Transterrestrial Musings

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My take is that these are all (including the Kyoto Treaty) massive kluges. At least the engineering kluges address the symptoms (which may be good enough). And my take is that the human race has a far better track record with its engineering kluges than with its economic or social kluges. My take is that once we understand the extent and costs of global warming and the dynamics of Earth's climate, we can pursue sound economic policies (eg, don't treat carbon emission or deforestation as a moral evil but as economic activity with an externality that needs to be accounted for) coupled with engineering palliatives.

Posted by Karl Hallowell at May 24, 2007 06:44 AM

Some analysis with these needs to be done, what is the best method and in what sense

Putting insulation to houses (to reduce heating and air conditioning needs a lot) and replacing coal with nukes (thorium molten salt reactors could rock) would be a lot easier as my hunch. And inceasing the price of energy somewhat so it would be worth paying at least some attention to.

It's often easier to remove the root cause than trying to apply a patch after a patch.
There can also be unpredictable consequences from these.

Artificial trees idea sucks - why release huge amounts of pure CO2 to the atmosphere and then try to scoop it up elsewhere when it's less than one part per thousand? Completely mindless.

Posted by mz at May 24, 2007 07:04 AM

Hey, I didn't say they were great. I only said that they beat Kyoto.

Posted by Rand Simberg at May 24, 2007 07:09 AM

Boy, am I "taking" a lot above. Guess I'm not a "giving" person. :-)

Posted by Karl Hallowell at May 24, 2007 07:12 AM

I being saying it for a while, but I think the planetary engineering schemes will ultimately be adopted, because they will end up being more practical and affordable than utopian schemes that get all the petroleum and coal producers to leave their fuels in the ground, or that get all the farmers around the world to stop producing nitrous oxide from their fields.

Posted by Paul Dietz at May 24, 2007 09:05 AM

Interesting articles on this AGW debate.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/timaruherald/4064691a6571.html

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=927b9303-802a-23ad-494b-dccb00b51a12&Region_id=&Issue_id=

Artificial trees is not a good idea.

Posted by Mac at May 24, 2007 09:13 AM

MZ,

Putting insulation to houses (to reduce heating and air conditioning needs a lot) and replacing coal with nukes

This is an assumption. What you should really say is that the cost of putting more insulation on houses and the cost of replacing coal with nukes puts an upper limit on the money that should be spent on geoengineering.

Some quick numbers (my estimation): 100M US homes or so, costing about $5,000 each to insulate properly. So that is $500B. Now you can see why geoengineering may make more sense.

Posted by David Summers at May 24, 2007 11:32 AM

Though saving energy because of better insulation saves you money in the long run. (Especially if the price of energy goes up.) I know people in Wisconsin complaining about their heating bills, while having single pane windows at the same time.

Many of these geoengineering schemes also require continuous expenditure.

I guess it's impossible for people here to think people could change their ways at all and think some external solution is needed.

(Btw Kyoto is a mechanism to add the external costs to CO2 emissions, just what was asked for)

But like I said, analysis is required.

Posted by mz at May 24, 2007 11:42 AM

I guess it's impossible for people here to think people could change their ways at all and think some external solution is needed.

I suppose it's possible that people could change their ways. Similarly, we could save a lot of money spent on the military and police if people would just change their ways and stop fighting and commiting crimes.

Possible doesn't imply practical or reasonable. Limiting CO2 emissions requires near-universal acquiescence to an international control regime, for centuries or longer. Judging by the way Kyoto has been worked around by most of the signatories, you should not be optimistic this would work.

Posted by Paul Dietz at May 24, 2007 12:12 PM

The problem with planetary engineering schemes is that one of them might actually work. With the present state of knowledge I have no confidence that what will happen will be anything like that intended by the "engineers". Take a look at the huge variation in effects predicted for a minor increase in CO2. You *really* want to even think about messing with this with the present state of knowledge? Here's Roger Pielke Sr. on why this sort of thing is so difficult:
http://climatesci.colorado.edu/2007/05/23/a-short-summary-of-why-skillful-climate-prediction-is-much-more-difficult-than-skillful-weather-prediction/
Then there's the problem of just what the planetary climate is *meant* to be if indeed it turns out to be adjustable by anything humans do. I can just see getting international agreement on this.
What I cannot figure out is why everyone worried about AGW isn't pushing to give Dr Bussard the few million dollars he says he needs to do a completely convincing demonstration of his machine, following which raising the rest of the money should be easy.

Posted by Mike Borgelt at May 24, 2007 03:34 PM

If the costs of CO2 emissions became real by legislation (like was proposed above), people (and companies) would follow the rules since it would be economically advantageous, There are problems here of course.

I've seen big companies here take the costs of CO2 into account when doing future plans. (Say, forestry sector.)

The price for CO2 tonnes is currently low and there are many many problems with the trading and supervision, but I wouldn't declare it dead or impossible yet.

There's then the other way of doing it instead of cap and trade - carbon taxes.

It would help if US and China were in the Kyoto treaty. Seems US is still recovering from the lobbying and disinformation campaigns by interested parties. It's not "up-ending one's economy".
Not to be hypocritical, EU countries are not shining examples of CO2 emissions reductions either. Particularly Germany has some weird policy things going on. But elsewhere too.

Posted by mz at May 24, 2007 04:19 PM

Mike, you wrote:

Take a look at the huge variation in effects predicted for a minor increase in CO2

Worst case CO2 emission changes are at least a 50% rise from 2000 concentrations to 2100 concentrations. That's not a minor increase.

Posted by Karl Hallowell at May 24, 2007 05:51 PM

If oil starts getting hard to get, it will be synthesized from coal, and that generates a lot of CO2. (Afaik USAF has already tested such fuel in a B-52.)

Over here in Finland we have "peat deposits as big energy-wise as the North Sea oil", which some politicians and lobbyists even hold as a renewable energy form (well, 1 mm per year regrowth...)

So there's unfortunately a lot of potential and push for long term growth of CO2 emissions.

Posted by mz at May 24, 2007 06:31 PM

mz all I see happening with the Kyoto agreement is number magic and lies with the occasional selfcongratulatory backslapping thrown in.

To twist a modern idiom: Context is king.

Posted by Habitat Hermit at May 24, 2007 06:36 PM

As long as the cost brought down by planetary engineering schemes, may as well throw in some solar power satellites while we're at it!

Posted by K at May 24, 2007 07:28 PM

Easier than the vast number of "shades" proposed would be making a "cloud" of dusty particles. It might not last but a year or so before gravitational forces dissipate it; you'd have a real-world test with hard data on effectiveness, and could repeat as needed (or not).

Posted by Stewart at May 24, 2007 11:21 PM

Remarkable talk, hermit, from a nation which has 19 tons CO2 emissions per capita per year. Compared to Europe's 10. (Even taking into account having the 50% bigger GDP per capita, which by the way doesn't make you any more "rightful" to produce more CO2)

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Carbon_Dioxide_Gallery

There's quite a lot more room to cut in USA. That said, yes, Europe should cut too. And China shouldn't build a new coal plant every two weeks as it does, or so I've heard. (They were at 3 tons CO2 per year per capita a few years ago, I don't know the current numbers offhand.)

The Kyoto protocol is just another mechanism for the reduction of CO2 emissions. It was insisted by the USA to include trading like is done for sulphur emissions in the USA (succesfully). I haven't looked that closely what all the problems with it are, but they don't sound utterly unsolvable to me.

Of course, reasonable and credible criticism of global warming science or policies has been hard to get, so I might be throwing the baby with the bathwater here, thinking it's just more of that industry funded think thank / wall street journal crap.

Posted by mz at May 25, 2007 06:18 AM

Of course, one last possible delay tactic by the CO2 emitting industry, if the disinformation campaign against the science fails in the future (most republican politicians seem to be in AGW denial, so it's working still), would be to lobby for different policies than the immediate possibilities (which would have the same effect), just to delay the process.

Not that there wouldn't be good questions about these issues, just that I'm sceptical about a lot of the motives here.

sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/001091
postipcc_political_.html

Posted by mz at May 25, 2007 06:37 AM

It might not last but a year or so before gravitational forces dissipate it

The e-folding time for the unstable axis of the Earth-Sun L1 point is 22 days, so dust there would not last a year.

Perhaps more plausible would be constant release of extremely low mass scatterers (nanometer diameter metal whisker dipoles, say) for which radiation pressure would be large compared to gravitational forces. These would be accelerated back toward the Earth over a period of hours or days. I don't know if they'd stay aligned with the Earth-Sun axis, however.

Posted by Paul dietz at May 25, 2007 09:17 AM

mz you might not be aware of it but you manage to make yourself say that it isn't better to be more efficient.

Your argument boils down to this:
- Person A creates less CO2 than Person B
- Person A is thus better than person B
- somehow you claim it's irrelevant that Person A manages to create less CO2 because of less activity
- somehow you claim it's irrelevant that Person B manages to do more work per unit of CO2 than Person A

Do you understand what I mean by "context is king"? The point is that simply quoting and comparing absolute figures like XX tons is almost always wildly misleading and only good for fooling people.

And yeah any evil corporate interests should send me lots of money, please bill it to Cpt. Obvious ^_^

Posted by Habitt Hermit at May 25, 2007 10:59 AM

Karl, The CO2 has gone from around 280ppmv to around 380ppmv. i.e. an increase of 100ppm or so the conventional wisdom goes, if you ignore all those measurements documented by Prof Beck.
We are still arguing whether this has had any detectable effect at all as we try to separate signal from noise and debate the sign and magnitude of this increase in CO2 on the water vapor effects which are at least an order of magnitude greater than the CO2 effect.
The GCMs don't even agree with each other. Last I heard there were 21 or so major GCMs. Why so many if they are based on physics? They aren't of course as is pointed out by Roger Pielke Sr.

So I have no confidence that any planetary engineering attempts will a) work and b) have the effects predicted. I'll also stick with a 100ppm increase in CO2 as minor compared to the up to 40,000ppm water vapor.

Posted by Mike Borgelt at May 25, 2007 03:42 PM

It might not last but a year or so before gravitational forces dissipate it

"The e-folding time for the unstable axis of the Earth-Sun L1 point is 22 days, so dust there would not last a year."

All the better, thanks for the information! We get data on just what amount of blocking does what, measureably, to Earth, at maximum and as it thins in months while still providing a porous shade. If there are unintended bad results, they'll go away in a shorter time as well also.

"Perhaps more plausible would be constant release of extremely low mass scatterers (nanometer diameter metal whisker dipoles, say) for which radiation pressure would be large compared to gravitational forces. These would be accelerated back toward the Earth over a period of hours or days. I don't know if they'd stay aligned with the Earth-Sun axis, however."

I see two hazards here. Dust I chose for its basic harmlessness; it's not likely to ever be a hazard to spaceships in future. You don't state how long your dipoles will be-- sounds like we could get the World's biggest lightshow if they do come to Earth's atmosphere, right after some of our satellites are bombarded by metallic dipole whiskers.
If your nanometer width whisker is dust-like in mass and dissipation rates, then we're discussing details. However, I do have concerns about using material that the sun will throw back at us.

Posted by Stewart at May 26, 2007 01:36 AM

You don't state how long your dipoles will be

On the order of the wavelength of radiation being scattered.

Posted by Paul Dietz at May 27, 2007 03:44 AM

Karl, The CO2 has gone from around 280ppmv to around 380ppmv. i.e. an increase of 100ppm or so the conventional wisdom goes, if you ignore all those measurements documented by Prof Beck.

As well you should, since those measurements are clearly loaded with experimental errors. Measuring CO2 concentrations in air is not that easy, since small sources of local contamination can overwhelm it. The results are also absurd from the point of view of the required carbon fluxes.

Basically, the only thing you can deduce from that paper is that the journal that published it has a terrible editorial process.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/beck-to-the-future/

Posted by Paul Dietz at May 27, 2007 03:50 AM

To Hermit:
I'm not encouraging efficiency if it it's considered efficiency replacing a single passenger car that produces X CO2 with a single passenger sports car that has ten times the horsepower and produces 5X CO2 - hence being more efficient - per horsepower!

The climate doesn't care about those horsepowers, it only cares about total emissions. Total efficiency can help here if it's not a kind of efficiency that increases overall emissions (like in the example above).

But of course I care about human welfare too - I think a lot could be done without lowering material standard of living much.
Still, it's very useful to note both ways of thinking.

It's also a philosophical problem - how should emissions be divided? Should it be a universal per capita way? And how much? Paying some extra for the rest? What about natural sources and sinks? etc etc. Far too long to be talked about here.

And yeah any evil corporate interests should send me lots of money, please bill it to Cpt. Obvious ^_^

It's not that probably any person here is benefiting from the corporate interests distorting science, but the opinions are an end result of the public misleading campaign working succesfully.

I don't think even Rand has gotten money from TCS writing about how "global warming is a religion" - he hasn't written about that subject for them.

The TCS articles about AGW are hilarious btw if you know anything about the subject. (And the articles on evolution too.)

Steven Milloy's Junk Science is another issue, a former tobacco industry sponsored lobbyist. So loved and linked by many people commenting here.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Steven_J._Milloy

Seems for example that Martin Durkin, the guy who made "The Great Global Warming Swindle" is a true "it's a hoax" believer - he has been sucked in to the lies and myths. He probably has no money interest. As far as I understand, the movie portrays a sun-link with galactic cosmic rays increasing clouds. The model has some problems. Interesting nevertheless, should be investigated.

So there are many kinds of people "muddling the waters", making it seem very unclear to the public.

I don't know how anyone can look at those with a straight face, except when one:
1) is a bit ignorant about the actual issues
2) believes that anything contrary to what the other side (democrats) is saying is usually right

Which is understandable. One doesn't have infinite time to check all available information. I have many things where I have an opinion even if I don't know so much about them, perhaps from bits from here and there or even just going with people who I think are somewhat trustworthy.

But when some stronger and more direct evidence comes to the table, one should re-examine those shaky assumptions, and not keep claiming the same thing over and over again. And not be so confident on the claims either.

The massive science smear campaign could be a big thing when history is looked at in the future - people asking why more wasn't done sooner.

I don't know who is criticizing AGW science as a whole seriously very toughly and well at the same time. Perhaps McIntyre and Roger Pielke Sr. are borderline serious cases?

Of course, on a grander scale the AGW, Rand talking about sharks being hunted for fin soup or the other happening massive extinctions are just symptoms of humans becoming an ever increasing new force of nature, having huge effects on the environment in many ways (and therefore into ourselves).

Posted by mz at May 27, 2007 01:58 PM

mz let's make this very simple; I'm sceptical of AGW precisely because I want to avoid fooling myself on your items 1 and 2.

"1) is a bit ignorant about the actual issues"

I'd say absolutely everyone including climatologists and meteorologists are a bit ignorant about the actual issues. Some of them might even admit to being very ignorant.

Not that the rest of us who aren't directly working with the issues in those sciences aren't even more ignorant, we sure are.

Climatologists are the ones with the global warming models and novel techniques that are far from sufficiently refined or proven.

Meteorologist are the ones with a longer track record and more established techniques and methodology, but which still aren't sufficiently refined or proven (although better so than climatology). Still they're at least approaching being 50% correct in general.

Does human activity have an impact on the atmosphere? Absolutely! Do we know enough about how and how much that we can treat any predictions with any kind of confidence? Absolutely not, we're a long way from having anything resembling sufficient understanding of how the atmosphere works.

It's not that great strides haven't been made because they have but the system and its complexity is so large that those advances in knowledge still fall short.

That goes for both meteorology ("weather forecasts") and climatology ("climate models") and their overlapping and quite often conflicting conclusions.

To my knowledge there is a consensus in both sciences that a slight average global temperature increase is occuring but that's where the consensus stops and splinters profusely in all sorts of directions on any detail as far as climate change or AGW is concerned.

"2) believes that anything contrary to what the other side (democrats) is saying is usually right"

Your item number 2 falls prey to my answer to item 1 because the statement only makes sense if you believe the various sciences have reached wider and deeper consensus.

In my opinon that would be not just a bit ignorant, or very ignorant, or even more ignorant, but completely ignorant no matter what the IPCC, political parties (any side), or special interest groups (any side) want you to believe.

Posted by Habitat Hermit at May 27, 2007 11:04 PM

Hermit:
Do we know enough about how and how much that we can treat any predictions with any kind of confidence? Absolutely not, we're a long way from having anything resembling sufficient understanding of how the atmosphere works.

I very much disagree. Basic climate physics already suggests there is something to worry about (C degrees of warming), and models then refine these prognoses. As an example, James Hansen's model from the eighties has portrayed the last two decades' temperatures quite accurately.

Saying "we don't know enough" is a claim too you know.
You're trying to get a moral high ground by pretending to be cautious - but wouldn't cautiousness be stopping putting gigatons of carbon dioxide per year in the atmosphere if you think the results are "uncertain"?

1.5 to 4.5 degrees is slight to you? Would saying a 90% probability of it being majorly of human cause be "splinters pointing in all directions"?

Did you read some TCS piece about it perhaps?
By far the majority of the "scepticism" is completely baseless, ignorant, nonscientific or misleading. Weighing little against sound science with multiple lines of evidence. (And it's not just resting on climate models.)

Many people have fallen prey to the popular media's "some scientists say" and "the controversial issue of global warming" style which is not portraying the science even remotely accurately. It's understandable.
In reality the science is much more certain than told in many medias.

It's either the bad science knowledge of the media, corruption or the unhealthy polarizing two party political system in the USA, where fairness only means "get the opinion of the other side too". And that means some industry funded think thank then.
It's been seen in the "moon landing is a hoax" as well as ID/evolution debates where one side's claims are obvious howlers. And these issues have had and will continue to have very little importance to the world's daily life when compared to global warming.

Conflating meteorology and climate models gives you one myth bingo point though.

Posted by mz at May 28, 2007 03:37 PM

Conflating meteorology and climate models gives you one myth bingo point though.

Yes, that's a howler you see a lot. People who trot it out should realize the climate is the average behavior (or, more generally, information on the probability distribution of the behavior) of the system. Lots of (most?) chaotic systems can have their average behavior computed, even if prediction of their specific state at some point in the future is not possible.

Posted by Paul Dietz at May 29, 2007 06:24 AM

I didn't use the word conflate nor did I actually conflate the two main atmospheric sciences. Overlapping != conflation even if one assumes I meant "completely overlapping" since something which completely overlaps can still be seperate. I wrote overlapping and I meant overlapping. Assuming otherwise quickly kills rational debate,

As for the rest I'm too bored, it's not like this is getting anywhere anyway and I'm tired of what amounts to little more than namecalling. The future will tell who is right or wrong soon enough.

Posted by Habitat Hermit at May 30, 2007 12:37 PM

I'm sorry, I might have been overaggressive. Your claims in the vein of ...any kind of confidence? absolutely not just made me go on a rampage a little. :) (People can read the context above.)

I can understand if you want to stop this talk - it's somewhat time and resource consuming.

Posted by mz at May 31, 2007 09:29 AM

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