Geoengineering - an idea whose time has NOT come.

Over at ClimateWire yesterday (subscription required), there was a story about the “new” controversy that’s brewing in climate crisis response. It seems there’s now open debate in the climate science community about whether geoengineering – active manipulation by humans of the Earth’s many systems – should be on the table as part of our climate crisis toolkit.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Some geoengineering schemes to fight climate change would probably succeed in cooling the planet, scientists said here Friday -- but whether we should ever deploy them is still an open question.

Researchers who gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology outlined a stark list of potential side effects of different climate engineering approaches, including further depleting the ozone layer, inducing drought and turning the blue sky white.

At the same time, many experts said geoengineering could be a planetary "Plan B," an option to exercise if cutting greenhouse gas emissions can't stave off dangerous climate change. "Even if we cut emissions, we have a lot of carbon dioxide already in the air," said David Keith of the University of Calgary. "We don't know exactly how bad the climate response will be, and we have to think clearly about how we manage the risk posed by CO2 already in the air."

Here’s where the scientists begin to loose the framing battle. By explicitly acknowledging the uncertainty around whether emissions reductions alone will have an effect on the warming trend that is occurring, Dr. Keith (following good scientific practice though he is) has opened the door to denialists. “Wait,” they will now scream “if all this carbon is still going to be left in the air, and you’re right (snicker) about carbon causing global warming, won’t the remainder still do that? If it will, why cut emissions (i.e. change our lifestyle) – it won’t do any good.”

The following three paragraphs don’t make it any better in the framing war:

An ongoing MIT research project into the risks posed by different levels of greenhouse gas emissions suggests that even steep cuts won't guarantee the world will stay under the 2-degree-Celsius climate guardrail espoused by many political leaders.

Stabilizing the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at the equivalent of 550 parts per million of CO2 -- a goal that's "not easy," according to MIT Energy Initiative director Ron Prinn -- would give the world just a 25 percent chance of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees between 1990 and 2090.

"Even with a very tough and expensive target, we are still at risk," Prinn said. "Hence, I think it's legitimate to begin thinking about geoengineering as something that should be on the table."

Much of the rest of the article from that point talks about the two main types of geoengineering being debated – those approaches that eat more carbon (like ocean fertilization), and those that reflect more sunlight back into space (like painting roofs white, or seeding the atmosphere with sulfates). Sure, it would be nice to have tools like this IF emissions reductions fail, but . .
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'Precious little' science has been done

"The thing that's always frustrated me," said Philip Boyd, a professor of ocean biochemistry at the University of Otago in New Zealand, is that geoengineering "has great press coverage. It has that science fiction component that makes good copy. But there's been precious little or no science done."

David Keith, the University of Calgary scientist, agreed. "The actual number of real, serious science done on this topic is pitifully small," he said.

And that’s a huge part of the problem where both the efficacy of the techniques are concerned, and for how science frames this issue in talking to the general public. Because geoengineering as a word appeals to humans apparently innate desire to control nature, these approaches seem to get disproportionate media coverage. Far easier, so the story goes, to “geoengineer” our way out of the crisis, then to change our habits that lead to the crisis in the first place. That’s been the stuff of climate crisis denial for years now, and will continue to be so as long as scientists refuse to make “normative” statements about the impacts of all these decisions.

Yet, there is hope for my fellow science travelers :

Boyd said he's about to publish a study that predicts many geoengineering proposals would increase the potential for conflict, in part because documenting their effectiveness and assigning blame if things go wrong would be difficult tasks. He and others also noted that some climate engineering options, like delivering sulfate particles to the stratosphere, appear cheap enough that a large corporation or an individual country could deploy them without any international input. "The fact that it's cheap automatically means the policy challenge is control," said Keith, the University of Calgary professor. "The challenge is to control early actors."

But in the end, if more conventional efforts to blunt climate change don't succeed, whether to proceed with geoengineering may become an easier question to answer. "The most dangerous approach," said Keith, "is to assume geoengineering will work if we need it to -- without doing the research to prove it."

Dr. Keith is, of course, correct from a scientific standpoint. And, he and his colleagues do a better job then most of highlighting explicitly the threats from geoengineering as an approach to dealing with this self-inflicted wound. Yet they don’t go far enough, in my view. They avoid discussions of how, in essence, the climate crisis is the result of generations of unintentional, undirected geoengineering. They miss (perhaps because they are unaware) the fact that climate crisis induced ecological effects are already upon us. And they couch it all in the emotion-less, cautionary language of science. And by doing so, they give deniers one more chance to drive a wedge between the good that science can bring to this issue, and the reality that we’re all living today – namely that Americans want more then anything for this slow bleed out to be someone else’s’ fault.

New NOAA climate science report - methane is more then just cow manure.

Apparently, it's not just Carbon Dioxide that we need to worry about. If Methane, which is regulated as a green house pollutant, is increasing this fast, I guarantee you it's not from cow farts.



H/T Joe Romm at Climate Progress.

Ecomigration - the next Climate Change Impact?

It's not often that real consequences from Climate Change get real press coverage. Today's Washington Post story about ecomigrants is the exception, rather then the rule. That said, it's an important story.

As I see it, ecomigration has the potential to seriously undermine economic recovery. Our economy (and our stimulus attempts) are built on the assumption that the economy needs to go back into a shpae or systems that looks like it did a few years ago. The problem is, if there are more Dust Bowl like migrations in the next decade, that assumption will likely fall apart. You can't for instance, stimulate an economy when large numbers of workers are on the move between regions. Major manufacturing plants for things like cars don't just up and walk from Tennessee to NorthD akota in search of more hospitable climates.

And finally, what is the world to do about places like Kiribati? As highlghted in the article, this island nation of 100,000 is facing a real threat from sea level rise. These people deseve the world's help -but I fear they won't get it because then we'd have to admit something is really wrong.

Ocean Iron Fertilization - the next big . . . ?

Recently at the Intersection, Chris Money reported on current efforts to get permission for iron fertilization of the ocean. He was using this specific example to spark a larger debate about the efficacy of geoengineering – essentially human manipulation of Earth systems to meet human needs and “right” human wrongs. As a science fiction fan, I'm very familiar with geoengineering's close cousin terra forming. I understand the processes very well, and I'm actually intrigued by any such activity.

Now, a disclaimer – I work for one of the federal agencies that are considering whether to permit this scheme. I don’t work in the office handling it, nor have I seen the application. I have read a lot of scientific, peer reviewed literature on ocean iron fertilization, and I have encountered a number of views on the subject. So what I’m about to write is NOT the official position of any government agency I am or have worked for. It’s my own synthesis. Period.

The idea behind ocean iron fertilization is that iron is a limiting nutrient for phytoplankton in the ocean. That means the microscopic plants that live in the first few inches of the ocean can’t grow because there isn’t enough iron for them to grow from. Iron, along with nitrogen and phosphorous, is a key fertilizer for all plants, and an iron deficiency can in fact limit plant growth. So the idea is to add a lot of elemental iron to several open ocean spots to cause huge phytoplankton blooms. The proponents of this idea say the big blooms will soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide, thus lowering levels of a significant green house/ climate change inducing gas.

As a scientist, I have to ask – what is the science behind this? Are there peer reviewed studies that argue for or against the idea? And are there existing examples of similar activities that might guide an analysis of this idea?

There is lots of literature on Ocean Iron Fertilization. What seems to be missing from these analyses, however, is reference to unintentional but persistent existing ocean features that might mimic this process, and can offer what I think are significant insights.

Every year, the Northern Gulf of Mexico goes, biologically, dead. This death is due to a significant load of nutrients – including phosphorous, nitrogen and iron – washing down the Mississippi River each spring. Since the Mighty Muddy drain about 2/3rds of the nation, it’s no wonder it would have a huge nutrient load when it exits the continental US at Venice, Louisiana. The Gulf Dead zone was first documented in 1972, and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) has lead research on it every since.

The Gulf Dead Zone reaches between 6,000 and 7,000 square miles per year. It results when all the nutrients power a huge phytoplankton bloom. Once the plankton run of food, they begin to die, sinking to the bottom. On the way down, and on the bottom, they cause serious oxygen depletion as they decompose. This hypoxic zone has periodic fish kills, and all sorts of marine animals are known to run from it, literally for their lives. And sadly, while the Northern Gulf Dead Zone is the largest, it’s not the only one.

So what does this mean for ocean iron fertilization? I think it means we need to proceed with extreme caution. If run-off fed blooms can pull oxygen out of the water on the continental shelf and continental slope, what will an iron created bloom do to open ocean ecology? Will the cost to marine life through out the water column be worth the pay off in carbon dioxide reduction? And should we really alter natural phytoplankton systems because our modern economy won’t (yet) adjust to a more carbon limited model?

My own gut tells me we’ve done enough damage to the Earth already. I don’t think there needs to be a large scale ocean iron fertilization action. But I’m still open to the science, and if there are good, peer-reviewed papers that show how this might actually work, and what the water column impacts would be – I would be open to where that science led me.