Apparently there’s a conference in California in a couple months on the subject. It might be interesting to attend, if it’s in LA (or wherever it is, but I’ll be more likely to attend if it’s in southern Cal).
[Update a couple minutes later]
This looks like it. It’s at Asilomar.
Well, March is a beautiful time to drive up the coast highway, though it’s pretty chilly in Pacific Grove that time of year (or any time, really — the wind off Point Joe can be bitter even in the summer).
My concern is that the people discussing space-based solutions will use bad (i.e., overly high) estimates for launch costs, because they won’t understand the economics of space technology.
The thing that makes be break out in a cold sweat about in these scenarios: non-minimum phase zeros. Wrap a loop around them, and they go nuts. How well can we really model planetary dynamics? Not well enough to be experimenting with our only prototype, IMHO.
I think such exercises are very instructive. They show just how difficult it is for us to have any long-term, widespread effect on the world. We expend energy at a rate 1/10,000th that which arrives from the sun (as EM radiation — the contribution of solar wind, discovered only a few months ago, is still unknown). Putting all of that to work to affect the climate in some way will have a proportionate effect.
Just to ward off those who cite the “butterfly effect,” there is no such thing. We model things with differential equations because they’re mathematically more tractable than integral equations. But Nature integrates, and the flaky responses given by differential equation models have no parallel in the real world.
Maybe we are already doing geoengineering.
One putative explanation for how it warmed up in the 80’s and 90’s and then the warming leveled off in the 2000’s is that 1) in the 80’s and 90’s the US was getting the sulfer out of power plan emissions in a big way, and 2) in the 2000’s China was ramping up coal power plants without regard for sulfer emissions.
One of the scientists peripheral to Climate Gate was suggesting this as an explanation as to why the temperature increase wasn’t going like Gangbusters and hence causing the Climate Mafia dudes to sweat. It was a kind of “Hey wait a minute, maybe we can explain why the temperature increase from CO2 isn’t on schedule.”
It seemed from the Purloined E-mails that the person suggesting the SO2 emission scenario was given the brush-off. I got the impression that the Climate Mafia dudes were so “committed to their priors” that 1) they didn’t want to admit that there was any “problem” with the temperature record at all — I guess that would be losing face to the “skeptics and deniers” and 2) this whole business of geoengineering is just soooooo politically incorrect.
The problem is this. When there was the ozone hole scare, yes there were and probably are “ozone deniers” who assert that the science on Freon and ozone is wrong. But whether the science on ozone is right or wrong, the decision was made to “do something” about CFC’s. The consequences in the grand scheme of things aren’t all that great: you sweat in a 20-year old car instead of pay to get the old-style A/C converted, you pay out several hundred dollars to the airconditioner repair pirates to “drain your refrigerant in an environmentally safe manner” every time your A/C goes out, a few people with asthma choke to death because the inhalers without Freon don’t work as well, a few people burn to death because Halon is not allowed for fire extinguishers.
With the CO2/Global Warming scare, “doing something” generally means 1) a mass committment to nuclear energy in a world where we still worry about rogue states and atom bombs, or 2) mass global poverty, which will take the lives of many more than those few people with asthma or who would have been saved with Halon fire extinguishers. We are talking DDT-ban death tolls or higher.
In my opinion, the “some combination of wind, solar, and biofuels and what we need is simply the will” is magical thinking. The kind of magical thinking that will lead to DDT-ban level death tolls.
So if we could burn coal in power plants, but make sure we burn high enough sulfer coal that the SO2 haze cancels out the CO2 warming. Especially if we restrict such coal plants to the windward side of the continents to keep acid rain from wrecking woodlands?
Nuclear energy does not have to mean more availability of fissile materials. Design the reactors to use “dirtier” fuel and burn the plutonium in situ. Or even better, switch to a thorium/U233 cycle which involves no weapons-suitable fissile material at all.