You Figure It Out: Royal Society On Geo-Engineering

A phase space diagram plotting cost vs. effectiveness of the various methods of geo-engineering under consideration as means of averting AGW. From the Royal Society's report on the topic. Note that "air capture" (ie carbon capture from ambient air), Pielke Jr.'s hobbyhorse, works OK but costs alot, and of course Roger Jr. is not happy with that assessment. Further, he seems to suspect a plot against him and his ideas.

Note too that the cheapest and most effective scheme, pumping aerosols into the stratosphere, is a political no-go. Aerosols shot into the sky in one place come down as acid rain in another country. Oopsie.

h/t

PS. The title comes from the fact that the reporters covering this story apparently found the diagram above quite confusing.

Richard S. Courtney On Geo-Engineering

Richard Courtney is a AGW denier and PR guy for British Coal.   Here are excerpts from his take on Geo-Engineering:

I am firmly convinced that dangerous AGW is not a problem and cannot become one. However, I do think the possibility of the geo-engineering should be supported. My reason for this is a political ploy and I explain it as follows.

At present there is no empirical evidence of any kind that the AGW hypothesis is correct. But supporters of the AGW-scare assert that action must be taken now to avoid the possibility of dangerous AGW in the future.

Politicians are responding to the AGW-scare by trying to constrain anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), notably carbon dioxide (CO2). Such constraints would do much harm and, therefore, I think they should not be accepted. But politicians of several countries are committed to their having accepted the AGW-scare as being a potential threat which warrants the constraints.

The politicians need a viable reason if they are to back-off from this commitment to the constraints without losing face.

The geo-engineering option provides the needed viable reason to do nothing about AGW now.

The AGW-scare is founded on an unproven assumption that global temperature is determined by net radiative forcing, and increase to GHGs in the air provides additional positive radiative forcing.

Increase to aerosols in the air increases cloud cover to provide additional negative radiative forcing. So, increasing atmospheric aerosols would drop global temperature. And this could be done at relatively little cost, for example, by emitting sulphates from commercial aircraft.

Hence, if AGW does prove to be a problem then the geo-engineering is a method to immediately stop its effects when it is detected. Actions to constrain the GHG emissions could then be implemented. The cost of the geo-engineering would be much less than the costs of the constraints to GHG emissions in the period until effects of AGW are detected. Indeed, the costs of the geo-engineering would be trivial compared to the costs of 20% reduction to world-wide GHG emissions for a single year.

And if AGW does not prove to be a problem then no constraints to GHG emissions and no geo-engineering would be needed.

In either case, the geo-engineering option is preferable to adopting constraints on GHG emissions in the near future.

This suggested political ploy is not fanciful and it has precedent. Opponents of the nuclear industry have objected that there is no “safe” method to dispose of nuclear waste. The nuclear industry has responded by asserting that the waste could be vitrified. A practical method for the vitrification still remains to be developed, but assertion of the possibility of the vitrification has been sufficient to overcome objections to nuclear power in several countries for nearly 40 years. (incidentally, I am in favour of nuclear power).

Richard

In the past, Mr. Courtney has made similar remarks re carbon sequestration--ie it won't work but will provide political cover (allow politicians to say they're DOING something).

A Less Dorky Geo-Engineering Project

Harvard's Kurt Zenz House is interested in "all things energy", especially carbon sequestration technologies. In fact he has been involved in several deep sea carbon storage schemes like those I have written about here.

More recently, Mr. House has been in the news for his work on "electrochemical weathering", which aims to increase the ability of Earth's oceans to store CO2 by rendering it less acidic:

Weak acids in water normally dissolve rocks on land over time, forming an alkaline solution that runs into rivers and then the sea. Electrochemical weathering creates a stronger acid to drive much faster reactions. Still at a theoretical stage, the method involves passing an electric current through seawater to separate out chlorine and hydrogen gas, similar to the industrial chloralkali process used to make chlorine gas. The chlorine and hydrogen are then combined in fuel cells to form strong hydrochloric acid. The fuel cells would be housed in an industrial-scale plant that would collect and use the acid to dissolve silicate rocks, which are common worldwide. This would neutralize the acid and the resulting alkaline solution could then be returned to the sea. Overall, the process would help stabilize the oceans' pH, House says, and could benefit corals which are dying from ocean acidification caused by rising CO2 levels.

House imagines a building a series of coastal processing plants equivalent in capacity to about 100 large sewage treatment plants, and running them on geo-thermal power (rather than, lets say, coal) so the CO2 pumped into the air in act of plant operations does not overwhelm the amount sequestered by the electrochemical process. For profit, plants could sell carbon reduction credits in a cap-and-trade scheme, and could conceivably store 1 gigaton of CO2 annually.

Drawbacks:

"Around the plant you would get a very basic solution," which could contain chlorinated byproducts, House says. These byproducts could harm sea life locally.

Furthermore, the scheme would probably be too expensive to be practical unless there already existed a cheap source of renewable energy on which to run the plants.

Nevertheless, way more doable than shooting a thousand-mile-wide mirror into outer space.

Another Geo-Engineering Scheme

Jim Lovelock (he of the Gaia hypothesis) and Chris Rapley have proposed a means of geo-engineering our way out of the AGW mess:

The oceans, which cover more than 70% of the Earth’s surface, are a promising place to seek a regulating influence. One approach would be to use free-floating or tethered vertical pipes to increase the mixing of nutrient-rich waters below the thermocline with the relatively barren waters at the ocean surface. (We acknowledge advice from Armand Neukermans on engineering aspects of the pipes.) Water pumped up pipes — say, 100 to 200 metres long, 10 metres in diameter and with a one-way flap valve at the lower end for pumping by wave movement — would fertilize algae in the surface waters and encourage them to bloom. This would pump down carbon dioxide and produce dimethyl sulphide, the precursor of nuclei that form sunlight-reflecting clouds.

From an engineering perspective this is probably not feasible, but even if it was, the effect would be the exact opposite of that hoped for: more CO2 would be released into the atmosphere than would be absorbed by the algae blooms. The simpler of the two explanations of why this should be so is:

“The concept is flawed,” says Scott Doney, a marine chemist at WHOI. He says it neglects the fact that deeper waters with high nutrients also generally contain a lot of dissolved inorganic carbon, including dissolved CO2. Bringing these waters to the lower pressures of the surface would result in the CO2 bubbling out into the air. So contrary to the desired effect, the scheme could result in a net ‘outgassing’ of CO2...

Ah well, maybe we can live in polar cities, and in any case, nobody has shot down my Carbopult(TM) idea.

Global Warming And The Morality of Geoengineering

This is probably the best piece I've read on the possibility of geo-engineering our way to a victory over global climate change Authored by moral philosopher Steve Gardiner from the University of Washington, Seattle, it is a meditation on a number of suggestions made in 2006 by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen. Last year, Crutzen wrote an article for the Journal of Climate Change, in which he claimed that attempts to limit man-made greenhouse gases were so pitiful that a radical contingency plan, an "escape route" was needed. Specifically, he suggested that we should consider:

...injecting sulphur particles into the stratosphere in order to suppress global warming by simulating volcanic eruptions.

Furthermore, Mr. Crutzen suggested that research on this and other geo-engineering options should begin now, because otherwise, should global warming begin to run out of control a few decades down the road, the option of implementing one of these projects will not be open to us.

Mr. Gardiner examines and finally rejects the logic behind Crutzen's proposal:

...talk of the choices that "we" might face obscures the fact that if Crutzen's scenario does arise, the people facing the tough choices won't be us. Crutzen is thinking of the threat of runaway climate change emerging fifty years or more down the track, and so confronting future generations. This is important, since some people (myself included) believe that one cause of political inertia, and a big part of the moral problem more generally, is that climate change allows the current generation to unfairly pass on its costs to future people.

And here's the money passage:

This brings us nicely back to the issue of political inertia. For it seems likely that the same forces that oppose substantial mitigation and adaptation measures would also oppose substantial compensation proposals (and perhaps a huge investment in geo-engineering too, if that were being proposed); and this brings a larger issue into focus. Crutzen's claim is that research on geo-engineering acts as a kind of insurance policy. But there are many such policies; and there is a real concern that the narrow one of "Geo-engineering Research Only" gains prominence among them only because it is the one that seems most congenial to us, the present generation. In short, perhaps we'd be happy to spend a few million dollars researching technology our generation won't have to bear the risks of implementing, and even happier to think that in doing so we were making a morally serious choice in favour of protecting future generations. But thinking so does not make it the case. The worry is that Crutzen's proposal - however well-intentioned - is at least as likely to facilitate the problems of political inertia and intergenerational moral corruption as to solve them. Surely we can, and ought, to do better.

In other words, throwing a few million now at a multi-billion dollar project our kids will be left to realize is not a serious attempt at addressing the issue. (Not surprisingly, it bulks large in the plans of the Bush administration.)