From the VTT TECHNICAL RESEARCH CENTRE OF FINLAND, a paper that suggests Dr. Judith Curry’s view of the “uncertainty monster” was right all along.
Uncertainties related to climate engineering limit its use in curbing climate change
Climate engineering refers to the systematic, large-scale modification of the environment using various climate intervention techniques. However, a new study by VTT and the Finnish Meteorological Institute suggests that the uncertainties associated with climate engineering are too great for it to provide an alternative to the rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate engineering has been proposed as a rapid and cost-effective means of mitigating climate change. It has been suggested that climate engineering could be used to postpone cuts to greenhouse gas emissions while still achieving the objectives of limiting global warming to under 2 degrees, as set in the Paris Climate Agreement. However, according to a recent study, the uncertainties associated with climate engineering are currently so great that it cannot be regarded as a substitute for, or a way of postponing, emission cuts.
According to the study’s results, climate engineering would allow very little additional emissions during the coming decades. “Climate engineering could have side-effects which become visible only after it is started. This means that huge uncertainty surrounds the method and it might have to be abandoned very quickly,” says Professor Hannele Korhonen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute. “If emission cuts were postponed due to climate engineering, a halt in climate engineering would place the two-degree objective beyond reach,” says Tommi Ekholm, a Senior Scientist at VTT.
If, in addition to mitigating global warming, we also want to prevent the acidification of oceans by carbon dioxide, climate engineering could substitute for emission reductions only in greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide. Our results show that the limitations imposed by climate objectives and the available means of combating climate change could have a major impact on the optimal climate change mitigation measures.
Major risks related to climate engineering
Climate engineering could cool the climate by reflecting the sun’s radiation back into space, for example by changing the characteristics of clouds or imitating particle cover in the stratosphere caused by volcanic eruptions. The advantage of these methods lies in their rapid cooling effect and reasonably low costs. However, such methods involve major risks, such as the weakening of monsoon rains and the knock-on effects on food production in Asia and Africa.
A sudden halt to the use of such methods, due to issues such as major negative effects, would also lead to rapid climate change, to which ecosystems and societies would have difficulty in adapting. “This means that the possibly large cooling potential of climate engineering should not be used as a reason to postpone unavoidable cuts in greenhouse gas emissions,” summarises Hannele Korhonen.
###
The study was published in the journal Climatic Change and was funded by the Academy of Finland. Research scientists from VTT and the Finnish Meteorological Institute collaborated on the project.
Publication: Ekholm, T. & Korhonen, H. (2016): Climate change mitigation strategy under an uncertain Solar Radiation Management possibility. Climatic Change, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-016-1828-5
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Life on this planet has always done better at these temperatures to several degrees warmer and with CO2 levels here to double where they are currently.
Life does worse to much worse when our planet is colder than this.
A bunch of humans have, instead decided that “they” know the perfect temperature and CO2 level of our planet/atmosphere………….the level measured before humans started burning fossils fuels.
Of the millions of years that life existed on this planet, we just happened to have the perfect temperature and CO2 level just over 100 years ago………and humans went and messed it up.
So now, some of these same humans have to figure out a way to stop the temperature and CO2 divergence from that perfect level.
From Climategate: history’s message:
. . .
The reasoning behind the anti-carbon movement rests on three pillars of science. Or rather: Pillars of Science. By historical standards, each Pillar is inconceivably massive – consuming more scientist-hours, say, than all of physics before 1900. Or something like that. In impact alone, they’ve surely earned their majuscules.
The first Pillar of Science (A) is the evidence that global warming is harmful to children and other living things. Note that I say GW,
not AGW – any global warming, whether natural or human-caused. Harm cannot be a function of cause. If anthropogenic warming is harmful in any material sense, non-anthropogenic warming must be equally harmful.
. . .
The second and third Pillars of Science (B and C) together constitute the evidence that anthropogenic carbon dioxide increases (the Keeling curve, of which I have not seen much good skepticism – but ya really never know with these clowns) are causing GW. Pillar B is paleoclimatology: the hockey stick and its cousins. Pillar C is climate modeling – the GCMs. Together, Pillars B and C are the pillars of causality.
. . .
If Pillar B was sufficient, Pillar C would not be needed. In fact, just by the fact that B is weak, we can see that C must be no stronger. If C were not weak, its proponents would take all possible pains to differentiate it from the weak B. As it so happens, we have the email for B (the Mann circle, paleoclimatology), but not C (the Hansen circle, climate modeling). The public behavior of the Model Masters is quite similar to that of the Hockey Team, and the two are broadly allied. Therefore, we can safely assume that their Outlook folders smell quite similar.
. . .
If the present planetary temperature is above the optimal point, incremental warming is harmful. If the present planetary temperature is below the optimal point, incremental warming is beneficial. Again, no evidence is required for these conclusions – they are purely deductive.
Therefore, the material case for AGW mitigation depends existentially on the assertion that the present temperature is near, at, or above the optimal point. Otherwise, AGW is not harmful but benign – even if Pillars B and C were perfectly sound.
Pillar A is a vast collection of observations and projections of purported harm which global warmth appears to have caused, be causing, or risk causing. Again, don’t miss the list. From the standpoint of reasoning about carbon-emissions mitigation, all this work is entirely useless, even though much of it is no doubt good science.
If there was any intent to incorporate Pillar A in a rational decision process, it would be necessary to fund a comparable investment in Pillar A’ – a complete list of the material benefits of warming. For comparison, we would also like to see a Pillar A”, a complete list of the material harms of cooling, and a Pillar A”’, a complete list of the material benefits of cooling. By examining all these lists, each collected by exactly the same process for maximum comparability, a person or persons with good judgment could compare them and decide whether Earth’s temperature at present is too low, too high, or just right.
Of course, no one is producing Pillars A’, A”, and A”’. The process that produces Pillar A pretends to be a process that produces factual materials as an objective background for judgment. Just as Caesar pretended to be just a private citizen, or FDR just a president. In reality, since it is not equally focused on collecting all sides of the question, it cannot possibly be interpreted as a rational attempt to assess the optimal point.
Unfortunately, the very existence of Pillar A makes the problem of assessing the optimal point much more expensive and difficult. Because of the anti-carbon movement, for the foreseeable future there will be more science, far more science, pointing to harmful impacts of warming, than benign impacts of warming, harmful impacts of cooling, or benign impacts of cooling.
. . .
What is the optimal point? Hard question. Easier question: is the present temperature above, below, or at the optimal point?
Still not an easy question, of course. But there is a good practical way to inquire: discard Pillar A. There is an easy way to discard Pillar A: consider the scientific consensus as of not 2010, but, say, 1965. Or any point definitively prior to the fertilizing influence of the anti-carbon movement on the scientific community. For instance, we could ask the founder of the CRU himself, the pioneering climatologist Hubert Lamb.
What we would instantly find is that in the pre-IPCC era, climatologists (such as Professor Lamb) simply took it for granted that the present temperature is well below the optimal point. This can easily be seen in the names they assigned to past periods warmer than the present – such as the Medieval Climate Optimum and the Holocene Climate Optimum. Had they considered this a serious question for debate, it would have been easy to choose a neutral name.
We can easily see the reasoning behind “Optimum” by looking at a more recent historical precursor to the AGW movement: the embarrassing false step of the global-cooling movement. We have always been at war with Eastasia. However, Time magazine has performed the decidedly anti-Orwellian act of making its entire 20th-century archive free, and apparently unexpurgated, on line. So you can click here, and see what Time said when we were at war with Oceania. Pillar A” makes a small appearance. One of the things you’ll notice is that much, much less effort is required to conjure disasters due to global cooling, than disasters due to global warming. Crop failures and starvation don’t involve a long chain of fanciful inference.
Therefore, it is not just a fallacy to rely on Pillar A to show that GW (anthropogenic or natural) is harmful. Rather, the best way to decide whether GW is harmful or benign is to disregard Pillar A, and consider the consensus judgment of climatologists from the era in which that judgment was of only academic interest. This algorithm tells us that GW is probably on balance benign – at least, to the material interests of humans. Pillar A is not only irrelevant, but probably wrong.
. . .
[See original for links]
Sooooooo. Are the Finns going to give up their wood burning,CO2 producing saunas? Thought not. Hypocritical money thieves! Hope they run out of their gut-rot vodka.
Mental masturbation with saving the planet being the climax.
YASTDWTAPTDE!
(Yet another solution that doesn’t work, to a problem that doesn’t exist).
Anyone would think climate science was run by Apple Inc.
For once I didn’t even give this report any stars. There is no option to give it a minus.
The Medieval Warm, aka Climate Optimum, aka The Renaissance, was warmer than
today, Good crops, population expanded, knowledge expanded.
The time of the Little Ice Age, crop failure, famine, disease. colder than today.
Which to choose. Obviously a hard choice.
Bring on the CO2.
[ snip . . feelings are important, however you might wish to resubmit your comment using more mature language. That would make your point more succinctly. Thanks. . . mod]
I’ll agree the uncertainty of effects around geo-engineering schemes make their use undesirable. But referring to “unavoidable cuts in carbon emissions” tells me he’s spent no time examining the uncertainty around the wisdom of that strategy.
Why not engineer faster than light travel, geoengineer entire planets and there problem solved.
Has a significant portion of scientists gone completely nuts? Do they think the earth exists within a Star Trek episode or other sci-fi movie where geoengineering is a plot point?
The dangers, the wasted time and costs, attempting to achieve the impossible is staggering in its stupid.
BTW if we do ever figure out how to effectively geoengineer the climate for a planet, it will be about the same time as we do discover faster than light travel.
Don’t screw with mother nature, she’s a harsh queen.
The biggest uncertainty being whether we are more likely on decadal or century time-scales to dearly wish the planet were not getting so hot or dearly wish it were not getting so cold. I would bet ten to one on it next getting too cold rather than too hot for people and other living things.
‘Climate engineering refers to the systematic, large-scale modification of the environment using various climate intervention techniques’
That statement alone is more frightening to me than every single alarmist piece of tripe put out by the despicable press in the last twenty years. Because, given the chance, they’ll do it.
THEN you’ll get to see PO’d Mother Nature.
Termites produce 10 times CO2 than man made CO2 emissions.
Imagine if you suggested to a greenie that we exterminate termites to save the planet.
When
From the VTT TECHNICAL RESEARCH CENTRE OF FINLAND, a paper that suggests Dr. Judith Curry’s view of the “uncertainty monster” was right all along.
“Uncertainties related to climate engineering limit its use in curbing climate change
Climate engineering refers to the systematic, large-scale modification of the environment using various climate intervention techniques. However, a new study by VTT and the Finnish Meteorological Institute suggests that the uncertainties associated with climate engineering are too great for it to provide an alternative to the rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.”
____________________________________________
– where does finlandia systematic, large-scale modification of the environment using various climate intervention techniques.
– why do Climate Engineering when ‘a new study by VTT and the Finnish Meteorological Institute suggests that the uncertainties associated with climate engineering are too great’