....now, I guess I am like the above commission...thinking it's gonna happen anyway, too late to turn back the clock, so may as well adapt as best we can.


It's gonna be a bumpy ride, and it's happening faster than we think.

IMHO, a big part of this has really just been a run of bad luck probability wise......but on the other hand, it's why I say that it's far better to be safe than sorry.

I'm curious…

What “bad luck” do you have in mind?

How about the two back-to-back major heat waves in 2011 and this year for starters? And the fact that the Arctic ice may be melting out by 2016-17 instead of 2030? The rate of just how fast things have been moving in the past 5 years is really starting to make little sense at all, if you don't mind me throwing that out there.

Or, was it “good luck” which obscured just how bad things really were?

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/stratospheric-aerosols.html

But I do concede, of course, that models were a little too optimistic back in the day(which they really were!!).

and the effects of continued warming for decades are bad as depicted, it seems irresponsible to rely on reducing carbon alone, especially in the artic.

Some of the geoengineering techniques are comparatively cheap, quick, and reversible if necessary. It would be a shame not to pursue them in order to drive behavior and technology more strongly.

It may be true that cutting emissions won't be enough these days, but there's plenty we can do to mitigate climate change, and that DOES include getting a temperature reversal started.

Our biggest issue is definitely not if, but when.

We can do it now. But I doubt we have an idea what the long term conditions would be in sequestered reservoirs. Part of the problem is we're not really trying.

Co2 scrubbers are off the shelf, given enough power we can pull lots of Co2 out of the air and sequester it. We have the technology to take it out of the air and bury it. Maybe not efficiently, due to immature tech, but we could do it in a crude manner.

Still, though, I don't think it would hurt to pour extra money into this.

OK, to offset the response from the inevitable pedant:

"Because it doesn't work at global scales and human lifetimes".


Putting Mickey Mouse "solutions" into play BEFORE dramatically cutting emissions
is guaranteed not to work as it

1) doesn't function at a useful timescale
2) doesn't function at a useful scale
3) provides a completely false impression that something productive is being done
4) deadens the (limited) perception that there is in fact an emergency
5) gives a Get Out of Jail Free card to both the fossil fuel industry and their enablers to continue with Business As Usual.


The only GUARANTEED method of "carbon sequestration" that works is to LEAVE the fossil
fuels in the strata where they were sequestered all those Ma ago.

Anything else is just a (literal) smoke-screen for the BAU supporters.

However, I think most serious climate scientists think it is a part of the picture.
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/video/carbon-sequestration-research

Sequestration is nice and all, but..... as you said, its not really going to be a major order factor in the solution. We would need a significant manufacturing infrastructure built to manufacture the C02 scrubbers, and the stuff needed for sequestration, and it would have to be done on a scale large enough that it would compete for labor, capital and resources with the drive for 100% renewables.

Tasking a significant portion of the worlds economy with building 100% renewables is bad enough politically....

Many posts in many threads indicate you are very much for geo engineering toward the end of carbon sequestration. However, I haven't noticed any pre conditions to acting.

Are you for attempts at geo engineering before progress in the political arena, I.E., instituting a mandatory carbon tax extending to all trading partners, and reduction of our collective carbon foot print through a steady diminishing fossil fuel use, forcing social and economic action?

Or alternately, is it your opinion that anything should be done to protect the business as usual status quo, and maybe someday get around to addressing the the political, social, and environmental realities of continuing our lifestyles of over consumption of our resources and over carbonization of our environment?

I'm also curious to know your proposed parameters for who should be allowed to engage in geo engineering and climate tinkering, within the global environmental commons. Should there be guidelines for prior peer reviewed research, on a nation state or global level, before experimentation is allowed? Or, should the Koch brothers or Bill Gates be allowed to pursue on a private enterprise or entrepreneurial level, experiments attempting a sequestering solution?

If the US government decides to try a sequestration project that could effect the future climate and atmosphere of Canada, who should act as the court insuring against callus decisions of self interest, much the same as was illustrated by the US auto industry's unmitigated acid rain of the 20th century killing the hard woods in Canada?

As for the last two paragraphs, if in the past, we haven't been able to come to any productive global collective bargaining solutions to the CO2 enigma, is it likely that allowing geo engineering, will open a new frontier of unregulated self interest plunder, extracting profit by capitalizing others misfortune?

Well, I think it depends on what one's definition of geo-engineering is.
Some people may consider planting more trees, for example, as such. I tend to think more along the lines of carbon storage & removal, and such things like that.

Are you for attempts at geo engineering before progress in the political arena, I.E., instituting a mandatory carbon tax extending to all trading partners, and reduction of our collective carbon foot print through a steady diminishing fossil fuel use, forcing social and economic action?

Or alternately, is it your opinion that anything should be done to protect the business as usual status quo, and maybe someday get around to addressing the the political, social, and environmental realities of continuing our lifestyles of over consumption of our resources and over carbonization of our environment?

I'm also curious to know your proposed parameters for who should be allowed to engage in geo engineering and climate tinkering, within the global environmental commons. Should there be guidelines for prior peer reviewed research, on a nation state or global level, before experimentation is allowed? Or, should the Koch brothers or Bill Gates be allowed to pursue on a private enterprise or entrepreneurial level, experiments attempting a sequestering solution?

If the US government decides to try a sequestration project that could effect the future climate and atmosphere of Canada, who should act as the court insuring against callus decisions of self interest, much the same as was illustrated by the US auto industry's unmitigated acid rain of the 20th century killing the hard woods in Canada?

As for the last two paragraphs, if in the past, we haven't been able to come to any productive global collective bargaining solutions to the CO2 enigma, is it likely that allowing geo engineering, will open a new frontier of unregulated self interest plunder, extracting profit by capitalizing others misfortune?

One thing in your reply I had never thought of, is the possible weaponizing of geo engineering. My concerns have always been of a country acting in its own interest without regard for possible effects on neighboring people.

Went to workshops in the late eighties and a couple in the early nineties on cultivation of and manufacturing from, hemp. There is a ton of info on this in government archives, as prior to the thirties hemp was a well respected crop in parts of the US. At the workshops, everything from rope, to rugs and clothes were made from hemp, using eco friendly if a little labor intensive methods. It really is a survival crop if it ever comes to that. The foods from hemp also have much variety and the oils many potential uses. But I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. I've often wondered why, if the police and government were so worried about its close cousin MJ, they didn't legalize cultivation of hemp. It would reek havoc with sensimilla buds if you had large quantities of pollen crossing, and fertilizing the females. It would pretty much make the drug variety of low quality and low price, and not worth cultivating. But the cops love the game too, they get to dress in camo and pile in their 4x4's and rake in the overtime pretending they are making the world a better place. Ah well, enough on this. Later.

. . . which also saves the trouble, investment, labor and time of digging it up/pumping it out.

But I guess that would be too hard.

What it says is that we cannot cut emissions fast enough to stop this.

We have the means to transition to a carbon free economy and we have a strategy See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraction_and_Convergence

But all of this has will not come unless the socio-ecomonic system changes to reflect new social realtions and to accomodate that we live in times of scarcity on a finite planet. Tackling climate change with the required radical action to avert climate chaos represents a very real threat to elite interests in the corporate, financial, media, government and military sectors.

It means, for example, taking away power from the fossil-fuel corporations, and giving it to local communities which could then run their own renewable energy schemes. It means supporting local food production for local consumption, rather than being force-fed products from an agribusiness industry (which treats animals cruelly) combined with a small number of giant supermarkets which enjoy a virtual monopoly.

It means questioning the mantra of endless economic growth and rampant mass consumption. It means massive interlocked movements at grassroots level to reclaim the power that governments and_ corporate institutions (including the IMF, World Bank, etc.) have stolen from them. It means questioning the very notion of the pursuit of happiness through accumulating material things. You can be pessimistic, or optimistic, about the prospects of any of that being achieved rapidly enough. (And if we don't at least try, you can guarantee none of it will happen

This is all very well and good.

However, some simple math. James Hansen (et al.) tell us that we should have atmospheric CO[font size=1]₂[/font] levels of 350 ppm (or lower.)

http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126

So we're now pouring CO2 into the atmosphere 2,000 times faster than nature can remove it.

It will take Mother Nature over 100,000 years to recover from the CO2 we've emitted in 200 years.

Every year we add another 2,000 years to her convalescence time.

These are not good numbers.

These are very, very bad numbers.

What the hell were we thinking?

What the hell are we thinking?

Scientists were warning us back in the 70's.

Carbon Dioxide Duration in Atmosphere
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/wea00/wea00296.htm

Question:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How long dose Carbon Dioxide stay in the atmosphere?

Replies:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill,

The duration period for carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere is somewhere between 100 and 500 years. Obviously, not all carbon dioxide molecules will stay in the atmosphere that long, but on average the duration may be around 200-300 years. Some scientists believe that it could be longer than that, others believe that the duration is shorter. Presently, there is some uncertainty in those figures.

The most important thing concerning CO2 duration is that its large concentration plus its long duration in the atmosphere make it the most important greenhouse gas after water vapor.

Some other greenhouse gases also have similarly long durations in the atmosphere, but their concentrations are much smaller than CO2 and thus they are less important (but not unimportant) contributors to warming.

Although water vapor is the most effective greenhouse gas, it has a duration in the atmosphere of only 3-7 days and its concentration will likely only increase if atmospheric temperature increases. This is a double whammy that most climate scientists are concerned about. If increasing concentrations of CO2 result in warmer atmospheric temperatures, that will likely result in higher water vapor concentrations in the atmosphere and thus further enhance atmospheric warming, assuming that the increased water vapor concentration does not lead to increased cloudiness (which may reduce warming in some regions of the world, but increase warming in others).

David R. Cook
Meteorologist
Climate Research Section
Environmental Science Division
Argonne National Laboratory

Carbon is forever
http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812/full/climate.2008.122.html

Carbon dioxide emissions and their associated warming could linger for millennia, according to some climate scientists. Mason Inman looks at why the fallout from burning fossil fuels could last far longer than expected.

After our fossil fuel blow-out, how long will the CO2 hangover last? And what about the global fever that comes along with it? These sound like simple questions, but the answers are complex — and not well understood or appreciated outside a small group of climate scientists. Popular books on climate change — even those written by scientists — if they mention the lifetime of CO2 at all, typically say it lasts "a century or more"1 or "more than a hundred years".

"That's complete nonsense," says Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California. It doesn't help that the summaries in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports have confused the issue, allege Caldeira and colleagues in an upcoming paper in Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences2. Now he and a few other climate scientists are trying to spread the word that human-generated CO2, and the warming it brings, will linger far into the future — unless we take heroic measures to pull the gas out of the air.

University of Chicago oceanographer David Archer, who led the study with Caldeira and others, is credited with doing more than anyone to show how long CO2 from fossil fuels will last in the atmosphere. As he puts it in his new book The Long Thaw, "The lifetime of fossil fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is a few centuries, plus 25 percent that lasts essentially forever. The next time you fill your tank, reflect upon this"3.

We fail to reach any international agreements about carbon, and fossil fuel use continues to be the same unregulated "every man for himself, the devil take the hindmost" approach that it has been for the last 250 years.

Atmospheric CO2 continues to rise until geochemical and climatological changes finally overwhelm our ability to adapt, decimating our civilization and our species.

Even after that point the carbon-driven changes keep on happening, thereby ensuring that no high-energy industrial civilization will be able to arise on this planet again.

And in the end, a door is opened for some brand new evolutionary development - perhaps even one that springs from our own DNA.