Posts Tagged ‘geoengineering’

Problems with, and potential necessity of Geoengineering

January 6, 2023

If businesses and States, do not reduce GreenHouse Gas (GHG) emissions, and do not stop destroying ecologies, then it is possible that the only way of keeping completely wild weather in check will be through geoengineering (GE).

GE is engineering the ecology and climate itself, to lessen climate change. The most usual projected method is to reflect solar radiation back into space, through the release of reflective particulate matter high in the atmosphere, or through mirrors in space etc…. I doubt huge mirrors in space will be used as they are too expensive and they may move out of orbit.

The problems with GE should be obvious.

  1. Ecologies and climates are complex systems.
  2. If we can’t alter complex human systems, to prevent climate change, what hope do we have of changing the world’s own complex systems and their multitude of interactions in a controllable or beneficial manner? We also have to somehow control human reactions to make it work. For example – no increasing emissions because we are now ‘safe’ etc.
  3. It is impossible to predict exactly what will occur when we start GE.
  4. It has been suggested that some areas will loose or gain rainfall dramatically. Some areas may lose plant cover etc.
  5. If we leave it too late then the Earth’s weather patterns may have changed so much, that we have nothing to work with in terms of predicting effects, and little ability to tell the effects of GE from climate change chaos.
  6. It is possible that some business and nation states would attempt GE independently with no co-ordination. This could have deeply difficult results.
  7. Some nations may protest about their losses, and there will be losses from either climate change or GE, and we may not be able to tell the difference.
  8. Nations may accuse other nations of conducting climate war against them. They could conceivably be right. This is likely to produce international tensions, and interfere in the governance and application of GE.
  9. As GE by itself does not reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions, the planet’s oceans will continue to absorb CO2, and become more acidic. This may kill much plankton and other marine life. Ocean Death would be a major ecological calamity.
  10. To understand what GE we should perform, we need accurate computer models. We have good computer models of global weather systems, but not yet good enough. Once we start interfering, then there is no baseline, we no-longer know ‘for sure’ whether we are doing the right things or not. This can possibly be overcome by intensive research projects working with models and their prediction capacity – but again we are working with complex systems and human political factors. There could also be large numbers of others factors we won’t know about until they hit us.
  11. if we suffer a world economic set back or a world war, then the GE would probably stop and, unless we had reduced emissions considerably, then we would likely experience an even more rapid climate change, as the controls would be released.

GE is a really bad idea. However, if we do not push for action now to reduce fossil fuel and other emissions, we may have to try it.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

“Solar radiation management”

September 10, 2019

Solar radiation management usually involves reflecting sunlight back into space to lower global warming. The cheapest versions of this proposal involve injecting particles or gasses into the upper atmosphere. The idea is it might give us time to reduce emissions, and reduce Greenhouse Gas levels in the atmosphere, through some kind of carbon removal technology which actually works at the kind of levels we need.

There are a few problems:

  1. We can only model the effects, and use those models to guide us in implementation. We will not know the effects until they arrive. Our models will always be out of date.
  2. Effects from this kind of geoengineering will not be immediate, so it will be even harder to judge what effects are arising from the technology.
  3. Some countries will suffer bad weather events after the process begins. We won’t know if they suffered those effects because of the process, because of climate change, or because of normal weather or a combination of all three.
  4. Some countries which suffer bad weather effects leading to famine or large scale destruction, might decide this is climate warfare against them – which could lead to conventional war. If not they would probably demand and deserve compensation, which would probably cause frictions between badly affected countries.
  5. We would have to have a world-wide agreement on this, and ownership of this, how it was used and what the effects are, to preserve peace and co-ordinate the practice. This is probably impossible.
  6. It will not stop the seas from getting more acidic, leading to ocean death, especially if it encourages delays to reduction of GHG emissions.
  7. It will be costly – not amazingly costly, but costly enough. If there is a world financial crash or war, then it could be discontinued, and climate change might “catch up” leading to more weather instability, and ferocity.

This is not a solution. But we don’t have a solution. This is a problem.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in complexity | Leave a Comment »

Carbon Extraction

March 31, 2019

There are many plans to extract CO2 directly from the air. Many people assure us it is necessary if we are to keep climate turmoil moderately stable, and avoid tipping points. However, as there is not that much CO2 in the air, you have to move vast quantities of air through the extraction plant, which requires heaps of energy, so you already have a problem.

The second problem is what do you do with the CO2?

Storage underground is unreliable – especially under the ocean or in old oil and gas wells (as the wells tend to fracture and crack releasing the CO2) and leakage has to be monitored and prevented for 100s of years, well beyond the life span of most companies or even governments.

Some solutions seem silly – after all in capitalism nothing is done, even something as obvious as save the world, unless it is compelled or makes a profit.

It has been proposed to use the CO2 to make the bubbles in soft drinks. Or to pump oil out of nearly dry wells, getting a substance that then produces more CO2.

Other people have suggested turning the CO2 into fuel and burning less oil or coal. The ‘and’ is important here, otherwise we are just adding to greenhouse gas emissions.

The problem with this last solution is the laws of thermodynamics. This process will have to use energy both to recover the CO2 and then turn it into fuel – more energy than will be gained by burning the fuel.

So the process can only be useful if we have lots of non-greenhouse gas making energy to spare, which we use to extract the CO2 from the air and manufacture the fuel. Our energy should likewise not be ecologically disruptive, and hydro for example certainly can be, as it floods some areas, dries up other areas, stops natural seasonal flows, stops aquatic creatures going upriver and so on.

The process is not impossible, but currently unlikely, at any level which makes the process useful.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

CO2 and non-linear systems

December 19, 2018

The amount of CO2 in the air has dramatic effects out of all proportion to the amount of the gas in the air or in proportion to the amount emitted by humans. It produces a non-linear effect.

Concentrations of CO2 have been much greater than they are now, in times when there were no humans around. Nobody is arguing that the world would end with much higher CO2 levels, just that relative climate stability would end, as the climate system shifts into new patterns, and human civilization would be extremely likely to suffer significant disruption and possibly destruction depending on how bad it gets.

As far as we can tell for the last half million years or so CO2 levels have remained between 180 and 300 parts per million (again, that’s pretty low compared to some other geological periods). In the last 100 years or so, this has risen to about to 410 parts per million (people were hoping the rise would stop at 350 parts per million, but it hasn’t).

There is no indication that this increase in CO2 concentration is slowing. That is a pretty rapid and significant change and most of it seems to have come from human emissions. The theory of greenhouse gases which has been around for well over 100 years would lead us to expect a rise in global average temperatures as a result, and this is happening – and it is happening pretty much as predicted (although a bit higher and more rapid than some official predictions).

Again it needs to be said that the average temperature rises are relatively small, but these small rises appear to be disrupting climate stability already. What seems small to us can have large effects on the system as a whole.

Now natural emissions of CO2 are huge – figures usually suggest around 800 giga tonnes per year. Natural ‘carbon sinks’ and conversion processes handle these emissions quite well. Human emissions are much, much, less than that, even now about 30 giga tonnes per year but increasing.

You might think its a matter of common sense that this little overshoot would not make that much of a difference, but we are not dealing with a simple linear system here. Small changes (in CO2 levels and temperature) can make large differences, due to the way feedback loops work and trigger, or disrupt, other systems.

For some while these emissions made little difference because natural carbon sinks could deal with the extra burdens – these sinks produced the well known pause in the rate of increase of average temperature (not a decrease in temperature or even a stabilizing of temperature, but a decrease in acceleration of temperature increase). These now seem to have been used up. The more we destroy the ecology and engage in deforestation etc. then the worse the accumulation gets and the higher the temperature increases. The rapidity of the change together with environmental destruction renders natural evolutionary or adaptational processes irrelevant – natural sinks do not appear to be able to handle the increase any more.

The more that the average temperature increases, the more that some natural sinks will start releasing CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases. For example the Russian Steppes might already be releasing previously frozen methane for more green house emissions.

This makes the situation even worse; it compounds the problems and shifts them into a whole other realm. We have to stop temperature increases now, if we don’t want extreme weather events to become more and more common, and remediation to become more difficult than it already is. Also as you probably know, land ice is melting and glaciers are disappearing and this will also likely lead to temperature increases and to rising sea levels. Neither of which is good for coastal cities or for human water supplies.

So if we continue with our current patterns of CO2 emissions we are heading for likely catastrophe – we are certainly not heading for good times.

This whole process is difficult to predict in its entirety, because of the way local conditions act with global conditions. For example, higher average temperatures could disrupt the patterns of the Gulf Stream which has kept the UK relatively warm. If the Gulf stream moves southward, then parts of Europe could heat up while the UK’s average temperature lowers. Whatever, happens the weather will change and probably change violently. If we do not stabilize CO2 emissions then the system fluctuations will get wilder, as it is subject to greater stress.

We need to stop CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, and start protecting the rest of the environment to allow its resilience to function. So we have to stop massive deforestation and other forms of pollution as well as stop CO2 emissions.

Human CO2 emissions largely come from burning fossil fuels, some forms of agriculture, and with some from building (concrete use). For some reason official figures for fossil fuel emissions often split the burning into electricity production, transport, industry, domestic and so on, but they all have the same cause.

We can pretty much end coal fired power for electricity now if we put money into it and impose regulations bringing coal burning to an end. We are helped in this as building new coal fired power stations is becoming more expensive than renewables, even with all the subsidies that fossil fuel mining and power receives. Ending coal burning won’t necessarily be pretty, but it can be done. Coal is poisonous during the mining and during the burning, and devastates fertile land during mining, so its a good thing on the whole. Petrol/oil burning may be a bit more difficult. We need an excess of renewable power and storage to allow transport to work like it does now. Possibly generating hydrogen from water is one way around that, but we need heaps of excess renewables to do that and that may then come up against material limits. Changing agriculture will be more difficult still, but people are claiming low emissions concrete is becoming available (I’m not sure).

However, there is a problem, even if we could stop tomorrow. The natural carbon sinks are over-stretched and unlikely to recover quickly. They will not remove the “excess” CO2 from the atmosphere quickly enough to prevent already dangerous average temperature increases. We may need to research Carbon dioxide removal techniques as well. These are being developed, but more money for research is needed, and we need to find some way to dispose of the extracted CO2, so it is not returned to the atmosphere in a couple of years. This is a massive technical problem, which is not really close to being solved (that is a matter of argument, but that is my opinion). Hopefully the problem can be solved.

We need to cut back emissions quickly. We will then almost certainly need to develop an extraction technology. If we can’t do either of these, then we face truly massive disruption: more extreme weather, flooding, city destruction, people movements, food shortages, and warfare.

Tags:, , , , , , ,
Posted in complexity, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Random remarks on climate and politics

November 4, 2018

There are at least two ways of looking at the planet: one as isolated being, and one as relational being in which the planet exists in the cosmos, in relation to the sun, the solar system, vast emptiness and so on.

With the first view you can imagine manipulating and dominating the planet, because that is all there is. With the second the planet is what keeps you alive in the vast emptiness of space; without it we cannot survive, it is something that needs tending and repairing as best we can. It is our vehicle of life. There is no practical alternative, we cannot all move to Mars.

You cannot do politics the way we normally do politics with the planet because it does not negotiate – it just acts. In particular it has no truck with authoritarian politics, where people tell others what will happen and there is no negotiation or little interest in the way things work, because an ideology is more important than checking if that ideology works. I suspect the less well the ideology works, the stronger this tendency can be when bonded to group loyalty.

One problem with Republicans is not that there are not Republicans who don’t admit climate change, but it seems far more necessary for them to abuse Democrats than to discuss practical solutions. This is probably because they need to demonstrate that they are really Republicans to other Republicans. If we were of a particular brand of irony, we would call this virtue signalling.

Being virtuous in the face of destruction is not particularly useful, especially when that virtue favours destruction, but at least you know you are not betraying your identity group.

However, while it may not be possible to tell the planet anything, we can try to listen to the planet, paying attention to what is happening, and attempting to perceive what the results of our actions are with the planet. This is almost the exact opposite of geoengineering… Listening to the planet and using basic logic, we cannot keep dumping waste which cannot be absorbed and reprocessed by the system – and this involves changing our economic and manufacturing processes to change the waste we produce.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Stratospheric Aerosol Injection

August 15, 2018

Stratospheric Aerosol Injection is a form of Geoengineering, which is being considered because the climate situation is getting desperate, with extremely high temperatures in the Antarctic, and massive bush fires around the world.

It involves injecting particles into the upper atmosphere. There are problems with using this technique to modify climate – some technical and some political and some both. This post describes some of them. It incorporates parts of an earlier post on this site.

1) We have to rely on models for our predictions and understanding of weather, climate and ecology, and models can be wrong.

2) The system we would be trying to modify is complex and not predictable in specific. So we do not know the exact results of putting the particles into the stratosphere – we would have to find out through doing.

3) The chances are high that some areas would suffer significant weather changes after the particles reached the stratosphere and these changes would not be uniform. The effects usually discussed are changes in rainfall. For example protecting Europe could lead to major drought in north Africa.

4) Geoengineering is based in social systems which are also complex systems, and GE could disrupt those systems and their balances.

5) For example, unintended bad weather effects could lead to massive people movements, which as we know can be considered potential ‘take overs’ and increase social stresses and tensions….

6) This together with unpredictability, might lead to accusations of weather warfare, whether it was or not, and this might then spill over into more orthodox forms of warfare.

7) GE is cheap in some sense, in that it might only cost billions a year to implement. While this suggests rogue corporations or states could begin GE, it also suggests that there could be fights over funding. Would those who contributed the most want the best results for their countries as opposed to others?

8) GE requires some form of international governance to avoid arguments, which has been shown to be hard to establish even with simpler objectives

9) I have not seen any viable self-supporting GE proposals. Nearly all of them require massive tax-payer subsidies, and some appear to need massive cross-national governance and regulation. We could give massive subsidies to private enterprise and hope they do they job without any oversight, but I doubt that will appeal even to the pro-corporate-power lobby. There is no apparent profit in Geoengineering, other than the potential to threaten people with bad weather. So it is unlikely that corporations would persist with it.

10) GE once begun must be continued, but warfare, or economic collapse could lead to rapid discontinuation, and hence extremely rapid climate change, which might further reduce biodiversity, as the change would be so rapid. Decline in biodiversity = decline in ecological stability.

11) It is extremely likely that once GE was implemented, people in power would breathe a sigh of relief and say “oh we don’t have to stop burning fossil fuels anymore”, so the situation gets worse, but they stay in power.

12) The rational solution to climate change is to lower emissions – we have known this since the 1980s at least. We have the technology to do this now, and it largely seems to work. That we don’t do this, shows we have a destructive set of social organisations and rivalries, and GE will be implemented within this destructive organisation and probably further destruction.

13) The assumption of GE is that it is easier to modify the complete climate and bio ecologies of the planet without serious unintended effects, than it is to lower emissions. This, in practice seems unlikely.

14) GE does not stop or ameliorate the results of high levels of CO2, thus ocean acidification and ocean death would continue – which would be calamitous.

15) The particles which people usually suggest we use are sulphites, these have the potential to further damage the ozone layer. There are plenty of other ecologically destructive actions GE does not ameliorate or stop.

16) People who support GE tend to be those who deny we should do anything about climate change, consequently the likelihood of point the points about continuing destruction, rather than lessening it, increases.

Short summary: Stratospheric Aerosol Injection is a largely uncontrollable, unpredictable process embedded in destructive social organisations, that will delay any chances of fixing climate change. Fixing climate change requires changing our social organisation and reducing emissions.

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in complexity, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Some remarks on Geo-Engineering

January 22, 2018

Geoengineering (GE) involves the attempt to solve the problems of climate change by altering the Earth’s ecology.

It largely comes in two forms:
Solar Radiation Management (SRM) in which we try and lower the amount of the Sun’s energy/heat reaching the earth’s surface. This can involve: mirrors in space, reflective gasses in the upper atmosphere, or painting mountains white.

Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) in which you try and suck CO2 from power stations or from the atmosphere. One recognized problem with this technique is the question of what we do with the CO2 once it is extracted.

The idea of GE is that we can continue on with polluting, and try and lower the effects of that pollution.

A common argument from pro-GE people, is that there is no evidence that the world can halt CO2 production and the resultant climate change, through political or economic processes at this moment, so GE may give us a longer period in which we can change, or transition to a new set of energy generators.

Both the IPCC and IEA seem to expect that we can establish CDR and gain negative emissions, but at the moment the technology is largely a fantasy technology which largely exists as a rhetorical way of saying new coal energy should be acceptable. CDR does not exist at anything like the scale we need, and there is no really useful, safe and permanent way of disposing of the collected CO2.

The primary question for both SRM and CDR is a simple one. GE, like everything else that depends on humans, is unlikely to be immune to its social bases. If the dynamics of contemporary societies are inherently destructive of ecologies, then GE is unlikely to prevent that destruction, nor to give a breathing space for new developments. It is likely to help make things worse, or continue the destructive dynamics of that system.

Clearly if we use SRM, the system has to be continually maintained, and that will cost billions. There will be ongoing arguments over who should pay, and how much they should pay. If there is a financial collapse or large scale war, then that maintenance is unlikely to be without problems. In which case climate change would have the brakes taken off, and would accelerate rapidly, causing even worse climate turmoil.

The governing idea of SRM seems that it is easier to change the whole ecological system than to change a political arrangement of economic power and profit. This I’m not sure about. The risk of unintended consequences when fiddling with a system as complex as that of climate is very high. We may already be living in a complex maladaptive system, which is bent on its own destruction and SRM simply magnifies this.

GE could be the equivalent of encouraging smoking to preserve corporate profits, while trying to do research in the hope of some day being able to postpone the inevitable and increasing cancer toll. It might be simpler to discourage people from smoking and to make cigarettes less profitable.

Basically, it can be suggested that if GE becomes the main way of dealing with problems of Climate change, then we live in a society in which ‘instrumental reason’ does not function very well as there are cheaper and possibly better options available, but those options require us to challenge established corporate power, and we are unlikely to do that successfully. I think the last 20 to 30 years of politics in the English Speaking world demonstrates that this failure is very likely to be the case.

Amazingly it is true that among people who both support corporate dominance and deny climate change, GE is quite popular. At the moment I can hypothesise this is precisely because GE does not challenge corporate power, and provides an opportunity for leeching money away from the taxpayers, but I don’t know. It certainly strikes me that if you really wanted less State intervention in life, then you would not want geoengineering.

I have not seen any viable self-supporting GE proposals. Nearly all of them require massive tax-payer subsidies, and some require appear to need massive cross-national governance and regulation. Of course we could give the massive subsidies to private enterprise and hope they do they job without any oversight, but I doubt that will appeal even to the pro-corporate power lobby. With CDR when that involves storage of CO2 underground, we know that ultimate and infinite responsibility of checking for leaks and collapse of storage, will reside with governments and taxpayers, as corporations do not last that long and will not take on those responsibilities. At the least, it seems probable that people will be concerned about other countries freeloading on their efforts, and there will be massive governmental jaunts to try and sort this out. The likelihood of small government and GE seems miniscule.

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Australia and Climate Change

November 12, 2016

It is frequently argued that Australia’s CO2 emissions are tiny, and that there is no point in the Australian federal government acting. This is especially the case if the US, under President Trump pretends there is no problem, as their emissions are huge.

Unfortunately the Australian Government is already acting.

By not attempting to ameliorate climate change it is showing that it does not care about climate change, and that it will not object to other bigger polluters continuing to pollute. So it helps make CO2 production normal and produces more climate change.

By encouraging coal mining in Australia our governments (of all persuasions) clearly demonstrate that they care more for the profit of some companies, than they care about the land, people’s health or maintaining a climate balance. By taking this choice, they ally with the commercial and political forces which produce climate change. Saying that stopping mining might cost us money and jobs is irrelevant – virtue can be difficult, and there appear to be more jobs in renewables anyway.

By encouraging Australia to continue to have one of the highest CO2 emissions per head in the world, they are implying that a prosperous life style depends upon destroying climate stability and that destroying that stability should be encouraged.

They are also encouraging short term visions over long term visions, and short term profit over long term expense, which is probably not good for anyone in general.

By being half hearted or indifferent to climate change they provide an exemplar and excuse for other’s behaviour (‘If wealthy countries in the West can’t be bothered, then why should we?’). If they acted to cut emissions and support renewables (or support thorium research, if you prefer) then they would be providing an exemplar of behaviour which also might influence other governments and corporate behaviour.

So let us be clear the government is acting. Just not the way we might think is sensible.

As for things like ocean fertilization or carbon capture and storage, they are likely to help prolong our use of fossil fuels. They are also likely to have weird and unintended effects. They may not even work other than in theory, or only work for a short time. We may need to deploy such methods, but the proper research will take longer than we might have to prevent climate turmoil (transformation is unlikely to be linear or smooth) and we have to move to 100% renewables or non-fossil fuels eventually. Why not start now, and help everyone achieve this, as well as make money for our scientists and companies out of the IP?

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »