From the Carnegie Institution comes a nutty consensus type idea, modeled in game-theory, implemented by an equally nutty future coalition. Law of unintended consequences anyone?
Geoengineering by coalition
Washington, D.C.—Solar geoengineering is a proposed approach to reduce the effects of climate change due to greenhouse gasses by deflecting some of the sun’s incoming radiation. This type of proposed solution carries with it a number of uncertainties, however, including geopolitical questions about who would be in charge of the activity and its goals.
New modeling work from Carnegie’s Katharine Ricke and Ken Caldeira shows that if a powerful coalition ever decided to deploy a geoengineering system, they would have incentive to exclude other countries from participating in the decision-making process. Their work is published by Environmental Research Letters and is available online.
Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas have been increasing over the past decades, causing the Earth to get hotter and hotter. Large volcanic eruptions cool the planet by creating lots of small particles in the stratosphere, but the particles fall out within a couple of years and the planet heats upagain. The idea behind solar geoengineering is to constantly replenish a layer of small particles in the stratosphere, mimicking this volcanic aftermath and scattering sunlight back to space.
“Attempts to form coalitions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have repeatedly hit the wall, because it’s difficult to get everybody to participate in a substantive and meaningful way,” Ricke said. “Members of coalitions to reduce emissions have incentives to include more countries, but countries have incentives not to participate, so as to avoid costs associated with emission reduction while benefiting from reductions made elsewhere.”
But a game-theoretic model developed by Ricke, Caldeira, and their colleague Juan Moreno-Cruz from the Georgia Institute of Technology showed that when it comes to geoengineering, the opposite is true.
Smaller coalitions would be more desirable to the participants, not less, because those members could set the target temperature to their liking without having to please as many parties. Likewise, countries that aren’t included in the coalition would actually want to join so that they could move the thermostat, so to speak, in the direction that better suits their interests. Since the costs of geoengineering are so much lower than mitigation, once a coalition has formed and has successfully implemented geoengineering, it would have an incentive to exclude permanently other willing participants.
“My view, aside from any technical result, is that it should remain a central goal to maintain openness and inclusiveness in geoengineering coalitions, so that all people who want a voice in the decision-making process are able to have that voice,” Caldeira said.
Such stupidity could be a reason to go to war. The ‘geoengineering’ group might have to be stopped if their efforts were having any effect. The consequences of not stopping them could be temeratures much lower than they expect, crop failure, famine, deaths, and expensive and dangerous disasters such as ice storms.
MangoChutney says:
February 22, 2013 at 1:02 am
Is it April 1st?
—
No, I’m afraid not…[sigh].
The real point of this is that there exist a variety of very high risk “space” solutions that would permit us to modulate insolation. I read about one of them in a science fiction novelette by Murray Leinster when I was nine or ten years old. They are high risk in the specific sense that if we do it wrong, we could kick the planet into an ice age or a real hothouse scenario as once we dump a “comet’s tail” of ionized metal gases into (say) a geosynchronous orbit around the Earth, they’ll stay there until sunlight itself pushes them away.
They are on the table if and only if the catastrophists turn out to be right. On this list everybody seems to be “sure” that that cannot happen, but I am not, I just think it is somewhat unlikely. It’s good to think that we have technology based options, and good practice for the equally unlikely case that we will one day want to terraform a marginal planet or a planet like Venus that is nearby but currently has a toxic unreduced atmosphere. In the meantime, the smart thing to do is wait and see and study without prejudice.
rgb
Eco Greenie GeoEngineering Wet Dreams. . . . Because some people can’t fathom that a nation in debt up to its eyeballs and running massive deficits just doesn’t have the money to entertain such intellectually foolish mental claptrap.
Time the universities started to evaluate the teaching staff and fire the ones who don’t have any common sense.
Meanwhile its snowing again in Paris. Could THE COALITION please nudge up the temp a notch to save on my heating bill? +15°C would do nicely, with a cooling spell when at bedtime. Thanks.
Well, how about that? There were no posts visible when I wrote mine. Now there are 5 others, and we do seem to agree. Tchüß.
Geo-engineering, really. Talk about dangerous climate change.
The real misanthropic solution should be suicide booths.
With the most guilt ridden liberals going first.
Why do these geoengineering schemes look like the plot of a Dr. Evil?
If done it should be implemented just over hot desert areas like death valley, sahara desert etc.
So the modeling results show you’d get a small group making global decisions that best benefit the small group,
And the individual excluded parties would want to join in, slant the global decisions to their benefit, which the small controlling group would reject.
So basically they have modeled how the UN Security Council got formed and functions, at least with regards to the permanent members.
Toss in some more grant money, maybe they could model how the lesser parties can be mollified by letting “regional groups” appoint temporary representatives to defend the interests of their regions, not just their home countries, while the original small group retains the important powers, namely not allowing the others to make any decisions that any of the original small group members don’t approve of.
Yup, that should only cost a few million more and yield a couple of peer-reviewed journal articles.
On this is rich. Suppose hypothetically we had the geo-engineering technology to dial in a desired average earth temperature. What should it be? We skeptics have said for years there is no “right” temperature and this illustrates the point. The folks in Canada and Russia would like it a few degrees warmer: they could be the new breadbasket of the world. The folks in North Africa and the Middle East would like it a few degrees colder. They could turn the Sahara into the breadbasket too. Who decides? There will be winners and losers. There will be war. Did Carnegie include that in their game?
The whole idea of geo-engineering on a global scale is insane anyway. Whenever we muck with Mother Nature even on local isolated scales it turns into a disaster. For a good example of conservation hubris and stupidity, look at what has been done with Macquarie Island.
“The danger here (and this may be your point) is that geoengineering may have major unintended consequences. ”
Yup! Putting C02 in the air, or taking C02 out of the air are both geo engineering. And yes geoengineering may have major unintended consequences.
What was that song? something like:
“Let’s all fly a kite
From earth block all sunlight
… … ”
geo-engineering for kids.
Soltau Luneberg plain winter 1986 temperature minus 35C
Why would Canadians join? Would Kenya notice? Would all countries be interested in reducing temperature?
Got it 😈
The important idea here is not scientific, but political. Their “science” of geo-engineering is silly. But their computer modeling is aimed at social engineering and is much more dangerous. This is the old Leninist mindset, that an “elite” group is better positioned to impose its global will if it does not share decision making. The Green/Red Coalition is a Bolshevik cancer in our free world today.
Before they geoengineer they have to tell us what the normal average temperature of the Earth is? It’s no easy question unless you average the Holocene temperature. Heck, they may have to warm it up instead of cool it down. Heh, heh.
If they tinker it could be the start of the world’s first Goldilocks Wars.
When these idiots can prove it’s possible to do something SIMPLE, like balance a budget for a large national government, and to implement policies that can easily adapt to keep that budget in balance during periods of economic variation, and to pay back debt and/or grow the economy to increase revenues when it’s necessary to borrow, THEN I might be inclined to give them a more demanding task. Till then, these philosophical alchemists can go suck an egg. Oh, and please, no more public research money for these dolts!
“Why do these geoengineering schemes look like the plot of a Dr. Evil?”
LOL, exactly what I was thinking! “Let’s build a Giant Magnifying glass out in space, hundreds of miles across, and it could focus a beam of sunlight on anything that we decided shouldn’t be there just like a kid and an anthill. And then we’ll just count on everything just working out from then on. What could go wrong? What? You people who think this isn’t a good plan Just Don’t Get It, do you?”
Why was I hearing a slight Austrian accent as I read the article?
This is hilarious for what it indicates about the mis-match of intention and outcome in the thinking of such idiots.
1) Presumeably those excluded would be states that dont buy the need for such a project. They want to develop and CO2 emissions go with that.
2) If they are excluded for being naughty CO2 emitters they can also say”hey you guys, you want to regulate the climate, fine, that means we dont need to cut back on CO2 emissions AT ALL.”
3). The excluded states remove all impedimentts they may have adopted as sops to the CO2 looney narrative, UN etc, and just ramp up their CO2 emissions wey beyondwhat they would otherwise.
Brilliant! It means the crazy West (which is the home of climate lunacy) can spend whatever they like performing engineering projects to compensate perceived “pollution” by the rest of the world who can then just get on with trying to develop unfettered by this crap.
Its a win win situation.
“I Was The Doctor Treating The Pilots” – Dr. Deagle
http://aircrap.org/chemtrails-doctor-treating-pilots-dr-deagle/336779/
Admad says: I think I would rather a coalition of Josef Stalin and Adolph (sic) Hitler, the world would be a safer place!”
We had that coalition. It wasn’t.
Since the costs of geoengineering are so much lower than mitigation, once a coalition has formed and has successfully implemented geoengineering, it would have an incentive to exclude permanently other willing participants.
That really should be: IF the costs of geoengineering are so much lower than mitigation BY THE COALITION and cheaper than other options, then the coalition would be stable within itself.
Even more broadly, if the benefits of the activity to the COALITION out weigh the costs to the COALITION, the coalition is stable and the activity will continue. This is a process that describes the majority of all human activity.
The question then becomes how do groups outside the coalition react to net consequences of the geoengineering — or at least the fear of consequences? It is why we have (and need) an EPA hold a coalition accountable for the total costs of their activities and not to
The authors present a broader case to their detriment. Solar geoengineering is a broad category including space mirrors.
What they allude to here is a specific stratospheric seeding of SO2 to increase planetary albedo. In this one case they may have found a case where the costs are low and the perceived benefits high so that a country or coalition could fund it and “to hell with everyone else.”
This one case, might be very asymmetric. The cost of a geoengineering project to cool the planet could be much greater than one to warm it. This would preclude the formation of an opposing coalition to geoengineer a warming project. Those opposed to the cooling project would form coalitions seeking cheaper ways to counteract it — air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles.
What sort of geoengineering coalitions might have already formed:
Cloud Seeders. OK, this is a local geoengineering — at least most people thinks so. It’s effectiveness seems to be modest. And some hold that it does not “Rob Peter to pay Paul”. But what if it did? What if there was a rain shadow downwind of cloud-seeding activities. “See you in court” would be the most mild response.
Ocean Fertilization. This is geoengineering that can be carried out by a single aqua-farmer-fisherman. What some see as fertilization and increasing the biological yield of a patch of ocean, others see as water pollution and dangerous geoengineering. Opposing coalitions have formed to make the practice illegal, but it is not possible to form a geoengineering project to counteract it. It is another asymmetric situation.
1) How long before this would be “weaponized”? Do as we say or we will shut off your sunlight
2) Who would control the thermostat?