of a maverick, Crutzen’s paper was assiduously spelled out and he sent it to all of the top minds in the field before publishing it. That made it hard to argue with his essential conclusion, which is that we better at least study the method. It was difficult for anyone to disagree with. The furthest people could go was arguing that the paper shouldn’t be published. It was controversial and required intervention by the president of the National Academy of Science, Ralph Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist himself and friend of Crutzen.

Wired.com: Early in your book, you split the people working on geoengineering into two basic camps: the red team and the blue team. Who are these teams and how are they different?

Kintisch: First, I don’t think anyone really wants to do geoengineering right now. Maybe a handful of people think we are at that stage or think it would be a good idea to “take control.” But the [blue team] scientists who are starting to spend more of their time studying geoengineering are generally engineering types, the kinds of scientists who like to think up new solutions and create new ideas and synthesize existing ones. The red team scientists have more of the temperament of skeptics. They are better at shooting holes in proposals and identifying problems. For any field, you usually have these two types.

The blue team includes most famously Edward Teller [nuclear scientist and former head of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory], who passed away in 2003, and his acolyte Lowell Wood. They are two of the blue team when it comes to the Pinatubo option. Then, when it comes to cloud-brightening, you have a British scientist named John Latham, who for most of his life has studied weather and came up with a way to brighten clouds. And when it comes to iron fertilization, which is growing algae blooms, there are a variety of scientists but most notably John Martin.

The red team includes scientists who have focused on the ways that these solutions could be deleterious, or on early technical problems with them. For the stratospheric aerosols, there is an expert on volcanoes, Alan Robock at Rutgers, who has focused on the problems with the Pinatubo option. For iron fertilization, there is an ecologist, Penny Chisholm at MIT, who is mostly focused on a variety of ecological and environmental issues related to growing these giant algae blooms.

Wired.com: One fascinating connection you draw is between scientists developing the atomic bomb and scientists working on geoengineering. “You hope to God this is never used but if you have to use it, you better know how it behaves,” David Battisti tells you. That argument runs throughout post-war science. Does anyone have a better answer than the atomic scientists did?

Kintisch: At this point, a lot of scientists feel the cat is out of the bag. If anything, a desperate politician 30 years form now may suddenly decide, “I need to cool the planet.” And if we don’t study it, scientists won’t have any way to warn this leader of what the consequences will be. From that perspective there is a Pandora’s box that has been opened.

Geoengineering is a bad idea whose time has come. It is something that you have to study and hope to never use. [For the atomic scientists], the other side has nuclear weapons and they are pointed at you, so you have no choice but to develop a deterrent. In this case, the nuclear weapons are the unknown chance that the planet’s sensitivity to CO2 is very high and will respond to some of these worst-case tipping points.

Scientist feel they have no choice but to develop this response that viscerally is almost sickening to many scientists, especially someone like David Battisti, who thinks a lot about the internal dynamics of the climate system and understands how hard it is to understand how the parts fit together and then predict its behavior.

Wired.com: We talk a lot about the “tails” of climate-change risk, the big, seemingly low-probability stuff that could have a major impact. Do we know what the tails of geoengineering schemes, particularly the Pinatubo option, are? Is there some slight chance that something really bad could happen?

Kintisch: For the most part, scientists are trying to focus their efforts on geoengineering ideas that have some natural analogue. The Pinatubo option mimics volcanoes. Cloud-brightening happens as a result of salt particles and dust.

But, we don’t really know that much at all about any of these wild concepts. So, what scientists say is that the best way to make a decision is to compare not doing geoengineering and experiencing the worst-case scenarios of global warming with doing geoengineering and experiencing the tails or worst-case scenarios of geoengineering.

Often a mistake people make in talking about this, is that they consider that geoengineering schemes would work perfectly without weighing that there would be these unintended consequences.

Wired.com: Do you think it will be possible to design experiments that can address the risks and uncertainties of geoengineering?

Kintisch: I think in all areas of science involving risk, it’s probably fair to say that there is no such thing as the perfect experiment that gives you the information you want and involves the least amount of risk. The best example is drug trials. People even die after a drug has been studied. In geoengineering, this gets down to how much information we will need to act in the future. We might be able with the Pinatubo option to understand more about the consequences on ozone. But we may not have thought to ask about other effects, like the impacts of diffuse light on various ecosystems. The larger you go [with experiments], the better the chance that you’re going to discover the unknown unknowns. But the larger you go, the greater the risk that the studies themselves will have a deleterious effect.

Wired.com: One of your sources asks you, “If, say, a Huckabee administration suddenly woke up and started geoengineering the planet, what could anybody else do about it?” This seems like a real question. What would anyone else do about it?

Kintisch: I’m not an expert on international relations or nuclear brinksmanship, but I do think that we have no idea. One thing that makes that question hard to answer is that we don’t know how severe the climate crisis would have to be before countries would consider unilateral geoengineering. Would there be food conflicts? Would there be problems with immigration? What other factors would be happening? Would it be a developing country with nuclear weapons or a coalition of nations?

This gets to the reason that scientists are meeting now in Asilomar. The worst- case scenario is, with any new risk, you don’t want its existence or its use in the future to cause conflict in and of itself. One way to do that is to set up international norms and agreements that countries cooperate, and the technology itself won’t become a flashpoint for conflict like what happened with nuclear weapons after WWII.

But the challenge for setting up rules for geoengineering is that scientists very rightly fear that if rules are set up right now, we might restrict research that might tell us things we need to know about geoengineering.

You don’t want a free-for-all with everyone going out and trying geoengineering at a large scale out of fear or strategic reasons. But you have to do some studies to understand what those rules should be. And the scientists here in Asilomar are trying, at an early stage, to lay out voluntary guidelines to square that circle, and do some studies in the environment that could give us some early clues about the risk of geoengineering.

Wired.com: It seems like the toughest issue is having some sort of global governance structure in place. But if we got that in place, wouldn’t we be most of the way toward a meaningful way to keep carbon in the ground?

Kintisch: That’s an interesting point. If we can’t get our act together to reduce by a relatively modest percent, this very dangerous trace gas that we’re spitting into the atmosphere, it does suggest that we’re going to have a lot of trouble regulating geoengineering.

One problem with geoengineering research that scientist Ken Caldeira has pointed out to me is that there are a lot of private companies who are involved in this research, who are out to do research but also to create a business around selling carbon credits. Is this a field that should be dominated by private enterprises?

I titled the chapter on the history of climate and weather modification as a pursuit of levers. Because what I think geoengineering comes down to is looking for levers, making small changes that have big effects in the climate system. And that’s usually the goal of a company, they look for ways to profit off a small investment and yield big returns.

We’re looking for good investments for our geoengineering buck, so it doesn’t surprise that you’d have [private companies] Climos and Planktos interested in the very lucrative leverage involved in iron fertilization. And Nathan Myhrvold, inventor and close confidante of Bill Gates, interested in the stratospheric aerosols.

Wired.com: But is this an area where the work should be done just with national sponsorship?

Kintisch: Unlike most branches of Earth sciences, geoengineering is this kind of radically multidisciplinary idea. You take a supposed understanding of a basic system and develop an engineering method of altering or radically changing it. Generally, when it comes to developing real-world products, scientists come up with the kernel of the idea and companies have proven to be the best at turning the kernel into a working technology. In a way, I can see the allure of letting companies develop geoengineering ideas because they are set up to try different things and the allure of profits can drive new ideas.

That said, it is a really worrisome proposition that for-profit companies would be entrusted in developing techniques that might be deployed and have such far-reaching environmental or ecological consequences. That’s why openness and transparency and scientific integrity is so important in this field.

Wired.com: You’re heading to the Asilomar conference today on geoengineering. Do you see a scientist-led effort to regulate themselves internally as the best way of proceeding with small-scale research? Are they capable of that?

Kintisch: I think in other areas of science, researchers have shown that they are able to regulate themselves, at least initially. There is usually this tension between the scientists wanting to regulate themselves because they want a free hand in exploring a bunch of ideas, but then at some point having the officials come in.

It’s such an early stage with geoengineering. Many of the people involved with it don’t have experience working with dangerous things. They are Earth scientists or energy experts. They don’t have the institutional experience that scientists in molecular biology have developed over the years.

And when it comes to molecular biology, there still are struggles between the community of scientists who study sensitive pathogens and governments. That community got started in regulating itself here in 1975.

It may sound like a lame answer, but there will be a continuous push and pull on geoengineering.

Wired.com: The biggest argument against geoengineering research raised by critics is that it causes delays in going after carbon emissions directly, and quite possibly will kneecap those efforts by providing political cover for big emitters. Do you think that’s a strong enough argument to pull geoengineering off the table?

Kintisch: I don’t think so. All the time we deal with moral hazard. We deal with it when it comes to insurance or people wearing seatbelts. As a society, we should be able to deal with the moral hazard of people understanding that geoengieering is a dangerous concept that has to be studied and should be kept as an absolute worst-case scenario, but that requires vigorous and public debate. It probably requires a more scientifically literate society than we have. When someone says a quick fix is available and you don’t know much about geoengineering, you might easily be persuaded.

So, I think moral hazard is among the dangers of intervening on a larger scale with the planet, but like any of them, it shouldn’t discount an idea that we have little choice but to look at.

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Scientists reject aerosol geoengineering

T. V. Padma

6 August 2010

[NEW DELHI] Geoengineering schemes that could help some countries deal with global warming could have the opposite effect in others, according to a study.

Geoengineering refers to large-scale interventions, such as capturing greenhouse gases, aimed at tackling global warming. Some climate scientists have suggested adding aerosols to the atmosphere to deflect the sun's rays in what they call 'solar radiation management' (SRM).

Previous studies only examined a small number of scenarios for SRM and did not look at how those impacts would differ on regional level.

But a study published in the August issue of Nature Geoscience examined the effects of 54 different approaches to deflecting solar radiation on 23 macro-regions of the world and found that the impacts of SRM could vary at regional levels.

Pumping aerosols into the atmosphere, for example, would have different effects on climate in China and India. The differences would grow with time, posing challenges to international governance of such interventions.

The analysis showed that while a given action could restore climate  in both countries to the baseline before man-made global warming, by the 2070s, the strategies needed to achieve the same results in different countries would conflict with each other.

"Our results demonstrate that not only would 'optimal' SRM activities imply different things for different regions, but that international negotiations over the amount of SRM could become inherently more difficult the longer such activities were used," the paper said.

"It is a far-fetched assumption that a single engineering intervention will alter the overall dynamics of such a complex system," Anand Jayaraman, director of National Atmospheric Research Laboratory in India, told SciDev.Net.

He said scientists first need to fully understand the system, and then improve prediction of the monsoon that is crucial to the agriculture, before working out geo-engineering solutions to global warming.

"Projections of climate change at the local and regional scale is a challenging task," Govindaswamy Bala, professor at the Centre for Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, who was not involved with the study, told SciDev.Net. "This is where the knowledge gap exists for both climate change and geoengineering research."

"We should note that this is a single modelling study," Bala said. "Comparison of multiple models will be required to test the robustness of results obtained in this study."

Link to full paper in Nature Geoscience[1.52MB]

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A Climate Cure’s Dark Side
by Sharon Begley, Newsweek, January 30, 2011

It sounded like a panacea for climate change: “geo-engineering” the atmosphere to block some sunlight and counter global warming. Now scientists scrutinizing the approach say it could produce dangerous cascade effects, severely disrupting weather and agriculture—and might fail to block the worst of the greenhouse effects anyway.

Two prominent climate scientists raised the possibility of geo-engineering in 2006, and it’s been invoked as the world’s emergency escape hatch ever since—a quick fix to stabilize or even reverse the heating of the planet. It would head off worsening heat waves, droughts, and rising sea levels. The estimated price is right, too. A 2009 analysis found that geo-engineering would cost only $2 billion or so a year, chump change compared with converting from CO2-producing coal, oil, and natural gas to wind, solar, nuclear, and biofuels.

But further study shows worrying pitfalls, according to a series of research papers that will appear in the next issue of Atmospheric Science Letters. The greatest threat is to Asian monsoons, which are driven by the temperature difference between warm land and cooler seas. In one scheme, a fleet of jets would crisscross the planet releasing five megatons of sulfur dioxide gas every year. The gas would mix with water in the stratosphere to form minuscule particles called sulfate aerosols, which scatter incoming sunlight back to space before it warms the atmosphere or ground. (That’s also how volcanic eruptions cool the planet.)

But oceans are harder to cool than land. As the sun effectively dims, warmer land cools faster than cooler oceans, explains meteorologist Alan Robock of Rutgers University. Shrinking that land-sea temperature gap would enfeeble the summer monsoons over Asia and Africa, a possible catastrophe for the billions who depend on that rain for their crops.

Perversely, geo-engineering might also reinforce some of the worst consequences of global warming, says climate modeler Olivier Boucher of the British Met Office, the U.K.’s national weather service. He has focused on a plan for ships to spray seawater up above the oceans, where it would evaporate to form a layer of sea-salt aerosols—making marine clouds brighter and reflecting more sunlight back to space. But because of where the clouds cluster, cooling effects wouldn’t be uniform. That would likely intensify greenhouse-induced drying in the Amazon, threatening the riot of species that live there, as well as the rainforest’s ability to suck up CO2.

In perhaps the greatest surprise to scientists, geo-engineering looks like it would fail to stop warming in the Arctic. “Quite a bit of warming keeps occurring there,” says Boucher, “so you don’t manage to reverse the greenhouse effect there.” Trouble is, loss of sea ice saps high-pressure bands that bottle up arctic winds, steering winter storms farther south. Europe and the U.S. would continue to be walloped by severe winter cold and snow, and ocean levels would keep rising. (Expect a seller’s market in sea walls.)

Most worrisome is how geo-engineering might disrupt “teleconnections.” These long-distance links let atmospheric conditions in one place influence weather half a world away. The best known teleconnection is the El Niño/Southern Oscillation: warm waters in the eastern Pacific that weaken the easterly trade winds, bringing deluges to the Southern U.S. and Peru but drought to Indonesia and Australia. “The strength and occurrence of [El Niño] might change in a geo-engineered world,” says climate scientist Peter Braesicke of the University of Cambridge. Even if safe and effective approaches are found, scientists can’t answer what may be the ultimate challenge: securing long-term political and economic support for the such measures. If the world becomes suddenly unwilling or unable to keep supplying the atmosphere with sunblock even as we continue to pump out CO2, we’ll be worse off than where we started.

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Countries Agree To Ban Geoengineering
Climate Technologies: Prohibition is adopted under the UN biodiversity treaty
Cheryl Hogue

More than 190 nations agreed last week to ban geoengineering as part of action under a United Nations treaty to protect the diversity of life on Earth. The countries, which are parties to the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Biological Diversity, met for a conference of treaty partners in Nagoya, Japan.

Geoengineering refers to large-scale technological intervention, such as reflection of sunlight, to address rapid climate change.

The treaty partners reached an agreement providing that "no climate-related geoengineering activities that may affect biodiversity take place, until there is an adequate scientific basis on which to justify such activities and appropriate consideration of the associated risks for the environment and biodiversity and associated social, economic and cultural impacts."

"This decision clearly places the governance of geoengineering in the United Nations where it belongs," says Pat Roy Mooney, executive director of the ETC Group, an international activist organization that opposes geoengineering. Also called Action Group on Erosion, Technology & Concentration, the organization describes itself as supporting "socially responsible developments of technologies useful to the poor and marginalized."

"Decisions on geoengineering cannot be made by small groups of scientists from a small group of countries that establish self-serving 'voluntary guidelines' on climate hacking," Mooney continues. He refers to the Asilomar Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies, held earlier this year in Pacific Grove, Calif. The conference, with about 175 attendees, was held to garner suggestions on guidelines for geoengineering research. As yet, it has not produced a report (C&EN, May 24, page 26).

The agreement provides an exception to the prohibition on geoengineering. It allows "small-scale scientific research studies that would be conducted in a controlled setting ... only if they are justified by the need to gather specific scientific data and are subject to a thorough prior assessment of the potential impacts on the environment."

The U.S. is not a party to the 1992 accord and thus was not officially involved in the geoengineering decision.

On Oct. 29, the same day that the U.N. meeting in Japan agreed to the geoengineering ban, Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), outgoing chairman of the House Science & Technology Committee, issued a report on geoengineering research. Gordon, who did not run for reelection this year, held a series of hearings over the past 12 months on governance of this type of research (C&EN, March 29, page 20).

"Broad consideration of comprehensive and multi-disciplinary climate engineering research at the federal level must begin as soon as possible in order to ensure scientific preparedness for future climate events," the report says.

Gordon, who says he is not in favor of deploying climate intervention technologies, warns against banning scientific study on geoengineering.

"A research moratorium that stifles science, especially at this stage in our understanding of climate engineering's risks and benefits, is a step in the wrong direction and undercuts the importance of scientific transparency," he writes in the report. "If climate change is indeed one of the greatest long-term threats to biological diversity and human welfare, then failing to understand all of our options is also a threat to biodiversity and human welfare."

The ban on geoengineering may be the most publicized outcome of the UN biodiversity meeting. Yet the official major product of the two-week gathering was a new international accord laying out how countries should cooperate in obtaining genetic resources and sharing their benefits.

Called the Nagoya Protocol, the pact outlines how countries and communities that have genetic resources, such as plants used as traditional remedies, will share in the benefits when commercial products such as pharmaceuticals are developed from them.

According to the UN Environment Program, which administers the biodiversity treaty, the Nagoya Protocol also says governments should consider reparations to developing countries for genetic material collected decades or even centuries ago if it is used to produce commercial products such as pharmaceuticals or new crop varieties.

"One option may be to put a proportion of any profits arising [from commercial products] into a special fund to be used by developing countries in order, for example, to build conservation or scientific capacity," UNEP says.

A spokesman for the trade group Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America tells C&EN it is studying the Nagoya Protocol but has not comment yet. "This is a very complicated document," he adds.