By the time you finish this blog post, you will understand why we differ from our critics in our conclusions.
As we write in SuperFreakonomics, there are many misconceptions about the facts surrounding global warming. Take the following true/false quiz to test your knowledge of the science, economics, and technology of global warming.
Global-warming science questions:
1. The Earth has gotten substantially warmer over the past 100 years.
TRUE / FALSE
2. Even if we were to immediately and permanently stabilize our carbon emissions at the current levels, or even cut these emissions substantially, climate models predict that Earth will continue to get warmer for decades.
TRUE / FALSE
3. When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it spewed millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Scientists believe that the haze generated by the eruption reflected some of the Sun
I like the geo-engineering solution. But I was reading that one of the biggest problems with global warming is not actually the warming itself, but global climate change. So some places will get cooler, some hotter, and so on. The problem with this is that economies aren't prepared for an abrupt change in climate. Some places just aren't prepared for rain, some aren't prepared for a lack of water, and so on.
ResponderEliminarCouldn't this cost even more?
And would we be able to control geo-engineering so that climate keeps more or less consistent?
What can you tell us about that?
Thanks.
The question isn't whether geoengineering deserves a seat at the table - everyone agrees it is worth researching. The question is whether it is worthwhile to expend resources to reduce carbon emissions immediately while this research is being conducted. Your critics seem to say, "Yes, it certainly is." As far as I gather from this blog post, you are saying, "No, it isn't." To accuse your critics of failing to "approach the questions like economists" is extremely disingenuous. There is a substantive economic question here about whether geoengineering type solutions and reducing carbon emissions are substitutes or complements. You have failed to engage with your critics who argue that they are complements.
ResponderEliminarDr. Levitt,
ResponderEliminarUnfortunately for you guys, the environmentalists could care less about logic and reason. Their only interest appears to be in sensationalizing their issue. It reminds me a bit of organized religion.
"You will be damned if you don't do what we want you to do".
I have made my peace with attempting to get through to people on this subject.
I am a finance guy, so I'm pretty much evil anyway.
Good luck.
As an engineer, I have some doubts as to truthfulness of the Geoengineering Technological questions you pose above. I have no doubt they have some fancy renderings, ( which they do, nicely contained in their white paper on the subject) But, renderings and white papers do not constitute a final design, and that "few hundred million dollars" is at best a +-50% estimate.
ResponderEliminarSo, does a concept exist? yes. Does a Design exist? No. It would probably take a few tens of millions of dollars to get to the final design, never mind the first prototype.
It would also be good if you added a Scientific Question 1.5: The vast majority of the Earth's warming over the past 100 years is due to human release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. (Answer: true)
ResponderEliminarHey, I got one for the authors:
ResponderEliminarThe argument apparently advanced by this chapter will be used by the fossil fuel lobby to hem and haw over potentially dire known consequences of their product:
TRUE/FALSE
the ideas in the book are fascinaing from an innovation point of view, but the goal is to bring earth back to normal not to keep altering it.
ResponderEliminarI'm not certain Dr. Krugman has disagree with any of the points you make here. The way I read his criticism, and I commented to this effect on his blog earlier today, is that he is concerned that your contrarian approach will take the wind out of the sails of cap and trade, providing the conservative media with ammunition to attack it. This greatly concerns me since I agree with you that honest and free discussion is of utmost importance. I don't see much difference between Dr. Krugman's opinion on this subject and those in the Bush administration who stifled debate on certain issues where they believed they had the correct answer. If one does indeed have the correct solution, it should withstand debate. Now I realize there are people on both side who debate dishonestly, but if we allow those people to control the debate by not having it, then we've all already lost no matter what our position.
ResponderEliminarGood work on the response.
ResponderEliminarI have to ask the question is this collusion between you and all the bloggers, with the theory that any press is good press so should be a boon to Superfreakonomics sales? That would be a great economics experiement but I guess you would have to control against something Superfreakonomics-ese that had less pre-press release (maybe Freakonomics because I do not think that had as much fanfare before being released). For instance now I am checking out blogs I have never checked out before, so perhaps this maybe a case of you scrath my back I scratch yours, however unintentional it maybe.
It also reminds of what Steven Landsburg lays out int he Armchair Economist about the simliarities between Religion and Evironmentalism. I just re-read it and this argument has the hallmark ideas incorporated in that chapter.
Anyways guys you have made a strong defense of Superfreakonomics, but I may have to wait until a friend buys it because that would be a lower carbon emitting activitiy then both of us buying a copy.
I think the most frustrating thing about this chapter was that your entire book discussed unintended consequences and somehow, you managed to write an entire chapter about geoengineering without mentioning the fact that nobody has any idea what the unintended consequences of that would be. That was the part of the chapter I found to be intellectually dishonest, not anything else.
ResponderEliminarSteven, what's you've gotten yourselves mixed up in is rhetorical trench warfare. It's the same phenomenon in the abortion debate, which is why you should be familiar with it.
ResponderEliminarYou and I may be swayed effectively by reason, but that doesn't work on everybody the same way. Sometimes, if persuasion is the goal (persuading people to care about the atmosphere, or that abortion is right/wrong), then rationality is not seen as the best tool by many people. To use rational argument is to give ground to those who are more convincing with inflammatory or mesmerizing statements.
So think about it: what are you trying to accomplish with your "different questions"? You are trying to arrive at an evidence-based, rationally correct solution to a problem. But that is not what many others are hoping to accomplish. They are trying to MOVE MINDS. That's what's wrong with your chapter from many people's standpoint. They are employing a tool to move minds that can be more effective than a rational argument. And when a rational argument is presented such as yours, it nullifies some of the effectiveness of their tool. Their persuasiveness loses it's power when the sort of people who would be persuaded by it start hearing seemingly conflicting information.
In a crowded room that may or may not be about to go up in flames, they are frantically trying to yell "FIRE!" and you're deploying a smoke detector. And the way they see it is that if anyone stops to check your smoke detector when they could be racing for the exit, you are dangerous.
Steve, you did it again. You failed to state that man is unequivocally the cause of warming and that we must immediately cease all carbon emissions. You really must hate the planet.
ResponderEliminarSo, how we gonna get these guys to stop emitting carbon? io9.com/5388819/frightening-scenes-from-chinas-pollution-apocalypse/gallery/
Think we can do it with these? gizmodo.com/5388795/sharp-triple-layer-solar-cell-sets-new-efficiency-record
Doubt it, but maybe a little. Physics seems to be getting in the way: energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=2469
Very few of us so-called "deniers" really deny that climate change is occurring. Speaking for myself, I am unequivocally certain that climate change is occurring. I am just as certain, however, that some sort of cost-effective technology like geoengineering, will arise to counter warming and I am just as certain that SUV's of one sort or another are with us to stay. Not too crazy at the thought of a constant dousing of sulfur dioxide, though, nor at the thought of tampering with such large, complex systems as the weather.
I am old enough to remember when Mt. Pinatubo blew her top and I have fond memories of two years or so of absolutely wonderful weather. The Earth adjusts itself very nicely, technology or not.
'The question is whether it is worthwhile to expend resources to reduce carbon emissions immediately while this research is being conducted. Your critics seem to say,
ResponderEliminarYou have failed to engage with your critics who argue that they are complements [not substitutes].
ResponderEliminarFeel free to direct readers to the Intellectual Ventures Laboratory blog site, where more information can be found on the Stratoshield and the Salter Sink:
ResponderEliminarintellectualventureslab.com
Finally, a clear summary of the debate! There is still a significant doubt in my mind, however, whether these are good solutions. Is it really a good idea to disperse massive amounts of sulfur into the atmosphere? The unintended consequences -- the bread and butter of the field of Freakonomics -- could well be enormous. I don't know the answer to this question; my engineering expertise has little to do with chemistry and biochemistry. Still, I would like to see Levitt and Dubner bring their perspective to this aspect of the issue.
ResponderEliminarBut, renderings and white papers do not constitute a final design, and that
ResponderEliminarTo use a somewhat tired analogy, it's the same reason no piece of religious scripture could be questioned in the middle ages: once part of it is questioned, the precedent is set that questioning it is okay, which is very dangerous for any dogma.
ResponderEliminarA lot of people in the global warming movement want to join the club without studying the controversies and complexities. They feel safe doing so because they have confidence in the principle that they will always be able to use the arguement from intimidation to avoid accounting for their ignorance, implying that you don't know what you're talking about if you disagree with anything they say.
You agree with them fundamentally, but have questioned a key part of the movement's orthodoxy: that the solution is entirely for there to be less interference, not a different or counter modification. A rational person, even if he disagrees, will see that you're fundamentally on the same page and won't be threatened by you.
But it isn't a logical structure for many people in this movement, it's a huge singular emotional zeal. They can't counter logically, or try to consolodate, the minor questions because there is no logical structure in their mind, just a huge certainty that people who disagree are "deniers" who will be labeled as such. You've threatened their territory, and boy are they barking.
Very well put, and I see that the detractors here stil don't grasp the concepts. I think your layout was an excellent attempt to cut through the clutter being thrown around. For anyone that really wants to see, it's in there. It won't be long and these sorts of (the lock-minded) people will be labeled crusaders.
ResponderEliminarFelix - there's no such thing as "normal" in a complex system.
Environmentalists are more interested in social engineering than geo-engineering.
ResponderEliminarthis article's condescending tone caused me to unsubscribe. I thought you might care to know.
ResponderEliminarTwo words: ocean acidification.
ResponderEliminarSo all we have to do is give this company millions and millions of dollars and it'll solve all our problems with no downside? It's like those trendy diets that let you eat nothing but cookies or bacon and you lose lots of weight, renew your spouse's affection and get a $500,000 home for $250 monthly payments!
ResponderEliminarThere's obviously no downside if the company doesn't disclose it. Why would they lie?
Why would our beloved Freakonomists fail to think about ocean acidification or acid rain? Why, those issues obviously are just smears launched by a frenzied anti-Chicago crowd.
The full physics perspective of reflection is more complicated than simply light/dark. The post mentions sunlight reflected back into space, but does not mention any other radiation. It's not that simple. Sunlight that makes it to Earth and is reflected by a white surface can reflected by the atmosphere back to Earth. This radiative trapping adds heat. Also radiative absorption by dark surfaces is still reradiated in infrared which can be absorbed, reflected, or transmitted by the clouds.
ResponderEliminarThe full radiative picture involves making the surface paler and the atmosphere more transparent to white light AND/OR making the surface darker and making the atmosphere more transparent to infrared light.
Here's the problem -- it may turn out that "warming" is not even the most civilization-threatening aspect of the atmospheric carbon crisis. Ocean acidification could disrupt the food chain in a way that's much more harmful to us in the long run.
ResponderEliminarSo should we cut carbon emissions as rapidly as possible while ALSO investigating whether any geoengineering solutions may mitigate the damage we've already done? Absolutely.
But it's very risky to let anybody think for even a moment that the geoengineering your describe, even if it works, implies that we should continue to transfer carbon from beneath the ground to the atmosphere at as rapid a rate as possible.
@MikeM: your analogy is not quite right. It's not a smoke detector -- everybody knows the smoke is already there. It's more like some people yelling "turn down the stove" and these guys are saying, "no, let's turn on the sprinkler system, if it works then you don't have to bother turning down the stove." But the unintended consequences of the water are not yet understood, plus that there are other people in the room who get rich from operating the stove and will use any excuse to delay or avoid turning down the stove, and that might get us all in trouble.
ResponderEliminarHave you read "The Skeptical Enviromentalist", of Bjorn Lomberg. I think he has some good ideas about global warming.
ResponderEliminarBingo, Mark ... ocean acidification is the one thing geoengineering of the type they're proposing here will not solve in the least. So the oceans will keep growing more acidic as they absorb more and more carbon dioxide, and the entire food chain will suffer (when shellfish can no longer make shells because of acidity).
ResponderEliminarSecond problem with the arguments here: Once you start pumping massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the air to cool the atmosphere, you're committed to it ... because the moment you stop, the climate goes right back to where it was. If CO2 concentrations at that point are much higher than they are today (and they will be, if we focus on geoengineering instead of on carbon emissions cuts), we are in for a heck of a lot of rapid, dramatic warming that till that point had been delayed.
Third problem: if much of the world isn't comfortable relying on the advice of thousands of the world's top climate scientists (ie, that we need to start cutting carbon emissions ASAP), how many of you will be comfortable with an international body of some kind (or maybe even a few countries acting unilaterally) agreeing to a massive geoengineering experiment? Are you willing to risk that your part of the world won't suffer severe drought (one likely side-effect) as a result? Are you willing to consign another region to that drought, with possibly deadly consequences?
It's funny how so many people who label climate change science with the epithet "religion" are willing to play God themselves with a giant geoengineering experiment of many unknown consequences.
It's interesting that neither of the two scientists who you rely on in the book seem to agree that we should go with geoengineering now as the cheapest option. Caldeira obviously wants drastic cuts in carbon emissions, and in his post here, Myhrvold advocated geoengineering as a "last resort" or "insurance in case we don
ResponderEliminarLG@27: You're close. People are saying, "Quick, rip the stove out and cook only with a large magnifying glass!"
ResponderEliminarAnd that's not an acceptable solution, either.
Is the Earth the warmest it has ever bee? Absolutely NOT. My geology training included the FACT backed up by the geologic record that glaciers extended almost all the way to the equator and have virtually disappeared over the past few million years.. Since the last major glacier (Ice Age) the Earth has been warming for tens of thousands of years. Looking at the last 100 years and trying to predict the future? You might as well read tea leaves. Wall Street, and the politicians that like to tax Wall Street, see gold the new carbon economy, and the Environemntalist get to see and end to oil exploration and desecration of the Earth by man. A win-win, right? Let nature decide if man is welcome on the earth and lets stay the course!
ResponderEliminarWhat I dont understand is, does it have to be one or the other, cant it be both?
ResponderEliminarIt is unrealistic to cut down carbon dioxides significantly in the near future. But do we really just want to build more and more ships and more and more rockets to mitigate the screw-ups we make?
And considering all the other negative consequences of fossil fuels. Dependence on foreign fuel for the US. Ocean acidification. Conflicts. And remember, oil is running out, maybe not in the near future, but eventually.
Denmark is the worlds 41st largest exporter of oil, okay, 41st is not great, but it is still an export [1]. But Denmark is still very focused on renewable energy. According to the UN 17% of the Danes energy consumption is renewable. And climbing. 20% by 2011, and 30% by 2020. There are 5,300 wind turbines, one per 1,000 Danes.
I think in 50 years time, 100% of the energy will be renewable. But only if we decide to go that way. And we need to go that way. In the short run, let us consider geo-engineering. Medium term, use renewables.One does not exclude the other. The battle starts today. The prospects are dim, but fortunately, we have two strong horses to bet on. Lowering emissions and geo-(re)engineering.
If we do not act on both fronts now, our children will be embarrassed about our actions. Climate change is the single biggest threat to man kind in recent history, maybe with the exception of total nuclear war. Nothing has the potential for killing more people, forcing more people from their home and loved ones, and causing more damage to buildings and other assets, than - global warming.
Let us hope, no, let us pray for a strong reduction in emissions from the Cop15 summit. No, better yet, send a letter to your local congressman or senator, requiring action now. Letting our children pick up the bill, is not how I was raised.
[1] cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2176rank.html
[2] en.cop15.dk/climate+facts/research/17+per+cent+renewable+energy+%E2%80%93+and+on+the+way+up
I have not read the book this article is referring to, but strictly from an economics/investment perspective, it seems to me a highly speculative conclusion that geoengineering is the cheapest long term solution.
ResponderEliminarIf the goal is to prevent the potential cataclysm global warming presents, all long term costs of every solution must be examined. For example, I find it unlikely that continuously spraying the atmosphere would not affect ecosystems and human health, both of which would be costs directly associated with this solution, and there are many more similar examples.
Additionally, by "fixing" global warming with a bandaid in the short term, there is no incentive to treat the growing wound beneath it. If the bandaid fails for whatever reason, the cataclysm we face today could pale in comparison to that future tragedy, thus making this a speculative solution.
The prudent investor would minimize risk and choose short term loss for long term stability and gain.
Your reasoning runs aground on the rocks of reality when you use "all else equal". It's not all equal. You are neglecting many things-- off the top of my head, that list includes the costs of ocean acidification, the costs of acid rain that will result from all that sulfur dioxide coming down, the effects on crop production due to reduced sunlight. This kind of narrow analysis, where you magically get to hold all other factors constant than the ones you are varying, does not belong to the domain of real-world problem-solving.
ResponderEliminarMr Levitt, any rational person would agree with your argument, but the people that are criticizing you are pseudo-religious fanatics. In their eyes you have committed blasphemy, and thus all your arguments will fall on deaf ears. It's like trying to argue with a brick. Just accept that some things cannot be changed and save your energy for something else.
ResponderEliminarIt is interesting that the first economic question is:
ResponderEliminar1. If the Earth
None of the above speaks to one of the major points of criticism - the "false consensus" in the 70s that there was a global cooling trend and the parallel to the real consensus of the global warming trend now.
ResponderEliminarWhy would you choose to include this in your chapter if for no other reason but to (dishonestly) discredit the current consensus on global warming?
Frankly, it appears there is a lot of cherry-picking going on here in order to support the case for geo-engineering. There are certainly valid concerns coming from your critics. Instead of addressing these concerns analytically, you have painted your critics as having political motives to challenge your assumptions.
By definition, SuperFreakonomics seeks to challenge conventional wisdom. Thus, such a challenge should be able to withstand counter-challenges. So far, I don
You are treading close to the line of being a crank. You may have crossed it by somehow believing that you know better than the thousands of scientists who actually work in the field.
ResponderEliminarI've read the chapter. Your responses distort what you actually wrote, as in that you didn't mean to say global cooling - which was NEVER a consensus at all - was equal to global warming when that's the plain reading of the words you wrote. You say you meant the 5% catastrophe risk to be scary but you say instead something like "what are we to make of this risk," which belittles it. You misstate over and over basic facts that are known to the science community.
Some of what you have written is indeed posing the question as economists do, but you don't go far enough. If you want to look at Net Present Value of investments designed to mitigate global catastrophic events, then do so--but don't do it half baked.
ResponderEliminarIf you're gonna propose that the NPV of misting SO2 up in the atmosphere is positive, then let's see some numbers on the probability of global catastrophe(s) going down, costs involved, probabilities of unknown risks, probabilites of failure and realistic cost estimates to go with all those probabilities. If you're arguing that other solutions than emmission reductions have more favourable NPV's then lets see it. I don't buy Nick Stern's $1 trillion estimate, and I doubt very, very much that you can spread around and effective amount of SO2 for a couple hundred million dollars. Show me the numbers. I don't think you can.
Other comments about Levitt's and Dubner's rhetorical devices and sources:
ResponderEliminar1) For many readers of superfreakanomics, the "revelation" that water is the strongest greenhouse gas will convince them that climate science is overlooking big pieces of the puzzle. That would be the wrong impression. They take the perfectly mundane observation that cloud characterizations are problematic for the models and make it seem like it is the dagger at the heart of the understanding of anthropogenic climate change. An honest accounting would say that the positive feedback of water vapor is pretty well understood and that great efforts have been made to constrain the impact of the uncertainties resulting from cloud parametrizations. "Elephant in the room," my foot. It is not much of a story to say that "the IPCC says that climate sensitivity is quite uncertain (2. to 4.5C) and that much of this uncertainty results from cloud parametrizations." For some, this well-recognized, large uncertainty is another reason to encourage the study of geoengineering. What if the sensitivity is 4.5C for a doubling of CO2? Then we might have to geoengineer to avoid the worst impacts. Most mitigation planning uses the best estimate of 3C. But many advocates of geoengineering are not interested in actually acknowledging that 4.5C is a possibility because they really want to avoid the restrictions on CO2 that such a sensitivity would imply. So, these revelations are again coated to go down easy in the denier community.
2) So Teller was a really bright guy and Wood is a really bright guy and Myhrvold is a really bright guy. Bright is good. Right is better. Teller was wrong about atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and Operation Plowshare. Myhrvold's cartoons about the role of particles, clouds, CO2 and models carry enough truth to be of rhetorical use in dising climate science but do not communicate about the state of the art. It is really interesting to see a basic denial stance with respect to climate science used to advance geoengineering. The irony is that geoengineering will probably only proceed when folks have enough confidence in the models to use their predictions to show that the experiments will not end badly.
Regards,
Chuck Wilson
Golden colorado
I agree with the critics -- you seem so enamored of the technology that you ignore your own research on unintended consequences. Humans are pretty bad at thinking really long-term and world-scale. Most of those nuclear scientists in the 50s really didn't worry about meltdowns and radioactive waste. Geoengineering is very much that kind of thing, with potential for huge mistakes that could affect the whole world.
ResponderEliminarUncritical enthusiasm from people who are supposed to know better is really disappointing.
This is a rather revisionist account of what is actually written in the chapter. It's much harder to disagree with this post. Except for I disagree that "environmentalists" are interested in answering a moral question rather than an economic question. Geoengineering is a possible short-term fix, but we need a long-term solution to the problem that doesn't require reducing the light for plant growth acidifying the ocean etc. Everywhere else you argue that incentives work and yet for some reason you don't think carbon taxes or cap and trade will work. In the chapter you confuse the international negotiations to set a carbon emissions reduction scheme in place with the individual reaction to the incentives once in place. There are three big players in the international negotiations - US, EU, and China. Agreement between them might not be as hard as you think, as all three have committed or are close to committing to reduce emissions.
ResponderEliminarThe economics in this chapter is worse IMO than the natural science (additionally, the way taxes on pollution work is also described incorrectly and the term "externality" is misapplied to the impacts of a volcano among other errors).
stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2009/10/freaking-out-about-superfreakonomics.html
While I would agree that geoengineering deserves consideration, as a solution to the problem of global warming it's not quite so simple as you suggest. It's na
ResponderEliminarReducing carbon emissions will cost a trillion per year, eh? Wow. How insane. I guess in 1890 you would have been warning that any attempt to replace horses would result in a trillion per year loss, due to putting all those blacksmiths out of work.
ResponderEliminarIt is because of neandrathal positions like this that China, not the U.S., is putting in more power efficient coal plants, researching electric cars, and preparing itself to PROFIT from the Green Tech industrial revolution - cause weird as it sounds, new tecnnologies replaceing old ones actually make money. Meanwhile, betting the house on the most unlikely solution is a form of fantasy that is typical of the Freaks.
You still haven't addressed why the first page and a half of the chapter pumps up the "global cooling" denial, which (if you believe what you say here) we can all agree is highly irresponsible. If you want to play contrarian games with a question like "Who creates more value, a pimp or a stock broker?" that's fine. If you want to tackle serious issues, don't act like widely discredited theories deserve top billing. What I suspect is that you WANTED the criticism, WANTED the opportunity to fight over it, and WANTED to use the stir to sell more books. But I'm a cyinic.
ResponderEliminar@Nick
ResponderEliminarShow me numbers that prove it won't cost $1 trillion. What are the costs associated with eliminating carbon emissions? Quantify for me how that will affect a global economy rocked on it's heels.
See, the thing that the AGW crowd is good at it is providing pseudo-proof with statistics that are manipulated to show what they want them to.
My guess is you can't quantify a single thing. Seriously, it's just like religion. It's a method of control. Only your bible is written by scientists who have shouted down anybody who questions their findings.
Who's loudest wins, eh?
Don't worry - in a hundred million years (which is but a speck in the grand scheme of things), the Earth will have long shed all signs that humans ever existed in the first place. After all, it has survived conditions that are multiple times worse than anything that people will ever devise or will be able to carry out.
ResponderEliminarAbout that trillion dollar a year price tag - hmm. The cost of deregulating the financial market has so far been about a 12 trillion dollar loss in the asset wealth of Americans, as the housing pop and the stock market collapse destroyed their savings. So U. of Chicago financial engineering, a la Eugene Fama, has cost us a trillion per year for the last 12 years.
ResponderEliminarI can't wait to hear how all that U. of Chi economics is terrible. Next post, maybe, Steve?
You are offering a painkiller for the fracture! You think that subduing the symptoms (reducing the earth temprature) would take care of the underlying issues? Surely not.
ResponderEliminarHaving a broken bone but no pain would only allow you to indulge further and cause irreversible damage (like its not already late). I would say, let people fix the broken bones first, i.e. find a permanent solution to the global warming, only then there is no harm popping a couple of pain killers too. You are using economics to let people off the hook here by suggesting only symptomatic treatment. You should know better how to use your tools (economics) than this.
Let me think for a bit as someone who you guys really do put forth in the book (which I read promptly after buying on Tuesday). The overall case in this book is people act on incentives, a hypothesis that I totally agree with in almost all cases. Altruism is certainly over cited, in my humble opinion.
ResponderEliminarSo I would want this question tackled: who benefits from global warming? We certainly have seen the onslaught of negative externalities of such a scenario. But one certainly cannot deny positive externalities as well. No scientist can assume it's all bad. To me, it seems obvious that countries beyond the tropical regions would benefit from such a scenario, so large industrial countries like Russia and I posit even China would want Global Warming to occur because it negatively affects the competition but opens up possibilities for Siberian regions and mountainous regions of China. This doesn't even take into account short-term economic effects, which I think have already been illustrated.
So, from an economic standpoint, what does Russia and China have to gain from fighting Global Warming? Frankly, I see no incentive. Thus, why should other nations act in ways that may be ecomonically detrimental? That's an idea worth exploring.
Cheap and fast is not necessarily best. Your geoengineering may look on paper and may even work, but what unintended, unforeseen side effects might they have? The surest and safest way to counter the effect of carbon emissions is simply to reduce them to safe levels.
ResponderEliminarAnd I'm surprised that economists would make such a simplistic claim as "reducing carbon emissions is expensive, with a price tag of at least $1 trillion per year". First of all, $1 trillion is what one country alone, the US, managed to squander on the Iraq war - so it is certainly not an unaffordable sum for the entire world. Second, the money would not simply disappear from taxpayers' pockets into a black hole; there would be a substantial return on investment in the form of new job creation, scientific research, technological spinoffs, peaceful international cooperation, etc.
One thing that I think is HORRIBLY MISSING from your analysis is a question of the long term impacts of geoengineering. While I can't deny (nor confirm, for that matter) the effectiveness of sulfur specifically in the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, there were certainly much longer lasting environmental effects. The lake, for example, became severely acidified over the next decade.
ResponderEliminarNow, what happens if we do something like that to, say, the entire oceanic ecosystem? The problem that a large number of critics have with your chapter is that is simply doesn't do enough research into the subject. Especially considering that the question here is so long-term relative to most questions, the fact that you're ignoring the serious ecological changes (which would NOT be relevant in any sort of CO2 emission reduction, as a. we'd be releasing more CO2 under your plan b) we know what the lower levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were like prior to us releasing it). You pose the idea of geoengineering as almost a magic wand capable of fixing it. And as some other have pointed out, IV having some sort of white paper model means little to nothing, speaking as an engineer.
Further, you also don't seem to weight the political implications of massive geoengineering. Whereas cap and trade would have some political obstacles (thanks, conservatives!), the geopolitical arena would go batshit insane if the US or any one group decided to just hurl sulfur into the atmosphere. While it would be difficult to implement cap and trade in the US, it would be nigh on impossible to get away with what you are proposing.
How about ocean acidity, or the hole in the ozone layer? There are more costs to carbon dioxide emissions than simply global warming. Geoengineering does not deal with this, and neither are all of the political issues adressed.
ResponderEliminarIn your book you quote Myhrvold and Wood as they slam climate models as "crude" and accuse climate scientists of intentionally biasing their models -a serious charge you take no effort to confirm or refute.
ResponderEliminarHowever, the projected effectiveness of the "stratoshield" geo-engineering plan is based entirely on simulations using the exact same climate models.
So which is it? Are the models too crude and biased? Or do they show that pumping sulfur into the stratosphere will help cool the planet? The eruption of Pinatubo is not a thorough support for your position: there is a big difference between a onetime occurrence and a recurring process... you can't establish a trend from one data point.
Either the models work or they don't... you can't have it both ways.
Climate control will be a perpetual guessing game considering the number of varaibles at play. It may be true we've warmed the planet, but how cool does it have to be before we go back to the days when famine stalked the land due to frost in the grain producing regions of the northern hemisphere? It's been offered that for all we know were it not for what warming could be attributable to AGW we should be sinking into the ice age predicted in the 70s. Afterall, we are geologically still in a planetary ice age when one takes into account the physical locations and arrangements of the planet's continental landmasses.
ResponderEliminarEven without the issue of CO2 and warming, the emissions that industry creates as a result of petro-fuels is worthy of significant effort to contain. Even with out the issue of acidification, the oceans are already subject to chemical run-off, over-harvesting and floating plastic gyres of trash. I'd rather be able to invest in something pragmatic and clearly beneficial rather than focus of the possibility that winters might be a bit warmer and the arctic ocean will become a prolific nursery for plankton and dependent sealife.
The days of buring petro-fuels are numbered anyhow as fission, fusion and space based solar are clearly the ways of the future. An industrial economy that is productive, including in bringing more efficiency and new energy technologies to market, and and not completely hobbled by uncompromising ideological positions is the surest way to get there.
Let's continue the quiz:
ResponderEliminar1. Government projects, no matter how well intentioned, can sometimes have unintended consequences that completely dwarf the intended effects.
TRUE/FALSE
2. A plan to pump millions of tons of sulfur dioxide through an 18 mile tube into our upper atmosphere might, just might, have disastrous unintended consequences.
TRUE/FALSE
Dubner and Levitt clearly believe the answer to the first question is "true". Oddly, they seem to believe the answer to the second question is "false". And they seem genuinely puzzled that anyone disagree with them. Quite odd.
Here is at least one problem with Levitt
ResponderEliminarSteve,
ResponderEliminarI believe that you are not being entirely honest about what you advocate. The stratospheric geoengineering solution requires that sulfur be continuously added to the atmosphere in increasing amounts to counteract the increasing CO2. In addition to ocean acidification such an approach leads to increasingly hazy atmosphere, one which potentially ruins other engineering solution to the problem such as concentrated PV or solar thermal. To avoid warming, sulfur addition must continue until CO2 concentrations return to 350 ppm. In fact, it would be come ever more dangerous to stop adding sulfur as temperatures will increase very rapidly when sulfur additions end. So, there are two possibilities: we burn all the coal and continue to add sulfur until the natural CO2 sinks do the job (500 - >1000 years) or we engineer another solution to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Currently there is no inexpensive engineering approaches to the later.
A fast scan of these comments indicates that your critics are not interested in halting global warming. Instead, they want carbon mitigation. They fear that your cheap cooling solution would halt any possibility of carbon mitigation.
ResponderEliminarTo which a reasonable observer might ask, "So what?" Is there another problem, other than global warming, that carbon mitigation solves and cheap cooling doesn't? Something a little less obviously bogus than ocean acidification?
Whatever this stealth problem is, let's drag it out into the open and start quantifying it.
CO2 levels of 550ppm in the atmosphere could cause an environmental castastrophe even if we manage to prevent the overall warming effect through geo-engineering. TRUE/FALSE?
ResponderEliminarInteresting discussion
ResponderEliminarS&S,
ResponderEliminarI admit that I haven't read the book yet, but I do have two serious problems with what I read above:
1. A trillion/yr to reduce CO2? Not by any studies that I've seen. Indeed even a study produced by the government a few years ago when the repubs were in charge and widely cited by many conservatives had a total figure that seemed unpalatable, until priced per/person/yr, about $100 (US only), not totally insignificant, but way below your figure. And that's not counting beneficial effects of kicking the carbon habit (e.g. reducing our dependency on foreign oil, and environmental benefits like Appalachian cleanup).
2. It sounds like you guys relied heavily upon the information from one group that's proposing a particular type of solution for Climate Change, without trying to verify that information from other sources. Of course these people are going to espouse their own solution. Your job (should you have accepted it) would have been to verify it's practicality with others.
Overall, I have to agree with the poster above. Are these techno-solutions worth investigating? Absolutely! Are they worth swallowing whole at this early stage of study? Absolutely NOT! Whether you say you want to or not, it sounds like you're mainly just giving attempted ammo to people who want to delay taking action by promising that success is just around the corner. Sorry but that sounds just like W on Iraq & Afghanistan for too many years.
But yeah, I should read the book first. I enjoyed Freakonomics, so maybe I'll do that. I'll probably try to read an excerpt from the Climate chapter first though. If it's too biased then I probably won't want to 'endorse' the book by buying it.
I am pretty disappointed at how you and S. Dubner have chosen to deal with this debate. It is really beyond me why you simply refuse to answer to the main critical comments that have been made regarding your chapter.
ResponderEliminarYou continue taking a defensive and arrogant attitude, and I think I will keep waiting for the two of you to simply acknowledge: We screwed up in that chapter; we gave the impression that we believe in things we do not actually believe; we inadvertently gave credence to pseudo-science in the 20th century, making it equivalent to modern science; and we did not provide a complete discussion of the relevant alternatives to address global warming.
While you may sell a lot of books, you continue to damage your reputation among a lot of well-respected scientists. I hope that still means something to you.
Is carbon dioxide heating the planet?
ResponderEliminarFalse
All the rest is therefore irrelevant.
The Stern Review has been used to impose carbon trading, Stern now advises global companies on carbon trading.
Sooo let me get this right, you want to create giant storm clouds and pour tons upon tons of sulfur into the air but have a problem with reducing carbon emissions. Sounds pretty crazy to me. Don't you think some kind of serious financial and health issues will be caused by these giant sulfur storm clouds. But I ain't no scientist, economist or even got good grammer. What do I know?
ResponderEliminarMight it have been more effective to lead off with your last point, "We are answering a different question than our critics," rather than burying it at the end?
ResponderEliminarThe people you're responding to don't appear to be very diligent about carefully reading what you've written before formulating a response of their own -- pretty typical for an argument on the Internet, in my experience.
You pose this question:
ResponderEliminar"3. Economists estimate that the costs of reducing carbon emissions are likely to be upwards of $1 trillion per year."
But the answer is: FALSE
Mckinsey and Co (along with many others) have been carrying out rigorous analysis on GHG Abatement for years. Their recent study, "Pathways to a Low Carbon Economy V. 2" points to costs of around 300 billion euros by 2030.
Balance that against the global collapse of ocean fisheries caused by CO2 acidification, which is just one small facet of the CO2 problem, and already it looks like global GHG mitigation is an overall neutral cost.
mckinsey.com/clientservice/ccsi/pathways_low_carbon_economy.asp
So this type of environmentalist is Mr. Wilson to global capitalism's Denace the Menace, and having caught Denise in a seemingly incontrovertible moral trap, Mr. Wilson doesn't want someone to point out an easy fix and have everyone else just lose interest. Policy hijinks ensue.
ResponderEliminarApologies if this has been said already-
ResponderEliminarGeo-engineering certainly DOES deserve a seat at the table, I doubt that ANY environmentalist believes otherwise.
The problem is that far too many people grab onto it as the primary solution, skipping right past the most obvious, which is simple restraint. If you doubt that, just look at the popularity of other "feel good solutions" like recycling and carbon offsets. People- at least North Americans are in deep-seated denial, and will grasp t any straws that come along- geoengineering is just way too "cool" an answer, and ends up stealing the show, because this is what people want to hear.
I really loved your first book, and was so excited about this one. Too bad, you have completely destroyed your impartiality with this one by not seeing this. You have lost a big fan.
The ocean acidification issue is really worth more than just a footnote. It's not very useful to keep the temperature at 1990 levels if we destroy the base of the food pyramid!
ResponderEliminarAlso, that $1 Trillion number is over many decades, and moving away from carbon-based fuels would likely have health benefits (reduced asthma and lung cancer, etc) that would make a substantial dent in the total cost, as would the economic efficiency gained by drastically more efficient machines.
I agree with many others here. Geoengineering is worth looking into, but it's not likely to be anything close to the best solution to the problem.
I agree that geoengineering belongs at table also, but the caveats must be watched.
ResponderEliminarFocusing only on the SO2 solution:
Coal usage specifically high sulphur coal would be considered more environmentally responsible than low sulfur as would emission controls on coal fired plants. Burning very high sulfur coal for geoengineering would be the mantra. By the way, this would be good for America's energy independence. Bad for natural gas for clean fuels [e.g. low sulfur diesel], ethanol additions, biodiesel and most EPA air mandates.
High SO2 comes with acid rain. Acid rain to deteriorate infrastructure including concrete and steel. Acid rain pollutes lakes killing fish changing habitats. Save man screw nature.
Rich
There are several disappointing things about your post. First, the critics of the chapter have pointed out a large number of errors and misrepresentations of science in your chapter on climate change. You have not addressed any of them, rather opting to brush them under the rug by creating your "quiz"
ResponderEliminarSecond, in discussions of your chapter, there have been many *scientific* criticisms of geoengineering presented, including ocean acidification and the likelihood of drastic climate change, even if the mean earth temperature remains the same. You do not address any of these, either, instead trying to paint the objections to geoengineering as based on a moral, rather than economic perspective on the issue.
I do think that some of your critics succumbed to ad hominem reasoning, rather than substantive analysis of your arguments, claiming that you're trying to be controversial to sell more books. I don't think it makes a very good argument, but by failing to respond to the *substantive* criticism of your work, and rather accusing the critics of not thinking like economists, you seem to have adopted the same tactic.
The cloud idea is worth more study and testing. The sulfur idea seems very risky in terms of unintended consequences.
ResponderEliminarBut all but one comment overlooks the other reason to control fossil fuel consumption.
First, the demand is rising and the supply is limited. We can debate the time table of these curves, but the eventuality is unavoidable. We cannot continue burning non-renewable carbon at the present rate.
Second, there are political problems where there is an abundance of valuable resources in one place and demand for them in another. Dictatorship and war correlates with the distribution of oil resources. If demand for these resources decreased, would there still be the same problems in the Mideast for example?
No one ever looks at the root cause of all our environmental problems - population. Every discussion of these dilemmas should begin with recognizing the role of overpopulation.
@Justin - Lighten up, Francis. World isn't going to end tomorrow, nor will it end 10 years from now. Nor 50 or a 100. I am not sure that is your primary fear, anyway. My bet is that what you are really afraid of is that capitalism will still be around that long.
ResponderEliminarIs the much we know about Geo-Engineering sufficienct, on the balance, to allow it's use? Are we prepared for the externalities that are bound to result?
ResponderEliminar"this is the kind of banter that entertains millions daily. it is greatly improved by focusing on the motives behind the participants' utterances rather than their truth or falsity, because the latter is usually too obvious to be interesting. but the motive fallacy creates an infuriating diversion when the original topic is important and correct opinion is a matter of dispute between well informed people-as with politics"-jamie whyte (in this case, global warming).
ResponderEliminarof COURSE they're trying to sell books. that's why they wrote one. the last time i checked, people have been sold on far worse claims than a differing idea on global warming solutions, an issue that is neither a moral or political one. then again, it is fun to watch people out 'right' each other.
You are correct that you and your critics are answering two different questions. You are not correct, though, in the question your critics are asking. You ask "What is the best way to cool the Earth in a hurry?" Your critics ask "What is the best way to cool the Earth?" Don't confuse this question with the moral dimensions. After all, if pumping sulfur into the atmosphere could reduce global warming cheaply and without huge negative consequences, wouldn't it be immoral to oppose such action?
ResponderEliminarThe scientific blogging community has harshly criticized you not because you focus on the economics of the issue rather than the moral aspects, but because you get the underlying science wrong.
For instance, let's say that injecting sulfur into the stratosphere could stabalise or even reduce the average global temperature. Is this the same as stabilising temperature through reductions in carbon emissions? Greenhouse gasses increase the average global temperature. But the temperature highs and lows are not affected evenly. Greenhouse gasses prevent heat from radiating away from the Earth, so temperatures do not get as low at night. The high temperature during the day is also increased, but not as much. So while the average temperature goes up, the variability in temperature goes down.
Guess what happens when you shade the planet? You decrease the highs that are reached during the day more than you reduce the lows at night. So you have brought the global average back down to normal, but you have further decreased the temperature variability. This is true for temperature variability from day to night as well as from summer to winter. A climate in which the temperature fluctuates from 60 to 90 during a day is different from one which fluctuates from 70 to 80 even though they both have an average temperature of 75.
Geo-engineering is fundamentally different than emission reduction for this as well as many other reasons, some of which have already been covered in the comments. Geo-engineering is not even a temporary fix for climate change. You can argue about whether or not it is worth doing, but you cannot compare it to reducing carbon emissions.
You are being criticized not for talking a different language than your critics (economic vs. moral) but for getting the science wrong.
Geo engineering does not result in massive increases in government. Every solution I've seen proposed by "environmentalists" does. I can't figure out how massively increased government is a good thing, but apparently the "environmentalists" think it's nearly as important as the end goal itself.
ResponderEliminarNick
You continue to misrepresent Weitzman
ResponderEliminarEnvironmentalists have exposed themselves for what they are ... people who want to extract as much money as possible from Americans, for as long as possible, and impose as many restrictions as possible on Americans.
ResponderEliminarIf they were REALLY concerned with getting the earth cooled off, at a relatively low cost, they would NOT now be so incensed at this chapter in the book. That a relatively inexpensive solution is at hand, and can be implemented any time we wish, contradicts their message that it will be hideously expensive and fundamentally alter our lifestyles, to remedy global warming.
They have revealed the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of their schemes. By enduring this criticism by them, Mr Levitt, you have done all of humanity a service ... we now KNOW, beyond any doubt, that what environmentalists REALLY want, is NOT a cooled planet, but our money and extended control over our lives.
Thank you, Dr. Levitt.
ResponderEliminarThose who misunderstand you do so because they are predisposed not to listen to those who question the environmental dogma.
This shows that the far left and the far right have something in common: they both act on emotion, ignoring rational arguments.
I suggest this link for a sober look at the issue. I also suggest that if you can't say you might be wrong, you should stay out of the discussion.
ResponderEliminargeocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html
Here is your test back....oy....!
1. The Earth has gotten substantially warmer over the past 100 years.
TRUE. But this conceals some valuable data. If you only look at 100 years, you can't see the long term trends.
2. Even if we were to immediately and permanently stabilize our carbon emissions at the current levels....
MAYBE TRUE. But only if the climate models are correct. So far they have been shakey.
3. When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it spewed millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Scientists believe that the haze generated by the eruption reflected some of the Sun
Wow, "geoengineering could solve the problem at a fraction of the cost" (?) This sounds too much like the 1950's mentality behind predictions of nuclear powered cars and cities on the moon. Or, even the more recent nonsense that genetic engineering will solve world hunger. You may know economics, but your gullibility index is frighteningly high when it comes to science and technology.
ResponderEliminarWe're going to have to face the fact that, according to the best information we have, humans have CAUSED this problem with a form of global geoengineering--the burning of fossil fuels for the past 150 years or so. More pie-in-the-sky geoengineering projects are not the answer; you can't show that they will work, or that it won't be like Boston's Big Dig when it comes to cost.
The only real answer is to stop the massive burning of fossil fuels we do to power our civilzation. That is guaranteed to work. There are nearly an unlimited number of ways we can do this while minimizing the impact to people's lives. The sooner we stop engaging in over-intellectualized denial-speak from people who have no idea what they're talking about, the sooner we can all grow up and really face the problem.
Look, if you're overweight, the best known treatment is to eat less, eat better food, and exercise more--yet billions are spent each year on diet fads, machines, and pills that don't work. Likewise, if you want to stop global warming, the best way to do that is to stop doing what caused global warming in the first place. Why do you spend so much effort in avoiding the obvious?
Any enemy of Krugman is a friend o'mine. Keep on freakin'!
ResponderEliminarMr. Obama is engaging in wishful thinking when he says the non-believers in Warming Doomsday are "being marginalized."
Check this funny video of dead economist Adam Smith ranting about Obama's energy speech yesterday.
02e56fa.netsolhost.com/blog1/index.php/2009/10/24/adam-smith-rants-about-obama-s-energy-sp
Are you truly asking "what is the cheapest, fastest way to quickly cool the Earth," without that decision being colored by possible "moral/ethical issues?"
ResponderEliminarBecause you've missed an immediately available solution that requires no additional investment whatsoever...
Simply launch and then detonate all existing nuclear weapons. The resulting nuclear winter will dramatically cool the earth for years, if not decades.
So why didn't you include this zero-cost, extremely quick and feasible solution in your book, if, as you claim, cost and speed were your only criteria?
Derik @ #19
ResponderEliminarAs Levitt
"I can
ResponderEliminarYou write: "That is why someone like Ken Caldeira can agree with the facts presented in our chapter, say that the chapter is written in good faith, but still disagree with the conclusion that geoengineering is the answer." This is as misleading as your original quotes. Caldeira states that although the sentence fragments of his you use are accurate, taken out of context they misrepresent his views. He says he believes the opposite of what you say he believes.
ResponderEliminarAs for GW itself, your quiz asks how much readers know about climate science. The real question should be whether two mid level and freaky economists know climate science better than the world's best climate scientists. Not likely.
"I have to be honest and say that I just don
ResponderEliminarThe dust up is about how geo-engineering effects people's perception of the global warming problem. Such a solution lessens the perceived necessity of reducing carbon emissions. That's great, because reducing carbon would probably be expensive.
ResponderEliminarImagine, however, that there is some unforeseen problem with geoengineering (as seems quite likely, seeing as how the science of geoengineering is in it's infancy), and we have to stop the project. Because we didn't reduce carbon emissions in the intervening time period, we are right back where we started, except now the time frame for avoiding serious climate related problems is even worse.
Geoengineering, then, is only a "better" solution insofar as it actually works - that is to say that its benefits exceed its costs. Because the true costs of geoengineering are unknown, it's premature (at best) to conclude that we should pursue it to the exclusion of cutting carbon emissions.
In every other context I'm aware of, geoengineering has been proposed as a fallback plan in case we can't cut carbon emissions fast enough. Based on my understanding of the Levitt/Dubner position from this post, it seems like you are advocating that we promote plan B to plan A status and forget about reducing carbon emissions.
Challenging the status quo is well and good, but methinks the authors doth promote contrarianism too much.
This is a great post. It is so amazing how we seem so fixated on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to "save the planet".
ResponderEliminarThink of a similar environmental issue - tress and paper. The basic argument is to stop using paper to save the trees, when it is really equally feasible to plant more trees and manage our forests.
Why in the global warming debate is the only option to stop emitting CO2? It actually is a renewable resource even if we could stop emitting it through our cars we certainly can't through our mouths - will that be next?
I just bought the book last Friday and am yet to crack it open. However, I have been following the climate change debates for a long time and there is one conclusion I have come to. Let us all continue to think of ways to cool the earth and prevent the catastrophic results of pollution, wasteful and irresponsible living.
ResponderEliminarAlthough I will take the stand, just to be a Devil's Advocate, that our living styles haven't really been destructive of the environment. I rest this statement on the fact that we as a civilization or a human race didn't know better. Now we know more than what we knew twenty or thirty years ago. In addition, we are today in possession of better data and facts. Taking this logic further, there is a lot more for us to learn about our planet and its responses; thus my opening paragraph.
But let us not stop implementing the various ideas by using our the current state of incomplete knowledge. I feel we will never know everything we need to know. But let us act now by bringing to fruition the geoengineering ideas mentioned in the blog. If these don't work, we can scratch them and try something else; armed now with a bit more insight into what approaches have a higher probability of success.
But let us act now and try something!
Yes, I answered true to all your questions.
ResponderEliminarHowever, don't forget, we are in an interglacial period.
Human evolution to our current homo sapiens sapiens level probably depended on our homonid ancestor's adaptation to the ice age glaciations, the upright posture made evolutionarily successful by the aridity of African savanna that had previously been forested areas, the opposable thumb due to tree climbing, the global tectonic plate vulcanism that created the Great Rift Valley, the bottleneck that reduced human population levels to the mere thousands about 70,000 years ago, the Great Leap Forward that allowed us to speak in complex thoughts, and the lowered sea levels due to glaciation that allowed sequential migrations out of Africa that wound up populating the world with US, the world's most dangerous creatures, that eliminated our less communicative homonin relatives.
The modern effects of human caused global climate change, and the positive feedback effect of albedo reflection temperature changes caused by the diminished ice cap are not yet truly calculable. Supercomputer models are not yet able to handle the data to any high degree of certainty.
The earth has been through periods of higher CO2 levels.
The earth has also been through periods of complete glaciation, the snowball earth, that allowed the development of primitive organisms that ultimately provided higher levels of oxygen that allowed our type of organisms, our ancestors, to survive, prosper, and evolve.
There is no guarantee that the human species will survive.
The natural paleolithic human communal unit seems to be about 150 people. We are now on a world exponentially populated by Billions of people. We do not yet know how to handle this situation.
The earth will do fine for approximately the next five billion years before the sun's nuclear furnace runs out.
The adventure is not yet over. Our human self aware consciousness is part of the evolution of the universe.
We do not yet know if Ray Kurzweil's singularity will come to pass before we self destruct.
Perhaps our current great challenge is how we deal with our waste products, much like how do yeast cells deal with the waste product of alcohol that winds up producing a fine wine.
I don't know.
On December 10, Obama will receive his award in Oslo, just in time to energize the
ResponderEliminarReasoned as your response may be, I see a crucial gap. The long term impact of these geo-engineering solutions is not well known. In such a scenario, promoting them as a super-solution can only be extremely cavalier or extremely stupid. Take your pick.
ResponderEliminarYes, the goal is to cool the Earth quickly. But an obvious unstated caveat is to do so with least ill-effects. As many have already said, the approach should not be to keep adding nuts and bolts, but to get the Earth as close to its natural state, as soon as possible.
The figure I used to hear for geoengineering was in the hundreds of billions per year at least; smaller than the cost of doing with CO2 reductions, but much greater than "a few hundred million". The cost figure cited sounds like a real low-ball.
ResponderEliminarGood to see all you guy's rivited to climate change! for a while I thought I was alone!
ResponderEliminarNice to see so many " Experts" placing thier knowledge on
line. Seems to me I may be out of my dept.
Be nice to speak to you guy's from time to time as I also
posses a limited knowledge of interest.
Please respond to the ocean acidification concern.
ResponderEliminarAnd could you please clarify whether or not you think we should be making reduction efforts while we research and implement geo-engineering? Do you think the answer is "geo-engineering" or "geo-engineering coupled with reduction?"
And to put things in terms of your "fact quiz," the people who disagree with you disagree with your assessment of the relative costs of reduction and geo-engineering. Compared to a world with substantial reduction, a world with a geo-engineering solution has to factor in the cost of increased ocean acidification, increased and more long term climate change (the climate will have the same mean temperature, but it will change quite a bit, increasingly more so as more and more SO2 has to be pumped to balance out more and more CO2), coordination problems (that climate change will favor some and hurt others, who presumably will raise the cost of implementation by resisting it), and the possibility of catastrophic and rapid temperature change if something interrupts the feed of SO2 to the atmosphere over the next few thousand years.
ResponderEliminarGeo-engineering and not reducing CO2 is significantly more costly than the cost of running an SO2 pumping hose. Since your critics think that is what you are advocating, they would take umbrage with your "true/false, there is a 500 million dollar solution" claim. Now if you are just advocating geo-engineering as a stopgap while we continue reduction efforts, your quiz works a lot better.
In New Zealand introduced rabbits quickly became a problem because they ate everything in sight. So clever people introduced stoats, weasels and ferrets to control the rabbits. This had the unfortunate effect of decimating the indigenous bird population, many of which are flightless and easier prey than the rabbits. I am very wary of quick fix artificial solutions to man-made environmental disasters because they tend to have unforeseen consequences. Better to address the actual cause of the problem even though this may require greater effort.
ResponderEliminar@23
ResponderEliminarReally? Someone needs a thicker skin...
One last thing....
ResponderEliminarDoes anyone believe that injecting huge amounts of Sulfur Dioxide is a good idea? This pollutant is exactly what we want removed from smokestacks of power plants!
SO2 contributes to respiratory illness and aggravates existing heart and lung diseases and contributes to the formation of acid rain, damages trees, crops, historic buildings, and monuments; and makes soils, lakes, and streams acidic.
Who is behind this plan? Satan?
One problem with your analysis is what you leave out. I'm glad to see you admit that excess CO2 brings other problems, such as ocean acidification. However the effects of CO2 turning into carbonic acid are enough in my eyes to justify that $1 trillion price tag you cite.
ResponderEliminarWhat is so bad about a little acid? Well how about the potential extinction of every type of coral and shellfish that depends on a calcium carbonate shell? Followed by cascading extinctions among animals and plants that depend on them and the environments they helped create? And then we have the same acidification process happening on land. (In fact if we go with the sulfur dioxide solution you make that problem even worse!) What additional harm will the acid rain do?
So we can use geoengineering to address our temperature. And then we're hit by the next even bigger pollution problem that is even harder to deal with.
The post misses the point of global warming - the issue is not how much light the earth absorbs - we want the earth to absorb light to perform useful work (plants create sugar, solar energy creates electricity) - the issue is that CO2 prevents the planet from getting rid of its waste heat. As an extreme example the planet venus reflects almost all the light that hits it due to sulfurous clouds(99%), but the surface is still hot enough to melt lead due to its CO2 atmosphere. It seems to me there is just bad engineering due to a very simplistic analysis that fails to understand root causes - I fear the day of living in an earth with a dim noontime sky and reduced plant productivity - all just so we can continue to use cheap coal and oil.
ResponderEliminarA fast geo-engineering program sounds crazy. One of the theories of human-induced climate change is that it is doing it faster than nature normally does so the biology and evoultion can't keep up with it so we will have massive extinctions and crop failures. Farmers won't be able to guess what to plant next year. We'll have massive human migrations because the rain patterns will change abruptly. And polluting the atmosphere to counteract the effects of different pollution will have all sorts of unintended consequences.
ResponderEliminarSee the NOVA show about Global Dimming where it demonstrates how airliner contrails are actually masking the true effects of global warming.
Statisticians seem to ignore the real world when they crunch their numbers. A functioning rain forest doesn't magically reappear when it starts raining again somewhere.
The costs of not reducing pollution are probably in the trillions also (acid rain, mercury poisoning of the food chain, lung disease, etc). It's just that the polluters want to externalize the damages they cause so we end up paying for it instead of them.
Instead of using fossil fuels which adds carbon to the atmosphere, we can create biofuels from algae which sucks CO2 from the atmosphere so it's carbon neutral.
True, it will be very difficult to achieve coordinated global political action on climate change. But there are difficult political issues around geo-engineering too, as Ken Caldeira among others has pointed out - even if you accept the simplistic premise that the geoengineering projects you cite will in themselves be enough to deal with the climate problem. What right does one nation or group of nations have to alter the climate in a way which affect all nations? (As we believe the US and Europe have been doing since the industrial revolution through CO2 emissions.) Imagine that geo-engineering made things better in the northern hemisphere, but appeared to have a negative effect on India and Africa. How would that affect international relations?
ResponderEliminarSo how much does the albedo of the earth have to change to counteract the C02 added to the atmosphere? for example if you have to change the earths albedo by 10% then you have to take into account lost productivity of the earth's biosphere e.g. there will be 10% less food, wood and any other products that come from biological sources in addition to an effective 10% solar energy/renewable energy tax - it sounds like heaven for the fossil fuel based companies - maybe coal can get a tax break for releasing S02 into the atmosphere? we used to call that pollution, now we can call it global cooling... Are you the kind of guy who when he is driving down the road and his car is overheating he suggest just stopping every few miles to let the engine cool down? instead of fixing the radiator... because that is basically what your global cooling scheme is, reduce the planet's productivity so we can keep using "cheap" coal and gas....
ResponderEliminarFinally, there are other so called "long wavelength" geoengineering schemes that do not have quite such disastrous consequences, like seeding the ocean with iron to __increase__ biological activity and use the deep ocean as a carbon sink.... but maybe then again coal companies won't be able to call spewing SO2 an environmental tax credit, better stick with what makes them happy...
thank you for this article -- it makes the scope of the disagreement perfectly clear.
ResponderEliminarHere is why I continue to agree with Krugman et al: "Climate Change" is an umbrella term that refers to a lot more than just rising mercury in the global aggregate thermometer. You allude yourselves to ocean acidification, not to mention desertification, red tides, drought, etc. With carbon restrictions, we may not be able to reduce the number on that thermometer as quickly, but we also won't potentially make any of these related secondary problems worse. With sulfur-particulate spewing, the effects on these other problems are unpredictable.
Climate models are hard enough without having to decide whether decreased solar input will change net global wind flows and leave Kansas rainless.
Hey guys,
ResponderEliminarAs a geology major and economics enthusiast, I applaud your approach, but I think you will find that there are deeper problems with the types of geo-engineering solutions you propose. If I were a betting man, I would bet that pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere might cause a whole host of new problems which are just as bad as global warming.
What happened with CFSs is a great example- these are the stable and thus non-toxic molecules that were ubiquitous in many products for a long time in part because they were thought to be environmentally safe. It turns out that their stability enabled them to reach the stratosphere, where they reacted with uv light to destroy ozone. Even worse, the solid state chemistry that occurs on small particles near the poles (frozen sulfur dioxide I believe) increases the rate of this reaction, hence the seasonal ozone layer hole.
The climate system is a complex one, and we still don't understand it well enough to say what the second order effects of your proposed geo-engineering solutions may be. I think the safest solution is to pull the carbon out of the atmosphere, though my understanding is that this is still prohibitively expensive.
Man made global warming is a hoax. The sun warms the earth. The earth is in a cooling period, domineted by ocean currents and solar activity.
ResponderEliminarThere is absoultly no proof of man made global warming.
Name the scientific study that proves man made global warming.?You cna't because it does not exist.
Some of the comments say, "...bring earth back to normal..." What is normal?
ResponderEliminarTo misquote Darth Vader, "I find your plentitude of faith disturbing". Climate change is a real problem, with potentially catastrophic consequences. So far, we agree. However, I'm nervous about what happens with geoengineering. It's certainly worth experimenting with, and people already have been (it appears that just dumping iron into the oceans isn't going to work), but there's no guarantees that (a) it's going to achieve the desired results, or (b) it's not going to achieve undesired results.
ResponderEliminarWe know that putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is almost certainly bad. (There are other reasons why we would want to move away from fossil fuels, of course.) Therefore, it seems to me to make sense that we discourage that. Right now, it's an externality, and the usual way to deal with market externalities is to use governmental action to internalize them. (This has worked well for pollution, for example. Make it expensive to pollute and people will find ways, some of them ingenious, to avoid polluting.)
I join with others in being amazed that you seem to be disregarding unintended consequences, when that's one of the things you've generally been doing very well with.
Did you basically steal your idea for this chapter from Futurama's global warming episode?
ResponderEliminarNarrator: "Every year, more and more ice must be dumped into the ocean to cool the earth, thus solving the problem forever.
Little Girl: But . . .
Narrator: Forever!!!
What your critics continue to ignore is that you are simply running through "what if?" scenarios based upon the asusmptions they have made. You call them facts in your article, but many of the "facts" are at best hypotheses or assumptions.
ResponderEliminarAs another reader pointed out the climate change mob and governments are much more interested in social engineering than climate engineering. I would rather see an analysis of where the ETS funds are going to go and the carbon debt developed nations will be expected to pay less developed nations. Also, an analysis of what it is going to cost individuals in developed nations. But perhaps this will detract from the political fervor of those expected to support the ETS in the developed nations.
Most importantly I would like to pose the following:
1) Do you accept that the earth appears (from geological proxies) to have been both substantially warmer and colder in the past than it is today?
TRUE/FALSE
2) Do you accept that the earth appears (from geological proxies) to have had both higher and lower CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere in the past than it is today?
TRUE/FALSE
The answer to both of these appears to be TRUE. The real question then becomes:
"Why is it specifically now, right now, that we must act to curb man made CO2 emissions, (which after all are a small percentage of total global CO2 emissions), because not doing so will inevitiably lead to climate catastrophe?"
The globe has managed to buffer itself climate-wise for millions upon millions of years through extremes far greater than we witness today, but suddenly man is going to undo the precious precarious balance of nature this century?
I fail to see how the answers to the last two paragraphs are not self-evident by applying basic logic.
@ the renewable energy people out there - nuclear is the "green" solution you are looking for. The environmental impact of solar, tidal, hydro and wind are unthikable should they be required to substantially offset decreases in fossil fuel use. The massive space required by the laws of physics are immutable in this respect. The energy densities are simply not there for renewables. The one possible exception is geothermal - at least that has some promise as a baseload replacement. But nuclear is here, now. By the time uranium/thorium resrves becomes an issue technology will have the next answer (hopefully ITER).
1. What are the potential unintended consequences of deploying large amounts of sulfur dioxide and/or seawater in the atmosphere?
ResponderEliminar2. What are the potential unintended consequences of significant increases in cloud cover and/or reduced sunlight reaching Earth's surface?
3. Is there evidence to suggest that the proposed geoengineering solutions can reflect or block enough sunlight to compensate for continued and rapidly increasing greenhouse gas emissions?
4. Are there geoengineering solutions in the work for other consequences of large atmospheric CO2 concentrations, including but not limited to ocean acidification?
5. What is the expected cost of maintaining these proposed geoengineering efforts continuously for the foreseeable future, including any additional efforts required in the event that carbon emissions continue to accelerate as well as any projected geoengineering that may have to be done to compensate for effects of the original geoengineering?
6. Can we be certain enough that we can do all of this that it is safe to take no action to actually address the source of the problem, given that inaction will increase the eventual scale of the problem?
China, India, US, Indonesia, Brazil. Four of these countries have stated firmly that they are not going to do anything to reduce their carbon foot print until they achieve their economic development goals. Thus 4 of the most populous countries can continue forward with huge carbon footprints. Worse is the fact that their critics have picked the wrong fight. Carbon dioxide is not the most pressing problem. The increasing pollution of the planet by the overuse of chemicals in agriculture is one. The plastic products are nearly reaching a level that we can't find ways to dispose of them without adding more pollution. In most of the world the water sources are being used inefficiently and decent water to drink is disappearing. Clean air is great, but water is needed to be equally protected.
ResponderEliminarIn the whole climate change debate, I have yet to hear someone clearly articulate an answer to the very simple question of...
ResponderEliminarWhat temperature is it supposed to be?
The climate is the most complex system which man understands only the most basic ways to model.
ResponderEliminarWithout addressing the harmful input to the system, and without good models, counter-balancing the climate with a geoengineered input isn't wise. If the geoengineering neutralized instead of counterbalanced pollution it might have more credence.
A 10-30 mile vertical hose? Salting the earth?
It sounds so easy, a billion or so and the problem is solved?
ResponderEliminarThe problem is that for the first time there is SOME global momentum to tackle carbon emissions. But your article will now be used by many as a comfort blanket to continue their obstruction to any policy that reduces the abuse of the planet.
Steve, glad to see you writing with such a high level of civility, in stark contrast with many of your critics who are sadly resorting to personal attacks.
ResponderEliminarI really liked your book and please keep up the great work.
Hmm, the science of "climate change" is undergoing some needed examination. Some of the proposed policies seem draconian if based on faulty science. I really don't see the world wanting to play ball with carbon dioxide policy.
ResponderEliminarAs far as geoenginnering, isn't an electric car an obvious choice provided by the free market. If there is a demand for them, they will be made, which to me helps address the problem directly. At some point you will need to say yes to nuclear power to make this work. I suspect if you can not agree to tradeoffs like this your goal in anti growth and you prefer the dark ages.
Anyone seen the episode of Futurama where they keep having to get bigger and bigger ice cubes from mars to cool the Earth? Just wondering.
ResponderEliminar#50
ResponderEliminar"Don
In September, 2009, Dr. Michael Mann
ResponderEliminarMany so-called environmentalists are really closeted anti-capitalist fanactics. Go green, it's the new red!
ResponderEliminarThank you for summarizing many of my own doubts about the environmental movement and the role of science in it.
ResponderEliminarAfter all this I am still left with some ambiguity, chiefly about the trillion dollars. One way of thinking about a trillion dollars is that it means full employment, universal health care, and affordable education for my kids. Then I get in my car and drive to work. On the way to work I pass the Gifted Pre-School, where the smarter and more successful people in my neighborhood drop their children. I see the line of enormous SUV's each dropping off a single 4 year old for 3 hours.
While I believe in capitalism and that people should be able to choose how to spend their money, surely we can work around such environmentally and politically disastrous choices as these. We actually subsidize these vehicles as they are classified as small trucks and exempt from many of the pollution laws that those of us who drive smaller cars comply with.
Perhaps if your book dealt with some of the ways we waste energy your chapter on global warming would be better received.
Environmentalist are more concerned about changing behavior than solving a problem which allows people to live their life as they want.
ResponderEliminarAlso, the whole Green industry is making money with new products like Hybrid cars which don't make financial sense because people are emotional on this issue.
As with many issues, global warming is highly overrated in my opinion, and many of these environmentalist should be ignored until the issue becomes so significant that the only real solution worth spending money on doesn't require changing behavrior of people.
Selling books based on clever-sounding, cheap, contrarian shortcuts without critical thought is easy, an idea the authors of superfreakonomics seem to have been seduced by. Their interpretation of global warming seems to have been saturated with their contrarian mindset, given they begin their chapter on climate change by citing concerns held briefly by some scientists in 1970s over global cooling, a common trope for climate contrarians.
ResponderEliminarOne of your problems is a consequence of the way you state your third economics question: "Economists estimate that the costs of reducing carbon emissions are likely to be upwards of $1 trillion per year."
ResponderEliminarNow as stated, the answer may be "TRUE". (Some) economists may well have made this estimate. The fact remains that some basic logical thinking will show them to be wrong. Most of the practical CO2 reduction tactics wind up saving money and increasing perceived quality of life, and would be worth doing even if CO2 was not a problem.
Geoengineering deserves a seat at the table. It's an action that we may need to take.
ResponderEliminarNonetheless, ocean acidification is real and if the PPM of carbon in the atmosphere continues to increase as rapidly as it is, it will cause havoc with the ocean food chains.
Adding sulfur at the levels necessary for cooling may cause solar dimming effects that we cannot anticipate.
Irregaurdless of climate change, Global Oil production is nearing a peak... this is the conclusion of dozens of petroleum geologists and the IEA. The WSJ has run articles in the last year suggesting that our coal reserves are not nearly as good as suggested by conventional wisdom. If our civilization is to "transition" off of economies that run on 86% fossil fuel, then that transition must begin decades before the decline of fossil fuels so that the transition does not occur during energy shortages... we need to build trillions of dollars of renewable energy infrastructure. This surely is reason enough for a serious transition NOW.
There are dozens of other reasons to transition quickly off of fossil fuels now... the toxicity of coal extraction and burning, the corrosive geopolitics of oil, wars being fought over oil, the curruption of petro-states, the paving over of farmland with exurbs, etc . etc. Our development and energy patterns are wholly unsustainable, not just unsustainable due to the dangers of carbon dioxide pollution.
Yes, geoengineering should be researched. But it is plan C, or lower.
"Yes, you
ResponderEliminarAs others have pointed out previously (notably Dr. Crutzen, Nobel Laureate for his work on the ozone-layer problem), the kind of atmospheric engineering that is promoted in this article might be useful for a short-term palliative.
ResponderEliminarHowever, it is more like a crutch than a band-aid: If we use this approach, we will be building up an ever-increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, which will require ever-increasing amounts of remediation. If we ever stop the remediation before the fundamental problem of CO2 accumulation has been fixed, all of that build-up will come down on us like a ton of bricks.
And even if we don't stop the remediation, the increased CO2 in the atmosphere will acidify the oceans. (This is already in progress, and seems to have already-detectable negative effects on coral reefs. Bad news for anyone who likes to eat fish.)
The problem with this whole approach is that it allows people to take an emergency measure and try to turn it into a long-term solution - and it ain't, it just ain't. At the very best, it might buy us a little time to find a permanent solution, which will entail removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.
(It reminds me of ROLM, a high-tech company in Silicon Valley where I worked years ago. They had a nice campus with fountains everywhere. During the California water-saving push, they stopped using fresh water, and just recycled the fountain waters. The water turned green; so they put in something to kill the algae. The water turned blue, so they added another chemical to stop that. The water turned orange, so they added another chemical to stop that. The water turned white, so they added another chemical to stop that. The water turned green again, and then they just left it that way.)
"Fuel addiction" is a misnomer.
ResponderEliminarIn a real life, terminating an addiction has an immediate economic positive effect. E.g. when I quit smoking, I'll have money left to spend on other things.
Fuel OTOH is not an addiction, it is essential for cooking, heating, cooling and transport. Abolisment is not an option, fuel needs to be replaced by alternatives, and alternatives are more expensive. So it boils down to how important externalities are considered and that's politics.
Prof Lindzen wrote:
ResponderEliminarThe problem with the question posed by this article, as I see it, is that it is extremely short sited in its goals. Given that the earth is warming, it makes since to try to cool it... right?
ResponderEliminarBut that is a bit like treating the symptom over the problem. You have a headache, so you take Advil, as opposed to searching for the root cause of the headache (such as stress) and treating that. Your headaches go away, but you develop a dependency on Advil. One problem is substituted for another, and the root cause stays them same (and eventually manifests itself as something else).
Perhaps we need to look at the root cause (carbon emission and a generally pollution prone lifestyle) versus the the symptom of that cause (cataclysmic climate change). There's nothing wrong with looking at treating the symptom, but in the long run it is definitely not the cheapest, fastest option to ending the problem.
Environmentalists WANT to change people's behavior and are often, or generally, opposed to "excess" human consumption, and often view the global warming as part of larger issues of general environemntal degredation via things like destruction of habitat, pollution, over fishing, etc.
ResponderEliminarReducing carbon emissions goes hand in hand with reducing these other things. The geo-engineering solution that you propose is maligned by environmentalists (myself included), because it attempts to address the issue of GW separately from other environental issues instead of using GW as a tool to help address other environmental issues. And that's the real crux of the matter and I'm sure that you understand that.
Furthermore, geo-engineering does not seem to be a good approach to me, because it adds another layer of complexity and potentially unknown consequences, making the risk of catastrophy greater, especially if used over a long period of time. OTOH I do agree with studying geo-engineering because no matter what we may end up needing to do it anyway.
I am much more concerned about acidification of the oceans than about global warming. That seems to me to be the greater long-term threat to human existence.
ResponderEliminarThe planet will do fine, whatever we do. Humans, maybe not so much.
- Neil
The questions should mention that the same models which are now being used did not anticipate in any way the effects of Pinatubo. This has been added to allow for the completely unexpected drop in temperatures at a time when carbon emissions have increased.
ResponderEliminarGlobal warming does not mean warming everywhere - in some places it might cause local cooling.
ResponderEliminarI think the question that the more scientifically-minded environmentalists might be asking is "how do we avoid global climate change?" And it's not clear that just cooling the average temperature will do that; the proposed cooling solutions may reduce the _average_, but also increase the _variability_, which may even be worse than the status quo. At the very least, they may not be able to preserve the pristine environment.
An excellent article. As an engineer, your mindset is to define a problem before you can repair it. An engineer has no need to assign 'blame' which is often where your detrators show great creativity. If the earth 'Naturally" had ice ages and warm periods (a concept completely rejected by others despite the record) and this were a period of warming now, we would have the same situation. Too many people living in low lying areas, etc, etc.
ResponderEliminarYou have defined a problem and offered several solutions, all under one trillion dollars! Why the attacks?
You have a horse that pulls a cart wih your food every day. You THINK the cart is getting heavier. Could be the road, the wheels on the cart, but you think the cart is heavier. You FEEL like the horse will not be able to pull the cart soon. Some say next week. Some say next year.
An environmentalist would try to change the horse and breed him to grow larger while cutting your food intake in half. The engineer would add another horse.
The "problem" will always be the moral superiority of the environmental groups and the need to punish the United States. The problem with the United States is the need to suffer and somehow prove it is trying to be an example to the world (as China accelerates in its pollution output).
The US is like a family spending more than it can afford to replace a perfectly good home heating system and setting the thermostat to 60.
Meanwhile your neighbor CHINA is burning leaves in the yard and has a 1800's coal furnace AND a fireplace.
The responses here show that no matter how reasonable, people will use "feelings" instead of science and engineering. THAT is a problem that can't be fixed without leadership, an area where we are sadly lacking...
Unfortunately, the MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION is NOT asked:
ResponderEliminarIs there undisputed evidence that global warming is caused by human activity?
Might global warming be a natural phenomenon, like the ice ages?
I think many readers got the point very clearly, and it shows that there are many and enough intelligent people to see the weakness in SuperFreakonomics.
ResponderEliminarWhile geo- or any- engineering may be of worthy pursuit, it is how and for what purpose it is being pursued.
I agree with many in the absolute objection of using geo-engineering to continue the alteration of Earth and environment. It should be done to REVERSE, that is, to clean up, whatever damage we have already caused.
So, instead of reducing our carbon emissions we increase our sulfur emissions? I'm sure the acid rain will be a great improvement.
ResponderEliminarYou know, I've noticed a lot of people here have no idea what global warming is or what the details are. Everybody should know that a molecule of co2 emits infrared. However, the amount of heat released is very small and it then escapes into outerspace. Additonally, a recent study by Richard Lindzen demonstrates that infrared escapes 6 times faster than scientists previously thought. It takes 5yrs to add 1 molecule of CO2 to the atmosphere and we are currently at about 38-39 parts per 100,000. So this means that everything will be fine for a long time because eventually the market will produce a new energy, not legislation. I'm not even going to address ocean acidification because I don't even think it is happening. I am also not citing any of my information because I'm sick of doing it, everything I have stated is 100% correct. Having this said, I have no doubt many will attack my statements.
ResponderEliminarDoes anyone really believe that scientists can somehow manipulate the variations over the years in the sun's output? Surely the amount of time, energy, and money being absolutely wasted on this nonsense could be better utilized!!!
ResponderEliminarCap n trade??? Gee, here's a crazy prediction: Citizens wind up spending billions to bail out a too big to fail company that overspeculated in this fictitious market. Please send some money to my capntrade hedge fund!
I think Geoengineering deserves further research, but I am not convinced that lower our carbon emissions shouldn't also be part of the solution. No matter how many times you try to fix a leak if you don't fix it at the source it's going to continue leaking.
ResponderEliminarI am not sure how much I trust the notion of sending more chemicals into our atmosphere. There was one time when DDT and asbestos were believed to be safe. The list of things from the past that were believed to be safe or safe enough is limit less, until we look at the consequences. That is what it always comes back to. Good or bad there are always consequences to our actions, if we cut carbon we pretty clearly know those good and bad consequences. If we rely on geoengineer there will be consequences, hopefully those consequences are fully examined before any real action is taken.
I too agree that the answers to the first 6 questions are "yes". However as Paul Harvey said "Now for the rest of the story".
ResponderEliminarThe evidence of temperatures being higher than the present many times during the Holocene (Including Medieval Warm Period, Roman Warm Period and Holocene Optimum) is extensive and 100 years of temperature rebound from the Little Ice Age means nothing. The only "evidence" that CO2 causes catastrophic warming is computer models that assume a high sensitivity to CO2. A model is only hypothesis and real world research has shown that the feedbacks to CO2 are negative resulting in higher albedo from low clouds, higher outgoing radiation and decrease in high clouds. Furthermore the "fingerprint" of enhancement of the effect of CO2 by water vapor, is missing. There are many other causes of warming including very high solar activity the past 100 years, changes in land use and brown cloud pollution. Your questionaire is meaningless without looking at the real complexity and natural variability of climate change.
While Global Warming is undeniable the actual cause is complex and elusive. Unfortunately only one group of voices is being listened to and this group often uses misleading science to support their claims. Often anyone who dares to question their pronouncements is publically and professionally ostracized.
ResponderEliminarConsider the impact of the following:
In 1900 there were 1.6 billion people on earth; there are currently 6.8 billion people. - There are now over 5 billion additional 98.6 degree heaters walking on our planet.
These "heaters" generate their heat 24 hours a day, 365 days a year (not to mention the CO2 the produce).
A majority of the "heaters
I've never seen so many comments on a subject that actually sound somewhat sensible, no matter the views expressed. But then, there are still plenty of them that aren't. That's humans for you, all talk, no action...
ResponderEliminarWouldn't the result of putting sulfer dioxide in the atmosphere be acid rain, if not just generally acidifying the air? I don't know, I'm not a chemist or ecologist.
Wouldn't planting trees be a more sensible, and self-sustaining, approach to controlling CO2? Seems obvious to me.
Limiting population growth effectively, like the Chinese governments policies have done(major kudos China!), would also go a long way to helping. Too distasteful? Look at the alternatives facing you(and your kids): starvation; lack of potable water; war; disease...
Nature's trying to tell us something - we have become an infestation! The planet's just doing what comes naturally.
Good luck to all you people and your progeny. I'm an old fart with no kids, you're problems don't worry me. But if you really loved your children you'd quit jabbering and actually DO something!
This is all voodoo!
ResponderEliminar...One would think, that the information age would've made us all smarter.
I'd just like to say... Just because some of us justifiably don't believe the world is dieing from SUV's, jet fuel, and breathing, doesn't mean we don't recognize man's role as custodians of the Earth.
What about ocean acidification? Your "stratoshield" will do nothing to help marine life. Oh, Mark got there before me in #22. How do your propose that the details of the shield (such as the cost and legal responsibility if it gets out of hand) might be negotiated between the major nations? You mentioned Pinatubo -- you do know that crop yields were reduced as a result? What if we were to over-do it? Famine for millions? Btw, I disagree with your cost estimates for the thing anyway -- the aerosols might not stay in the stratosphere for as long as you think -- this would have to be a continuous activity, not a once-and-for-all one. Repeat after me: marketz good, governmentz bad.
ResponderEliminarAs a matter of fact, seawater is alkaline. Dissolving the carbon dioxide from all the world
ResponderEliminarYour response avoids the key objections to your proposal.
ResponderEliminar1. If we continue to emit massive amounts of greenhouse gases while keeping the planet cool with geoengineering solutions, we can't--contrary to your assertion--ever stop geoengineering because that will result in massive heating spikes due to the GHG increases during the geoengineering phase.
Your "solution" does nothing to stop the cause of warming, it just masks its effect. It's like ignoring the cause of pain because you have good painkillers.
2. What are the negative effects of the geoengineering solutions. You seem to imply there are none, but scientists are clearly not in agreement on this. A huge concern is the potential suppression of the Asian monsoon which would have devastating effects on tens of millions of people.
Felix, what is "normal," the way the earth was during the last ice age or the Little Ice Age, maybe the way it was before it cooled and settled enough for life to emerge, maybe the way it was during the Pleistocene? Geez, are any of you people capable of rational thought?
ResponderEliminarFelix said, "let's get the earth back to normal first".
ResponderEliminarThat makes perfect sense, because the earth has always had the same, stable, normal climate with little or no deviation, so all we need to do is reestablish it! Brilliant. Reminds me of the innate logic of nature preserves, another great idea in which we enforce nature's natural unchanging, static state.
You'd think that the costs associated with carbon emissions would be acceptable, considering it would allow the economy a larger window into the future to continue making money... No?
ResponderEliminarI wonder has anyone considered with all this talk of Carbon and Carbon Dioxide sequestration that the problem may be solved by electrolysis of the components into Carbon and Oxygen... Isn't Carbon fibre's main constituent CARBON... with carbon fibre more plentiful and thus cheaper... whole new options in the way of vehicles and machines could be envisioned!
ResponderEliminarThis is a great potential band-aid and the science should continue to be explored as such. This is not a long term solution, which we must simultaneously work toward more aggressively than we have been. Unfortunately, we are also reaping the cost of an embarrassingly poor educational system in this country so that too many people risk being distracted by the shiny first option and forgetting to pursue the second. Just as unfortunate are those who exploit the feeble for short term personal and political gain.
ResponderEliminarDo we humans have a responsibility to all life on the planet, or only to ourselves? If we use geoengineering to mitigate the effects of increased CO2 that we put into the atmosphere, what will happen to the earth's temperature when (not if, when) humans are no longer around to continue the geoengineering program? And yes, I agree that these are different questions, but they are also important ones.
ResponderEliminarI really don't care what you say now, after the fact, in a desperate attempt to salvage your reputations. Your book, which you wrote, follows all the denialist tropes.
ResponderEliminarPresumably you spent some considerable time composing and editing, and deciding what kind of approach you would take. That approach is the same approach of morons like James Inhofe.
It's a little late to complain. You should have the integrity to stand behind what you actually wrote, not try to weasel out of it.
"How can we most efficiently cool the Earth fast?"
ResponderEliminarhow i wish that was the only question you tackled in chapter 5. you have sound footing to stand on there and interesting information to offer.
but you did not stick to policy and economics. unfortunately you also made numerous misleading claims about climate science, the criticism of which you have not yet addressed. please consider the picture you have painted for those readers unfamiliar with the nuances of climate science.
ps i wont call you a denier if you wont call me religious, deal?
Paul VZ, how about saying that "normal" = the average state of the earth over the Holocene, the period of human civilization, approximately the last ~ 10,000 years. During that time (including the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age), the average global temperature remained in a very narrow band between +0.5C and -0.5C on either side of 15C (even if there were somewhat larger regional variations), and, until relatively recently the CO2 concentration hovered around 280 ppm. In other words, how about keeping the climate that all of human agriculture, population distribution, industry and infrastructure is organized around. We're talking about "normal" to human beings, and I don't really care what dinosaurs may have thought of as normal. Is that sufficiently rational for your standards? (BTW, the authors' stratoshield proposal likely fails in this regard, since a very likely side effect would be a significant impact on world rainfall patterns, as happened after the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo.)
ResponderEliminarBut say, you've finally built your geothermostat.
ResponderEliminarWhat temperatutre should we set it to?
Do we really want the return of harsher winters in Europe and America?
"As a matter of fact, seawater is alkaline. Dissolving the carbon dioxide from all the world
ResponderEliminarBeware of bogus citations:
ResponderEliminarFeelingcold cites a political source (BuytheTruth), rather than a scientific one, for this discussion of a chapter of an economics book regarding a scientific subject. Another entry on that website states "Darwins theory is just a theory." Get the picture? Yikes!
I do however appreciate the authors' attempt to approach the economic side of this subject.
Who came up with the cost estimates for the Geo-Engineering solutions - some ex-investment bankers or former AIG financial risk managers ?
ResponderEliminarSo how many dinghys, with what kind of technology on board (it doesn't sound cheap) fully equipped to spend the next ten years operating reliably in all kinds of weather spraying away the whole time, without getting washed up on our beaches or burst by ?
You might as well propose that dirigables circle the earth and unfurl enormous rolls of white toilet paper...it might be cheaper. Dirigables and toilet paper already exist, and so are ready to be deployed immediately.
Levitt says "Our question, at noted above, is what is the cheapest, fastest way to quickly cool the Earth." Well, there's your problem right there! This question isn't quite irrelevant, but it is far, far too limiting, because it (a) assigns zero value to any side effects, and (b) assigns zero value to the negative consequences of greenhouse gas emissions other than those associated with higher global-average temperature.
ResponderEliminarI am one of the many scientists --- possibly a majority --- who agree that substantial government funds should go into geoengineering research. But I completely disagree with the thrust of Levitt's comments. I especially disagree that Levitt's question is somehow "scientific" while the questions of his critics are laden with moral choices. Levitt assigns zero value to, for instance, changes in rainfall and drought patterns that would still occur in a geoengineered world; zero value to acidification-induced coral reef deaths (with the resulting fisheries collapse); and, of course, zero value to all of the "unknown unknowns" that geoengineered solutions would engender. These choices by Levitt are as morally fraught as any choices by his critics.
Ignore Krugman's criticisms. He's a former advisor to Enron and we all know how well that went.
ResponderEliminarAlso, remember that all actions have unintended consequences and global geo-engineering is likely to have major ones.
You seem still to be dodging the three most serious criticisms:
ResponderEliminar(1) The geoengineering scheme proposed would do nothing about ocean acidification
(2) It would contribute to ozone depletion--you drop a single scientist's name to argue "no" but disregard that recent publications say "yes".
(3) It would leave Earth vulnerable to "fall of Rome" problems--what happens if the SO2 machine quits and nobody fixes it?
Well done. Except for the specifics about the Intellectual Ventures solution ideas, quite obvious after hardly any thought. At least to me, from well before you OR Al One-Note Gore entered the arena. What you have so brilliabtly added, is a concise explication that is reasonably polite regarding the Iron Mentalists who seem insistant in imposing their supposedly superior moral choices upon the rest of us.
ResponderEliminarMay I suggest a possible explanation for their behavior? They say a Rapacious Developer is one who wishes to exploit a resource, or build a cabin in a pristine forest, next summer, while a Courageous Enviornmentalist is one who did so, last summer. It is just the old Class Struggle, with the D's now the party of the New Haves.
If doing "cooling things" doesn't reduce greenhouse gas accumulations in the atmosphere, it won't matter in the end, we will fry.
ResponderEliminarIt could be that many in the climate change industry do not like human beings, and want to see people suffer as an end in itself. This is not a novel position. Environmentalism is the successor to thousands of years of religion. (But at least religion offers a reward in heaven. Environmentalists just like human suffering, full stop.)
ResponderEliminarAnd that's why the environmentalists freak at relatively painless geoengineering solutions. They would prefer a world in which they can preen about as moral arbiters, imposing great sacrifices on humanity.
Sir, when did you stop beating your wife? ... and other loaded questions:
ResponderEliminarHere's some loaded answers: the biggest problem with Global Warming is the cooling. Are you looking at model-based estimates? How were those models validated?
The number one greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapor; it accounts for 95% of the total effect. If you truly believe that the 3% attributable to Carbon Dioxide is the problem, at least try to explain why.
Dark surfaces vs light surfaces: they also shift the wavelength of the reflected light from short wave to long wave. The atmosphere absorbs energy from electromagnetic energy and that absorption depends on the wavelength.
When you ask if clouds are darker than oceans, which part of the spectrum are you referring? The oceans are excellent reflectors of light. The biggest difference is that oceans reflect in one direction, up while clouds reflect light and heat in two directions. They reduce heating during the day and they reduce cooling at night.
If you're going to Geo-engineer, make sure your models and specs are right. Otherwise, there may be unintended and catastrophic consequences. Of course, you're also right - Geo-engineering does deliver the ability to quickly and effectively address climate change, unlike the alternative proposed courses of action.
Putting that much sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere will cause enormous acid rain.
ResponderEliminarBesides the unsolved technological challenges, I think most of your points are uncontroversial. The problem isn't that geoengineering won't cool the planet, the problem is whatever else it may do. You obviously understand the significance of unintended consequences - isn't that what the whole book is about? - and yet you completely ignore them here. Reflecting sunlight in the stratosphere will cool the planet by reducing the amount of light that reaches the surface, but what will it do to the plants which need that light to survive? Will we cripple our forests? Will algae populations shrink? What species will die off as a consequence of that? What species will fill the gaps? What will that do to oceanic oxygen content? Nitrogen content? Carbon sequestration? What will it do to our crops? Doesn't atmospheric sulfur dioxide have a short "half-life" because it precipitates as acid raid? Are you worried about acidification of water basins? Acidification of the oceans? Could that mean the end of coral reefs and low-lying islands? Maybe. No one knows that the effects will be!
ResponderEliminarOne can easily construct a thousand doomsday scenarios from an engineering project on this scale - anything from famine to drought to unimaginably toxic acid rain - and any one of them could be worse that the problem you are trying to solve. And how much time did you devote to these issues?
You are fighting a straw man.
Climate change, not global warming. World wide climate change AND YES THAT INCLUDES PLANET AMERICA !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ResponderEliminarI might be duplicating someone else's comments, because I did not read all previous ones, but: previous poster questioned the effect of ocean cloud cover reducing algae growth. I read somewhere that algae/plankton in the oceans are the PRIMARY source of Oxygen on the planet. Also, the primary source of food in the Ocean. Since Americans eat huge amounts of food that is raised with ground up fish meal as a source of protein, I think many people who don't even eat fish, or any direct form of seafood, might be surprised if their preferred food sources JUMP in price or drop in availability.
ResponderEliminarYou fail to mention that increasingly Paul Krugman is a really lousy economist. He always was a poor journalist, prone to biased opinions not based in fact. He has now simply extended it into an area where he previously exhibited some competence.
ResponderEliminarWe have been unknowingly geo-engineering for a number of centuries. It has not had a positive effect on the planet.
ResponderEliminarAre you sure you understand it well enough now to not cause more harm than good? It might be necessary at some point in the future to take some of the steps that you advocate, but tailoring the environment in the manner you describe might have effects that have not even be considered yet.
The right approach is to consider all feasible and effective solutions. This shouldn't be debate between prevention and geoengineering, but both angles should be considered. However, I consider geoengineering more of an emergency stopgap as we shift to a decarbonized economy. Geoengineering has potentially significant ecological impacts (seeding the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide could cause more acid rain), it raises difficult political issues (can one nation or international agency assume the authority to regulate the Earth's climate, with all the attendant risks), it may ultimately be limited in addressing centuries of unabated carbon emissions, it does not address the other impacts of fossil fuel dependence (security and pollution issues), and it is untested. It's foolish to dismiss geoengineering out of hand, but it would also be foolish to dismiss the need for significant reductions in carbon emissions.
ResponderEliminarPeter
The planet has natural temperature cycles much more extreme than our pathetic sub-degree influences; and there's even evidence now that we're on a cooling trend for the past few years. Why are we so consumed with keeping an enormous machine like the Earth in unnatural stasis? Whether we caused it or not is irrelevant; the real question is "what's the harm?" Hurricanes? Smaller beaches?
ResponderEliminarNo, we don't have more hurricanes because of the heat, hurricane intensity is determined by the 'rate' of cooling of the ocean, not just how hot it is, so theoretically you can have a super-hot summer followed by an atypically warm winter, and not have much in the way of hurricanes.
"The sky is falling, the sky is falling!!". The world is full of lemmings following Chicken Little. Frankly, I'm from the middle of Canada so I'm ready for some warmer weather. Why should I be the one to suffer instead of shorebound people stepping back from the ocean another 50 feet?
#1. The only constant is change.
ResponderEliminar#2. Strange weather patterns are *normal*. Why else do we need weather people?
#3. Global warming alarmists are the same as any other end of the world cult. e.g. Rapture, Hale Bopp Comet, ...
Stop letting your politicians manipulate you like puppets.
The Earth has gotten substantially warmer over the past 100 years
ResponderEliminar- Whats your definition of substantially? Give some real facts not opinions, and stop sensationalizing your stories
Geo-engineering is addictive. Assume it works great at countering the warming of increased CO2. Without the threat of warming, CO2 levels continue to rise. No problem, just make the reflective atmospheric layer a little thicker. Since there's no increased warming, CO2 levels continue to rise (even though the oceans are getting more acidic, but that's not important enough to worry about at this point). So we make the reflective layer even thicker. By now, no one can see the stars anymore and the memory of bright sunshine is fading (as is the sun). Now we're at 500 ppm (instead of today's 385 ppm) and we're rightly afraid of cleaning up the atmosphere before it gets even darker, because we've become addicted to a solution that only gets worse. Fade to darkness.
ResponderEliminarCurrent concerns about global warming has a striking similarity to a "major" environmental issue during the 70's and 80's: ACID RAIN.
ResponderEliminarIsn't it ironic that the solution now being proposed and supported by the environmentalists to "solve" global warming is to inject acid rain producing gases into the atmosphere by the 10's of millions of tons? If you want more sulfur dioxide, why don't you just tell the oil refineries and plastics manufacturers to take off the air scrubbers that they were required to install in the 80's?
If acid rain was a real issue then, isn't it still a real issue now?
Consider also another fact that was not mentioned in this article: when volcanoes erupt, they don't just spew pure sulfer dioxide - it also spews out a significant amount of other gases, including carbon dioxide and OTHER GREENHOUSE GASES. Yet, according to these experts, the global temperature still dropped that year. Huh?
By the way, I would be curious to see how the average annual total human greenhouse gas emissions over the past century would stack up agains the average annual total greenhouse gas emissions of global volcanic activity.
Regardless of where you come down on this issue, the good thing (which everyone should agree with) is that our knowledge of our ecosystem has expanded exponentially because of this theory. What we know now is far greater than what we knew ten years ago.
ResponderEliminarThe problem with this, is that much of our policy is being based upon our knowledge from 10 years ago.
I saw that in the current cap and trade legislation there is ways for people/business to receive credit for planting trees. Which sounds great, because trees are good for the environment. Except no. There is a few studies out showing that trees planted in temperate zones have little to no effect on slowing down the warming (and some surmise that it may actually exacerbate it). It's a vestige of the old Kyoto-era thinking that stay hangs around.
That's just one of a dozen examples of how we are getting this wrong because we are acting before we have sufficient information.
Addendum: I think no scientist would argue that the amount of carbon dioxide released by humans is far less than the amount released by the environment, be it the oceans, fauna or volcanoes. What is an issue is not the amounts, but the rates. If you image the environment as a giant scale with two anvils on either end, then one side is carbon dioxide release and the other anvil is carbon dioxide sequestering. The environment has evolved over millions of years to sequestered a certain amount of carbon dioxide. So, the environment has evolved to balance the amount of carbon dioxide it releases with the amount of carbon dioxide it sequesters. What's at issue is that we, as humans, started to pour sand on one side, ever so slowly. The problem is that even with a slow pour, this delicate balance that required years to attain is being thrown out of wack. Eventually the scales will start to tip more and more. Now, can the environment adapt to start sequestering carbon dioxide more? Yes, but it's gonna take thousands if not millions of years. In the mean time, this current environment, which is specifically adapted to a certain level of carbon dioxide release, is going get warmer. What will be the result? From the looks of things, not good. That's what's got people worried.
ResponderEliminarIf the analysis was true it's strange that a reputable scientists haven't followed this line of research. Given the initiative is from the ex-head of advanced research of Msft - where track record of delivering innovative ideas is not great (but great at PR and great claims) then we should be very sceptical
ResponderEliminarGlad to hear you are unsubscribing. No loss as you weren't listening anyway, nor would you be open to any idea other than your own. Do you hold your breath too when you get mad?
ResponderEliminar"Geoengineering" seems more than a bit risky. It also seems weird to court controversy on an issue like this and saying you want people to use reason but then attacking those attacking you rather than putting forward the pros and cons of your proposed solutions. I guess it works if you want to sell books, but one would need a global consensus to get around the liability issues inherent in a solution that by messing with global weather patterns could easily get blamed for any bad changes that follow.
ResponderEliminarI think despite Mr. Levitt's post, a lot of people still misconstrue him and what was written by him and Mr. Dubner in their book.
ResponderEliminarThe people here who are attacking (and I use this term carefully to refer to people who so intentionally blind themselves to and subsequently, flatly insult any research or proposals that would even only slightly go against the mainstream thought on global warming) Levitt, geoengineering, and the like are fanatics that I unfortunately have to encounter very often. People who see geoengineering as possibilities, as Levitt and Dubner show us in the book, are not villainous. We are simply forced into a battle by extremists. But to those fanatics: we are not on the other side of the spectrum. We are not extremists ourselves.
I don't really understand why people have to react so violently. Levitt and Dubner have not fervently attacked Al Gore and the like so as to merit this type of violent criticism. Is it really so hard to just accept the book as an instrument for new knowledge and possibilities, instead of treating it as something heretical that threatens your stand on global warming? Levitt and Dubner are not forcing anyone to CHANGE but simply presenting another outlook. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, as human beings have always had a LONG way to go before thinking rationally.
The unintended consequence of sulfur dioxide clouds is acid rain that will acidify oceans, kill fish, destroy coral reefs, corrode iron steel bridges and buildings, etch away the Pyramids and the statue of David, and make breathing more difficult for 100 percent of animals including humans. Not a good idea.
ResponderEliminarThe problem with this entire approach is its initial premise: you say you (as economists always, and irritatingly, do) are looking at it objectively and amorally, and that this is the cheapest solution to solve global warming problem. That might be true, but it is far from objective. Just asking the question: "what is the cheapest way to attack the current global warming problem," you are already placing value judgments on the ultimate goal - which is "cheapness." It'd be just like saying - "I'm going to objectively look at the way we can stop global warming while at the same time murdering as many puppies as possible." Is that a completely amoral question? If not, how is it any different that the question you ask? The only difference is that the premise is different - in your question, it's that frugality and efficiency is something to be valued, while in mine it's killing puppies - or else why would we even be asking the question?
ResponderEliminarSo, while you might be right that the cheapest fix for the (current) environmental problems is pumping more particles in the air (and, as others may have pointed out, your conclusion may ultimately be false). But don't pretend like this is an a-moral or unbiased question.
Eventhough I keep myself updated on issues like global warming and increasing emergency imposed by US on countries like China and India to curb their carbon emissions, I was not aware of these geo-engineering until I saw a program on the same on Discovery Channel.
ResponderEliminarI find this idea really exciting and worth trying. Ur chapter gave these experiments a needed publicity and I really hope atleast governments around the world seriously consider this issue before blindly committing the resources for curbing carbon emissions.
Steven, you write:
ResponderEliminar"Unlike the question that we are asking
RE:
ResponderEliminarAerosols (global dimming) will reduce crop yields worldwide (famine anyone?). They also will reduce CO2 uptake by plant life (lower growth rates). Finally, they will increase emphysema deaths globally (I guess that's why they were banned by the Clean Air Act). And, as other's have indicated, they do nothing about ocean acidification.
ResponderEliminarFor a short term solution, sure. But there WILL be a cost. The long term solution is to get the problem, the REAL problem, under control (yeah, and that means NOW cuz it will take forever to have any effect).
This is probably how it will play out, however. 'Lowest-common-denominator' economics, the kind we celebrate here in the USA, ensure's that we'll dance merrily along until NYC goes underwater, and then insist on global cooling via aerosols. Kinda like invading Iraq and Afghanistan to 'solve' the Al-Qaida problem. Is anyone under any illusions about WHO will be footing the bill for that solution? Its an artifact of LCD capitalism to dance merrily along until easily solved infections become life-threatening, and then charge the guy present for oversights of the past. No wonder we got the healthcare system we have.
Dear S. Levitt,
ResponderEliminar'GLOBAL DIMMING' is already happening, and has been for a while. This is actually an old argument in some scientific communities to use aerosols as a possible stop-gap measure to ameliorate a fast uncontrollable warming if needed.
However, it was also concluded and understood quickly that it cannot be a long-term solution simply because that approach does not address the problem of excess pollutants in the atmosphere.
Use it as an emergency measure is your point to which I do not brush aside.
... But let's not get there in the first place.
IDK about global dimming, but there are other ways to reflect sunlight other than SO2, cloud seeding, genetically modified harry plants (like in the desert), ect. Also if you wanted to reduce carbon levels, sprinkle some Iron and other neccesary nutrients in nutrient deficient areas of the ocean, and bam, algae blooms like mad, absorbs tons of C02, and drifts to the bottom of the ocean when dead. Also feeds the fish :) None of these solutions would cost anywhere near the billions (if not trillions) it would take to stop releasing CO2 from fossil fuels. (The algae would solve ocean acidification too by absorbing CO2 [idea from popular science]) Simple solutions can work.
ResponderEliminarThat said, global warming might not be a bad thing, sure, there might be a few more storms that kill a max of maybe a million more people at max (but there are easier solutions to that..) and sea levels may rise (at like 1 cm per year, nobody's drowning), but longer growing seasons, more prevalent rainfall, more CO2 (i don't see how more CO2 hurts plants), and larger growing regions could solve world hunger. And all that at a fraction of the cost of reducing emissions.
Also, what "irreversible implications" whould these solutions have? I don't think we can do much that is truely irreversible.
ResponderEliminar