geoengineering

Ocean dead zones to expand, 'remain for thousands of years'

I doubt geoengineering will ever be practical as a primary strategy for dealing with climate change (see here and here). That said, I don't consider most of the efforts to pull CO2 out of the air geoengineering -- that is ungeoengineering our self-inflicted climate wound. And those efforts are only plausible with super-aggressive mitigation that keeps concentrations close to 450 ppm.

It's strategies like injecting sulfur into the atmosphere that should worry people the most. Those strategies have many flaws, but among the worst is that they do nothing to stop humanity from turning the oceans into one giant acidic deadzone.

A new study in Nature Geoscience, ($ub. req'd, abstract below) makes crystal clear why very serious mitigation must always be humanity's primary strategy for averting climate catastrophe. As AFP reported on the study:

Global warming may create "dead zones" in the ocean that would be devoid of fish and seafood and endure for up to two millennia ...

Its authors say deep cuts in the world's carbon emissions are needed to brake a trend capable of wrecking the marine ecosystem and depriving future generations of the harvest of the seas.

Precisely. This study makes a matching pair with NOAA stunner: Climate change "largely irreversible for 1000 years," with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe.

Even worse, of course, is that while there are many plausible, albeit expensive and untried on large scale, strategies for removing CO2 from the atmosphere, it is far from clear how one does that from the ocean.

Here is more detail on this important study and on oceanic dead zones:

Geoengineering is risky but likely inevitable, so we better start thinking it through

The following is a guest essay from Jamais Cascio, a cross-disciplinary futurist specializing in the interplay between technology and society. He co-founded Worldchanging.com, and now blogs at OpenTheFuture.com.

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With the recent release of a detailed comparison between different geoengineering strategies and the launch of a German-Indian joint experiment in ocean-iron-fertilization, the debate over whether geoengineering will have any place in our efforts to combat global warming is one again churning. I've been writing about the geoengineering dilemma since 2005, and Grist's David Roberts -- no big fan of geoengineering -- asked me to give my take on where the issue stands today. My top-line summary?

Geoengineering is risky, likely to provoke international tension, certain to have unanticipated consequences, and pretty much inevitable.

Just to be clear, here's what I want to see happen over the next decade: An aggressive effort to reduce carbon emissions through the adoption of radical levels of energy efficiency, a revolution in how we design our cities and communities, a move away from auto-centered culture, greater localism in agriculture, expanded use of renewable energy systems, and myriad other measures, large and small, that reduce our footprints and improve how we live.

This plan, or something very much like it, is required for us to have the best chance of avoiding disastrous climate disruption. Could we make it happen within the next decade? Definitely. Are we likely to do so? I really want to say yes ... but I can't.

And that's a real problem, because we're not exactly overburdened with global warming response plans that have a solid chance of actually doing something about it in time. We all know that half-measures and denial masquerading as caution certainly won't be enough to avoid disastrous warming; unfortunately, neither will the kinds of ideas still coming out of the world's capitals. Although clearly better than nothing, they simply won't get carbon emissions down far enough fast enough to avoid a catastrophic climate shift.

Here's why: No matter what we do, even if we were to suddenly cut off all anthropogenic sources of carbon right this very second, we are committed to at least another two to three decades of warming, simply due to thermal inertia. Add to that the feedback effects from environmental changes that have already happened: ice cap losses increasing polar ocean temperatures, accelerating overall warming; melting permafrost in Siberia releasing methane, which can be up to 72 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide; overloaded carbon sinks in oceans and soil losing their ability to absorb CO2. These factors combine in a way that could make even our best efforts too slow to avoid disaster.

So what would we do?

Desperate enough to contemplate geo-engineering

[I think that as a climate-saving strategy geo-engineering is somewhere between a dead end and a hoax — why would you choose chemotherapy that might make you sicker if your doctors told you diet and exercise would definitely work (see "Geo-engineering remains a bad idea" and "Geo-engineering is not the answer")? The likely new science […]

Science: Geo-engineering scheme damages the ozone layer

Science has published a major new study, "The Sensitivity of Polar Ozone Depletion to Proposed Geoengineering Schemes" ($ub. req'd). The study finds:

The large burden of sulfate aerosols injected into the stratosphere by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 cooled Earth and enhanced the destruction of polar ozone in the subsequent few years. The continuous injection of sulfur into the stratosphere has been suggested as a "geoengineering" scheme to counteract global warming. We use an empirical relationship between ozone depletion and chlorine activation to estimate how this approach might influence polar ozone. An injection of sulfur large enough to compensate for surface warming caused by the doubling of atmospheric CO2 would strongly increase the extent of Arctic ozone depletion during the present century for cold winters and would cause a considerable delay, between 30 and 70 years, in the expected recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole.

Of course, this geo-engineering scheme has lots of other problems. An earlier study noted:

Messing with nature more won’t fix the messes we’ve already made

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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[JR: Geo-engineering is to mitigation as chemotherapy is to diet & exercise. You can find some more specific reasons geo-engineering is unlikely to make sense at these posts: "Geo-engineering remains a bad idea" and "Geo-engineering is not the answer." I will be blogging again on this shortly. In the absence of strong mitigation efforts, geo-engineering will not stop catastrophic outcomes, like the end of most ocean life.]

Time magazine has declared geo-engineering one of "10 ideas that are changing the world."

"Messing with nature caused global warming," Time wrote. "Messing with it more might fix it."

What are they thinking?

Geo-engineering: cooking up solutions just like nature used to make

Geoengineering may be an awful idea for reversing the warming effects of climate change, but it sure makes for a sweet subject of satire, à la this retro-style informational video. Like they say, “If you can’t fix the problem, techno-fix the problem!” After all, technology will save the world. Because we know everything there is […]

Planktos update

Remember Planktos, the company that was going to sail into the Atlantic ocean and dump a bunch of iron ore, hoping it would stimulate CO2 absorption and profit the company via carbon offsets? Well, Andy Revkin brings news that the company has set sail. Guess the cat’s out of the bag! (Planktos has been criticized […]

The many ways big money seeks to avoid reducing fossil fuel use

The following is a guest essay from Peter Montague, executive director of the Environmental Research Foundation. —– It now seems clear that the coal and oil industries are not going to allow the United States to curb global warming by making major investments in renewable sources of energy. These fossil fuel corporations simply have too […]

Climate change mitigation strategy could actually damage the planet

Earl Killian sends me this WSJ op-ed: "Thinking Big on Global Warming" (subs. req'd.). He sees some good news in it -- the WSJ "published a non-denier [opinion] piece."

Yes, but geo-engineering is one of the delayers' sexiest strategies -- holding out the promise of a pure techno-fix that doesn't require all those annoying regulations needed to completely change our energy system. The conservative (duh!) authors of the WSJ piece embrace trying to "develop capabilities for increasing the fraction of sunlight that is reflected outward by the upper atmosphere back into space." They claim: "We know it would work because it happens naturally all the time."

Yes, volcanoes spew out aerosols that cool the Earth, but I have previously debunked aerosol geo-engineering. The authors seem unaware of a major study that finds "doing so would cause problems of its own, including potentially catastrophic drought."

And, of course, this strategy allows unfettered ocean acidification, and as noted recently, "when CO2 levels in the atmosphere reach about 500 parts per million, you put calcification out of business in the oceans."

So we might temporarily stave off superheating the planet, but still bring ruinous climate change and destroyed the ocean ecosystem! The authors claim:

Do not try to sell climate geo-engineering to committed enemies of fossil fuels. Although several geo-engineering options appear to be highly cost-effective, ideological opposition to them is often fierce. Fashionable blogs are replete with conspiracy theories and misinformed attacks.

Who are these enemies of fossil fuels? I don't know such people. I know enemies of greenhouse gases. I am one of those. But we tend to like natural gas, and many of us would be okay with coal if you added permanent carbon capture and storage. Greenhouse-gas mitigation avoids catastrophic global warming with high confidence and few negative side effects (and, indeed, many positive side effects). No one has proposed a geoengineering plan that meets either of those two tests.