Glacier Melts Credibility of Climate Science

To follow on Pest_Ctrl's post the whole issue of global warming shows the potential pitfall of geoengineering because we have essentially been engaged in geoengineering the last 100+ years by pouring in tons of CO2 and other gases into the atmosphere.

I wouldn't dismiss geoengineering as a solution to Earths climate and other problems but given the complexity of the systems I would be very very cautious about any geoengineering solution and save them as a last resort.

 

Define economically viable. What are the costs of doing nothing? Costs are coming down, and there are other ideas floating around to make it more economically viable as well, like using it to make carbon neutral hydrocarbons, and using it more widely for enhanced oil recovery.

Exactly. This is a reason to do more research. Also note that this one is quite easy to reverse. If you stop spraying seawater into the sky the clouds will disperse within a days.

In fact it has been very significant. Political pressure essentially shut down most geoengineering research for many years, as David Keith describes in his Ted talk from a few years ago. (The whole thing is good but the specific comments are at about the 6:50 mark). Groups like Greenpeace haven’t just been saying that they think we should be cautious about using it. They’ve been trying to shut down the research. They've been trying to keep scientists from even talking about.

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I’m not sure how that shows the pitfalls. That was inadvertent or de facto geoengineering. What we’re talking about here is planed, designed, and tested geoengineering.

I think the biggest danger is that we might get to a point where we are forced to take aggressive action, perhaps to keep the ice caps from melting, but we haven’t done enough research to know which is the best method or what the secondary effects might be.

There are also a number of geoengineering ideas that are very low risk and could be used as soon as their ready.

 

I agree that more research is needed and I'm not saying research shouldn't be done but the problem with geoengineering is how do you actually test it? We can model it but again given the complexity of the systems we might not fully know all of the affects of geoengineering until it is actually done.

 

Exactly. We should definitely try this on Mars first.

I think a good definition would be from an energy point of view. We burn fuels to produce energy. If the energy needed for a certain method to recapture the carbon (both the method and the materials needed) is close to the energy produced by the burning, then obviously it fails. The currently available methods probably won't be that bad, let's say it requires 10% energy, that basically is the same as increasing the energy price by 10%. I am no expert on this issue so the numbers are just uneducated guesses. To make carbon neutral powerplants viable, either the technology needs to get to the point where it uses minimal energy to recapture the carbon and the carbon taxes on regular plants surpasses the cost of carbon sequestration, or they need a lot of governmental subsides. Right now I don't think that's the case.

As for your proposed method of spraying sea water into the air, if the effect disappears in a few days after you stop, wouldn't that require you to be spraying sea water pretty much 24/7 for the next hundreds of years? How much would that cost? I imagine the process would also produce a lot of tiny salt particles in the air, would that be another source of pollution? And if you just do that over the oceans, I think it would almost guarantee a change in wind and ocean current pattern, as the ocean cools down from less sun radiation. I think I like the idea of spraying sulfur particles into the stratosphere better, it's basically going to be like a giant volcano eruption, which has happened many times before in our history, and we have a better idea of what happens after.

I don't think we have that much difference in opinion. A lot more research in geoengineering needs to be done, and before that, it's best if we don't try anything that we don't fully understand.

 

Well, in this thread so far we’ve talked about scrubbing CO2 from the ambient air, carbon capture and sequestration from say coal fired power plants, and spraying large amounts of sea water in to the air to create reflective clouds. To start with, what are your concerns with these three?

 

We’re well into the black in terms of the amount of carbon produced to sequester CO2. The issue now is the cost. One estimate from about a year ago suggested that the price of electricity would have to increase by about 50% to cover the costs of CCS, so let’s use that as a starting point. Is that too much? What would the cost of doing nothing be?

Remember that this would only be a temporary measure because it doesn’t address the issue of ocean acidification, but the article I linked to above suggested that it would be fairly cheap, as I recall. We’re going to run out of fossil fuels in any event and we’ll have to switch to renewable energy sources anyway, but something like this may buy us the time we need to switch over.

I would think that the water would largely evaporate and the salt would drop back into the ocean. If that’s the case one might be able to park a fleet of these ships off the west coast of West Africa and send the clouds over the desert. I wonder if that would produce an appreciable amount of precipitation, maybe enough to get something growing there? If so then that new plant life would consume CO2 as well. Because this would be reversible quite quickly it’s an attractive option to try. I agree that releasing sulphur into the upper atmosphere is a fairly well understood process at this point, it still has some negative side effects and, and the effect takes a year or so to “wear off” once you get it up there, so if you make a mistake it can’t be corrected right away, although in the grand scheme of things a year isn’t that long.

Agreed. We don’t want to be firing large amounts of some experimental material into the atmosphere without being very sure what it was going to do. Some forms of geoengineering could potentially be very dangerous, and we want to be very careful with those.

Here’s an overview of the scrubbing technology being developed, btw, and some pictures of Keith’s working prototype.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126901.200-can-technology-clear-the-air.html?full=true
http://people.ucalgary.ca/~keith/AirCapture.html

 

So, what agenda is driving this propaganda, and what motivates so many scientists to make claims that AGW is something that needs to be dealt with?

Are these scientists in league with politicians who push the propaganda?

 

I guess you know this, but you'll never get an answer to this question. ... At least, based on the last 19 times someone has asked it.

 

Could you be any more vague and immaterial?

Please bring some substance next time.

 

Perhaps you managed to miss it, but you did not post a single bit of proof or evidence in your vague, immaterial, "reasonably lengthy post".

Hell, you didn't even go into specifics of any kind, especially when it comes to the scientific community. Not to mention the giant leaps in logic and backbending to produce motive.

 

I wonder if it "cost trillions" (inflation adjusted) for the clean air and water acts. It's Palin-esque stupidity to assume the move to cleaner technology is a zero sum game in terms of cost.

The government grew the fossil fuel energy sector by building on-demand power infrastructure, paved roads dollar for dollar, and subsidized plants and pipelines across the nation, and now the same sector is crying foul and hiding behind "free markets"? If anything, they're afraid disruptive technology will be cheaper in the long run because other companies are finding ways to reduce the upfront costs for renewable energy.

The kicker is that oil has to be subsidized in order for it to be cheap. Whether through quid pro quo defense agreements, trading oil with dollars, interest from the oil import trade deficit (~120 billion in 2005), infrastructural repairs, or tax credits/subsidies for companies to secure or rediscover more sources. That isn't even accounting for external costs such as health and productivity issues from exhaust and smog.

You cut down the demand for imports, and the changes will pay for itself.

That is THE agenda is money, power and control for the people who are the leading proponents of this issue...and how it’s a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, you know, the molecules, where it’s going and where it’s not.

 

How do the scientists get money, power, and control by lying about global warming? And why so many of them? Are they working together? Are they working with the politicians?

What do you think is being damaged by allegations of AGW? Who is harmed?

Are you being deliberately vague, or have you just not thought out your own position, or do you think that if you clearly elucidated your position that it would somehow make your position weaker?

 

same old same old...

 

What's truly genius about the evil scientist plot is how they write hundreds of thousands of emails to one another without showing evidence of their vast plot. It is all in the coded text messages -- FTW (for the warming!)

 

This is where this issue gets interesting and important, because he’s actually correct to a significant extent on this point, but of course his posts are pure agenda-driven propaganda as well. I think Mojoman is a purely manipulative persona on this board, but he is useful for making a point here.

I took a fairly basic environmental engineering class about 10 years ago and the prof had some interesting and eye opening things to say about the environmental modeling that was going on. He was and is an environmentalist and he is very familiar with environmental modeling, and although he believed at the time, and to the best of my knowledge still believes, that manmade global warming is likely happening, he could not support the prominent models that were being quoted in the media. He told us that there were so many assumptions being plugged into these models that their results amounted to “more politics than science”. He said that he’d talked to some of these people at conferences and asked them quite directly why they were doing this, and he got answers like, “you have to make a strong statement to catch people’s attention or they won’t pay attention to you or believe you”. Basically they were rationalizing their actions. They knew of course that they weren’t presenting an accurate picture to the public, but they had convinced themselves that manipulating the pubic in this way was for the greater good, and I think that they believed that the picture they were painting was going to come true, even if the current data didn't show it.

Towards the end of the Keith video above he talks about the “moral hazard” issue that he’d heard talked about so much. I think that is another example of a rationalization for being manipulative. The question, then, is where does this mentality come from and how does it become a kind of groupthink amongst a group of scientists? Is it a holdover from the excessive PC thinking of the 80s and 90s? For groups like Greenpeace I don’t doubt at all that they’re exploiting this phenomenon for the sake of money and power, but this doesn’t explain why many otherwise reasonable scientists get caught up in it. Whatever the cause, this kind of thing presents another kind of moral hazard. If you lie to people and get caught they well tend not to believe you in the future, or to believe in what you were saying, just like the boy who cried wolf. If you overstate the case for global warming and you get caught, then people are less likely to believe in your or the theory of global warming in the future. I think this is where we’re at now and I think it will likely get worse as people dig into the models more. And note that none of this means that manmade global warming isn’t happening. All the knowledgeable scientists I know and respect think it probably is, but they are being undercut by groups like Greenpeace and these racial elements that tried to lie to the public to make them believe in global warming. These groups are starting to get caught and that is making people like Mojoman appear more credible to Joe and Jane public.