Judith Layzer says there’s no easy way out when it comes to climate change — but that geo-engineering might be a last-ditch solution.
From David Chandler, MIT News Office
In the middle of a day filled with a stream of information-packed PowerPoint displays and alarming projections of what the future holds for our planet and our civilization, Judith Layzer’s talk was something of an anomaly.
Layzer, an assistant professor of environmental policy in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, was among the speakers at last Friday’s daylong symposium on “Engineering a Cooler Earth.” She immediately changed the tone of the day’s presentations by dispensing with graphs and charts and speaking only with the aid of her quite expressive gestures.
The symposium was a detailed exploration of a subject that has long been nearly taboo even for polite discussion: that instead of, or in addition to, the emissions-reduction strategies usually looked at as a way to stave off the dangers of global climate change, there might be other ways of solving or at least reducing some of the effects faster, more inexpensively or both, through grand schemes collectively known as geo-engineering. These include two major approaches: pulling carbon dioxide right out of the air, or blocking some percentage of incoming sunlight to reduce temperatures.
Drawing upon colorful anecdotes and historical references, Layzer described the uphill battle the world faces in dealing with the social and political realities of trying to change deeply entrenched habits, systems and interests.
She began by talking about the new bestseller, “SuperFreakonomics,” which ends with a chapter about geo-engineering and has attracted a storm of controversy for its suggestion of a possible cheap, easy fix. “[The authors] begin by saying that catastrophic climate change is unlikely,” Layzer explained, and then go on to suggest that any efforts to curb emissions, though worth pursuing, are likely to be “too little, too late,” but that instead the geo-engineering approach offers an “easy fix.”
The chapter focuses on one particular approach to reducing sunlight: injecting massive amounts of sulfur into the upper atmosphere to mimic the cooling effect observed after the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991. “There’s a fundamental disagreement,” she suggested, “over whether the risks of geo-engineering exceed the risks of climate change.”
The risks, as several symposium speakers described in detail, include the fact that such an approach would require an essentially permanent commitment to a massive project — injecting two Pinatubo’s-worth of sulfur into the stratosphere every year — that, if stopped at any time, could lead to an even more rapid rise in global temperatures than would happen with no intervention. And the fact that, with increased concentrations of carbon dioxide, oceans would continue to grow more acidic and thwart the growth of any marine shellfish and coral.
Virtually all of the symposium’s presenters agreed that the methods based on reducing sunlight, as with the sulfur injections, are too uncertain and prone to side effects to be serious candidates for solving the problem. Carbon-removal schemes, however, might have some promise and are worth at least researching. These ideas include enhancements to natural biological processes that remove carbon from the air, or the development of technological substitutes such as “artificial trees” that could have the same effect.
Layzer, like most of the symposium’s speakers, framed geo-engineering approaches as something that might turn out to be necessary if other measures fail to take hold, or if the rate of climate change turns out to be worse than expected. In short, something that should be studied just in case.
At its core, the intense controversy over global warming, and over concepts for ameliorating its effects through geo-engineering, is not so much about the science or the technology, she suggested. “The debate is and will continue to be driven by political considerations.”
She said she sees some hope for a common-sense path that may bypass the very different world views of the often-acrimonious sides in debates over global-warming policy. Increasingly, she said, big businesses that for many years were pressuring political leaders to delay any action on controlling carbon emissions now see a new clean-energy future as an opportunity. Helped along by President Barack Obama’s framing of the issue, she said, they have increasingly “changed the image from sacrifice to business gains.”
Nobody thinks the road to mitigating climate change will be easy. Any such efforts involve “going up against the biggest industry in the history of mankind,” Layzer points out. Still, “the political momentum does seem to be real,” she said, “and the collapse of coalitions that have opposed it is the best evidence of that.”
The main focus, she and most of the other symposium speakers emphasized, should remain on curbing greenhouse gas emissions. But with a problem so fraught with uncertainties and political complexities, it makes sense to hedge our bets.
And that’s a point that’s clear enough, without the need for a chart or a graph.
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Total Madness. It’s bad enough that there is widespread dumping of wastes, but when it’s done deliberately, it will turn out to be the darkest days of Planet Earth. To entertain a global experiment that has the potential to wipe out half the population of the globe speaks loud & clear of hearts turned to stone.
It is spoken as if it is already etched in rock.
So it is reasoned, so let it be done.
Nobody thinks the road to mitigating climate change will be easy.
And how will this be undone?
But with a problem so fraught with uncertainties and political complexities, it makes sense to hedge our bets.
This is a bet? 1 trillion quatloos for 2 billion served the sentence.
They be Caesar and we be the victims in the global Colliseum, if I read it right.
Yes, Billy, there are Monsters in the dark.
All of this assumes, of course, that there is some kind of unnatural warming taking place in the first place. I have seen no evidence of that to date.
Convert coal plants to produce white ash. I am surprised that all these really bright people have not seen this obvious answer. We could then outlaw any cleaning of this ash fall output, with fines and imprisonment. This would also remove the future requirements of painting our roofs white. Did they mention Lindzen and maybe ask his opinion on either the problem or their solutions? Glad to here that they recognize that GE has been cleverly manipulated into supporting the AGW agenda, really it was clear all along that it was only a framing issue.
Hear not here
Dare I point out that the thermostat model in the graphic uses an environmentally-incorrect mercury switch ?
Can we place enough giant mirror assemblies out at L4 and L5 to stave off the next ice age ?
“Convert coal plants to produce white ash. ”
Or toss a magnesium engine block into the furnace from time to time.
Nope. Never heard of Peak Sulphur?
The author is obviously in the pay of the Giant American Sulphur Producers. This is the last gasp.
Interesting item. But very scary.
“blocking some percentage of incoming sunlight to reduce temperatures.” It is utter insanity to start messing around with mega schemes that are fraught with uncertainty. Total uncertainty.
Trying to reduce incoming sun energy?! Arrgh! On August 22, 1992 (one year after Pinatubo) there was snow on the ground all across southern Alberta … a lot of snow. Never seen before.
It would be far better to put the sheep and children on high ground just in case Al Baby’s predictions come true. (What is he saying now? 67 meter sea level rise?)
Even thinking about screwing with this geo-engineering stuff is inane.
A number of years ago cold sea water was sprayed on lava to slow/stop its advance as it threatened to close of a harbor.
http://wapedia.mobi/en/Eldfell#5
So a geo-engineering approach can work for some problems. I wonder when these folks will switch to examining how they might fix the problem of a cooling Earth? Stopping the advance of a glacier on a major city seems like an easy one – compared to heating the global SST by half a degree. I see lots of big grants to study this problem. The real quandary is what new sources of taxes will be suggested when the carbon tax fails.
crosspatch (21:16:33) :
Or toss a magnesium engine block into the furnace from time to time.
I saw a magnesium helo transmission on fire over in Vietnam. Awesome display, and no way to put it out. I think something like that would go right through the stoker grate and out the bottom of the furnace.
the obvious fix for ocean acidity is to dump alkalines or a metal for the carbonic acid to feed on. of course refining the metal in the first place releases lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the first place….
Or we could demand that China and India put their efforts into putting out the underground coal fires in their countries that make up 10% of their emissions (we could do likewise here). Getting rid of undergound coal fires would take us a long way to acheiving the 350 ppm the alarmists are setting as a goal.
This is another interesting example of the changing narrative.
It started with increased carbon dioxide emissions causing increases in temperatures of such magnitude that some human habitats would be rendered uninhabitable due to massively rising sea levels, hurricane activities and droughts. At that stage it was all about a “tipping point”. There was a scary (but ill-defined) point at which carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause mayhem.
At that stage the call was to avoid the “tipping point”. If we never reached the tipping point, all was fine just. As fine as it had been while temperatures rose then fell then rose again throughout the last century in 30-odd year cycles that bore no apparent relation to levels of carbon dioxide.
The message did not persuade the little people. Perhaps it just sounded too fanciful, perhaps it was put forward too zealously, perhaps the little people simply didn’t care; whatever the reason they remained unmoved.
The next stage was to try to set in motion an irrational dread of any climatic change at all. Out went “man-made global warming” and in came “climate change”. A new ogre had been written into the fairytale. Any change was deemed to be bad whether or not caused by human activity.
And now we see the consequences.
Lunatic cures are suggested to combat a problem that is only thought to exist because lunatic notions were put forward by those with their own agenda. All sorts of agendas latch onto this because they see a means to achieve their desired end, even though many of them are sworn enemies.
Those who desire supra-national government see a way to gain a foothold, those who wish to strengthen their existing grip on single-nation domestic politics do the same.
Those who rue the fall of the communist bloc see an opportunity for eternal State control of all economic and social activity, those who seek personal profit know trading in carbon credits can make their fortune (and giggle at the thought of making a packet from buying and selling hot air).
Tree-hugging, people-hating hippies find an outlet for their deranged mental meanderings, while those who really care about the poor are concerned lest the dire predictions might be true.
The whole circus has something for every self-interest. That’s what makes it so dangerous.
Words escape me. Unintended consequences are incalculable. I suppose before we do this we need to agree upon Earth-Normal-Temperature since apparantly its been static for 4.5 billion (minus 100) years. Perhaps we can target 70 °F @ur momisugly noon @ur momisugly sea level @ur momisugly 45° N Latitude every day of the year.
Mike McMillan (21:08:23) :
Can we place enough giant mirror assemblies out at L4 and L5 to stave off the next ice age ?</i?
Actually we could be insidious: suggest to place reflectors to avoid warming having in mind that they can become mirrors when the ice age cometh. I would think it would be a matter of controlling the angles of the mirrors.
The bonus is that by the time they are built it will be evident that there is no warming and we are going down the present oscillations curve into cooling, so they will be set in inactive mode and ready if the ice gods rise. Building them will give a good push to the economy too.
FatBigot,
The problem is, back during the Cold War, the pinko bleeding heart fellow travellers were easy to spot, and any sane person knew the soviet union was worse than nazi germany, so anybody saying a kind word for Uncle Joe was known and ignored.
Today, the environment is not the Soviet Union, and the very same pinkos are claiming it is we who are the aggressors against nature, and of course nature doesn’t give us any Kapetyn Forest or Gulag Archipelagos of extermination of humans to allow us to demonize the ‘enemy’. No, just a lot of cute and fuzzy creatures who look good on propaganda posters far better than chubby vodka besotted commies.
Even in the age of liberation theology, where they tried portraying us as the exploiters of the 3rd world labor class, they failed because too many of us really didn’t give much of a rats behind about ‘those’ people.
But now we have the perfection of communist revolution via Bambi Politics. Claiming you are not the agressor is not possible, akin to an attorney asking the impossible to answer question, “so when did you stop hitting your wife?” Everybody knows Bambi is getting killed and you, the idiot on a hike with a gun, are obviously guilty whether or not shots were fired.
Mike Lorrey (21:46:44) :
“the obvious fix for ocean acidity is to dump alkalines or a metal for the carbonic acid to feed on. of course refining the metal in the first place releases lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the first place….
Or we could demand that China and India put their efforts into putting out the underground coal fires in their countries that make up 10% of their emissions (we could do likewise here). Getting rid of underground coal fires would take us a long way to acheiving the 350 ppm the alarmists are setting as a goal”.
Mike Lorrey,
Total nonsense.
1. Ocean acidification is a non problem debunked in dozens of scientific reports.
The first corals developed during a period when CO2 levels were much higher (12 times higher)
2. The underground coal fires rage for thousands of years. Although huge efforts are undertaken to extinguish these fires the process will take a very long time.
3. We add 2 ppmv/year CO2 to our atmosphere. (30 billion tons per year)
Most of this CO2 is absorbed.
There is no way we can reduce CO2 levels by CO2 emission reductions, let alone influence the temperature of our planet.
Reduction of CO2 is a non solution for a non problem and so is geo-engineering.
Robert Wykoff (22:12:21) :
As someone who lives virtually on the 45th parallel, I can tell you that would be an improvement. Snow on the ground already, and it will be with us for most of the next six months.
John F. Hultquist (21:35:45) :
An so is building a dyke.
Richard Lindzen, also from MIT has another opinion about geo-engineering
http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/news/x23532458/The-Right-View-MIT-s-Lindzen-CO2-has-little-effect-on-climate
Here is the problem. letting people who study “environmental policy” loose. They don’t understand the science or engineering behind what they propose. Policy solutions are the bane of our lives. Where I live, I don’t want someone proposing “blocking some percentage of incoming sunlight to reduce temperatures”. I want more sunlight please. Right now I must go and throw some more logs on the fire and pray for some sunshine.
Frontal attack on IPCC climate models by NASA:
http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/global-warming-predictions-invalidated
Now we only have to tell the good news to the Copenhagen clan.
Superfreakonomics
I have only read a summary of this book in the Sunday Times. I did read the first which was entertaining but like a lot of books of its type, had a few interesting ideas followed by pages and pages of stultifying repetition.
The strange issue is that having debunked AGW, the authors then come up with a completely barmy idea. Forget the basic stupidity of pumping sulphur into the atmosphere deliberately. It’s clear that none of the geniuses asked an engineer whether holding a 5 mile long tube from balloons was in any way feasible!
It’s a bit like the thousands of IPCC scientists who accepted the hockey stick without question ignoring the weight of writen eveidence from history about the MWP and LIA.
Cheers
Paul
Lunatics.
Reminds me of the Simpson’s episode where Mr. Burns erected a giant umbrella to block out the Sun. That way he could sell more electricity from his nuclear power plant. As I recall, that was the double episode: Who Shot Mr. Burns?
Is this life imitating art? Or did the Simpson episode correctly foretell the future?
Extra: that was one of episodes where a new word was injected into the language: crapulence.
“Artificial trees?” Don’t we have real trees?
Apart from that, this is insane nonsense. Let’s keep those geoengineers on a short leash.
The easiest way to reduce temperature is to correctly site the measurement instruments. As Anthony’s efforts have shown, there is a positive bias to the surface temperature data.