Lethal Heating: 08/27/19

27/08/2019

Geoengineering: 'Plan B' For The Planet

The sun sets in a sky dusted with ash over Màrdalsjškull, 20 km east from Iceland's Eyjafjoell volcano, on May 5, 2010. AFP/File / HALLDOR KOLBEINS

Dismissed a decade ago as far-fetched and dangerous, schemes to tame global warming by engineering the climate have migrated from the margins of policy debates towards centre stage.
"Plan A" remains tackling the problem at its source. But the UN's top climate science body has made it clear that slashing carbon pollution won't be enough to keep Earth from overheating
That has opened the door to a host of geoengineering schemes, and an under-the-radar set of global industry guidelines, currently in review, which could help mainstream them.
Here is a menu of "Plan B" geoengineering solutions, and their potential drawbacks:

Direct CO2 Capture
Experiments have shown it is possible to suck planet-warming carbon dioxide directly from the air, converting it into fuel pellets or storing it underground.
A Canadian company backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates launched a pilot facility in Canada in 2015, and another company unveiled one in Iceland last year.
DRAWBACK: The technology is currently prohibitively expensive and may take decades to operate at scale.

Solar radiation management would slow global warming by reflecting more sunlight away from Earth. AFP/File / Jonathan WALTER

Afforestation
Extensive planting of trees could significantly slow the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, which currently stands at more than 410 parts per million, 40 percent more than 150 years ago.
DRAWBACK: Even if deforestation could be reversed -- more than 100,000 square kilometres of tropical forests have disappeared each year since 2013 -- the number of trees needed to put a dent in CO2 emissions would clash with food and biofuel crops.

BECCS
Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) marries a natural process with a high-tech one.The first step is to plant rapeseed, sugarcane, corn or "2nd-generation" biofuel crops such as switchgrass, which pull CO2 from the air while growing. The second step is while burning the harvested plants for energy to sequester the CO2 produced.
In theory, the result is less CO2 in the atmosphere than when the process started. Virtually all climate change models projecting a future consistent with the Paris Agreement's temperature targets assume a key role for BECCS.
DRAWBACK: Studies calculate that up to twice the area of India would need to be given over to biofuels, putting BECCS in conflict with food crops.

Ocean Fertilisation
Microscopic ocean plants called phytoplankton gobble up CO2 and drag it to the bottom of the ocean when they die. Their colony size is limited by a lack of natural iron, but experiments have shown that sowing the ocean with iron sulphate powder creates large blooms.
DRAWBACKS: Scientists worry about unintended impacts. Die-offs of plankton, for example, use up oxygen, which could create massive "dead zones" in the oceans, something already on the rise.

Enhanced Weathering
Natural weathering of rocks removes about one billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every year -- about two percent of total man-made C02 emissions.
Spreading a powdered form of a greenish iron silicate called olivine across certain landscapes can mimic that process, experiments have shown.
DRAWBACKS: It would be expensive to mine and mill enough olivine to make a difference.

Biochar
Biochar is charcoal made by heating plant waste -- rice straw, peanut shells, wood scraps -- over long periods in low-oxygen conditions. It can store CO2 for long periods, and also enriches soil.
DRAWBACK: The scientific jury is still out on how quickly this method could be scaled up, and on the stability of biochar used as a fertiliser.

Solar Radiation Management
Unlike other strategies, solar radiation management does not target CO2. The goal is simple: prevent some of the sun's rays from hitting the planet's surface, forcing them back up into space.
One idea is to inject or spray tiny reflective particles into the stratosphere -- possibly with balloons, aircraft or through giant tubes.

A picture taken on October 17, 2017 shows the sun rising in Tours. AFP/File / GUILLAUME SOUVANT

Nature sometimes does the same: Debris from the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines lowered the planet's average surface temperature for a year or two afterwards.
Scientists have also calculated ways to alter clouds that could help beat the heat.
DRAWBACKS: Even if it works as intended, solar radiation management would do nothing to reduce atmospheric CO2, which is making oceans too acidic. There is also the danger of knock-on consequences, including changes in rainfall patterns, and what scientists call "termination shock" -- a sudden warming if the system were to fail.

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David Wallace-Wells: ‘There Are Many Cases Of Climate Hypocrisy’

The Guardian - Ian Tucker

The journalist and author on the climate crisis and how the US and China will be key to averting disaster

David Wallace-Wells: ‘Incremental policy isn’t going to be adequate to avoid terrible levels of warming.’ Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

David Wallace-Wells is the deputy editor of New York magazine. In July 2017, he wrote a long-form essay about the dire prospects for human civilisation caused by the climate crisis. It became the most read article in the history of the magazine and led to a book, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future, which is being published in paperback in September.

•••••

Q&A with David Wallace-Wells

The first line of your book states: “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” If you were sitting down to write the book again, would you be inserting another “much” into that sentence?
I still think the public aren’t as concerned as they should be about some of the scary stuff that’s possible this century. But I do think things have changed quite a bit. And I also think the politics have changed quite a lot. When I turned in the book in September, nobody had heard of Greta Thunberg. Nobody had heard of Extinction Rebellion. In the US, very few people had heard of Sunrise. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had not even been elected.

In the United States, you have a climate crisis denier as president, yet areas of the country are experiencing frequent flooding, more forest fires and rises in average temperature of more than 2C. How do you explain this?
Actually, it’s quite striking how many Americans do believe climate change is happening. [Democratic presidential nominee] Jay Inslee says 75% of voters want action, compared with 63% 12 months ago – that is remarkable. There was a piece earlier this month in the New York Times about how for many young Republicans, it is their top issue.

There is a pervasive techno-optimistic view that we can just invent something and it will solve the problem

There seems to be a division in the US Democratic nomination race between candidates who advocate wholesale system change such as the Green New Deal and others who favour a more incremental progress because they claim that’s the only way to get laws passed. Which is the most effective approach?
The science demands a quite systematic response; incremental policy simply isn’t going to be adequate to avoid really terrible levels of warming. But ambitious legislation has to go through the Senate and I don’t think there’s a scenario where a Democratic president takes office in 2021 with more than 60 Democratic votes [a three-fifths majority].
On the other hand, the last few administrations have gotten quite creative in how to use what’s called “budget reconciliation”, which you can use to pass stuff through the Senate with only 51 votes [a simple majority] by defining legislation as essentially budget-based. That’s one reason why you see so many of the Democrats’ plans are essentially investment programmes.
Inslee has been more ambitious in putting forward details about how he would regulate the fossil fuel business but some of the other campaigns have basically just put forward a sort of Green New Deal or green Marshall Plan – a massive spending programme directed at green energy projects.

You’re hopeful that technologies like geoengineering and carbon capture will play a significant role in mitigating temperature rise. Some environmentalists and scientists argue that these unproven methods can’t bail us out, and that they give licence to the fossil fuel industry to carry on polluting…
I look at the science and say if we’re defining a comfortable world [as] staying below two degrees of warming, I just don’t think that there’s any way we can achieve that without a really quite dramatic amount of negative emissions.
But I’m also very mindful that there is a pervasive techno-optimistic view – especially among wealthy Americans – that we can just invent something and it will solve the problem.
The UN says we need to halve global emissions by 2030 to avoid catastrophic warming. We’re really deeply deluded about how quickly new technology can scale and can be deployed. We’re far from having a 747 flying on a zero-carbon fuel.

We can agree to decarbonise – rethink our agriculture, aim for a meatless diet and so on – but we don’t live in a global, centralised command-and-control economy. Every country has its own political interests. How do you make the world take collective action?
That’s harder than the technological problem. There are many cases of what I think of as climate hypocrisy, for example, Canada declaring a climate emergency and then the very next day approving a new oil pipeline.
Each individual nation could be quite aggressive in their decarbonisation and yet be living through the exact same climate that there would be if they took no action unless the rest of the world followed suit. No major industrial nation is on track to meet its commitments under Paris.
My own hope is that I see almost half of our global emissions being produced by two countries – the US and China. Maybe it’s naive, but I hope a cooperative pact can be reached between the two countries like the nuclear non-proliferation agreements that were made between the US and Russia in the cold war. The two nations remained rivals but were nevertheless jointly committed to protecting the planet from an existential threat.
If the US and China really took aggressive leadership on this issue, the collective action problem would become less important – the world’s most powerful countries have a way of bending the will of the less powerful.

We need to fight to make the world one we want to live in, rather than giving up hope before the fight is really over

Some environmentalists argue that we need to rethink economic growth – we need to reorient our expectations of the conveniences and luxuries of modern life…
I don’t yet have a firm perspective on this. My intuition is that we don’t need to abandon the prospect of economic growth to get a handle on climate change.
I look at the case of the US and I see that if the average American had the carbon emissions of the average EU citizen, the country’s emissions would fall by 60%. And I think most Americans would be happy with those lifestyles.
The American electricity grid loses two-thirds of all energy produced as waste heat. We discard something like 50% or 60% of all of our food. So we could achieve some quite significant emissions gains.

Do you still think of yourself as a journalist or have you morphed into an activist?
I do still think of myself as a journalist. And I don’t know how long that will last. I still feel like a chronicler of the story rather than a protagonist. I’m really heartened and excited by all of the new activist energy that we’ve seen over the last year.

Millennials are expressing doubts about having children because of the environmental crisis – they are concerned that their grandchildren and possibly their own children will be living in an inhospitable and volatile world. You have recently had a child…
My intuition is that we need to fight to make the world the one we want to live in rather than giving up hope before the fight is really over. The world is going to get warmer. Almost inevitably, there will be a lot more pain and suffering in it than we have now. But how much is really up to us.

At what point should panic set in? It’s plausible there’ll be four degrees of warming by the end of the century, which would mean mass migration from areas such as the Middle East and Asia to newly temperate areas such as Siberia and Greenland. That’s not a very smooth transition for human civilisation.
It seems hard to imagine. Yet we’re already seeing some fair amount of panic. The significant amount of human migration we’re seeing in the US coming from Central America, for example.
I am personally horrified by the way our politics are beginning to adjust to them. We need to be much more open-hearted and attentive to the suffering of those around the world rather than closed off and hard-hearted, which is how almost all of the countries of the west have been over the last decade to refugees.
We’re also seeing panic in the protest movements, which are essentially declarations that existing power structures and priorities are simply not sufficient to address this crisis in the terms that it demands.

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The Amazon Fires And The Dilemma For Climate Scientists

Sydney Morning Herald - Andrew Glikson*

As fires rage across the Amazon – dubbed the "lungs of the planet" given it produces 20 per cent of the oxygen in the atmosphere – and while forests are ablaze in Siberia, Alaska, Greenland, southern Europe and parts of Australia, climate scientists might be justified in saying: "We told you so."
They tend not to gloat, however, about the tragedy that confronts us all.

The battle against fire in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, on Friday. Under increasing international pressure to contain the fires sweeping parts of the Amazon, President Jair Bolsonaro authorised the military to battle the massive blazes. Credit: AP

Brazil alone has had 72,843 fires this year. The pace of global warming is exceeding projections, astounding climate scientists. Within the past 70 years or so major shifts in climate zones and an accelerating spate of extreme weather events—cyclones, floods, droughts, heat waves and fires— is ravaging large tracts of Earth.

Scientists Jos Barlow and Alexander C. Lees write in The Conversation that “climate change itself is making dry seasons longer and forests more flammable. Increased temperatures are also resulting in more frequent tropical forest fires in non-drought years. And climate change may also be driving the increasing frequency and intensity of climate anomalies, such as El Niño events that affect fire season intensity across Amazonia.”
And yet the human causes of climate change remain subject to extensively propagated denial and untruths, despite their foundation in the basic laws of physics and the empirical observations of global research bodies such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the World Meteorological Organisation, and our own CSIRO.

Climate scientists find themselves in a quandary similar to medical doctors who need to break the news of a grave diagnosis. How do they tell people that the current spate of cyclones, devastating islands from the Caribbean to the Philippines, or the flooding of coastal regions and river valleys from Mozambique to Kerala, Pakistan and Townsville, can only intensify in a rapidly warming world?

How do scientists tell the people that their children are growing into a world where survival under a mean temperatures 2C above pre-industrial levels may be painful, and in some parts of the world impossible, let alone under 4C rise projected by the IPCC?

The Cassandra syndrome is alive and well. (Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy but, humiliated by her unrequited love, he also placed a curse on her, ensuring no one would believe her warnings.)
Throughout history, messengers of bad news have been rebuked or worse. Nowadays, many scientists are reticent to publish their climate change projections. Given the daunting scenarios they confront, many find it difficult to talk about it, even among friends and family.
Atmospheric levels of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide have reached a combined level of almost 500 parts per million, intersecting the melting threshold of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets and heralding a fundamental shift in the state of the terrestrial climate.

As fires consume large parts of the land, it would appear parliaments – including Australia's – are preoccupied with economics and international conflicts while they hardly regard the future of civilisation as a priority.

*Dr Andrew Glikson is an earth and climate scientist at the Australian National University.

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