Kintsugi and the Moral Hazard

One says he will reform himself, and then nature and circumstances will be right... The other will reform nature and circumstances, and then man will be right. Talk no more vaguely, says he, of reforming the world — I will reform the globe itself.

 - Henry David Thoreau, Paradise (to be) Regained

Climate Geoengineering Part 4 of 4

This is the fourth and final post in a series on climate geoengineering: "the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change." My aim has been to answer the following questions:

1. Prometheus or Icarus? - Why consider climate geoengineering at all?
2. Fire and Ice - A synthetic sulphuric aerosol veil in the stratosphere?
3. Obscured by Clouds - What other options are on the horizon?
4. Kintsugi and the Moral Hazard - What would Jesus do?

Source.

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This post is broken into five parts:

1. A shotgun approach to climate change
2. Kintsugi
3. The moral hazard
4. What would Jesus do?
5. In conclusion

A shotgun approach to climate change

Climate geoengineering is "the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change." As we've seen, there are a few ideas gaining traction in certain scientific and entrepreneurial circles related to climate geoengineering schemes; the farthest-reaching and likely the most controversial is the creation of a veil of sulfur aerosols in the stratosphere (from mile 6 to mile 31 above sea level; see image below).

Source.

The veil could be created by planes that deposit sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, or weather balloons that spray it up through a hose from Earth's surface. Once up there, the sulfur dioxide will spread pretty easily throughout the stratosphere.

• Pro: the sulfur particles will reflect some of the sun's heat and light before it enters Earth's atmosphere, thereby "cooling" the atmosphere a bit; 
• Con: the particles will also weaken the necessary ozone layer near the poles. 
• Pro: plants will likely appreciate the scattering of some of the sun's light in directions that benefit them, and they'll like the higher CO2 remaining in the atmosphere; 
• Con: the blue sky will be whitened, weather patterns (like the Indian monsoon) will change, and the oceans will continue to become more acidic and lifeless.

Geoengineering is not a silver bullet solution to climate change. In fact, short of an immediate, full transition from a fossil-fuel-based economy to a renewable energy-based economy, there are no silver bullets available to take out this accelerating climate change beast. 

Silver bullet:

Source.

Our response to climate change, then, must be a shotgun approach. We've got to fire at it every pellet we've got available, and we've got to do it all at once - pellets like the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, minimizing production and consumption, and localizing our economies.

Shotgun shell:

Source.

Ultimately, what geoengineering can provide is breathing space (source): it could let us stabilize temperature while we work out the great energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables and develop carbon capture technologies that don't yet exist in theory or reality. Not even in theory is geoengineering a permanent option, by the way.

Kintsugi 

The story goes that a 15th-century Japanese shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimasa, sent a broken tea bowl to China to have it fixed. When the bowl came back, it was held together with metal staples. Disgusted, he set out to find a better, more aesthetically pleasing way to repair broken pottery. His eventual solution? Adding gold dust to adhesive resin, so that cracks are emphasized and made attractive.

- this iFixit.org post

Source.

The philosophical perspective on kintsugi is that "it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise." (Source.) 

Instead of becoming destitute due to the ensuing climate change tragedy, the history of life on Earth could become "all the more whole, and all the more beautiful, for having been broken and mended." (Source.) 

The spirit of kintsugi is conjured by activist and journalist Naomi Klein when she writes that the worrisome uncertainty of climate change can be "balanced and soothed by the prospect of building something much better than many of us have previously dared hope." She writes that "if there has ever been a moment to advance a plan to heal the planet that also heals our broken economies and our shattered communities, this is it." (Source.)

During my first introduction to climate geoengineering (by Naomi Klein, actually) I was repulsed. How could we consider messing with something so grand and so poorly understood as the global climate system? It's clearly an example of what Wendell Berry calls arrogant ignorance: "We identify arrogant ignorance by its willingness to work on too big a scale, and thus to put too much at risk." (Source.)

Oliver Morton, however, with compassion and thoughtfulness, led me to seriously consider climate geoengineering: "It is about...exercising compassion on a planetary scale - a project that will have to be as political as it is scientific or technological."

I think that climate geoengineering needs to be researched and tested, and most importantly it should be discussed in policy circles at local, regional, and national levels. To be pulled off ethically and effectively, geoengineering will require international communication and coordination at a level never seen before.

Geoengineering as a component in a full-spectrum, gold dust-infused adhesive for our fracturing Earth system is now palatable to me.

It should be further studied and discussed not as a silver bullet solution, but as a source of breathing space for us to refine and implement renewable energy technologies globally (and all the requisite transformations in our economies and governments). I think it's worth considering in this context.

What I want to be responsible for, however, is that I'm advocating consideration of inorganic solutions to a problem with presently viable organic solutions.

Source.

The moral hazard

What is disquieting [about geoengineering projects] is not their likelihood, but what they reveal about the persistence of belief in the technological fix. The notion that science will save us is the chimera that allows the present generation to consume all the resources it wants, as if no generations will follow. It is the sedative that allows civilization to march so steadfastly toward environmental catastrophe. It forestalls the real solution, which will be in the hard, nontechnical work of changing human behavior.

- Kenneth Brower, writing in The Atlantic

The moral hazard in considering geoengineering is that in falling for its allure as a panacea (and it isn't one), society will be less likely to appropriately respond to climate change in the long run. At this point in the game, we shouldn't delay the development and implementation of technologies and social structures necessary to create a cleaner, sustainable future.

The moral hazard of geoengineering is that the short-term benefit of extending sustainable temperatures may lead society to delay grappling with the harder tasks ahead. We can't delay.

Some people see geoengineering as worth avoiding altogether simply due to the moral hazard, let alone its concomitant ecological hazards. It's thought that the cost is too high of delaying the inevitable under the temporary umbrella of geoengineering.

• What's chilling about the moral hazard is the likelihood of it.
• What's behind the moral hazard is our distrust of the institutional mind - the mind of corporations seeking to profit, the government seeking to control.
• What's jarring about the moral hazard is that those willing to consider it do so from a place of privilege, either geographically or temporally or economically or all three, such that suspending an energy transition won't hurt them or their kids as much as it will hurt poor brown people on the other side of the planet.

The moral hazard of geoengineering: "Give me chastity and continence, but not just yet!" - St. Augustine, Confessions.

What would Jesus do?

'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

- Jesus, Matthew 22:37-40 

I'm generally in Thoreau's first camp of eco reformers: I think that the exterior will be taken care of when we look within at our latent desires and objectives, reform ourselves, and shift our actions to be considerate of present and future humans and non-humans.

Then I read Morton's The Planet Remade, and his logic is sound, his empathy is appropriate, and his optimism is high. He argues that we can reform nature by developing better technologies, and then our ecological issues will be resolved.

Even throughout this blog series I've written support for the study, discussion, and implementation of climate geoengineering.

And here I am, aiming to finish the series with what I think is the most important question I've yet asked about the subject: what would Jesus do? Note: I'm asking this question as an atheist, not as a Christian.

I'll answer that question by focusing on Jesus's two commandments to us:

• Would support of geoengineering be charitable to our neighbors?
• Would support of geoengineering honor that the kingdom of God is within/among us?

Is it charitable?

Geoengineering, done ethically, could be a component of the cultivation of a livable planet for all life. In this regard, I think that it is charitable, that it is loving thy neighbor.

However, the 'ethical' qualifier is not easily resolved. A global market left to its own devices, no matter how beneficent in theory, continues to prove to have more concern for profit than a concern for life.

Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be 'uneconomic' you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.

- E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered 

The two ethical dilemmas of geoengineering are the profit motive (that prioritizes material wealth over human/non-human health and well being) and the cataract of privilege. Geoengineering, "far from a quick emergency fix, could make the impacts of climate change even worse for a great many people." (Source.)

A charitable shepherd wouldn't graze his flock on poisoned pasture.

Does it put God above all else?

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

- Jesus, Matthew 6:19-21

A mostly unconcerned and unrelenting pursuit of economic growth continues to drive the warming of the planet. Our economy is a fossil fuel-powered, consumption-driven machine. Different, better, and newer stuff while the health and well being of life suffers. Our desires for distractions and comfort and ease have an environmental and social cost.

As Valentine Michael Smith says in Stranger in a Strange Land, "the truth is simple but the way of man is hard." Jesus was a radical, and I think he would promote a radical response to current and impending ecological collapse. This would include, I think, altering our economies and means of production to satisfy human and non-human needs. Our current appetites cause too much suffering, and I think that Jesus would invite us to subdue our hunger for consumption.

Material success is our golden calf. It is our treasure, and it is where our hearts are. I think that Jesus would admonish us to reprioritize our values and place the health and well being of life first, as an expression of putting God above all else.

In summary, I think that Jesus would ask us to act consistently with his two commandments. I think that he would have us seek solutions that lead to the best outcomes for all, actions and outcomes that demonstrate respect for all life (including non-human life).

I know that Jesus would tell us our real challenge is not a technological one but a spiritual one. And that is what makes geoengineering a dangerous option - we, a spiritually immature species, wielding planet-wide powers that will likely compound entrenched ecological problems.

I think that Jesus would tell us to kick our addiction to fossil fuels, over-consumption, and our selfish gratification of base desires for comfort, and that he would tell us to fulfill our responsibilities as able stewards of this pale blue dot in God's Creation.

In Conclusion

Writing this blog series on geoengineering has been a very positive experience for me. I felt like I was in college again, writing a research paper.  

Since I began writing this fourth and final segment over a month ago, I read a 900+ page novel that takes place in India and Afghanistan in the mid-80's, I teared up at the election results, I've felt new hope in humanity and our future, and I listened to my wife tell me that my voice matters. 

I deeply appreciate the time and consideration that you've given to any part of this series. I am also grateful for the privilege of health, family, friends, access to information, leisure, and material necessities that make my life possible and spectacular.

Let's make this world a better place for all life.

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Please comment if you have a response to this or any of my posts. I'd love to hear from you.

Obscured by Clouds

Climate Geoengineering Part 3 of 4
This short series of posts addresses climate geoengineering: "the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change." My aim is to answer the following questions:

1. Prometheus or Icarus? - Why consider climate geoengineering at all?
2. Fire and Ice - A synthetic sulphuric aerosol veil in the stratosphere?
3. Obscured by Clouds - What other geoengineering options are feasible?
4. Kintsugi and the Moral Hazard - What would Jesus do?

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A summary of the first two parts of this series on geoengineering:

• Human-caused climate change is real and building momentum.
• Transitioning from our current fossil fuel economy to a renewable energy economy is a beast to tackle, even if we didn't complicate it with fossil fuel-funded political denial.
• The world's carbon cycle had been balanced for at least 800,000 years.
• Fossil fuels are stored carbon from before the dinosaurs, and industrialized economies since the 1750s have been putting that stored carbon into the atmosphere.
• The excess carbon in the atmosphere (carbon dioxide, CO2) traps the sun's energy, warming the planet. A degree of warming is great, preventing a snowball Earth, but now we're heating the place up with additional trapped warmth. 
• Sulfur dioxide in the high atmosphere (stratosphere) causes a cooling effect on the planet, since it blocks some of the sun's energy from ever making it in to get trapped by CO2.
• One of the main ideas for geoengineering the climate is to intentionally deliver sulfur to the upper atmosphere to block some of the sun's energy.

This post is broken into 4 parts:

1. Carbon Storage - Direct Air and Power Plant Exhaust
2. Carbon Storage - Ocean Fertilization
3. Carbon Storage - Afforestation
4. Cloud Whitening

Carbon Storage - Direct Air Capture and Power Plant Exhaust

"That negative [CO2] emission are likely to be necessary if the chances of two degrees of warming are to be kept low surprises many people. There is a widespread belief that simply stabilizing emissions - emitting the same amount each year - solves the warming problem."

- Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade

The problem is that we've got too much CO2 in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels. There are other greenhouse gases that we pollute the atmosphere with as well (like methane and nitrous oxide), but CO2 stays up there by far the longest and is much more prevalent. One of the most obvious questions to ask, then, is why don't we just remove the excess CO2 from the atmosphere?

Source.

To get a sense of the challenge, let's consider a quarter teaspoon of salt like in the image above. A quarter teaspoon of salt has about 10,000 grains of salt in it. If we let that spoon represent 10,000 molecules of our atmosphere, just 4 grains of salt in that spoon make up the portion of our atmosphere that's CO2. In other words, the challenge of removing CO2 from the atmosphere is the challenge of finding and filtering out four particular grains of salt from a quarter teaspoon.

The most obvious place to do this filtering is at the source: power plant flues. Approximately 10%-25% of the exhaust from fossil fuel power plants is CO2 (Source). This technology, known as Carbon Capture and Storing increases the cost per watt of electricity generated by at least 20% and as high as 90%. This cost is likely to change, however, given the implementation of carbon taxes and the costs expected due to mitigating the effects of climate change (Source).

"The only way to understand CCS is to actually do it. We cannot do without this, in my view. We're looking for really positive and quick action... Deployment is what we're talking about. Not research." (Source.)

- Nick Otter, CEO of Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute (GCCSI)

Three problems with carbon capture technology:

1. Once the carbon is captured, where should it be stored? The likely place is injection into geological formations as in the use of advanced oil/natural gas recovery techniques, like fracking. In 1986 a landslide in Cameroon released a cloud of CO2 that suffocated 1,700 people (Source).
2. It costs a lot to implement, especially when retrofitted to existing power plants. Furthermore, power plants that use this technology use about 40% more energy to run (Source).
3. It isn't effective enough. It may remove up to 90% of CO2 in power plant exhaust compared to standard power plants, but we've got to decrease the CO2 in the atmosphere, not just minimize what we're putting up. We don't have the technology for that yet.

This article is an overview of the "world's first power plant with negative emissions", fueled by biomass cut from forests. The diagram below illustrates the process.

Source.

Carbon Storage - Ocean Fertilization

The ocean holds about 50 times the amount of carbon as the atmosphere. Carbon capture and storage in the ocean seeks to increase the amount of carbon the ocean can store, and this would aid in removing more CO2 from the atmosphere.

There are large patches of the ocean rich in the ingredients for life except for a deficiency in iron. By providing those areas with iron we could increase the amount of organisms (phytoplankton) present that could feed themselves on the CO2 in the ocean; the more ocean CO2 they remove, the more CO2 the ocean can absorb from the atmosphere.

Source.

What the diagram above illustrates is that by fertilizing parts of the ocean with iron we'd be promoting the growth of ocean plants that then get eaten by ocean creatures (zooplankton). The carbon in the plants and creatures would eventually fall to the floor of the ocean where it would get stored for a while (estimates of 100 years), though not permanently (Source).

One of the amazing things about this idea is how effective it could be. It's estimated that 10 grams of iron could fix 2,200 pounds (1 tonne) of carbon (a factor of 100,000 to one). In other words, less than .05% of all iron mined might be enough to completely offset human carbon emissions (Source).

Source.

The image above highlights the concerns with ocean fertilization:

1. How much carbon will actually be removed from the atmosphere, and for how long? We know that this isn't a permanent storage of CO2, but just how long isn't clear.
2. How much methane and nitrous oxide will be emitted? Both gases are much stronger greenhouse gases than CO2.
3. What impact on ocean acidification will the added carbon have on the ocean? Remember from part 2 of this series that the oceans will not become acid, but they are already becoming more acidic than much ocean life can handle.

Some experiments were performed in the Southern Ocean and off the west coast of Canada, but the results weren't encouraging: the plankton that benefited most weren't the best suited to getting CO2 into the ocean's depths, and more nitrous oxide was produced than expected (Source). This article is a great overview of the 2012 Canadian experiment, and it also underlines the rogue nature that some groups may in the future adopt as climate change hits the fan.

So as we see again, our mathematical models are good, but Earth's systems are so complex that more experimentation is needed with this idea (and all geoengineering ideas) before we have a complete understanding.

Carbon Storage - Afforestation

"No matter how important forest conservation and reforestation efforts are for many economic, social, and biodiversity reasons, forestry can only be a piece in the large jigsaw puzzle that is (or would be) successful climate change mitigation."

- Climatologist Mark Trexler, Source 

Plants feed on CO2, so planting trees (afforestation - converting land into forests) falls on the list of climate change mitigation strategies.

It has been estimated that in order to remove the amount of industrial CO2 added to the atmosphere at year 2000 levels would take the planting of global forests equivalent to an area twice the size of India. This is an area of land also equivalent to half of the planet's current arable, or farmable, land (Source). China, where just 2% of original forests are intact, currently operates the world's largest afforestation project: 1.5% the area of India each year, with 85% of planted trees not surviving (Source).

Source.

Some challenges with this idea as a major climate change mitigation strategy:

1. Despite progress in fighting deforestation (the global annual rate of deforestation has diminished by 50% since early 1990s), Earth's forests are still shrinking by close to 1 out of every 1000 acres per year (.08%). Forests still shrink due to human population expansion and agricultural uses. (Source.)
2. Planting trees in snowy areas could increase the heat absorption of these areas, canceling the cooling effect of planting them. (And we should still plant them.)
3. The carbon taken out of the atmosphere by new trees doesn't just remove it from the atmosphere; the newly available space left by the removed atmospheric carbon is partly taken up by some CO2 that the ocean will put back up.

Cloud Whitening

"Brightening things to cool them down is something you can do on scales from that of an individual house to a lake to a sea, using everything from micro-sprayed cloud-condensation nuclei to plain old paint."

- Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade 

Source.

After mopping our kitchen floor I like to put a fan to work blowing across the floor surface; this leads to the floor drying much more quickly than without the fan. There's always a layer of water vapor on the surface of water bodies. When I turn the fan on, it blows this water vapor away, and more of the water on the floor is able to evaporate. (Source.)

As water evaporates from large water bodies, it condenses at high elevations due to cooler air. Small particles of dust and pollen in the air make it much easier for the water vapor to condense into water droplets and then clouds. (Source.) Adding new particles into a cloud encourages additional condensation. 

This is the basic principle behind cloud seeding, one method of which was developed by an atmospheric scientist named Bernie Vonnegut (Kurt was given the idea for Ice-nine in Cat's Cradle, one of my favorite books, by H.G. Wells during a visit to his brother's lab).

Cloud seeding sees use around the world, most notably in China. In 2008 China seeded clouds prior to the Olympics to clear the air in Beijing, and they seeded during the Olympics to cause the clouds to rain prior to reaching Beijing and the opening/closing ceremonies. China has also used seeding in response to droughts, intentionally causing rain and snow. However, "there is still no convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather modification as it only has 30 percent or less chance of success." (Source.)

While cloud seeding for cloud formation, saturation, and eventual rain or snow uses Vonnegut's silver iodide as particles, cloudships like the ones pictured below would form a fog-like cloud using vapor and salt from the ocean. (Source.)

Source.

It's a fairly straightforward process to increase cloud coverage, and since clouds reflect sunlight before it gets to the lower atmosphere, it's a fairly straightforward approach to keeping global warming at a minimum. In fact, some models suggest that cloud whitening "could produce enough cooling to more or less offset a doubling of carbon dioxide" in the atmosphere. Furthermore, if the process were turned off after having been started, the clouds would return to normal within a couple days at most (Source).

Source.

Issues with cloud whitening:

• Surprise surprise, the biggest issue is a lack of funding for research! More research needs to be done to understand cloud formation and weather and atmospheric processes, but mostly money is needed to fund the prototype project developed by some Silicon Valley engineers. 
• More white will reflect more light (as do 'natural' clouds and snow/ice), but water vapor is a more effective greenhouse gas than CO2. More water vapor in the air, if not reflecting the sun's energy, will trap it.
• We don't know what the weather effects will be. Some models show large impacts on the Indian Monsoon and the Sahel in Africa. 

“Clouds have one of the biggest impacts on global temperature. But they’re one of the most poorly understood parts of the atmospheric system. There’s never been a way to do a controlled study of aerosols and clouds. Their interaction is a big mystery.”

- Kelly Wanser, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, inventor, technologist

The two diagrams below summarize the major geoengineering options:

Source.

Source.

Thank you for reading.

- Check back in a week or so for Part 4 of this series!

"According to two ice-core records from Antarctica, the atmospheric carbon-dioxide level dropped by as much as 8ppm [3.2%] over the second half of the 16th century... When Europeans arrived in the Americas at the end of the 15th century, they brought with them diseases to which Native Americans had no immunity... [that] reduced the population of the Americas over the subsequent decades by 90% - from around 60 million to around 6 million...As a result, some half a million square kilometers which had been under cultivation reverted to scrub and forest, which would have sucked billions of tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere... [It] is a good bet that at least some of the reduction of the CO2 level seen in the Antarctic ice is a result of all that plant growth."

- Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade

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Please comment if you have a response to this or any of my posts. I'd love to hear from you.

Fire and Ice

Climate Geoengineering Part 2 of 4
This short series of posts addresses climate geoengineering: "the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change." My aim is to answer the following questions:

1. Prometheus or Icarus? - Why consider climate geoengineering at all?
2. Fire and Ice - A synthetic sulphuric aerosol veil in the stratosphere?
3. Obscured by Clouds - What other options are on the horizon?
4. Kintsugi and the Moral Hazard - What would Jesus do?

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This page on wikipedia does an awesome job laying out the ideas, methods, and issues with adding sulfur to the upper atmosphere to block some of the sun's energy from ever entering. In this post I've added a further background structure with the hope that the necessary details and logic are clear, straight-forward, informative, and worth the read.

This post is broken into 6 parts:

1. The carbon cycle
2. Where fossil fuels come from
3. Where fossil fuel CO2 goes
4. The greenhouse effect
5. Atmospheric sulfur
6. A veil to dim the sun

The Carbon Cycle

Source.

Before the industrial revolution, the global carbon cycle was well balanced for at least the past 800,000 years. In other words, any carbon added to the atmosphere through breathing or burning was soaked back up by either plant life or the ocean itself.

Carbon leaves the atmosphere in 2 main ways:

1. Photosynthesis by plants. Plants breathe in carbon dioxide, take the carbon atom and fix it as carbohydrates (energy) or to their bodies as new plant matter. They then breathe out the leftover oxygen. 
2. Dissolving in sea water. Besides being used in photosynthesis by phytoplankton in the sunlit surface waters of the ocean, some ocean organisms use carbon to make their shells and skeletons or the carbon dioxide is stored as minerals through other chemical processes.

As the diagram above shows, the carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere by natural causes is balanced by the carbon dioxide that gets removed from the atmosphere by natural causes.

However, humans have been adding more CO2 to the atmosphere than Earth has been able to properly balance. The imbalance started with the industrial revolution. We'll be talking more about the imbalance briefly. (Source.)

Where Fossil Fuels Come From

Well before dinosaurs walked on Earth, many plants and animals that died didn't decompose completely before getting trapped within a swamp (Earth was pretty swampy then). Eventually, the plant and animal life turned into the fossil fuels we use today.

When we burn fossil fuels, we're actually releasing the carbon dioxide that those plants breathed up and stored within their bodies and the bodies of the animals that ate them. Each time we burn fossil fuel we're releasing carbon that was stored deep underground for the last 300 million years or so. This added CO2 disrupts the natural balance that the carbon cycle has found over the last hundreds of thousands of years. (Source.)

Source.

Where Fossil Fuel CO2 Goes

Land plants are capable of absorbing about 25% of the extra CO2 that humans add to the atmosphere. They actually kind of like that extra CO2; it makes them run more efficiently. Another 25% is absorbed by the oceans; this CO2 is mostly dissolved, and it makes the oceans more acidic (the oceans won't become an acid, but they move toward the acid side of the pH spectrum and it endangers crustaceans and coral). NOTE: the oceans are capable of absorbing less and less fossil fuel CO2.

The remaining 50% of fossil fuel CO2 stays in the atmosphere. We've increased the amount of atmospheric CO2 by about 43% since 1750. (Source.)

Source.

The Greenhouse Effect

"During the Middle Miocene, when temperatures were ~3° to 6°C warmer and sea level was 25 to 40 meters higher than at present, CO2 appears to have been similar to modern levels." - Science 

If it weren't for the greenhouse effect, Earth might look something like this, a giant snowball of a planet:

Source.

Energy from the sun enters our atmosphere and heats up the surface of the planet a bit. Some of that heat gets radiated back into space, and some gets absorbed by greenhouse gases (like CO2) in our atmosphere. This absorbed heat is what gives Earth a habitable climate, but excess greenhouse gases are now giving us excess heat. Check out the image below. (Source.)

Source.

Here's a pretty common graph showing the relationship between temperature and atmospheric CO2 over the last 800,000 years (click to enlarge):

Source.

Atmospheric Sulfur

Some small molecules in our atmosphere absorb the sun's energy (like greenhouse gases). Others, such as small sulfur particles, reflect the sun's energy before it gets trapped in our atmosphere.

Sulfur is an essential element for life. It makes it into our upper atmosphere naturally from volcanoes erupting, and ocean plant life put some up there too. Since sulfur particles reflect some of the sunlight that hits them, particularly powerful volcanoes sometimes have a short-lived measurable cooling effect on Earth's climate. (Source.)

An industrial source of sulfur particles is the burning of fossil fuels, particularly coal. Because of the sulfur particles from coal power plants, it's actually possible that half of the warming due to CO2 in the atmosphere is actually being prevented due to our fossil fuel use. Whoa - so the Earth would actually be warming faster without the sulfur leaving smokestacks.

In fact, if we stopped using all fossil fuels tomorrow, we'd likely see a sharp upward spike in temperature in the near future because the sulfur we put into the sky with the CO2 wouldn't be there, but the CO2 still would be - sulfur particles fall down much sooner than the CO2 would (by at least 90 years), and more heat would be let in and then trapped. (Source.)

This is also why we saw a brief lull in temperature increases in the early 2000s; this lull is expected when we factor in China's growing industry's sulfur impacts on the atmosphere (Source).

Don't get me wrong, this isn't an endorsement to keep burning coal to keep out the some of the sun's energy. The CO2 we are putting into the atmosphere is way worse than the "cooling" benefit we get from the concomitant sulfur particles.

Source.

A Veil to Dim the Sun

So, on to the main event. Basically, one of the leading ideas for dealing with the warming of the planet due to human-produced CO2 is to intentionally add sulfur molecules to the upper atmosphere. This "veil" in Earth's stratosphere would reflect some of the sun's energy before it entered Earth's atmosphere, thereby "cooling" Earth by preventing some of the sun's heat from getting to it in the first place.

How we could get the sulfur up there:

• Airplanes, civilian and/or military.
• Modified artillery (large guns).
• High-altitude balloons.

Source.

Likely side-effects:

• Ozone depletion. The sulfur dioxide we put up there will interact with the ozone layer.
• Whitening or yellowing of the sky. The sulfur molecules won't just reflect the sun's light upward. It will reflect it in many directions, thereby altering the color of the sky. Side note: plants would prefer the light scattered, and sunsets would likely grow in beauty.
• Changing atmospheric circulation patterns. A temperature change in the upper atmosphere will likely occur, and this will cause changing circulation patterns in the upper atmosphere that will likely lead to new circulation patterns lower.
• Global weather patterns will shift. For example, the Asian monsoons alone, feeding hundreds of millions of people, would possibly dry up. (Source.) 

Whilst such changes are very difficult to predict with high confidence, models suggest there will be both hydrological winners and losers. [Stratospheric veiling] could also have unpredictable and unexpected environmental effects; if so it could conceivably lead to climate changes that are worse than the 'no [veiling]' option.

 - Solar Radiation Management: the governance of research

Thank you for reading. A part of me still feels some deep sadness that we even have to explore geoengineering options, but we have to explore them, even if it's only to find out that the benefits won't outweigh the costs. 

Part 3, coming soon...

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Please comment if you have a response to this or any of my posts. I'd love to hear from you.

Prometheus or Icarus?

Climate Geoengineering Part 1 of 4
This short series of posts addresses climate geoengineering: "the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change." I'm writing to answer the following questions:

1. Prometheus or Icarus? - Why consider climate geoengineering at all?
2. Fire and Ice - A synthetic sulphuric aerosol veil in the stratosphere?
3. Obscured by Clouds - What other options are on the horizon?
4. Kintsugi and the Moral Hazard - What would Jesus do?

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My main source of info for this series is the latest climate change-related book I'm reading, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World, by Oliver Morton. Any quotes I use that are not specifically referenced are from the book, and I can provide specific page numbers upon request.

Morton opens the book with two driving questions:

1. Do you believe the risks of climate change merit serious action aimed at lessening them?
2. Do you think that reducing an industrial economy's carbon-dioxide emissions to near zero is very hard?

What do you think?

Reading this blog, it's pretty likely that your answer to #1 is 'yes'. The second answer is likely less clear to you, but probably also a yes.

I now agree that climate engineering should be studied, developed, and debated for feasibility and potential effects, because I think that transitioning from fossil fuels is going to be extraordinarily challenging:

• There are few obvious short-term financial or experiential incentives to transition now. 
• We use a lot of fossil fuels, and nations are and will be reluctant and contrary to damaging their economies for the sake of an unseen future. (See the quotes below.)
• Climate geoengineering, as we currently see it, will not solve the multitude of problems that increased atmospheric CO2 causes (like ocean acidification and species' failure to adapt), but it may provide some breathing space to allow "more time for the development and deployment of fossil-fuel-free energy technologies more advanced than today's."
• An international project that a global geoengineering program would entail would require us to "reinvent politics" - we couldn't enact such a large-scale project in our current geopolitical playing field.
• The ideas of climate geoengineering and their possible repercussions could scare people into greater willingness to transition to renewables faster.

The leading reason to be wary of the study and development of climate geoengineering schemes is quite valid, but it's insufficient in my view to keep us from pursuing additional knowledge and data: "Simply talking about climate geoengineering [may] lead to less climate mitigation." In other words, if "people believe there's a plan B that may work, they will pursue plan A with less vigour."

I hope you stick around and read the following parts to this series. We will almost certainly be seeing climate geoengineering in our future.

"If the world had the capacity to deliver one of the largest nuclear power plants [no added CO2 with nuclear power] ever built once a week, week in and week out, it would take 20 years to replace the current stock of coal-fired plants."

"To replace those coal plants with solar panels at the rate such panels were installed in 2013 would take about a century and a half. That is all before starting on replacing the gas and the oil, the cars, the furnaces and the ships."

"Half the computer models looked at for the most recent IPCC report said that if the climate were to be kept below the two-degree [3.6º Fahrenheit] limit, emissions would have to be negative by 2100. Humans would have to be actively taking carbon dioxide out of the air, rather than just refraining from putting any more in."

 - Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade

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Please comment if you have a response to this or any of my posts. I'd love to hear from you. 

Book summary: The Collapse of Western Civilization

This summer, twelve students read one of my sponsored summer reading books, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. I thought they might have selected the book because it's only 76 pages of text, including 10 pages of a "Lexicon of Archaic Terms" and 16 pages of an interview with the authors (the interview is excellent). However, when we got together many of them expressed surprise at its brevity.

The stage of this book is the year 2393, western civilization has collapsed due to impacts of climate change, and a historian from the Second People's Republic of China is documenting our present age leading up to the collapse (the authors' explanation for why they chose China is brilliant).

This isn't a doomsday book; it is an insightful, objective analysis of our current cultural and political limitations to deal effectively with climate change.

In general, my students enjoyed reading it, liked the different perspective from which it is written, and were surprised by the science of human-induced climate change. As with my discussions with students about Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, these students were surprised not only by the scientific measurements and models of our climate trajectory, but very surprised that they don't hear about this stuff at all on the news.

Besides the content of the four main ideas below that made this book pretty insightful, the emotional distance that the historical perspective provides has a bit of a transformative power.

Here are four key ideas expressed and expounded in this book that I wanted to share:

• "Indeed, the most startling aspect of this story is just how much these people knew, and how unable they were to act upon what they knew. Knowledge did not translate into power."

• "Those in what we might call active denial insisted that the extreme weather events reflected natural variability, despite a lack of evidence to support that claim. Those in passive denial continued life as they had been living it, unconvinced that a compelling justification existed for broad changes in industry and infrastructure... At the very time that the urgent need for an energy transition became palpable, world production of greenhouse gases increased."

• "Our historian concludes that a second Dark Age had fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on 'free' markets, disabled the world's powerful nations in the face of tragedy...A key attribute of the period was that power did not reside in the hands of those who understood the climate system, but rather in political, economic, and social institutions that had a strong interest in maintaining the use of fossil fuels."

• "The scientists who best understood the problem were hamstrung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind - including imminent threats... Meanwhile, scientists continued to do science, believing, on the one hand, that it was inappropriate for them to speak on political questions (or to speak in the emotional register required to convey urgency) and, on the other hand, that if they produced abundant and compelling scientific information (and explained it calmly and clearly), the world would take steps to avert disaster."

I recommend it.

The two heads of this teacher

Last school year I grappled with my role and responsibility as an educator with subjects to teach and a global mission to fulfill. I judge that I spoke too frequently and too laden with sadness and frustration about the climate crisis and our need for people who know better to step up.

I went into this summer knowing that I wasn't very effective last year in inspiring a community of climate activists, but unsure how to win that game and still train citizens in scientific thinking and in effective participation in science- and engineering-related fields.

Sometime in early July I found contentment in the space between the pull and the push: the need to pull the brakes on the free-market ideological god of the "hidden hand" finding global equilibrium and balance through The Market, and the push to imagine and create technological saviors for our troubled societal and global body. There's actually a middle ground on which I can be both a stand for a different perspective and a stand for scientific and design mastery.

On the one hand I am a climate activist who sees the need for minimizing product consumption and the product development that drives it. Necessity isn't the mother of invention so much as invention is the mother of necessity. And breaking our society's addiction to "progress", incorrectly and unfortunately measured by gross domestic product, is a necessary strategy in winning the climate war.

On the other hand I am a physics and engineering teacher who aims to inspire interest and inquiry, and to train students in mastering concepts and problem-solving skills related to the development of technology. Technology that we need to help mitigate the effects of human-induced global warming and other ecological crises. We need solutions and some of my students will be among those developing them.

I never had two heads, it just felt that way. There's just the one now, and I like it.

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.” 

- Rumi

Stop the train, you're leaving

This afternoon I met with a staff member from the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, CCAN. I first really heard of CCAN at a free screening of an inspiring climate change movie that came out this past spring. That's also when I first learned about bomb trains and the work that CCAN was doing to stop them.

Bomb trains, or simply oil trains, are trains that transport crude oil from fracking fields and tar sands to ports where the oil can be refined and/or exported to the world market. These trains go through populated areas, and it's estimated that 25 million people in the U.S. live within one mile of tracks traveled by the trains (check out this interactive map, search by zip code and zoom out a bit, then check out Houston too...).

When I went to the film screening in downtown Baltimore, I parked next to an elementary school in a residential district. On the other side of the school were railroad tracks that oil trains travel on a regular basis.

This oil is considered extreme because it is particularly volatile. As Sierra Club director, Michael Brune, explains clearly in this article:

Two factors are responsible [for the danger of these trains]. One is the extreme volatility of fracked oil and tar sands oil. Both are extremely combustible, making them challenging to refine and dangerous to transport. 

The other factor is the aging and inadequate infrastructure of a rail system that was never designed to carry such hazardous cargo. As a result, the U.S. had a total of 144 oil train incidents last year [2015]. In 2009 there was only one.

CCAN has so far been effective in preventing at least one Baltimore crude port from being developed, they're working to educate the public and lobby politicians, and they hold monthly meetings/trainings for those interested in fighting this and other unequal dangers that many of Maryland's citizens face. (Check out CCAN's overview of their Baltimore oil train fight here.)

CCAN is also doing work to ban fracking in Maryland, expand Maryland's renewable energy standard, and provide access to community solar power. Their next meeting is Wednesday August 31 from 6-8 (always the last Wednesday of each month).

I am glad to continue to learn about issues that impact so many people and for which solutions exist. I feel blessed to have met Jam from CCAN today, to grow my tribe with one more inspired, passionate, and caring human.

Our words will be elemental

This morning we sat on the dock here in Maine, and through the filters of my sunglasses I watched the sun reflected a thousand times in little waves that danced at the lake's inlet. Now, sitting in front of a stone fireplace, looking over my shoulder at a rising, nearly full moon reflected in the waves at that same inlet, I get the added bonus of the chorus of a hundred crickets, Beethoven on my laptop speaker, and our neighbors wrapping up conversations as they say their goodbyes. And this is after stepping from a magical, little, wooden restaurant/bar with an old dude playing his 12-string and singing a complement to the camaraderie among strangers. Topping it off was the look in my son's eyes and the creativity of his sentences as we played cards waiting for dinner to come out.

I'm pretty moved right now thinking about these moments from today, all fairly short and wholly wonderful. So it's partly with reluctance and partly in defense of those moments that I now turn again to The Dithering:

"Despite 50 years of growing scientific consensus, the warming of the earth continues unabated. Well-funded lobby groups have sowed doubt among the public and successfully downplayed the urgency of the threat. Meanwhile, geopolitics has impeded the development of an effective global response."

- Stefan Rahmstorf, Professor of Physics of the Oceans

For a month or so now I've written that I think the most important step that we can take for the future of life is to talk about climate change. I've also mentioned a couple times that the source of the issue is our exploitative, extractivist, consumerist culture.

With a concern for seeming to over-simplify large and challenging issues, I want to express three things:

1. Our ecological and social problems result from our exploitative consumerism. 
2. Avoiding dealing with present problems carries them into the future.
3. We could solve all our problems by building our individual and collective integrity to a level of impeccability.

A plan of action: talk about climate change and other social and ecological issues as being results of industrial capitalism (it's inherently exploitative); vote for candidates who will build momentum in the right ecological direction (like Clinton) while knowing that extremely little gets accomplished on election day. 

"We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental."

- Uncivilization, the Dark Mountain Manifesto 

The intrusion of freedom

"It is the intrusion of human freedom and responsibility that makes economics metaphysically different from physics and makes human affairs largely unpredictable."

- E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

I think that one of the appealing aspects of science is that it predicts the future. Here we have a situation with known present conditions, and with documented principles and mathematical relationships we can reliably predict the future conditions of the situation.

It's enjoyable, it's seductive, and it's satisfying. For me at least. Usually.

However, as simple as it is for many of us (scientists and engineers, really) to find hope in reducing existence to physical and biological principles and mathematical relationships, in doing so we neglect the value of human volition in making our future quite unpredictable.

Unfortunately, "most people, most of the time, make no use of their freedom and act purely mechanically," Schumacher writes.

What's important to get, though, is that to Schumacher predictability isn't necessarily the absence of freedom. Predictability in human action is "when we or others are acting according to a plan." 

When we look to the future and see rising seas, climatic changes in food production and pests, less clean water, more pollution, etc., we see the results of mechanically following the plan laid out for us by an exploitative, consumerist economy. To create a (predictably) better future for more human and non-human life than this vision suggests, we need to follow a new plan.

"A plan is the result of an exercise in the freedom of choice," he writes. It just happens that we tend to predictably choose "the behaviour pattern of very large numbers of people doing 'normal' things."

"The problem comes when we begin responding to social proof in such a mindless and reflexive fashion that we can be fooled by partial or fake evidence."

- Robert Cialdini, Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion

There may be large-scale devastation in our lifetimes, there may not be. There will at least be small-scale devastation during our lives and large-scale devastation over the long-haul for our species and others. Why not move in a healthier direction now in support of life?

What to do (any order works):

• Educate yourself
• Talk about it with anybody: “The most cost-effective way to reduce CO2 emissions is to reduce the use of coal first and most sharply.” Oh, and natural gas is a bad substitute.
• Join the movement

Thanks for reading!

"The task is formidable indeed, but the resources that are waiting to be mobilised are also formidable."

 - E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful