Switzerland Calls On UN To Explore Possibility of Solar Geoengineering 92
Switzerland is advocating for a United Nations expert group to explore the merits of solar geoengineering. The proposal seeks to ensure multilateral oversight of solar radiation modification (SRM) research, amidst concerns over its potential implications for food supply, biodiversity, and global inequalities. The Guardian reports: The Swiss proposal, submitted to the United Nations environment assembly that begins next week in Nairobi, focuses on solar radiation modification (SRM). This is a technique that aims to mimic the effect of a large volcanic eruption by filling the atmosphere with sulphur dioxide particles that reflect part of the sun's heat and light back into space. Supporters of the proposal, including the United Nations environment program (UNEP), argue that research is necessary to ensure multilateral oversight of emerging planet-altering technologies, which might otherwise be developed and tested in isolation by powerful governments or billionaire individuals.
Critics, however, argue that such a discussion would threaten the current de-facto ban on geoengineering, and lead down a "slippery slope" towards legitimization, mainstreaming and eventual deployment. Felix Wertli, the Swiss ambassador for the environment, said his country's goal in submitting the proposal was to ensure all governments and relevant stakeholders "are informed about SRM technologies, in particular about possible risks and cross-border effects." He said the intention was not to promote or enable solar geoengineering but to inform governments, especially those in developing countries, about what is happening.
The executive director of the UNEP, Inger Andersen, stressed the importance of "a global conversation on SRM" in her opening address to delegates at a preliminary gathering in Nairobi. She and her colleagues emphasized the move was a precautionary one rather than an endorsement of the technology.
Critics, however, argue that such a discussion would threaten the current de-facto ban on geoengineering, and lead down a "slippery slope" towards legitimization, mainstreaming and eventual deployment. Felix Wertli, the Swiss ambassador for the environment, said his country's goal in submitting the proposal was to ensure all governments and relevant stakeholders "are informed about SRM technologies, in particular about possible risks and cross-border effects." He said the intention was not to promote or enable solar geoengineering but to inform governments, especially those in developing countries, about what is happening.
The executive director of the UNEP, Inger Andersen, stressed the importance of "a global conversation on SRM" in her opening address to delegates at a preliminary gathering in Nairobi. She and her colleagues emphasized the move was a precautionary one rather than an endorsement of the technology.
Oh thank fuck (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Oh thank fuck (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a proponent of geoengineering, but I don't see why so much attention is on attenuating sunlight.
Weaker sunlight could affect crop yields and will do nothing about ocean acidification.
Oceanic iron fertilization [wikipedia.org] is more promising.
But we need to be doing both to have any chance of keeping warming below 2C.
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Re: The Agriculture Ministry is not in charge of G (Score:2)
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Reading at -1 [Re: Oh thank fuck] (Score:2)
If you're looking for honest, intelligent and informed discourse on this or [most any other topic] here, you'll have to read the -1 comments...
I do read the -1 comments, and if there is intelligent and informed discourse there, I'm afraid that it is absolutely buried in the insults, political rants, and nonsense science.
Even the occasional intelligent comment is often buried in flamebait language. I tend to stop reading when a post starts out ranting about gay-loving faggots, or accusing everybody who disagrees with their ideology of being a fascist.
and this is coming from a guy who learned about 'impending AGW' in his single digits before the average climatologist had even been born.
Yeah, up until it got political, the greenhouse effect used to be just something taught in astrono
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Surely they're safe until the coal plants pay up first.
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Finally, I work on this. It's a fantastic idea, quite safe and effective if done methodically, a cheap way to save millions of people, hundreds of billions of dollars, and ensure climate change is defeated at all. To say the opponents are literally the "leaded gasoline hockers and possibly worse" of this century wouldn't be an understatement.
Sure why not? After all, it's much easier to block/reflect sunlight than to generate some.
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How naive. Not it is not "fantastic", "quite safe", "effective" or "cheap". All of these are _unknown_ and no large-scale engineering project _ever_ has not had significant negative effects. It requires a massive amount of research before we can even begin to make somewhat reliable statements about its characteristics.
You are bereft of insight and understanding. People like you are dangerous.
Re: Oh thank fuck (Score:1)
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This is not a "riskier option" It is incredibly dumb and doesn't even address critical problems that already are in motion like ocean acidification.
Just because we didn't do enough earlier is no justification for doing utterly randomly and at face ineffective silliness.
We already know that simply cutting back particles from shipping had had a serious wrong direction impact on warming so now we're going to mess around further with things we obviously don't understand as punishment for past sins?
Dear lord..
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Ok, can geo engineer all you want in a panic but why take a path that we know from a simple examination of the intended effect will not do what we need it to do?
At least if you want to do some risky shit to the planet then do something that might actually help if it worked at intended.
The problems here:
1) it won't work as intended, these things rarely do
2) if #1 is false, it still won't do what we actually need done.
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Weird how someone whose income depends on it would call people who question it luddites.
Your arguments in favor are so detailed, informative and unbiased that I can't help but be converted to The Cause!
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Sure, let's let a bunch of idiots from the WEF pull the strings while we're at it.
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Riiiight. Because we understand climate so well that we cannot even predict past trends, much less future ones. You'll note, for example, that arctic ice still exists, even though climate scientists predicted an ice-free arctic years ago.
Deliberately screwing with the climate is just a really awful, terrible, horrible idea.
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Deliberately screwing with the climate is just a really awful, terrible, horrible idea.
We've been deliberately screwing with the climate for decades. It's too late to whine about it now. That's just dishonest, bad faith, bullshittery.
unwittingly [Re:Oh thank fuck] (Score:2)
Deliberately screwing with the climate is just a really awful, terrible, horrible idea.
We've been deliberately screwing with the climate for decades.
No, we've been unwittingly screwing with the climate for decades.
Arctic ice [Re:Oh thank fuck] (Score:4)
Riiiight. Because we understand climate so well that we cannot even predict past trends, much less future ones. You'll note, for example, that arctic ice still exists, even though climate scientists predicted an ice-free arctic years ago.
Your words are not quite in the accurate order. Correctly: years ago climate scientists predicted an ice-free arctic [at some time in the future].
The misunderstanding seems to come from inaccurate quoting [reuters.com] of Al Gore (who is not a climate scientist) who was himself inaccurately quoting a scientist saying "some models" predict an ice free arctic in the future (but without stating exactly when).
A nice discussion of arctic sea ice here: https://nsidc.org/learn/ask-sc... [nsidc.org] , if you actually care.
Nevertheless, your overall point is accurate. If we can't trust climate models, we absolutely can't predict the results of attempts at geoengineering to fix the problem. You can either say "don't trust climate models," or say "we can solve the problem with geoengineering," but not both.
...And I will remind you that the quoted error bars on warming due to carbon dioxide are plus or minus fifty percent.
Deliberately screwing with the climate is just a really awful, terrible, horrible idea.
I will agree here.
Re: Arctic ice [Re:Oh thank fuck] (Score:2)
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Doing more searching, here's what I see Prof. Wadhams has actually published in the scientific literature (as opposed to what popular journalism says). In 2013, he published this https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.... [wiley.com]
Quoting from the abstract:
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Get to where you can predict with 99% accuracy where a hurricane will land and what strength 3x days out...
Or maybe simpler...maybe be able to forecast the rain where someone lives better than 60% or so....
Once you can actually show predictions in the weather events we commonly have...THEN, maybe we can talk about geoengineering.
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Tell you what... Get to where you can predict with 99% accuracy where a hurricane will land and what strength 3x days out... Or maybe simpler...maybe be able to forecast the rain where someone lives better than 60% or so....
You're confusing climate with weather.
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They are interconnected.
At the very least, one affects the other....so, get to where you can predict one of them first before you start fucking with the whole earth atmosphere and complex climate system and weather system that is largely driven by the climate of the earth.
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They are interconnected.
But they are not the same thing.
It's the difference between predicting the average height of an American male, and predicting the height of Oliver J. Niemand, 31, of Secaucus, NJ.
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Either they are connected or they are not.
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Finally, I work on this. It's a fantastic idea, quite safe and effective if done methodically, a cheap way to save millions of people, hundreds of billions of dollars, and ensure climate change is defeated at all. To say the opponents are literally the "leaded gasoline hockers and possibly worse" of this century wouldn't be an understatement.
Greetings! Which car did you get promised on Snowpiercer?
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Greetings! Which car did you get promised on Snowpiercer?
I prefer the Termination Shock scenario of Neal Stephenson.
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Finally, I work on this. It's a fantastic idea, quite safe and effective if done methodically, a cheap way to save millions of people, hundreds of billions of dollars, and ensure climate change is defeated at all.
You may be right. However, this is a pragmatic and economic efficiency argument. If we're going that route, I really think we ought to talk about using fracked natural gas as a way to transition off coal. That's also a well understood and economically feasible way to dramatically reduce CO2 emissions in the next decade. It worked fantastically well in the US and there's no reason to believe it won't work in India, China, Germany, and Africa.
(That and nuclear but let's not go on that tangent.)
We can and shou
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We're expecting the world to get its act together? (Score:2)
Seriously? That's the justification for refusing to investigate geoengineering? And atheists criticise Christians for irrational beliefs ;)
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Seriously? That's the justification for refusing to investigate geoengineering? And atheists criticise Christians for irrational beliefs ;)
Don't worry. I don't think there is a single example of a truly epically large scale tragedy of the commons being stopped either before it started and much less while it was in progress. The people presiding over this one will continue the party all the way to the end whooping and singing 'Drill baby! DRILL!!' the whole way. The way this usually works is something nice gets completely wrecked, then, eventually, people start trying to restore it but the best one can hope for is to recreate a moon cast shadow
Re:We're expecting the world to get its act togeth (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think there is a single example of a truly epically large scale tragedy of the commons being stopped either before it started and much less while it was in progress.
Stratospheric ozone is one example where the world came together and solved a problem.
Acid rain is another.
True but not enough to give real hope (Score:2)
Those were sorted out because the cost to society of doing so was relatively small. Climate change requires the allocation of massive resources to achieve the shift, which is more than people are willing to bear.
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If the wealthiest elites worldwide agreed to bear the costs of a "shift" then there would be a significantly lower "cost to society".
As it stands, the poor and middle class of the developed world are being asked to give up decades of socioeconomic progress at the behest of activists.
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No. The justification to not fuck with the planet is we don't know wtf we're doing, it is just as likely to do nothing - wasting resources that could have been better spent, or do nothing, or make it worse and it won't do a damned thing about critical events like ocean acidification.
The few changes we've made to do thing like reduce pollution coming from shipping has already had unexpected side effects which made heating worse and you think making huge changes intentionally is a great idea?
The scientific h
Right,.. let's just keep on (Score:2)
...messing with the environment to support our ridiculous population base as opposed to - you know - not breaking the future and just quit having so many useless humans?
"We're all starving! Let's litter the fields with nitrates! Problem solved! Awesome! - Oh, wait. We killed a bunch of stuff... but sod them... we got ours!"
The same tale. Every. Time. With the same outcomes. Everytime we mess with our environment we end up breaking it even further. Let's not forget ... this is the *only* environment capable
Re:Right,.. let's just keep on (Score:4, Insightful)
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Where are you getting this misinformation from? The human population is going to peak later this century and then start declining.
"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future."
--Neils Bohr
If the second derivative of the population growth continues its trend, that will be true. But it is dependent on a very large number of factors.
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Where are you getting this misinformation from?
Predictions are we "stabilize", (whatever that means), at 10b
Fact is - we can't afford the 8b useless prats we have at present. We couldn't afford the 6b before.
But let's keep deluding ourselves. I'm sure that will work out great.
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We already know iron seeding doesn't work - it will produce blooms of life that consume nutrients that would otherwise drift to where existing ecosystems would use it.
In other words, you'd be expending a lot of effort to cause life to thrive in a new place as you starved it somewhere else.
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Well, I won't be expending any effort doing that. But once the panic sets in globally, the reasoning you present, with which I agree, will not be considered. And other much worse stuff to "fix" things which I am blissfully unaware of which someone will chime in with, "But we can fill the atmosphere with aerosols of sulfur compounds," and the like.
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Sulphur's dumb, but there was also talk of sea water. I'm not sure about the energy requirements for a seaborne water jet that could reach useful altitudes, and I'd still complain because it is just masking one effect and encouraging us to ignore others.
CO2 impairs human cognition above the levels we evolved with. It acidifies our oceans and has a negative impact on the biosphere. And if we ignore those things, it's not like the methods we're using to release all that carbon don't have secondary polluti
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environmentalists are eugenacists?
Oh, look. It's the half-Hitler of knee-jerk delusional responses. Quit the fence sitting and climb in the pool.
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We're already geo-engineering (Score:4, Insightful)
We've geoengineered CO2 levels by +50%. Earlier we had geoengineered ozone to unfortunate levels. We've also geoengineered acid rain, and of course the same sulfur being discussed now.
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No, we have not "geoengineered" anything here. Engineering is a planned, coordinated, targeted and intentional act. All we did was throw waste into the environment.
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Translation: "we have a history of doing unintentionally stupid shit so that justifies doing more stupid shit but intentionally this time".
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We've geoengineered CO2 levels by +50%. Earlier we had geoengineered ozone to unfortunate levels. We've also geoengineered acid rain, and of course the same sulfur being discussed now.
And thank goodness that we are finally pushing back on the last 500M years of animals turning co2 into bones and shells, then just discarding them on the ground.
Plant life suffocates to death when co2 gets below 0.02%, and thanks to the industrial revolution, we have, thus far, managed to push it back up to 0.04%.
This is why, in the past 10 years huge swaths of arid terrain have started turning green again.
When plants are gasping for breath, they lose a lot more water than when they can limit co2 intake to
Toot tooooot, all board SnowPiercer! (Score:2)
What could go wrong? What details didn't we foresee?
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What could go wrong?
Not much.
Sulfates have a half-life in the atmosphere of about ten days. So if there is some unforeseen consequence, we can turn off the sprayers, and two weeks later, everything will be back to the way it was.
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If it were that easy, we would not have a problem. It is not that easy.
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So you're ok if we start this above your home.
Let us know how it works out. Then you can take us to court for a few years if you don't like the results. Easy.
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What could go wrong?
Not much.
Sulfates have a half-life in the atmosphere of about ten days.
No, the proposals I see are to spray sulfates aerosols into the stratosphere, where the settling lifetime is on the order of a years.
As you note, in the troposphere they'd rain out in days. But if they only have a lifetime in the atmosphere of ten days, the amount you'd have to loft would be orders of magnitude too high, it wouldn't be practical.
Look at this year's temps (Score:1)
Well, do you want to die, or do you want to find solutions that may prevent us all from dying?
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That depends on what you want. Save humanity or save the planet, I guess we can't have both.
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It is pretty unclear whether we can. Bright-eyed enthusiasm does not solve actual technological problems.
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Well, do you want to die, or do you want to find solutions that may prevent us all from dying?
A little too much doomsaying here. Climate change due to the anthropogenic greenhouse effect is real, and will have real negative effects.
But no, it's not "we're going to die." We will have to deal with consequences.
*(at least, not due to AGW.)
Yes (Score:2)
Yep, let's scorch the skies... (Score:2)
Recipe for acid rain (Score:2)
Re: Recipe for acid rain (Score:1)
That and at those layers you also get ozone and other unstable molecules. That is besides the fact that the delivery vehicle will have consumed more carbon than the little sunlight they reflect could have ever made an impact.
This has nothing to do with climate change and everything with governments wanting to experiment with geo-weaponry.
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Already experimenting (Score:2)
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If it has the opposite of desired effect then we must not be doing it enough! Double down!
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This is actually a BS argument put forth by groups who want to roll back emissions standards for shipping (which, of course, will save money that can go to C-level executives and stock holders because shipping prices sure as hell won't go down).
If you compare sulfur emissions by year [statista.com] with the rise in ocean temperatures by year [statista.com], it's easy to see that there is no correlation whatsoever between the two.
Return to coal power (Score:2)
What about my lungs? (Score:2)
What exactly do you want to pump into the entire atmosphere? Particulate matter is widely regarded as pollution. Soot. Black lung. Volcano ash causes lung disease in people who live at a relatively safe distance from the exploding volcano but still in the range that ash falls. Chalk also caused lung disease in a high school teacher of mine. .I can just see the media raging over the new "Glitter Lung" that came from Switzerland.
USE THE ENERGY. It's fuckling FREE ENERGY.
https://energy.mit.edu/news/tr... [mit.edu]
This w
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You are not wrong. But the human race is incapable of doing the sensible thing. Greed, stupidity, lust for power, etc. stand in the way.
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I can just see the media raging over the new "Glitter Lung" that came from Switzerland.
You're correct in all your assessment, but here's a Differential analysis:
Many of the fuels used also generate aerosols. And if we were to remove all pollution controls, and used the most polluting fuels and just burned them without any restraint, we can inject much aerosols, and temporarily affect the average global temperature.
It's the oil and coal industry that will be raging about their newfound source of profit, by using the dirtiest fuels, and loudly proclaiming that it is to counteract global warming.
My inner geek channels General Akbar - "It's a trap!"
How many Science Fiction stories begin this way? (Score:2)
And how many of them have happy endings?
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I think this is literally the setup for Snowpiercer.
Proof (Score:2)
If you think that the concept of pumping poison into the air to counteract the effects of Global warming, you either don't know enough about the effects of those poisons, or you have a death wish.
The overly rapid increase of energy retention gases is a problem, so let's just make it worse!
The upside is we can pollute as much as we want. That's not even sarcasm, that is probably how it will be done. Convert cargo ships back to direct bunker fuel, extr
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Well naturally. (Score:2)
If you don't do anything proactive, you have to be reactive.
You don't cut your foot off as a precaution in case you get advanced diabetes.
Termination Shock (Score:2)
Once again, Neal Stephenson predicted the future in his novel Termination Shock. It's this exact situation.
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Giant mirrors at L1 (Score:2)
But, wouldn't it be cheaper to put them on the ground, like in unused spaces?
WTF? (Score:2)
I used to have a car that filled the atmosphere with sulphur particles and everyone bitched and moaned.