Some scary prospects of where people are turning - geoengineering, the false solution that once seemed like science fiction, is actually being taken seriously. Seriously?

Diana Bronson, ETC Group

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

- Albert Einstein

As global climate negotiations in Barcelona enter into the last week of talks before December’s Copenhagen summit, there continues to be more aggravation than agreement amongst negotiators. Despite the litany of warnings about the devastation a failure in Copenhagen will cause – mass migrations, floods, worsening hunger and elimination of entire small island states – the most powerful countries in the world have failed to significantly reduce emissions, let alone commit to new targets or adequate funds to pay for adaptation. Unwilling to muster collective political will to dramatically reduce consumption, wealthy countries are looking for ways to continue business as usual.

The surprising announcement that the US Congressional Committee on Science and Technology will be holding hearings on geoengineering in Washington later this week has some participants in Barcelona wondering if the lack of collective political will on the part of industrialized countries has something to do with Plan B moving a whole lot faster than we thought.  Plan B is geoengineering: the intentional, large-scale plans to modify the climate and related systems.

Geoengineering technologies include, for example, schemes to simulate a volcanic eruption by shooting sulphur particles into the stratosphere to reflect the sun’s rays back to outer space. Other technologies whiten clouds to make them more reflective. Some geoengineers propose dumping iron particles in the oceans to feed algae that might soak up CO2. Others want to change hurricane paths and rainfall patterns.

This is not science fiction. In just the last year, high-profile and influential scientific bodies, including the U.S. National Academies and the UK Royal Society, have begun evaluating the pros and cons of different technological fixes. The UK Parliament has already held hearings on geoengineering, new research institutes are opening and public funds are being allocated to geoengineering research. In a bewildering turnaround, former opponents of action on climate change like the self-described “skeptical environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg in Denmark and Lee Lane of the American Enterprise Institute have now jumped on the geoengineering spaceship, calling not only for more research but also for experimentation and deployment of these extreme techno-fixes.

While these developments remain below the public’s radar, we need to pay attention. Ties are tight between the research, corporate, and political players in geoengineering. To cite one example, Steven Koonin – the current Under Secretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy and former Chief Scientist at the world’s second largest oil company (BP) – recently led a group of ten scientists in thinking through the  “technicalities” of shooting sulphates into the stratosphere. Such high-risk interventions are being contemplated and global permission is unlikely to be asked in the current regulatory vacuum for geoengineering.

Geoengineering is not part of the ongoing negotiations at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – at least, not yet – but we must question the strategies of those refusing to make progress on a post-Kyoto plan. Are they waiting for conditions to ripen for a rollout of geoengineering? Was Gordon Brown disingenuous or just badly briefed when he said there was “no plan B” on climate change? His own Royal Society recently recommended the UK government invest £100 million for geoengineering research, assessing the possibilities precisely as  “Plan B.”

The belief that technology will save the world from climate change runs deep amongst government delegates in Barcelona.   Technology is virtually the only negotiating topic where some progress has been displayed, albeit with all the familiar battles over intellectual property.  And it is quite possible that the spin doctors will try to portray some modest agreement on technology in Copenhagen as a “success,” while the thornier issues of emission targets and money are set aside for “later.”  

We need to make sure that whatever comes out of Copenhagen strengthens the struggle for real climate justice and a sustainable path forward. If geoengineering becomes a silver bullet distraction, rich countries will have not only walked away from the Kyoto Protocol, they will have begun to abandon any semblance of a multilateral approach to the climate crisis.                               

For more information, see http://etcgroup.org/en/issues/geoengineering                                                                                                                                                                  

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The two Steves knew exactly what they were doing when they sat down to pen the final chapter of their sequel to their 2005 bestseller Freakonomics. In the now infamous chapter in the newly released SuperFreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner manage to downplay the global warming threat, compare climate change believers to religious fanatics, and accept at face value the assertion by some pointy-headed geeks that they can save the world on the cheap.

No surprise, SuperFreakonomics set off a firestorm of criticism and angry rebuke. To quote Joe Romm, "the Superfreaks frame this chapter mostly as their (misguided) view of the science versus the views of that famous non-scientist Al Gore (as opposed to the views of all of the scientists who disagree with the crap they are peddling). That straw man approach gives them the 'high' ground."

The Steves feigned surprise Monday night before a crowd of 300 gathered at Seattle's Town Hall. Why would anyone get upset about that chapter? We're not denying the climate change problem, they averred, nor are we saying nothing should be done about it.

To the contrary, the Steves told the audience, when they suggested that the costs of capping carbon emissions are greater than the costs of potential geoengineering solutions, they're just being good, objective scientists. No, make that economists -- the only truth tellers among the social scientists, who get treated like pariahs because they make morally agnostic observations about humanity, they said. Dismal science, indeed.

The truth is, there's plenty to object to in SuperFreakonomics. The whole tone of the climate chapter understates the threat and overstates the potential for technology to save the day. Some examples:

That's a pretty simplistic review of the first part of the global warming chapter. But it's no more simplistic than the authors' breezy survey of climate science and unquestioning regurgitation of the wild geoengineering ideas being offered up Nathan Myrhvold and his Hall of Justice pals at Bellevue-based Intellectual Ventures. (Motto: If you thought of it, we already patented it.)

This point bears a bit more scrutiny. Freakonomics and its sequel contain lots of counterintuitive observations based on measurable data. The global warming chapter stands out because, well, it doesn't rest on data. Myrhvold says he and his pals can float a "garden hose to the sky" to pump sulfur 18 miles high into the stratosphere, all for $20 million in upfront costs and $10 million annually to keep it running. Uh huh.

And the IV brainiacs have super boats in mind that would spray ocean water into the air to feed the formation of clouds, blocking more sunlight from hitting the surface and being absorbed as heat. Sounds great, but how many boats? What do they cost?

Dubner event hinted salaciously that IV has solutions to ocean acidification in the works. Details, please!

These are fascinating ideas. But they're just that -- ideas based on some pretty big leaps of faith, i.e. that these things can be engineered, that someone will fund them, and, moreover, that the solutions will actually do enough to cool the planet.

As Grist's very own David Roberts wrote a few weeks back, "Lesson: the problems humanity faces are systemic and interrelated. The idea that sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere will save us is akin to the hope that a math equation can be solved by erasing one of the numbers."

OK, enough. The real point here is get beyond the bad in SuperFreakonomics and focus on two messages that deserve greater discussion in the world of climate wonkery.

First, Levitt and Dubner do what economists do best, and that's note that emissions from burning fossil fuels are a negative externality -- fancy economist speak for the fact that we don't really pay the full cost of relying on coal, oil, and gas. Power plants and their customers around the world generally don't pay anything now to deal with the environmental impact of CO2 emissions and other bad stuff -- heavy metals in the emissions and ash, health effects of particulate pollution, etc.

And it's an open question whether an international carbon-cap system based on trading credits and buying offsets can genuinely cut carbon emissions enough to reduce global warming that's already predicted to happen. At the end of the day, no matter what is decided at Copenhagen, it's still in too many people's economic interests to keep burning fossil fuels. It's also right for Levitt and Dubner to note that cutting carbon emissions won't address methane from livestock or nitrous oxide from fertilizer.

Second, and just as significant, Levitt and Dubner are doing a real service by talking about geoengineering and stressing that technology and innovation are going to be a part of saving our asses -- it won't be done through complex cap-and-trade schemes alone. As fancical and unproven as the ideas proffered by Myrhvold and company are, eggheads everywhere should be encouraged to think about them and figure out ways to execute them. We might just need some wacky tech solutions to fend off the worst effects of global warming while we transition the global economy toward clean, renewable energy.

So, read the book. Take the Steves' dismissive tone with a grain of salt, but think hard about how we insert geoengineering into the climate discussion, and heed their warning about the limits of public policy to steer people away from the old ways of doing things.

More on the super-freaking-hullabaloo ...

Video: Stephen Dubner on SuperFreakonomics:

Video: Intellectual Ventures video on "garden hose to the sky":

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Yale Environment 360: I want to start with this little dust-up over SuperFreakonomics. In the book, you are quoted as saying, when it comes to global warming, “Carbon dioxide is not the right villain.” Is that accurate?

Ken Caldeira: That is not accurate. I don’t believe I said anything remotely like that because I believe that we should be outlawing the production of devices that emit carbon dioxide, and I don’t think we can solve this carbon climate problem unless we drastically reduce our carbon dioxide emissions very soon.

e360: They also write that you are convinced that human activity is responsible for “some” global warming. What does that mean?

Caldeira: I don’t think we can say with certainty whether we’re responsible for 90 percent of it or we might be responsible for 110 percent of it. But the vast majority of global warming, I believe, is due to human release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

e360: Another thing that plays in to the same kind of sensibility is the idea [which the book quotes Caldeira saying] that the “doubling of CO2 traps less than 2 percent of the outgoing radiation emitted by the Earth.” When that’s phrased like that, it makes it sound like it’s not really much of a problem.

Caldeira: You should think of the whole global warming problem as a 1 percent problem, at least for doubling of CO2. In absolute temperature Kelvin — scientists like to use the Kelvin scale — the current Earth temperature is around 288 degrees Kelvin, and a 3-degree warming on top of that is basically a one-percent additional warming. And so this whole issue of climate change, when viewed from an Earth-system perspective, is a story about 1 percents and 2 percents. Two percent might sound like a small number, but that’s the difference between a much hotter world, and the kind of world we’re accustomed to….

e360: Overall, do you feel like your work has been accurately and fairly represented in this book?

Caldeira: The main misrepresentation is the quote that says that CO2 is not “the right villain.” Now, again, I don’t use “villain” talk myself, but if you say what’s the primary gas responsible for the planetary warming, I would say it’s carbon dioxide.

Now, there’s a tougher question when it comes to the other statements that are attributed to me. All of those other statements are based in fact and based on studies that either I have published or other scientists have published. And if we pull back to the case of the biosphere taking up 70 percent of CO2 — well, yes, we have a published study that said that. It also presented results saying that we might warm up the planet enough to risk melting Antarctica ultimately. And so there is a selective use of quotes.

If you spend several hours talking to somebody and they take a half-dozen things and put it in a book, then it’s going to be in the context and framing of arguments that the authors are trying to make. And so the actual statements attributed to me are based on fact, but the contexts and the framing of those issues are very different from the context and framing that I would put those same facts in…

So I think that the casual reader can … come up with a misimpression of what I believe and what I feel about things.

None of Caldeira’s statements in this recent Yale e360 interview are a surprise if you read my original, accurate debunking — Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’: New book pushes global cooling myths, sheer illogic, and “patent nonsense” — and the primary climatologist it relies on, Ken Caldeira, says “it is an inaccurate portrayal of me” and “misleading” in “many” places.

And this all matches the Bloomberg interview of Dubner and Caldeira, which also backed up my reporting on error-riddled Superfreakonomics:

Caldeira, like the vast majority of climate scientists, believes cutting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions is our only real chance to avoid runaway climate change.

“Carbon dioxide is the right villain,” Caldeira wrote on his Web site in reply. He told Joe Romm, the respected climate blogger who broke the story, that he had objected to the “wrong villain” line but Dubner and Levitt didn’t correct it; instead, they added the “incredibly foolish” quote, a half step in the right direction. Caldeira gave the same account to me.

Levitt and Dubner do say that the book “overstates” Caldeira’s position. That’s a weasel word: The book claims the opposite of what Caldeira believes. Caldeira told me the book contains “many errors” in addition to the “major error” of misstating his scientific opinion on carbon dioxide’s role….

Although this made a lot of news, it really isn’t news.  Anyone who spends a great deal of time reading Caldeira’s work, communicating with and listening to him, as I have, would know instantly how directly at odds his views are with the entire Superfreakonomics chapter.

More newsworthy is Caldeira’s longer elaboration on his views of geoengineering and what the world’s overall approach to global warming should be:

e360: Let’s talk a little bit more broadly about geoengineering. I was struck by something one of the authors said on NPR the other day — that he got interested in geoengineering when he realized that the problem with global warming is not that there is too much carbon in the air; it’s that it is too hot. Do you agree with that?

Caldeira: The reason it is too hot is that there is too much carbon dioxide in the air. Now the carbon dioxide itself, of course, has big negative implications for ocean acidification and ecosystems, including coral reefs. So there are direct CO2 effects.

But I think if we had some magic thing that would reverse all effects of CO2 perfectly, then you could say, “Well the problem is not CO2.” But nobody really expects that we are going to have some magic, perfect CO2 nullifier. And it’s clear to me that if we continue allowing greenhouse gas concentration to grow in the atmosphere, and try to engineer our climate to counteract those effects, that as the greenhouse gases accumulate, and our counteracting system grows ever larger and larger, that the risk of some kind of catastrophic failure of this offsetting — or the imperfections in this offsetting — would grow in time and the net result would be pretty negative, I would imagine.

So, I do see CO2 as the problem. I think to present it as if, “Well, it not’s really CO2, but the effects of CO2,” it’s like if you got shot by a bullet and you said, “Well, it wasn’t really the bullet that was the problem, it was just that I happened to have this hole through my body…”

e360: Right. Well, a lot of people think of geoengineering as a quick and cheap fix for global warming. Is it?

Caldeira: Let’s pretend for a moment that putting dust in the stratosphere is easy to do and works reasonably well. And let’s say the United States and England and the “Coalition of the Willing” decided to go ahead and deploy this system, and that China or India then went into a decade or two of deep drought. Whether the system caused that drought or not, I think the Chinese or the Indians would rightly suspect that the reason they have this drought and ensuing famines might be due to this system that was put up by these other countries. And you could easily imagine that there would be a great amount of political tension, and possibly even leading to warfare. So I think just the political dimensions and the governance dimensions of these geoengineering options suggest that we would be very reluctant to deploy these things, even if we thought they worked more or less perfectly.

Another example is that, in many climate model simulations, the area around Egypt tends to get wetter with global warming. And so what if you do this geoengineering scheme and it takes away water from countries that didn’t have water a few centuries ago? Are they are going to be happy you’re doing this? So I think just the political problems associated with perceived winners and losers are so great that a politician is not going to want to deal with these problems.

Then, of course, the system is not going to work perfectly. First of all, it’s not going to address the issues of ocean acidification. It’s not going to perfectly offset global warming, so you’ll have some residual effects. So, I look at these geoengineering options as something we would only want to consider if our backs were really up against the wall, and where all these environmental and political risks seem worth taking because the alternatives look so frightening.

e360: I know that some scientists have suggested that there should be some kind of taboo on geoengineering research. But I know that you’ve been outspoken in the need for a federally-funded geoengineering research program. Can you explain that?

Caldeira: Yes, I think we don’t know right now whether these kinds of approaches have the potential to reduce risk or not. In our climate models, the amount of climate change can be reduced by these kinds of approaches, but the climate models are an imperfect reflection of reality, and they don’t consider the kinds of political risks that I was mentioning before. And so I think we just have to say we don’t know whether these options can really reduce overall risk…

Let’s say geoengineering doesn’t work, and that it would add to risk. It seems to me it would be worth having a research program to demonstrate that beyond a reasonable doubt so we can all forget about this and move on.

On the other hand, if these options do have the potential to reduce risk, then it seems to me that we would like to have the option to reduce that risk should a time come where that would seem necessary. I kind of think of these geoengineering options as seeing, “Well, can we invent some kind of seatbelts for our climate system?” We need to drive the climate system carefully, we need to greatly reduce emissions. But even if we’re driving carefully we still run the risk of getting into an accident. And seatbelts can potentially reduce the damage when we’re in an accident.

But the reason I’m concerned about geoengineering is because I am so concerned about greenhouse gas emissions, and so, again, I’m in favor of essentially making greenhouse gas-emitting devices illegal. But I don’t think we’re going to reduce emissions fast enough to make me feel that we’re not running some really grave risks. And so I think we need to develop options to diminish those risks.

And it’s not just geoengineering. I’m much in favor of a very broad-spectrum approach. I think one of the things we saw with the subprime mortgage crisis is that a few million people in the United States defaulted on their mortgages and we have a worldwide economic crisis. I think we have to assume that climate change damage will be a much bigger amplitude than a few million mortgage defaults.

If there’s some kind of climate crisis in Southeast Asia, is that going to amplify and shake the whole global economic system? This is the kind of thing that Jim Lovelock is afraid of, that you’ll have “economic migrants” resulting from climate change that will ultimately destabilize modern civilization.

And so I think we also need to be doing research in how do we make our society more robust, so that these local climate damages won’t turn into global problems. We need to be doing basic adaptation planning; we need to look at geoengineering options. But the main thing we need to do is work to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions.

But thinking of geoengineering as a substitute for emissions reduction is analogous to saying, “Now that I’ve got the seatbelts on, I can’t just take my hands off the wheel and turn around and talk to people in the back seat.” It’s crazy.

The authors of SuperFreakonomics simply never understood what the chief climatologist they interviewed believed about the central thesis of their chapter, As Bloomberg reported last week:

Caldeira, who is researching the idea [of aerosol geoengineering], argues that it can succeed only if we first reduce emissions. Otherwise, he says, geoengineering can’t begin to cope with the collateral damage, such as acidic oceans killing off shellfish.

Levitt and Dubner ignore his view and champion his work as a permanent substitute for emissions cuts. When I told Dubner that Caldeira doesn’t believe geoengineering can work without cutting emissions, he was baffled. “I don’t understand how that could be,” he said. In other words, the Freakonomics guys just flunked climate science.

And ironically, the “polymath’s polymath” contrarian’s contrarian apparently agrees with Caldeira in opposing the geoengineering-only approach — although Nathan Myhrvold apparently never understood what the Superfreaks actually wrote in their chapter and the Superfreaks apparently never understood what the former Microsoft CTO actually believed!  See Nathan Myhrvold jumps the shark — and jumps ship on Levitt and Dubner (on their blog!) asserting: “Geoengineering is proposed only as a last resort to try to reduce or cope with the even greater harms of global warming! … The point of the chapter in SuperFreakonomics is that geoengineering might be good insurance in case we don’t get global warming under control.” Did he even read the book?

One final quote that I think might surprise a great many people who don’t know Caldeira, who got their entire misimpression of him from Superfreakonomics:

If I had to wager, I would wager that we would never deploy any geoengineering system….

If you want to know what Caldeira thinks will happen, you can listen to Caldeira’s entire interview with journalist Jeff Goodell on the Yale e360 website.

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Un-friggin-believable.

Nathan Myhrvold, who Levitt and Dubner call the “polymath’s polymath” — who is one of the primary “experts” the authors rely on to make the case for their central geoengineering-only approach to global warming — has just publicly repudiated that approach. Apparently he never read the chapter — or didn’t understand it if he did.  And apparently in their rush to print this “rebuttal” to my debunkings, the Superfreaks didn’t bother to read it closely, since he just wrote this jaw-dropper on their blog:

Geoengineering is proposed only as a last resort to try to reduce or cope with the even greater harms of global warming!

… The point of the chapter in SuperFreakonomics is that geoengineering might be good insurance in case we don’t get global warming under control.

You can’t make this stuff up.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists posted here about Myhrvold’s amazing defense repudiation of Superfreakonomics:

That is exactly the opposite of what the book argues and represents a complete repudiation of the chapter from one of the main sources on which Levitt and Dubner relied.

Or go to the Bloomberg interview of Dubner and Caldeira that backs up my reporting on error-riddled Superfreakonomics for an independent view of what the book is about — and what the authors think the book is about:

Caldeira, who is researching the idea [of aerosol geoengineering], argues that it can succeed only if we first reduce emissions. Otherwise, he says, geoengineering can’t begin to cope with the collateral damage, such as acidic oceans killing off shellfish.

Levitt and Dubner ignore his view and champion his work as a permanent substitute for emissions cuts. When I told Dubner that Caldeira doesn’t believe geoengineering can work without cutting emissions, he was baffled. “I don’t understand how that could be,” he said. In other words, the Freakonomics guys just flunked climate science.

Are you baffled also?  The two leading experts (well, one expert and one F.A.K.E.R.) that Dubner and Leavitt relied on for their geoengineering-only solution don’t believe in it!  Well, Caldeira doesn’t believe in it.  As we’ll see, it’s impossible to figure out what Myhrvold believes.

Myhrvold is not a ”polymath’s polymath.”  He repudiates the Superfreaks, so he’s a contrarian’s contrarian.

Why exactly does Myhrvold think the Superfreaks were so desperate to push the (incorrect) statement about Caldeira that his “research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain”?  Since the Superfreaks made me take the PDF of the book down, go to the NPR interview of Levitt (transcript here):

So we’re not – look, I’m not a scientist and Steven Dubner’s not a scientist either, but we’ve managed to interact with some of the greatest scientists in this country. I think what we conclude is that the nature of the debate is just completely wrong. The real problem isn’t that there’s too much carbon in the air. The real problem is it’s too hot.

Ouch.  But now it looks like the greatest scientists in this country don’t even agree with them.

Read the Times online excerpt whose subhead actually claims “This time they claim that CO2 may be good”!

The book itself says:

It’s not that we don’t know how to stop polluting the atmosphere. We don’t want to stop or aren’t willing to pay the price.

And then there is Myhrvold himself in the book — for extended quotes see “Error-riddled Superfreakonomics’, Part 2“:

“If you believe that the scary stories could be true, or even possible, then you should also admit that relying only on reducing carbon-dioxide emissions is not a very good answer,” he says.  In other words:  it’s illogical to believe in a carbon-induced warming apocalypse and believe that such an apocalypse can be averted simply by curtailing new carbon emissions.  “The scary scenarios could occur even if we make Herculean efforts to reduce our emissions, in which case the only real answer is geo-engineering.”

As I said in Part 1, not only is it not illogical, but I suspect most of the world’s leading climate scientists believe that if you could curtail all new carbon emissions (including from deforestation) starting now (or even starting soon), you would indeed avoid apocaplyse.  In fact, as Caldeira makes clear, the reverse of Myrhvold’s final statement is true:  ONLY if we make Herculean efforts to reduce our emissions, could geo-engineering possibly contribute to the solution.

But Myhrvold says (from the Times online excerpt):

Myhrvold is not arguing for an immediate deployment of the sulphur shield but, rather, that technologies like it be researched and tested so they are ready to use if the worst climate predictions come true.

Good for him.  He’s ”not arguing for an immediate deployment” of something that doesn’t exist.  Good strategy.  If only his former company, Microsoft, had applied that approach with the Windows Vista operating system.  Zing!

So why is he pushing this approach?

He is also eager to get geoengineering moving forward because of what he sees as “a real head of steam” that global warming activists have gathered in recent years.

“They are seriously proposing doing a set of things that could have enormous impact — and we think probably negative impact — on human life,” he says. “They want to divert a huge amount of economic value toward immediate and precipitous anti-carbon initiatives, without thinking things through.

“This will have a huge drag on the world economy. There are billions of poor people who will be greatly delayed, if not entirely precluded, from attaining a First World standard of living.”

Ah, those extremist, nutty “global warming activists” — like, say, climatologist Ken Caldeira himself who has said:

I believe the correct CO2 emission target is zero. I believe that it is essentially immoral for us to be making devices (automobiles, coal power plants, etc) that use the atmosphere as a sewer for our waste products.  I am in favor of outlawing production of such devices as soon as possible….

Every carbon dioxide emission adds to climate damage and increasing risk of catastrophic consequences. There is no safe level of emission.

I compare CO2 emissions to mugging little old ladies … It is wrong to mug little old ladies and wrong to emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The right target for both mugging little old ladies and carbon dioxide emissions is zero.

I am in favor of fire insurance but I am also against playing with matches while sitting on a keg of gunpowder. I am in favor of research into geoengineering options but I am also against carbon dioxide emissions.

Nathan is apparently pushing geo-engineering research because people like Caldeira (and me) want to immediately and precipitously cut carbon.

But wait, Myhrvold now says on the Superfreaks blog:

Geoengineering is proposed only as a last resort to try to reduce or cope with the even greater harms of global warming! The global-warming community has treated us to one scary scenario after another. Some are predicted by the science, some are extrapolations beyond current science, and some are not much better than wild guesses, but they could happen. Should we fail at cutting enough and those things occur, geoengineering might offer a better option….

This kind of attack [by Romm] makes it very difficult for people to suggest new ideas. I have thick enough skin to laugh it off when Romm attacks me, but plenty of people don’t. The politicization of science has a terrible impact on the unfettered discourse of ideas that is so important to making progress. This has been a big impediment to geoengineering. Serious climate scientists who are privately interested in geoengineering are loathe to discuss it publicly because they worry that somebody like Romm will attack and ridicule them if they do. Indeed, part of the reason I chose to work on geoengineering and chose to go public about it is to try to get the topic to be more widely discussed.

The point of the chapter in SuperFreakonomics is that geoengineering might be good insurance in case we don’t get global warming under control.

Except, of course, I have only been attacking and ridiculing people who support the geoengineering-only approach — the very approach that Myhrvold himself utterly rejects here.

Yes, good old reasonable Nathan Myhrvold, who just sees geoengineering as an insurance policy “in case we don’t get global warming under control.”  But then, of course, he trashes the “global warming activists” who want to do just that in the book.  It is Myhrvold and the Superfreaks who have poisoned the dialogue.  Indeed, they go out of their way to attack and ridicule those who want to try to get global warming under control sans geoengineering.  As I note in “Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’, Part 2,“ Myhrvold and the geniuses groupthinkers at IV, however, dismiss all of the solutions:

In the darkened conference room, Myhrvold cues up an overhead slide that summarizes IV’s views of the current slate of proposed global warming solutions.  The slide says:

Too little means that typical conservation efforts simply won’t make much of a difference. “If you believe there is a problem worth solving,” Myhrvold says, “then these solutions won’t be enough to solve it.  Wind power and most other alternative energy things are cute, but they don’t scale to a sufficient degree. At this point, wind farms are a government subsidy scheme, fundamentally.”  What about the beloved Prius and other low-emissions vehicles?  “They’re great,” he says, “except that transportation is just not that big of a sector.”

[Pause for laughter.  Then for weeping.]

Yes, as I noted, globally “Transport accounts for around a quarter of total CO2 emissions.”  In fact, transport is the key sector, because reducing carbon emissions in electricity generation is so damn easy (see “An introduction to the core climate solutions“).

That’s why I call Myhrvold and his ilk, F.A.K.E.R.s — Famous “Authorities” whose Knowledge (of climate) is Error-riddled.

And, then we get this multi-whopper piece of nonsense:

Too optimistic:  “A lot of the things that people say would be good things probably aren’t,” Myrhvold says.  As an example he points to solar power.  “The problem with solar cells is that they’re black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12% gets turned into electricity, and the rest is reradiated as heat — which contributed to global warming.”

As discussed in Part 1, this may set the FAKER record for howlers in one paragraph.

In his “rebuttal,” Myhrvold never actually debunks the central critique I make of that paragraph.  I have a little bombshell to drop on that tomorrow, which some readers have asked to see, so for now, let me end by noting one typically nonsensical thing Myhrvold says in his rambling, ad hominem attack on me:

Strangely, he gives comparatively little attention to the main point of the chapter, which is geoengineering.

Please do go check the quote at the Freakonomics blog here.

I give “comparatively little attention to the main point of the chapter, which is geoengineering.”???  You can’t make this stuff up — unless of course you’re a ”polymath’s polymath.”

So now we know that not only didn’t he read the chapter of SuperFreakonomics he is defending repudiating defending repudiating, he didn’t even bother to read “Error-riddled Superfreakonomics, Part 1,” which he links to in his defense repudiation (!), in which I repost Caldeira’s devastating critique of the geoengineering-only approach (and add some of my own) or “Error-riddled Superfreakonomics, Part 2,” which focuses on him, in which I actually repost Robock’s entire critique of the geoengineering-only approach, complete with citations.

His post vindicates my original assessment.

I believe the correct CO2 emission target is zero. I believe that it is essentially immoral for us to be making devices (automobiles, coal power plants, etc) that use the atmosphere as a sewer for our waste products.  I am in favor of outlawing production of such devices as soon as possible….

Every carbon dioxide emission adds to climate damage and increasing risk of catastrophic consequences. There is no safe level of emission.

I compare CO2 emissions to mugging little old ladies … It is wrong to mug little old ladies and wrong to emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The right target for both mugging little old ladies and carbon dioxide emissions is zero.

I am in favor of fire insurance but I am also against playing with matches while sitting on a keg of gunpowder. I am in favor of research into geoengineering options but I am also against carbon dioxide emissions.

Carbon dioxide emissions represent a real threat to humans and natural systems, and I fear we may have already dawdled too long. That is why I want to see research into geoengineering — because the threat posed by CO2 is real and large, not because the threat is imaginary and small.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Geoengineering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

You keep trouncing them with the facts, Joe, and they keep bobbing and weaving. It’s kind of funny, really.

It’s going to come down to this: It must be starting to dawn on Levitt and Dubner that they screwed up, big time. How they respond is going to be a good test of what kind of men they are. Will they step up and concede major errors, and agree to rectify them in the next edition, and publish this one with disclaimers? Since they appear to have no financial or idealogical ties to fossil fuel industries, this may actually be possible.

I only know Stephen Dubner casually through personal correspondence, but believe that he is a decent person who just got trapped. Let’s see if he and Levitt can admit the truth and act on it, discarding any thoughts of cost/benefits, temporary embarrassments, and so on. This is the only card they have left in the long term.

At least they can plead ignorance of the subject, and being misled by Myhrvold and God knows who else. If Myhrvold is the smartest guy Bill Gates knows, it sounds like a good time to short Microsoft.

Like all sagas of the truth getting sidetracked, there is one little thing that they may have figured out ahead of many of us: their analysis indicates that we are not going to be able to convince enough citizens or governments to reduce emissions anywhere near fast enough to really put the skids on global warming. Even now, we hear people on TV saying it’s inconceivable to think we can replace coal and oil on any meaningful scale until, say, 2030. They’re dead wrong, of course, but they’re the ones who still have the power to appear on TV and say those things.

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Cross-posted from The Bellows.

One of the things about politics is that solutions always seem easier to implement and more promising before they stand a real chance of being implemented. People who have for one reason or another fallen in love with the idea of a carbon tax watch the difficulty Congress is having negotiating a passable climate bill and ask why we don't just pass a carbon tax. It would be so easy! It's just a tax! Pass it, price carbon, and bada bing, you're done.

But of course, a carbon tax looks like a clean, simple option at the moment because no one is invested in securing protections or advantages for themselves because a carbon tax isn't on the table. The moment it looked as though Congress might actually consider and pass a carbon tax, every single interest that has pushed for free carbon credits or other assistance would take on the carbon tax, demanding exemptions or offsetting subsidies of some kind, and generally producing the exact same kind of mess for a carbon tax bill that we have now with a cap-and-trade bill.

It's worth thinking about this when reading things by people supportive of geoengineering as a solution to the climate change problem. They tend to look at the difficulty the world has had putting in place a system that will succeed at reducing emissions, conclude that the world will fail at reducing emissions sufficiently, and argue that geoengineering is the only way forward.

Now, this is somewhat off base in that it ignores the progress that is actually being made on emission reductions, despite the scope of the problem. Europe is reducing emissions, America may well pass a climate bill within the next year, and even key emerging market nations are rapidly adjusting their positions to accept and move forward on emission reduction measures.

But the question that stands out most to me is just why these geoengineering advocates think that it will be easier to do grand scale, highly unpredictable projects that will affect the earth's climate in a significant fashion in just a short amount of time than it will be to continue on the path we're currently following, negotiating for emission cuts. Really, have they thought about this?

Begin with the fact that politicians are extremely risk averse. Who wants to be the guy in charge of the effort to build the who-knows-how-many-billions-of-dollars 18-mile long sulphur dioxide tube? The downside risks are enormous relative to the potential upside benefits.

And why have they not noticed that the public isn't exactly enamored with intellectuals at the moment, particularly where global warming is concerned. Think about the conspiracy theories being spun on the right at present and then extrapolate out to what might happen if the United Nations determined that massive amounts of gas ought to be pumped into the upper atmosphere.

But the real failing is the inability to consider the way that various interest groups are likely to act. In the best case scenario for geoengineering, costs are likely to be focused on certain groups and certain locations, and those groups may respond to the proposed solution by doing anything from demanding compensation to threatening war, depending on their severity. If risk models indicate that certain particularly bad outcomes might result from the project with certain probabilities, and they will, the potential for those outcomes will be negotation flashpoints, potentially leading to intractable divisions between countries.

Geoengineering seems like the easy approach now, because it's not on the table. There is no hysterical battle between proponents and opponents, no op-ed bickering between scientists and faux scientists, no global debate on who would and should bear which costs associated with whatever solution is agreed upon. But as soon as it became a real possibility, a fierce debate would rage. And, if one major geoengineering solution were tried and it failed, it is difficult to see how another attempt could win support, and at that point, of course, we'd have lost the ability to address climate change by reducing emissions when it would have helped.

I think it would be irresponsible not to continue studying the issue and looking for potential geoeingineering fixes, but I think that anyone suggesting that we should abandon the effort to cut emissions in favor of a geoengineering approach has not thought the matter through. It should be considered the last ditch effort, only pursued seriously when it is clear that emission cuts will not prevent catastrophic warming.

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This week, as reported by Andy Revkin, entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson said something heroically, world-historically stupid: "If we could come up with a geoengineering answer to this problem, then Copenhagen wouldn't be necessary. We could carry on flying our planes and driving our cars." Sir Richard was talking about removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. He's not alone. The authors of the upcoming book SuperFreakonomics also think that geoengineering is a cheap, easy way to avoid the work of fashioning a more sustainable society. (See Joe Romm for much, much more on the errors in that book.)

I've been writing too many wordy posts lately, so instead, here are some pictures. These first two come from the preface of Gus Speth's book The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Pardon the somewhat crude scans.

Notice a theme?

This one is from our story on a recent paper in Nature: “Planetary Boundaries: A Safe Operating Space for Humanity.”

© 2009 Grist Terms of Use.

If you cannot see this graphic, please see this one.

Lesson: the problems humanity faces are systemic and interrelated. The idea that sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere will save us is akin to the hope that a math equation can be solved by erasing one of the numbers.

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Cross-posted from The Huffington Post.

The forthcoming SuperFreakonomics, written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, plays fast and loose with the scientific consensus on climate change. The book's fifth chapter, "Global Cooling," revisits a number of discredited arguments that misinform readers about the danger unchecked global warming poses to the United States and the world.

The authors also gloss over solutions available now that could help reduce global warming and instead promote a futuristic technology that makes for an interesting read, but, unfortunately, would do nothing to cut pollution now.

Muddling Climate Science

Excess carbon dioxide from burning gas in cars and coal in power plants and destroying tropical forests has increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to levels unseen in millions of years and is largely to blame for the increase in global average temperature scientists have measured over the past century.

As the authors ably explain, damage from carbon dioxide production is an economic externality, something one person or one business does that affects everyone else in the world. But strangely, the authors spend a great deal of the chapter seemingly defending the idea of increasing levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

At one point they say more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will increase growth rates for plants. What they fail to mention is that weeds, allergens and invasive species are among the plants that may grow faster with elevated levels of carbon dioxide. Overall, the minor benefit for some plants pales in comparison to the major disruptions climate change could bring to agricultural crops, forests, and natural ecosystems, as well as human society.

Whether intended or not, this is the same tactic that the oil and coal-friendly group, CO2 is Green, has adopted. It's also reminiscent of the tobacco industry's claims that "smoking is good for you." In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency has labeled carbon dioxide a pollutant because too much of the gas is changing our climate and setting in motion a series of changes that will have serious consequences around the world.

The authors also brush off the critical role carbon dioxide will play in determining our future climate when they criticize climate models for projecting what they say is too large a range for future temperatures -- between two and 10 degrees F above today's levels. But what they fail to mention is such projections depend almost entirely on how much more heat-trapping emissions go into the atmosphere. Models project that a decrease in production of heat-trapping emissions would lead to less warming -- around two degrees F by the end of the century -- while continued high emissions would lead to greater warming -- closer to 10 degrees F.

A two degree shift is dangerous but tolerable. Ten degrees would be catastrophic. Nevertheless, Levitt and Dubner say, we should abandon efforts to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

These are just a couple of the many contrarian claims repeated in SuperFreakonomics.

Technical Fixes

Levitt and Dubner advocate the advantages of unproven technological solutions such as putting reflective particles into the atmosphere to bounce away sunlight and cool the Earth. When you ask scientists about so-called "geoengineering" solutions they will tell you that we have no idea if it will work, that it might backfire and that even if we could do it, that it would be no excuse for failing to reduce the heat-trapping emissions that cause global warming now. It's worth noting that scientist Ken Caldeira says the authors misrepresent his views on geoengineering in their book. He does not support geoengineering to the exclusion of reducing emissions as the authors imply. Instead, he says we need to reduce excess carbon dioxide emissions to zero.

The authors appear to have taken a purposefully contrarian position on climate change science and economics. The scientific myths that Levitt and Dubner highlight will likely continue to persist in circles of people opposed to reducing emissions. It is far easier to believe there's no need to do anything about a problem if one believes the problem does not exist.

But science doesn't work that way. According to the United States' leading federal and academic scientists -- as well as the peer-reviewed scientific literature -- global warming is happening, it's hurting us now and the degree to which it will affect our children and grandchildren depends on the choices we make about how we use energy today.

While it's tempting to believe geoengineering may solve our problems, we need to work now to address climate change.

Luckily, the House of Representatives did pass legislation that would dramatically reduce heat-trapping emissions and momentum is building for the Senate to do the same. If all goes well, world leaders who meet in December's climate change negotiations in Copenhagen will produce an effective international treaty to address climate change.

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Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception.

That staggeringly anti-scientific statement (page 170) is just one of many, many pieces of outright nonsense from SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. In fact, human-caused global warming is well-established science, far better established than any aspect of economics.

Hard to believe such a staggeringly illogical statement (page 203) comes from Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, the same folks who wrote the runaway bestseller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

For the record, it’s perfectly logical to believe that -- indeed, I daresay most of the world’s leading climate scientists believe that -- if you could curtail all new carbon emissions (including from deforestation) starting now (or even starting soon), you would indeed avoid apocaplyse. None, however, would use the loaded word “simply” I’m sure and most, like Hansen, would like to go from curtailing emissions to being carbon negative as soon as possible. The Superfreaks, however, are simultaneously skeptical of global warming science, critical of all mitigation measures, but certain that geo-engineering using sulfate aerosols is the answer.

“Rogue” is a good word for Levitt, but I think “contrarian” is more apt. Sadly, for Levitt’s readers and reputation, he decided to adopt the contrarian view of global warming, which takes him far outside of his expertise. As is common among smart people who know virtually nothing about climate science or solutions and get it so very wrong, he relies on other smart contrarians who know virtually nothing about climate science or solutions. In particular, he leans heavily on Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft, who has a reputation for brilliance, which he and the Superfreaks utterly shred in this book:

Impressive -- three and a half major howlers in one tiny paragraph (page 187). California Energy Commissioner Art Rosenfeld called this “patent nonsense,” when I read it to him. And Myhrvold is the guy, according to the Superfreaks, of which Bill Gates once said, “I don’t know anyone I would say is smarter than Nathan.” This should be the definitive proof that smarts in one area do not necessarily translate at all.

In olden days, we called such folks Artistes of Bullshit, but now I’m gonna call them FAKERs -- Famous “Authorities” whose Knowledge (of climate) is Extremely Rudimentary [Error-riddled? I'm still working on this acronym].

The most famous FAKER was Michael Crichton. I thought Freeman Dyson was the leading FAKER today, but Myhrvold makes Dyson sound like James Hansen. I will devote an entire blog post to the BS peddled here by Myhrvold (who now runs Intellectual Ventures) because I’m sure he’s got the ear of alot of well-meaning, influential, but easily duped, people like Levitt and Dubner.

Here are the howlers in that paragraph for the record:

1. “The problem with solar cells is that they’re black.” Try googling “solar cells” -- (Nathan, you can Bing "solar cells") -- and most of the panels you’ll see are in fact blue. I’ll call this half a howler. Lots of the cells are black. As we’ll see, however, it is NOT a problem. This is a bogus issue.

2. These days, lots of solar cells get much higher efficiency than 12 percent. Scientific American writes about “Suntech’s Pluto line of multicrystalline cells, which boasts 17.2 percent efficiency converting one sun’s light into electricity, or Suniva’s ARTisun single silicon crystal cells that can convert 18.5 percent of the sunshine into electricity.” This book is supposedly about solutions available in the near future and billions of dollars are being poured into technologies that could more than double those efficiencies. Indeed, “New solar energy material captures every color of the rainbow.” But, of course, only IV’s unproven and dubious aerosol geo-engineering solution gets the benefit of assumed scientific advances, not real, actual hardware that could start solving the problem now.

3. The biggest howler from the perspective of a would-be FAKER (and those who are duped by them) is the logical error of failing to ask one simple question: What was the absorbtivity or emissivity of the material that the panel covered up? If you look on Google images, you’ll see that PV panels are often -- if not usually -- put on roofs or over ground that is quite dark, often black. In a large fraction of cases, the panels contribute less heat reradiation than what they are covering would. This is a complete red herring, a “trivial issue” in the jargon Levitt would normally use.

4. The way Leavitt and Dubner write the paragraph -- “A lot of the things that people say would be good things probably aren’t,” Myrhvold says. As an example he points to solar power. -- they have Myrhvold saying all forms of solar power “probably aren’t” a good thing. That is a laughable notion, and I seriously doubt he believes that. But, as we’ll see, this is the Superfreaks style, to overstate or misstate what the people they talk to actually believe.

John O’Donnell, VP Business Development, GlassPoint Solar and a former lead engineer at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (old bio here, Business Week profile here) just emailed me to be sure I don’t miss the forest for the trees here in debunking this nonsense:

Yes Nathan is howlingly off base. Not because solar panels are (whatever cover with whatever relative emissivity), but because solar panels, like wind turbines and solar thermal power plants, eliminate the emission of CO2 which would otherwise occur from electricity production.

As Ken Caldeira so grippingly points out (and I tried to make graphically clear in my Stanford talk last year) , each molecule of CO2 released thermal energy when it was formed -- that’s why we formed it. In the case of electricity generation, about 1/3 of its thermal energy went out a wire as electric power, the rest was released promptly as waste heat. But each molecule of CO2, during its subsequent lifetime in the atmosphere, traps 100,000 times more heat than was released during its formation.

A hundred thousand is a big number. It means that running a handheld electric hairdryer on U.S. grid electricity delivers a planet-warming punch comparable to [the heat directly emitted by] two Boeing 747s operating at full takeoff power for the same time period. The warming is delivered over time, not promptly, but that don’t matter; the planetary heating is accrued, the accountants would say, the moment you hit the switch.

The thermal energy balance for a solar panel runs vastly in the other direction. If our solar panel is pure black, and 14 percent efficient, then for each kWh of electric power that comes out, there are 7 kWh of heat that were absorbed and radiated. But each kWh it generates it eliminates the release of 1.4 pounds of CO2, which during its lifetime in the atmosphere will absorb 210,000 kWh of heat. So the energy balance for the solar panel (when it’s connected to the US grid) is about NEGATIVE 209,993 kWh(heat) per kWh(electric) -- since some fossil power plant somewhere is being turned down based on its generation. And hey, if it’s blue instead of black, that might increase to negative 209,995 kWh.

So, yes, Myhrvold is an uber-FAKER, raising issues that are uber-trivial.

As an aside, O’Donnell is a CSP guy, like me, the solar energy that I believe is most promising for large-scale, low-cost, low-carbon power delivery (see “Solar Baseload -- a core climate solution“). Naturally, the Superfreaks never mention this in their amateurish take-down of solar.

The reason I’m calling Leavitt and Dubner Superfreaks for short is that Chapter Five, the “Global Cooling” chapter -- aka “What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?” -- has precious little economics, and what it does have is simply wrong. So the book could easily have been titled Superfreaks. [Note: Most of the book is searchable online.]

The answer is that Gore and Pinatubo’s eruption both suggest a way to cool the planet, albeit with methods whose cost-effectiveness are a universe apart.

Yes, the Superfreaks frame this chapter mostly as their (misguided) view of the science versus the views of that famous non-scientist Al Gore (as opposed to the views of all of the scientists who disagree with the crap they are peddling). That straw man approach gives them the “high” ground.

But by embracing aeresols and rejecting mitigation, they have adopted the identical view of that rogue, thoroughly debunked, non-economist Bjorn Lomborg. Unlike the Superfreaks, CP readers know that Ken Caldeira calls the vision of Lomborg’s Climate Consensus “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story.”

And yet Caldeira is the primary practicing climate scientist the Superfreaks rely on in the chapter! He has responded to many email queries of mine over the weekend so I could characterize his views accurately. He simply doesn’t believe what the Superfreaks make it seem like he believes. He writes me:

If you talk all day, and somebody picks a half dozen quotes without providing context because they want to make a provocative and controversial chapter, there is not much you can do.

One sentence about Caldeira in particular is the exact opposite of what he believes (page 184):

Yet his research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight.

Levitt and Dubner didn’t run this quote by Caldeira, and when he saw a version from Myrhvold, he objected to it. But Levitt and Dubner apparently wanted to keep it very badly -- it even makes their Table of Contents in the Chapter Five summary “Is carbon dioxide the wrong villain?” It fits their contrarian sensibility, but it makes no actual sense.

Here is what Caldeira really believes:

I believe the correct CO2 emission target is zero. I believe that it is essentially immoral for us to be making devices (automobiles, coal power plants, etc) that use the atmosphere as a sewer for our waste products. I am in favor of outlawing production of such devices as soon as possible …

Every carbon dioxide emission adds to climate damage and increasing risk of catastrophic consequences. There is no safe level of emission.

I compare CO2 emissions to mugging little old ladies … It is wrong to mug little old ladies and wrong to emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The right target for both mugging little old ladies and carbon dioxide emissions is zero.

I am in favor of fire insurance but I am also against playing with matches while sitting on a keg of gunpowder. I am in favor of research into geoengineering options but I am also against carbon dioxide emissions.

Carbon dioxide emissions represent a real threat to humans and natural systems, and I fear we may have already dawdled too long. That is why I want to see research into geoengineering -- because the threat posed by CO2 is real and large, not because the threat is imaginary and small.

Ouch!

Needless to say, you’d never get that impression from reading Superfreakonomics. Again the authors had a contrarian argument they wanted to push, and they shoe-horned the one true expert they talked to into it.Dystopia.

I’ll address the other myriad errors and analytical flaws in the chapter in future posts. Their core argument is the same as Lomborg’s, that aerosol-based geo-engineering can substitute for aggressive mitigation, which they repeatedly diss as uneconomic, contrary to virtually all actual independent economic analysis (see “Introduction to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost -- one tenth of a penny on the dollar“). They leave the impression Caldeira shares that view. This is what he really believes:

If we keep emitting greenhouse gases with the intent of offsetting the global warming with ever increasing loadings of particles in the stratosphere, we will be heading to a planet with extremely high greenhouse gases and a thick stratospheric haze that we would need to main more-or-less indefinitely. This seems to be a dystopic world out of a science fiction story. First, we can assume the oceans have been heavily acidified with shellfish and corals largely a thing of the past. We can assume that ecosystems will be greatly affected by the high CO2/low sunlight conditions -- similar to what Earth experienced hundreds of millions years ago. The sunlight would likely be very diffuse -- maybe good for portrait photography, but with unknown consequences for ecosystems.

We know also that CO2 and sunlight affect Earth’s climate system in different ways. For the same amount of change in rainfall, CO2 affects temperature more than sunlight, so if we are to try to correct for changes in precipitation patterns, we will be left with some residual warming that would grow with time.

And what will this increasing loading of particles in the stratosphere do to the ozone layer and the other parts of Earth’s climate system that we depend on?

On top of all of these environmental considerations, there are socio-political considerations: Will we have a cooperative world government deciding exactly how much geoengineering to deploy where? What if China were to go into decades of drought? Would they sit idly by as the Climate Intervention Bureau apparently ignores their plight? And what if political instability where to mean that for a few years, the intervention system were not maintained … all of that accumulated pent-up climate change would be unleashed upon the Earth … and perhaps make “The Day After” movie look less silly than it does.

Long-term risk reduction depends on greenhouse gas emissions reduction. Nevertheless, there is a chance that some of these options might be able to diminish short-term risk in the event of a climate crisis.

I would add the grave risk that that after injecting massive amounts of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere for a decade or more, we might discover some unexpected bad side effect that just gets worse and worse. After all, the top climate scientists underestimated the speed and scale of greenhouse gas impacts (and the magnitude of synergistic ones, like bark beetle infestations and forest fires).

We would be in incompletely unexplored territory -- what I call an experimental chemotherapy and radiation therapy combined. There is no possible way of predicting the long-term effect of the thick stratospheric haze (which, unlike GHGs, has no recent or paleoclimate analog). If it turned out to have unexpected catastrophic impacts of its own (other than drought), we’d be totally screwed.

No surprise, then, that science advisor John Holdren told me in April that he stands by his critique:

The ‘geo-engineering’ approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects.

Even geoengineering advocate Tom Wigley is only defending “a complementary combined mitigation/geoengineering scenario, an overshoot concentration pathway where atmospheric carbon dioxide reaches 530 ppm before falling back to 450 ppm, coupled with low-intensity geoengineering,” with the goal of stabilizing global temperature rise at 2°C, in case we can’t stabilize at 450 ppm. You can see a good discussion of that at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists‘ expert roundtable response to Alan Robocks’ excellent piece, “20 reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea.”

Well, stabilizing at 530 ppm requires doing a massive amount of mitigation starting now -- only 2 or 3 fewer wedges than what is needed for 450 (see “How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution“).

Levitt and Dubner and Myhrvold are FAKERs. They simply don’t know what they are talking about.

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 A visual overview of geoengineering schemes.Image: Kathleen Smith/LLNL

LONDON - Sci-fi proposals to cool the planet are laden with risk but may be Earth's only hope if politicians fail to tackle global warming, scientists said on Tuesday in their biggest evaluation to date of "geoengineering" concepts.

The verdict by Britain's prestigious Royal Society came a little more than three months before a U.N. showdown in Copenhagen on how to reduce the carbon emissions that drive climate change.

John Shepherd, a professor at Britain's University of Southampton, who chaired a 12-member panel which assessed the evidence, said geoengineering was filling a perilous political void.

"Our research found that some geoengineering techniques could have serious unintended and detrimental effects on many people and ecosystems -- yet we are still failing to take the only action that will prevent us from having to rely on them," he said.

The report cautiously said some geoengineering schemes were technically feasible but were shadowed by safety worries and doubts about affordability.  Provided these questions were answered, such projects could be a useful tool as part of a worldwide switch to a low-carbon economy, it said.

But, the report warned, other geoengineering schemes are so costly or so freighted with risk and unknowns that they should only be considered a last-ditch fix.

Just five years ago, geoengineering was widely dismissed by mainstream climate scientists as quirky or delusional. As recently as 2007, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) cautioned of its potential risk and unquantified cost.

But the schemes are now getting a serious hearing in many quarters, helped by mounting evidence that climate change is advancing faster than thought while progress toward a carbon-curbing U.N. treaty is moving at glacial speed.

Supporters say geoengineering can buy time to let politicians hammer out a deal or wean the global economy off polluting fossil fuels.

The report, "Geoengineering the climate: Science, governance and uncertainty," was based mainly on peer-reviewed literature.  It took a year to carry out, and the Royal Society came under fire from green groups that accused it of handing a cloak of respectability to a once-mocked scientific fringe.

The authors of the report said geoengineering fell into two main categories.

The most promising entails removal of carbon dioxide, such as by planting forests and building towers that would capture CO2 from the air.

Some of these projects could be harnessed alongside conventional methods to reduce emissions once they are demonstrated to be "safe, effective, sustainable, and affordable," said the report.

The other category is called solar radiation management.

Instead of tackling CO2, it would act like a thermostat, turning down the heat that reaches Earth from the sun.

Concepts in this field include deflecting the sun's heat away from the Earth through space mirrors, scattering light-colored particles in the high atmosphere to reflect the solar rays, and using ships to spray water that would create reflective low-altitude clouds.

The advantage would be to lower temperatures quickly and could be tempting if global warming suddenly cranked up a gear, the report said.

But these techniques would not curb CO2 emissions that cause dangerous ocean acidification; their costs are unclear but possibly astronomical; and they may end up generating disasters of their own.

Even so, they should not be dismissed out of hand, given their potential in an emergency, said Ken Caldeira, a professor of climate modelling at Stanford University, California.

"We need to think if Greenland were to be sliding into the sea rapidly, causing rapid sea-level rise, or if methane started to de-gas rapidly from the Siberian permafrost, or if rainfall patterns were to shift in such a way that wide-spread famines were induced," he said.  "We would be remiss if we did not do what we could do to understand the potential of these options as well as their uncertainties and risks ahead of time."

Painting roofs white to reflect solar rays -- an idea gaining ground in California and other sunny places -- would provide only limited, local cooling and not affect the rise in global temperature.

"None of the geoengineering technologies so far suggested is a magic bullet and all have risks and uncertainties associated with them," Shepherd said.

The panel called for funding of around $162 million a year to kickstart research into whether geoengineering schemes could be feasible -- and, if so, in what circumstances they should be applied and how they would be managed.

Here is a snapshot of the report's views on the main geoengineering proposals: 

These are schemes that remove carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere. Projects that are shown to be "safe, effective, sustainable and affordable" should be deployed alongside cleaner energy and other conventional methods to reduce carbon emissions. Among those highlighted in the report:  

Planting trees
Afforestation would suck carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere through the natural process of photosynthesis.
• For: Safe, easy, swift, and cheap to deploy, good for biodiversity.
• Against: Only limited potential for carbon removal, potential conflicts over land use (forests vs. food crops).

Bio-energy
Use trees, shrubs, and other vegetation as an energy source, such as bio-mass and charcoal.
• For: Affordable and safe.
• Against: Slow to reduce global temperatures, potential conflicts over land use.

Enhanced weathering
CO2 is removed from the atmosphere over thousands of years by a natural process involving the weathering, or dissolution, of carbonate and silicate soils. Enhanced weathering would accelerate the process by adding silicates to certain soils.
• For: High potential for storing CO2 in the soil.
• Against: Expensive, slow to take effect, and impact on soil acidity and vegetation unclear.

Carbon scrubbers
Build hi-tech towers around the world to capture CO2 molecules from the air.
• For: Safe, technically feasible, and very high cleanup potential.
• Against: Costs unknown but likely to be high, need for infrastructure to store the carbon collected by the towers.

Ocean fertilization
Sow the open seas with iron nutrients to encourage the growth of marine plants called phytoplankton that suck up CO2 at the surface through photosynthesis. The phytoplankton die and sink to the ocean floor, effectively storing the carbon forever.
• For: Technically feasible, not too expensive.
• Against: May not work, given complex ocean currents; slow to reduce global temperatures; very high potential for damaging the marine ecosystem.

Oceanic upwelling
Place huge vertical pipes in the sea to pump water from the depths to the surface and from the surface to the depths.
• For: Would boost the efficiency of the ocean as a means of storing CO2.
• Against: Unfeasible, would only reduce atmospheric CO2 by a tiny fraction, environmental impact unknown.

These are schemes that would cool the planet by reducing heat from the sun rather than by curbing fossil-fuel pollution.  Some of these could have a quick cooling effect, but would not address CO2 buildup, which causes ocean acidification and other problems.  They may also have a potential for causing massive environmental problems.  As a result, solar radiation management is less preferable than carbon dioxide removal, says the report. It should only be applied in an emergency and for a limited time, and in any case should accompany reductions in carbon emissions.  The principal schemes:
  
Albedo (reflective materials)
Cover desert areas with reflecting film or generate white clouds over parts of the oceans through spray generators aboard "cloud ships."
• For: Quick to implement and rapidly effective.
• Against: Desert albedo would have a major impact on desert ecosystems, ocean albedo could affect weather patterns and ocean currents. Both very expensive.

Stratospheric aerosols
Mimicking the dust spewed from volcanoes, these would be fine, white particles of sulphate that would be scattered into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight.
• For: Technically feasible, highly effective (could start to reduce temperatures within one year), can be deployed quickly and at low cost.
• Against: Possible impact on ozone layer, high-altitude clouds, may disrupt regional rainfall patterns.

Space sunshade
Place reflectors in orbit that would reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth by 1 or 2 percent.
• For: Highly effective, and no theoretical limit on potential cooling.
• Against: Would take decades to deploy; huge cost; potential effects on regional climate; impact of reduced sunlight on ecosystem unknown.

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Obama going to Copenhagen

‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science

In the 20 years since we climate activists began our work in earnest, the state of the climate has become dramatically worse, and the change is accelerating -- this despite all of our best efforts. Clearly something is deeply wrong with this picture. What is it that we do not yet know? What do we have to think and do differently to arrive at urgently different outcomes?[1]

The answers lie not with science, but with culture.

Climate activists are obsessed with greenhouse-gas emissions and concentrations. Since global climate disruption is an effect of greenhouse gases, and a disastrous one, this is understandable. But it is also a mistake.

Such is the fallacy of climate activism[2]: We insist that global warming is merely a consequence of greenhouse-gas emissions. Since it is not, we fail to tell the truth to the public.

I think that there are two serious errors in our perspectives on greenhouse gases:

Global Warming as Symptom

The first error is our failure to understand that greenhouse gases are not a cause but a symptom, and addressing the symptom will do little but leave us with a devil's sack full of many other symptoms, possibly somewhat less rapidly lethal but lethal nonetheless.

The root cause, the source of the symptoms, is 300 years of our relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing technoculture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical and colonial civilizations.[3] This should be no news flash, but the seductive promise of endless growth has grasped all of us civilized folk by the collective throat, led us to expand our population in numbers beyond all reason and to commit genocide of indigenous cultures and destruction of other life on Earth.

To be sure, global climate disruption is the No. 1 symptom. But if planetary warming were to vanish tomorrow, we would still be left with ample catastrophic potential to extinguish many life forms in fairly short order: deforestation; desertification; poisoning of soil, water, air; habitat destruction; overfishing and general decimation of oceans; nuclear waste, depleted uranium, and nuclear weaponry -- to name just a few. (While these symptoms exist independently, many are intensified by global warming.)

We will not change course by addressing each of these as separate issues; we have to address root cultural cause.

Beyond Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The second error is our stubborn unwillingness to understand that the battle against greenhouse-gas emissions, as we have currently framed it, is over.

It is absolutely over and we have lost.

We have to say so.

There are three primary components of escalating greenhouse-gas concentrations that are out of our control:

Thirty-Year Lag

The first is that generally speaking the effects we are seeing today, as dire as they are, are the result of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in the range of only 330 parts per million (ppm), not the result of today's concentrations of almost 390 ppm. This is primarily a consequence of the vast inertial mass of the oceans, which absorb temperature and carbon dioxide and create a roughly 30-year lag between greenhouse-gas emissions and their effects. We are currently seeing the effects of greenhouse gases emitted before 1980.

Just as the scientific community hadn't realized how rapidly and extensively geophysical and biological systems would respond to increases in atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations, we currently have only a rough idea of what that 60 ppm already emitted will mean, even if we stopped our emissions today. But we do know, with virtual certainty, that it will be full of unpleasant surprises.

Positive Feedback Loops

The second out-of-control component is positive (amplifying) feedback loops. The odd thing about positive feedbacks is that they are often ignored in assessing the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions. Our understanding of them is limited and our ability to insert them into an equation is rudimentary. Our inability to grasp them, however, in no way mitigates their effects, which are as real as worldwide violent weather.

It is now clear that several phenomena are self-sustaining, amplifying cycles; for example, melting ice and glaciers, melting tundra and other methane sources, and increasing ocean saturation with carbon dioxide, which leads to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. These feedbacks will continue even if we reduce our human emissions to zero -- and all of our squiggly lightbulbs, Priuses, wind turbines, Waxman-Markeys, and Copenhagens won't make one bit of difference. Not that we shouldn't stop all greenhouse-gas emissions immediately -- of course we should -- but that's only a necessity, not nearly a sufficient response.

We need to find the courage to say so.

Non-Linearity

The third component is non-linearity, which means that the effects of rising temperature and atmospheric carbon concentrations may change suddenly and unpredictably. While we may assume linearity for natural phenomena because linearity is much easier to assess and to predict, many changes in nature are non-linear, often abruptly so. A common example is the behavior of water. The changes of state of water -- solid, liquid, gas -- happen abruptly. It freezes suddenly at 0°C, not at 1°, and it turns to steam at 100°, not at 99°. If we were to limit our experience of water to the range of 1° to 99°, we would never know of the existence of ice or steam.

This is where we stand in relationship to many aspects of the global climate. We don't know where the tipping points -- effectively the changes of state -- are for such events as the irreversible melting of glaciers, release of trapped methane from tundras and seabeds, carbon saturation of the oceans. Difficult to pin down, tipping points may be long past, or just around the corner. As leading climatologist Jim Hansen has written, "Present knowledge does not permit accurate specification of the dangerous level of human-made GHGs. However, it is much lower than has commonly been assumed. If we have not already passed the dangerous level, the energy infrastructure in place ensures that we will pass it within several decades."[4]

Evidence of non-linearity is strong, not only from the stunning acceleration of climate change in just the past couple of years, but from the wild behavior of the climate over millions of years, which sometimes changed dramatically within periods as short as a decade.

The most expert scientific investigators have been blindsided by the velocity and extent of recent developments, and the climate models have likewise proved far more conservative than nature itself. Given that scientists have underestimated impacts of even small changes in global temperature, it is understandably difficult to elicit an appropriate public and governmental response.

Beyond the Box

We climate activists have to tread on uncertain ground and rapidly move beyond our current unpleasant but comfortable parts-per-million box. Here are some things we need to say, over and over again, everywhere, in a thousand different ways:

Bitter climate truths are fundamentally bitter cultural truths. Endless growth is an impossibility in the physical world, always -- but always -- ending in overshot and collapse. Collapse: with a bang or a whimper, most likely both. We are already witnessing it, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Because of this civilization's obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable. We simply cannot go on living this way. Our version of life on earth has come to an end.

Moreover, there are no "free market" or "economic" solutions. And since corporations must have physically impossible endless growth in order to survive, corporate social responsibility is a myth. The only socially responsible act that corporations can take is to dissolve.

We can't bargain with the forces of nature, trading slightly less harmful trinkets for a fantasied reprieve. Geophysical processes care not one whit for our politics, our economics, our evening meals, our theologies, our love for our children, our plaintive cries of innocence and error.

We can either try to plan the transition, even at this late hour, or the physical forces of the world will do it for us -- indeed, they already are. As Alfred Crosby stated in his remarkable book, Ecological Imperialism, mother nature's ministrations are never gentle.[5]

Telling the Truth

If we climate activists don't tell the truth as well as we know it -- which we have been loathe to do because we ourselves are frightened to speak the words -- the public will not respond, notwithstanding all our protestations of urgency.

And contrary to current mainstream climate-activist opinion, contrary to all the pointless "focus groups," contrary to the endless speculation on "correct framing," the only way to tell the truth is to tell it. All of it, no matter how terrifying it may be.[6]

It is offensive and condescending for activists to assume that people can't handle the truth without environmentalists finding a way to make it more palatable. The public is concerned, we vaguely know that something is desperately wrong, and we want to know more so we can try to figure out what to do. The response to An Inconvenient Truth, as tame as that film was in retrospect, should have made it clear that we want to know the truth.

And finally, denial requires a great deal of energy, is emotionally exhausting, fraught with conflict and confusion. Pretending we can save our current way of life derails us and sends us in directions that lead us astray. The sooner we embrace the truth, the sooner we can begin the real work.

Let's just tell it.

Stating the Problem

After we tell the truth, then what can we do? Is it hopeless? Perhaps. But before we can have the slightest chance of meaningful action, having told the truth, we have to face the climate reality, fully and unflinchingly. If we base our planning on false premises -- such as the oft-stated stutter that reducing our greenhouse-gas emissions will forestall "the worst effects of global warming" -- we can only come up with false solutions. "Solutions" that will make us feel better as we tumble toward the end, but will make no ultimate difference whatsoever.

Furthermore, we can and must pose the problem without necessarily providing the "solutions."[7] I can't tell you how many climate activists have scolded me, "You can't state a problem like that without providing some solutions." If we accept that premise, all of scientific inquiry as well as many other kinds of problem-solving would come to a screeching halt. The whole point of stating a problem is to clarify questions, confusions, and unknowns, so that the problem statement can be mulled, chewed, and clarified to lead to some meaningful answers, even though the answers may seem to be out of reach.

Some of our most important thinking happens while developing the problem statement, and the better the problem statement the richer our responses. That's why framing the global warming problem as greenhouse-gas concentrations has proved to be such a dead end.

Here is the problem statement as it is beginning to unfold for me. We are all a part of struggling to develop this thinking together:

We must leave behind 10,000 years of civilization; this may be the hardest collective task we've ever faced. It has given us the intoxicating power to create planetary changes in 200 years that under natural cycles require hundreds of thousands or millions of years -- but none of the wisdom necessary to keep this Pandora's Box tightly shut. We have to discover and re-discover other ways of living on earth.

We love our cars, our electricity, our iPods, our theme parks, our bananas, our Nikes, and our nukes, but we behave as if we understand nothing of the land and water and air that gives us life. It is past time to think and act differently.

If we live at all, we will have to figure out how to live locally and sustainably. Living locally means we are able get everything we need within walking (or animal riding) distance. We may eventually figure out sustainable ways of moving beyond those small circles to bring things home, but our track record isn't good and we'd better think it through very carefully.

Likewise, any technology has to be locally based, using local resources and accessible tools, renewable and non-toxic. We have much re-thinking to do, and re-learning from our hunter-gatherer forebears who managed to survive for a couple of hundred thousand years in ways that we with our civilized blinders we can barely imagine or understand.[8]

Living sustainably means, in Derrick Jensen's elegantly simple definition, that whatever we do, we can do it indefinitely.[9] We cannot use up anything more or faster than nature provides, we don't poison the air, water, or soil, and we respect the web of life of which we are an intricate part. We are not separate from nature, or above it, or in any way qualified to supervise it.[10] The evidence is ample and overwhelming; all we have to do is be brave enough to look.

How do we survive in a world that will probably turn -- is already turning, for many humans and non-humans alike -- into a living hell? How do we even grow or gather food or find clean water or stay warm or cool while assaulted by biblical floods, storms, rising seas, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, snow, and hail?

It is crystal clear that we cannot leave it to the technophiliacs. It is human technology coupled with our inability to comprehend, predict, and prevent unintended consequences that have brought us global catastrophe, culminating in climate disruption, in the first place. Desperate hopes notwithstanding, there are no high-tech solutions here, only wishful thinking--the tools that got us into this mess are incapable of getting us out.[11]

All that being said, we needn't discard all that we've learned, far from it.[12] But we must use our knowledge with great discretion, and lock much of it away as so much nuclear weaponry and waste.

Time is running very short, but the forgiveness of this little blue orb in a vast lonely universe will continue to astonish and nourish us--if we only give it the chance.

Our obligation as activists, the first step, the essence, is to part the cultural veil at long last, and to tell the truth.

---

Endnotes:

[1] Many thanks to Richard Grossman, who posed that question fifteen years ago with respect to corporate domination of governance and culture when he founded the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD). He understood that we must take the time to stop and penetrate beyond the obvious if we are to think outside of the cultural prescriptions that constrain our ability to act differently. Many thanks as well to Ross Gelbspan, a courageous and ground-breaking journalist, who early on investigated the forces driving the fossil fuel machine and has been sounding the alarm for almost two decades. See his excellent article, "Beyond the Point of No Return," December 2007, which inspired many of the ideas in this piece.

[2] I would like to express deep gratitude to John A. Livingston, pioneer environmentalist, preservationist, teacher and writer. In 1981 he wrote "The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation," which inspired the title of this piece. The fallacy that Livingston was referring to is well-described in the foreword by Graeme Gibson: "The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, as a statement of belief, is one of the fiercest and most uncompromising of John Livingston's convictions. Had he entitled it 'The Failure of Wildlife Conservation,' we might have tried again -- without having to think too much about it. But he didn't. ... As a result of the word fallacy, we are confronted with an insistence that we rethink everything." From The John A. Livingston Reader, McClelland & Stewart, 2007, pp. xiv-xv. So it is, with the fallacy of climate activism, that we must rethink everything.

[3] Endless (exponential) growth is an impossibility in a finite physical system (planet earth), and we have a wealth of examples of overshoot and collapse, non-human and human, all of which are fully predictable. Our cultural inability to grasp such an obvious reality is a primary obstacle to progress in addressing climate change and its root cause. Indigenous cultures tend to have much better understandings of these things. See Herman E. Daly and Kenneth N. Townsend, "Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem," from Valuing The Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics, MIT Press, 1993, p. 267 ff. For a wide-ranging discussion of the demise of civilizations, see Jared Diamond, Collapse, Viking, 2005.

[4] James Hansen et al.(2007), "Climate change and trace gases," Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. A 365: 1925–1954 (2007).

[5] Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900 - 1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 92. The actual quote, referring to population, is, "Mother nature always comes to the rescue of a society stricken with the problems of overpopulation, and her ministrations are never gentle."

[6] A word here about the skeptics, with whom we are also obsessed: Forget about them. They may appear to have control of the public discussion, but they are babbling into the abyss. Our enemy is us. By our own unwillingness to face the profound implications of climate change -- that we have to reject civilization as currently conceived and come up with something completely different -- we are doing far more damage to the cause of preserving life on earth than the deniers could ever do.

[7] "One of the more peculiar traits of our society is its assumption -- its insistence -- on solutions. Just as there are reasons for all things, so there are solutions for all things. Always there are ultimate answers; there is no problem that is not amenable to logical reduction. This, as we have seen earlier, in spite of such bewildering enterprises as ecology. I have no 'solution' to the wildlife preservation problem [read 'global warming problem']. There may not be one. But given the somewhat shaky assumption that one exists, I sense that I can at least feel the direction." John A. Livingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, p. 151.

[8] Our culturally skewed and defensive view of pre-hierarchical societies, seeing only lives that were "nasty, brutish and short" struggling to survive in "nature, red in tooth and claw," has distorted earlier human experience beyond recognition. See, for example, Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, Harper & Rowe, 1987; and Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, Tavistock Publications, Ltd. (London), 1974.

[9] Jensen is one of our most passionate and incisive cultural critics and environmental writers. His words are, "For an action to be sustainable, you must be able to perform it indefinitely. This means that the action must either help or at the very least not materially harm the landbase. If an action materially harms the landbase, it cannot be performed indefinitely ..." From Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay, What We Leave Behind, p. 56.

[10] Although, as I indicate in footnote 12 in a brief discussion of holistic management of grasslands, we can and must repair enough of the damage so that the infinitely complex self-organizing systems of nature -- the systems that gave life to all living creatures -- can begin anew.

[11] For example, consider hare-brained schemes from very smart scientists, some of whom know that the schemes are hare-brained but in their desperation see no other way. A recent article in Rolling Stone, "Can Dr. Evil Save The World?," has an interesting overview of the geo-engineering debate. The bottom line seems to be that we currently are able to do and think anything except changing the way we live, and risking the existence of life on earth is simply a chance we have to take (although 100 percent odds of failure is hardly a bet one should want to take, assuming there are any rational moments left). See also Ross Gelbspan's article, "Beyond the Point of No Return," footnote 1.

[12] Glimmers of hope lie in the remarkable restorative powers of the earth. One such phenomenon is ancient pre-history but new to us. That is the relationship between grazers and grasslands. Whereas conventional grasslands management destroys soils and diversity, nature's way sequesters vast amounts of carbon in soils, with photosynthesizing plants as intermediators along with fungi, micro-organisms, insects, animals and birds -- and creates productive and healthy land that, unlike forests, can bind carbon for thousands of years. We have the potential to remove gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere, reducing greenhouse gas concentrations by many parts per million with proper land management. Beyond grasslands, the planet's power of regeneration, despite our assaults, remains extraordinary. See the Holistic Management International website.

Another example is the dramatic restoration of denuded rainforest in Borneo after only six years: "Planting finishes this year [2008], but already [Willie] Smits [the Indonesian forestry expert who led the replanting] and his team from the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation charity claim the forest is 'mature', with trees up to 35 metres high. Cloud cover has increased by 12 per cent, rainfall by a quarter, and temperatures have dropped 3-5°C, helping people and wildlife to thrive, says Smits. Nine species of primate have also returned, including the threatened orangutans. 'If you walk there now, 116 bird species have found a place to live, there are more than 30 types of mammal, insects are there. The whole system is coming to life. I knew what I was trying to do, but the force of nature has totally surprised me. ... The place became the scene of an ecological miracle, a fairytale come true,' says Smits, who has written a book about the project."

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James Lovelock speaking at the World Nuclear Association Symposium in 2007Courtesy Jon and Lu via FlickrWhat is it with Preeminent Thinkers and intensely bleak public lectures? Two weeks ago Earth Institute economist Jeffrey Sachs, in an address at the Asia Society in New York, argued that climate change cannot be averted without massive use of unproven carbon-capture and sequestration technology and that China will provide little to no political help in curbing emissions.

On Monday night at Seattle’s Town Hall, British scientist James Lovelock gave a prediction of the effects of climate change that was even more dire. Efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions are just fine, he said. They just won’t amount to much.

“Our main task, should the earth continue to heat, is to adapt and learn how to survive,” he said. “We’re unlikely to become extinct by global heating, but we may be cut back to one billion people or less.”

That’s approximately a seventh the world’s current population.

Lovelock, who turns 90 next month, made his name in the early 1970s by putting forth the Gaia Hypothesis that the Earth’s physical and biological processes are self-regulating and sustaining, not sentient but in some sense a cohesive “being.” I’m not up-to-speed on Gaia’s complex influence on the scientific establishment, but it’s been ridiculed and dismissed as more metaphysics than science, yet also influential among biologists and ecologists.

In more recent books—The Revenge of Gaia and The Vanishing Face of Gaia—Lovelock has turned his attention to “global heating,” his preferred term because “warming” sounds too benign. He alluded to what Gaia has to say about global heating, though he never really spelled it out.

“The Earth does not just accept climate change passively,” he said. “It responds to what we’re doing to it, and that response is far more frightening than what we’re doing.”

Despite the futility of trying to avoid all of the effects of global heating, Lovelock recommended a few measures. He said nuclear and solar thermal power were the only sensible clean energy responses, and that the U.S. might learn from France about safe handling and disposal of nuclear waste. That rankled a number of audience members who pointed out the problem-riddled waste handling project at the Hanford Nuclear Site in eastern Washington.

Lovelock also seemed open to trying a number of geoengineering climate fixes. One man asked him about injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere to reflect solar heat away from the Earth.

Lovelock compared such approaches to dialysis for failing kidneys. “It will buy you time, but it’s not a cure,” he said. “Then again, if your kidneys fail, you never refuse dialysis.”

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I haven't read The Atlantic much lately, but I picked up the latest issue at the airport and it is superb. Three pieces are worth particular note.

First, Joshua Green has a piece on "The Coming Green Economy" that is as good as anything I've ever read in popular media about the contours of the green energy space over the last 30 years. It avoids many of the dumber canards passing as conventional wisdom these days, but is appropriately skeptical. Really top-notch.

Then there's a piece by Graeme Wood that I fully expected to hate: "Re-Engineering the Earth," about geoengineering. Articles in the popular press on this subject tend to be far too credulous and breathless about the awesomely laser-tastic future techno-zappery that's going to save us. Wood actually does a decent job of presenting both the hopes and the many, many dangers.

And finally, not exactly green, but well worth checking out, is Jamais Cascio's "Get Smarter," about how technology is enabling us to enhance, extend, and network our natural intelligence. Climate change is never mentioned, but if you want a little hope about our ability to deal with something this huge, Cascio's article is the place to find it.

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No myth has done more to lull Americans into complacency or allow bad actors to fight off good policy.

The American people are deeply attached to the notion that any problem can be solved with a new doohickey. It would, after all, relieve them of the terrible responsibility of saving the world. (Surely a clever scientist in a lab somewhere will invent a Climate Stabilizer and we can all stop worrying about this nonsense!)

The powers that be in the energy world are deeply invested in persuading legislators that the technology just isn't ready yet -- that's why it's premature to start mandating emission reductions. This is what the perpetually-ten-years-away "clean coal" is all about. More research!

It's not hard to see the appeal of a techno-fix. The alternative to whizbang new technology is a list of thousands of changes in regulation, legislation, behavior, and thinking, each one demanding the country's collective attention, wits, and wherewithal. It can seem overwhelming.

But a) fundamental breakthroughs in energy technology are extraordinarily rare, b) we don't have time to wait for them, and c) nothing spurs learning like doing. The best way to figure out better techniques and technologies is to start deploying the hell out of what's already here.

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Geoengineering: Plan B for when Copenhagen fails? eek!

Oh, great, DARPA -- the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the Defense Dept -- is convening a meeting to look into geoengineering.

Count me with Ken Caldeira:

That's rather naive, though. If we pursue geoengineering, what are the chances the "military dimensions" won't eventually be involved?

Geoengineering fans constantly tell us that it's "just research." They assure us they still want to avert climate change via social and economic change, and that geoengineering is Plan B, or Plan C, or whatever the metaphor is.

But this has always struck me as a rather bloodless, rationalistic way of looking at it, a "guns don't kill people, people kill people" spin on technology. Easy access to guns affects people's decisionmaking, and the more tangible and within-reach the various dei ex machina of geoengineering seem, the more the political and economic debate will warp around them. Decisions are not made in vacuums.

Do you think China will see our military investigating the purposeful manipulation of climate and conclude that it's "just research"?

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A 12-day United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity ended Friday with just a wee bit of progress toward salvaging the world's rapidly disappearing flora and fauna. Perhaps most encouraging: The 191 countries present agreed to ban the controversial practice of seeding the ocean with nutrients to encourage growth of carbon-sucking algae. In addition, Germany, which hosted the conference, agreed to spend $785 million on forest preservation by 2013 and an equal sum annually after that. Indonesia said it will create a 77,000-square-mile marine protected area, the largest in the world; Bosnia, Malaysia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo also agreed to create nature preserves. But those relatively small steps forward aren't nearly enough, say critics, pointing out that three species go extinct every hour. "Of course we achieved less than we should have given the dimension of the problems," admits German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel. "Achieving unanimity among 191 states is difficult."

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