WUWT readers may recall this story on geoengineering on WUWT that referred to at the time as “batshit crazy“. It seems others in the green community agree.
This Open letter to IPCC on geoengineering has had over 100 signatories, many of them major environemnetal players and was sent to chairman Pachauri. Right now that seems the least of his worries as Josh points out.
Here’s the open letter. It is quite something:
Rajendra K. Pachauri
Chairman of the IPCC
C/O World Meteorological Organization
7bis Avenue de la Paix
C.P. 2300
CH- 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland
Dear Dr. Pachauri,
The undersigned organizations would like to express our concerns about the upcoming IPCC joint working group expert meeting on geoengineering to be held in Lima, Peru, June 20-22, 2011.
Geoengineering, the intentional large-scale manipulation of the Earth’s systems to modify the climate, is one of the most serious issues the international community will face in the decades ahead. The prospects of artificially changing the chemistry of our oceans to absorb more CO2, modifying the Earth’s radiative balance, devising new carbon sinks in fragile ecosystems, redirecting hurricanes and other extreme weather events are alarming. The potential for accidents, dangerous experiments, inadequate risk assessment, unexpected impacts, unilateralism, private profiteering, disruption of agriculture, inter-state conflict, illegitimate political goals and negative consequences for the global South is high. The likelihood that geoengineering will provide a safe, lasting, democratic and peaceful solution to the climate crisis is non-existent.
h/t to Climate Depot
Here’s the links. If you know of a organization that should sign on, forward the link to them in a professional letter.
[ download IPCC Letter: PDF – 68 KB | form to endorse letter (organizations only) HERE ]
It sounds as though the greens are beginning to appreciate the old wisdom: “if you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas”. Perhaps they really thought that it was them leading all this nonsense, while most of us realise that once the politicians get in on any act there is little, if any, controlling them. They’ll learn. Let’s hope they learn fast.
Steve C says:
June 21, 2011 at 12:19 am
“It sounds as though the greens are beginning to appreciate the old wisdom: “if you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas”. ”
What are you talking, the Greens ARE the politicians.
In the long run, and a number of different scales apply to ‘long’, colder is far more likely than warmer. On all time scales cold is less able to sustain life than warm is. On close examination, CO2 is probably the safest geo-engineering method we can use to keep us warm, weak as it is. It is also the safest fertilizing method to sustain food production when it gets cold. I think we can only hope that there is enough CO2 available to sustain human life, at present or better standards of living, through the cold times.
===================
The idea of Geo-Engineering to impact the climate is not new and in the 1960’s and 70’s there was considerable interest in the subject.
The major difference, is that then they were looking to Warm Up The Planet.
In spite of William Connolley’s survey of “who wrote about it then”, the fact is that global cooling was given serious consideration and scientists of the time were coming up with ideas to warm the atmosphere.
In March 1969, J.O. Fletcher from the Rand Corporation, produced a paper called “Managing Climatic Resources”, still available on the Rand website, http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/2009/P4000-1.pdf. It was written for a publication called “Impact”, the journal of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO.
He had written on a similar topic the year before in 1968, this time the paper was called “Changing Climate”, again available at Rand, http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2009/P3933.pdf
In 2001, the two papers were combined into a chapter for a book called “Omega –Murder of the Eco-system and the Suicide of Man”, edited by Paul K Anderson. The language hasn’t changed much in forty years and by co-incidence, there was also a doom laden chapter by a couple of gentlemen named John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich.
The chapter by Fletcher was called “Controlling the Planet’s Climate” and it can be accessed at http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/cooling2.pdf. They were indeed talking of global warming, but they were more concerned about the serious cooling of the previous decade:
He recognises the Climatic Optimum, the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, and moves on to say:
“Since about 1840, a new warming trend has predominated and appears to have reached a climax in this century, followed by cooling since about 1940, irregularly at first but more sharply since about 1960.
He talks of severe ice conditions in 1968, “which was a year in which Icelandic fishermen suffered losses due to the most extensive sea ice in the last half century, while phenomenal wheat yields from the plains of both Asia and North America due to increased rainfall pushed world wheat prices to a 16-year low.”
So what to do about it? Here are some of the ideas:
ICE-FREE ARCTIC OCEAN
The largest scale enterprise that has been discussed is that of transforming the Arctic into an ice-free ocean. Three basic approaches have been proposed:
(a) influencing the surface reflectivity of the ice to cause more absorption of solar heat;
(b) large-scale modification of Arctic cloud conditions by seeding;
(c) increasing the inflow of warm Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean
It has, for example, already been noted that the creation or dissipation of high cloudiness has an enormous influence on the heat budget of the atmosphere and of the surface. Moreover, under certain conditions, only one kilogram of reagent can seed several square kilometres of cloud surface. It is estimated that it would take only sixty American C-5 aircraft to deliver one kilogram per square kilometre per day over the entire Arctic Basin (10 million square kilometres). Thus, it is a large but not an impossible task to seed such enormous areas.
Imagine that if you will…
BERING STRAIT DAM
The basic idea is to increase the inflow of warm Atlantic water by stopping or even reversing the present northward flow of colder Pacific water through the Bering Strait. The proposed dam would be 50 miles long and 150 feet high.
DEFLECTING THE GULF STREAM
Two kinds of proposals have been discussed, a dam between Florida and Cuba, and weirs extending out from Newfoundland across the Grand Banks to deflect the Labrador current as well as the Gulf Stream.
DEFLECTING THE KUROSHIO CURRENT
The Pacific Ocean counterpart of the Gulf Stream is the warm Kuroshio Current, a small branch of which enters the Sea of Japan and exits to the Pacific between the Japanese islands. It has been proposed that the narrow mouth of Tatarsk Strait, where a flood tide alternates with an ebb tide, be regulated by a giant one-way ‘water valve’ to increase the inflow of the warm Kuroshio Current to the Sea of Okhotsk and reduce the winter ice there.
CREATION OF A SIBERIAN SEA
Dams on the Ob, Yenisei and Angara rivers could create a lake east of the Urals that would be almost as large as the Caspian Sea. This lake could be drained southward to the Aral and Caspian Seas, irrigating a region about twice the area of the Caspian Sea. In terms of climatic effects, the presence of a large lake transforms the heat exchange between the surface and atmosphere.
CREATION OF AFRICAN SEAS
If the Congo, which carries some 1,200 cubic kilometres of water per year, were dammed at Stanley Canyon (about 1 mile wide), it would impound an enormous lake (the Congo Sea). The Ubangi, a tributary of the Congo, could then flow to the north-west, joining the; Chari and flowing into Lake Chad, which would grow to enormous size (over 1 million square kilometres).
NAWAPA PROJECT
The proposed North American Water and Power Alliance is a smaller scale scheme. It would bring 100 million acre-feet2 per year of water from Alaska and Canada to be evaporated by irrigation in the western United States and Mexico.
Nothing happened then and I doubt it will now, but all the while we are paying out.
Peter George says:
June 20, 2011 at 9:50 pm
Let’s figure out what we would do without their participation.
Why bother? Nothing needs to be done climate-wise, nor would anything we do make any difference to the climate anyway. It’s completely pointless, would be extremely expensive and would amount to economic suicide for any country stupid enough to undertake such an endeavor.
Climate is largely a water phenomenon. Earth’s cooling system is its rivers and lakes, and the rains that they naturally produce in hot weather. The cooling system is clogged. Weeds and their silt are the real problem in climate. The weeds dessicate the landscape, the silt covers the stream and lake beds, so that they don’t connect with the groundwater. The groundwater dries up, we have to go deeper for it. We get contaminated water (heavy metals). The geoengineering needed is old: weeding and dredging. It can be financed with the biofuels that can be made from the weeds.
Further to the remark of June 17th on the above cited WUWT article,
as a retired pharmacist with some considerable experience in compounding medicinal products,
I was intrigued over the comment “batshit crazy” and it’s clinical implications.
For several decades now, my ancient and humble home has been shared with a colony of pipistrel bats who
leave quite a deposit of fecal material on my balcony.
During the last few years this material has gathered
on a small canopy erected over the balcony to keep things clean.
I decided to see if there was any veracity in the audacious and un-researched claim
that some aspect of behaviour might be labelled as being “batshit crazy”.
To that effect, using old gelatin capsule shells [ a remnant of my older working days ]
I produced a couple of batches of test products which I affectionately called Bat Crap Caps.
These were then sold to a rather disreputable but well known chap with a reputation for ‘pushing’.
Interestingly enough, I have had two repeat orders since the 20th inst.
To my way of thinking, this confirms that there is indeed a condition known as “batshit crazy”
– even allowing for a 13% placebo effect!
It appears that the ‘user’ is sent into a delusional state, normally associated with misplaced personal esteem
or political importance. There is no reasoning with a person under the influence of Bat Crap Caps.
In fact – it is entirely possible that two or maybe more of the commentators above are under the influence.
I am currently working on a new product where I have sublimated the pipristrel faeces
with sodium bicarbonate to rapidly speed up the absorption process and produce a faster ‘high’.
I call this iteration Crack Bat Crap Cap and hope to begin marketing soon to the working intelligentsia.
My research assistant tells me this latter product is best ‘snorted’ and that we can market said powder
under the tagline of ‘shooting a load of crap’. I rather feel he is having a laugh or ‘taking the pipistrel’!
Regards
N
I am very interested to know why Dr Pachauri’s address is c/o the WMO in Paris – is he a resident there, or sheltering there?
REPLY: official address for correspondence, nothing more- Anthony
Even if we have not concluded that CAGW is real ( and I certainly have not reached this conclusion ) there are good reasons for developing the capability to directly capture CO2 from the air and dispose of or sequester it.
1. The science is not settled. If and when that astonishing piece of irrefutable evidence for CAGW comes along, radical emissons reductions, or some “batshit crazy” climate tampering scheme will be the catastrophic knee-jerk reaction, UNLESS THERE IS A PROVEN AND WIDELY RECOGNIZED ALTERNATIVE.
2. Many moderates and independents still worry that something needs to be done, and they will elect politicians who feel the same way ( e.g. Mitt Romney and Chris Christy ). Unnecessarily spending huge sums of money on developing – or even deploying capture and sequestration technology would be BAD. Unnecessarily spending huge sums to pump sulfates into the atmosphere, massively seed clouds, change the chemistry of the oceans, etc. would be CATASTROPHIC.
3. As the new Mann / Kemp paper demonstrates, those who seek to use AGW to drive the world towards and authoritarian state aren’t going stop because the real science doesn’t support them. But they WILL drop it as soon as the best PROVEN AND WIDELY RECOGNIZED SOLUTION doesn’t advance their political agenda.
IMHO, this last item is the clincher. If, for example, a new catalyst is discovered to speed up mineralization of CO2 enough to make it practical and cheap to combine CO2 with other stuff to make some safe building or landfill material, THE ENTIRE CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATE WILL EVAPORATE OVERNIGHT.
That means we DON’T HAVE TO ACTUALLY DO IT, if the real science says there’s no need. We just have to prove it can be done and make sure everyone knows it.
Before any fool could manage to change the earth, God will get rid of those fools: He is the FINAL CONSPIRER. Pachauri and the rest are just third to fifth level devils.. 🙂
All tentatives in this regard will be frozen up by the current Solar Minimum 🙂
Peter George says:
June 21, 2011 at 8:38 am
Even if we have not concluded that CAGW is real (and I certainly have not reached this conclusion) there are good reasons for developing the capability to directly capture CO2 from the air and dispose of or sequester it.
Nature already does that for us, you don’t have to worry about it.
Peter George says:
June 21, 2011 at 8:38 am
Even if we have not concluded that CAGW is real ( and I certainly have not reached this conclusion ) there are good reasons for developing the capability to directly capture CO2 from the air and dispose of or sequester it.
None of your “reasons” pass the sniff test. The ends don’t justify the means. Besides, the CAGW beast is already dead; it just doesn’t know it yet.
Methinks Mr George may have been partaking of the capsules……
The creator of Return to Almora has grown a penis nose.
Jimbo says:
June 20, 2011 at 5:56 pm
No really, I agree with you. The door swings both ways. If AGW is real then AGCEngineering is a sensible and natural outgrowth.
(That nose has got to go however.)
SFA. Sequestering every CO2 molecule emitted in the industrialized world would have bupkis effects on BRIC emissions, or on the overall CO2 levels.
Which we should be trying to maximize, by the way. “2,100 ppm by 2100 or bust!” It’s time for the fauna to pick up their (our) game; the flora have decimated (reduced by 10%) the CO2 stores they depend on many, many times over.
I wish I had more time for this.
Myrrh says:
June 21, 2011 at 11:20 am
Nature already does that for us, you don’t have to worry about it.
Then atmospheric CO2 levels will start falling soon naturally? How long should we wait before rejecting that hypothesis?
Bruce Cobb says:
June 21, 2011 at 12:06 pm
1) None of your “reasons” pass the sniff test.
This is no substitute for actual arguments. Give us at least some facts or actual reasoning, please.
2) The ends don’t justify the means.
I don’t get it. You think its immoral to learn how to capture and sequester CO2?
Nostrumdammit says:
June 21, 2011 at 12:49 pm
Methinks Mr George may have been partaking of the capsules……
Same as response to Bruce Cobb (1). Real arguments have been shown to aid clear thinking.
Indulge me here. I’ll just copy the beginning of my original comment.
Peter George says:
June 20, 2011 at 8:59 pm
I guess in the end I’m just interested in clear, honest thinking about what we could and should do if CO2 does turn out to be a serious problem. And we should do it now, because if we wait until that key piece of astonishing research that proves the need, radical emissions reductions will already be the presumed solution.
And radical emissions reductions would be really, really hard. If humans ever deliberately stabilize atmospheric CO2 levels, I think it will almost certainly to be through some form of fascism, or else through massive capture and sequestration.
I would prefer sequestion.
I like sequestration even better than sequestion.
fredb, so you still trust the ipcc to analyze anything? And think Fox News and its viewers operate Pavlovianly? Well, perhaps it is you who are simply reacting to vacuous memes yourself in both cases. Did you know, for example, that there is such a thing as Fox Business Network; that it actually competes head to head with Fox News; that its variety also involves all sorts of “Liberal” guests; that FBN simulcasts Don Imus’ program for 5 hours, 2am. – 7am Pacific time each weekday; that Imus has many well known Liberal personalities and political operatives and elected Politicans on his show, mostly on the basis of the fact that he likes them personally regardless of their views.
Ok, really what I wanted to do here is to point out the existence of FBN, so that the simplistic Pavlonian ideological Liberals would have twice as much to get worked up over.
@ur momisugly Peter George: You seem to assume that C02 is a problem. Why? What makes you think C02 is or will be a threat? Remember to give us Real arguments, not just your usual rhetoric. Don’t bother with the Precautionary Principle, either, that won’t fly.
Peter George says:
June 21, 2011 at 7:49 pm
Then atmospheric CO2 levels will start falling soon naturally? How long should we wait before rejecting that hypothesis?
? What hypothesis? S’fact. Doesn’t matter how much CO2 is in our gaseous atmosphere Air, Carbon Dioxide is heavier so whether one molecule or 5,000,000, CO2 will displace Air and come down to Earth. And if it’s raining, will come down with the rain.
Just as well plants don’t live floating in the atmosphere, they live on the ground and take in the food Carbon Dioxide through the underside of the leaves, amazing synergy.
Weren’t you ever taught anything about the Carbon Life Cycle? You’re 20% Carbon, the rest mainly water.
@Bruce Cobb: You’ve misunderstood. I don’t assume CO2 is a problem. I believe, based on a preponderance of evidence, that there is a concerted effort to use fake CO2 science to drive the world into an elitist, authoritarian world order.
I fear that it may work. If Al Gore had won in 2000 it might have worked already. The treaty the UN and most of the EU has been pushing would have given an self-defined and self-maintaining beauracracy (guess their ideological leanings) extraordinary power over the economies of the world, overriding their national sovereignty. As it is, Mr. Obama’s EPA has effectively declared itself to be the central economic planning agency for the US, regulating our only reliable and economic energy source selectively. Mr. Romney and Mr. Christie are on board.
They are not going to stop because the science isn’t there. Just think about Hockey Stick 2 ( Kemp 2011).
But they will drop it and go on to other things if the best available solution to the “problem” doesn’t serve their agenda.
Any program of radical global emissions reductions would drive us quickly in the direction they want to go. Why else do you think they’re doing all this? Climate tampering schemes are, as Anthony so colorfully put it, “batshit crazy” and so will never remove the “need” for radical emission reductions to solve the “problem.”
But, if and when the technology is cheap and clean, CCS would only involve collecting the money and then contracting with the lowest bidders to remove the desired amount of CO2. It provides no justification for what they want to do. SO THEY’LL DROP IT LIKE A HOT POTATO.
And then, we won’t even have to collect the money and remove the damn CO2, precisely because it probably presents no real problem in the first place.
If there is an even better way ( speaking potential here, not necessarily actual implementation ), then I WOULD LOVE TO LEARN ABOUT IT.
Of course, if CO2 does turn out to be a real problem, everything I’ve argued is even more true.
When Rutherford found that firing electrons at a metal foil produced back-scattered electrons he famously described it as like hanging out a linen, firing a canon at it, and having the canonball bounce back. That’s because it violated the extraordinarily well-established laws of classical physics. Rutherford’s back-scattering electrons is only one of many examples of astonishing results in real science.
I’m an arrogant guy. But I’m nowhere near arrogant enough to think I understand the climate system as well as Rutherford (and everyone else at the time) thought they understood electrodynamics. It simply would not astonish me if CO2 did turn out to be a problem. But, that’s just me – who really knows?
@Myrrh: If you think you’ve got better reasons for believing CO2 will never be a problem than Rutherford had for believing in classical electrodynamics, you’re out of my league so I won’t waste your time. But you might want to consider what I was actually saying:
This isn’t about the science. It’s about the elites getting the serfs back under control, and the serfs trying to stay free.
And freedom comes by agreeing to nonsense science? How does that work?
But still, you keep giving the impression, as you have again with the Rutherford/do I know CO2 will never be a problem, that you don’t quite get that CO2 is not a problem…
Misinformation about it is. Because that’s what dumbs down people. And when you take away knowledge, you get serfs.
What you’re proposing is the creation of serfs, creation of ignorance by giving credibility to insane ideas about CO2.
..if CO2 is not a problem now, why do anything about it?
@Myrrh: This isn’t going anywhere. I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. It wasn’t my intention.