Talk by Mike Cheiky, President and Founder of CoolPlanet Energy Systems, which is developing carbon negative fuels with Biochar.

As the climate continues to change as a result of human actions, the government has done little to regulate the known causes of the problem. Consider Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's recent proposal to restrict the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Such actions disregard the science behind greenhouse gases and their relation to global warming.

It sounded like a panacea for climate change: “geo-engineering” the atmosphere to block some sunlight and counter global warming. Now scientists scrutinizing the approach say it could produce dangerous cascade effects, severely disrupting weather and agriculture—and might fail to block the worst of the greenhouse effects anyway.Two prominent climate scientists raised the possibility of geo-engineering in 2006, and it’s been invoked as the world’s emergency escape hatch ever since—a quick fix to stabilize or even reverse the heating of the planet. It would head off worsening heat waves, droughts, and rising sea levels. The estimated price is right, too.

A 2009 analysis found that geo-engineering would cost only $2 billion or so a year, chump change compared with converting from CO2-producing coal, oil, and natural gas to wind, solar, nuclear, and biofuels.But further study shows worrying pitfalls, according to a series of research papers that will appear in the next issue of Atmospheric Science Letters. The greatest threat is to Asian monsoons, which are driven by the temperature difference between warm land and cooler seas. In one scheme, a fleet of jets would crisscross the planet releasing five megatons of sulfur dioxide gas every year. The gas would mix with water in the stratosphere to form minuscule particles called sulfate aerosols, which scatter incoming sunlight back to space before it warms the atmosphere or ground. (That’s also how volcanic eruptions cool the planet.)

In perhaps the greatest surprise to scientists, geo-engineering looks like it would fail to stop warming in the Arctic. “Quite a bit of warming keeps occurring there,” says Boucher, “so you don’t manage to reverse the greenhouse effect there.” Trouble is, loss of sea ice saps high-pressure bands that bottle up arctic winds, steering winter storms farther south. Europe and the U.S. would continue to be walloped by severe winter cold and snow, and ocean levels would keep rising. (Expect a seller’s market in sea walls.)Most worrisome is how geo-engineering might disrupt “teleconnections.” These long-distance links let atmospheric conditions in one place influence weather half a world away.

The best known teleconnection is the El Niño/Southern Oscillation: warm waters in the eastern Pacific that weaken the easterly trade winds, bringing deluges to the Southern U.S. and Peru but drought to Indonesia and Australia. “The strength and occurrence of [El Niño] might change in a geo-engineered world,” says climate scientist Peter Braesicke of the University of Cambridge. Even if safe and effective approaches are found, scientists can’t answer what may be the ultimate challenge: securing long-term political and economic support for the such measures. If the world becomes suddenly unwilling or unable to keep supplying the atmosphere with sunblock even as we continue to pump out CO2, we’ll be worse off than where we started.Read more

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/30/a-climate-cure-s-dark-side.html

By Clive Hamilton

In 1892 Edvard Munch witnessed a blood-red sunset over Oslo, Norway. Shaken by it, he wrote in his diary that he felt "a great, unending scream piercing through nature". The incident inspired him to create his most famous painting, The Scream.The striking sunset was probably caused by the eruption of Krakatoa, which sent a massive plume of ash and gas into the upper atmosphere, turning sunsets red around the globe and cooling the Earth by more than a degree.Now a powerful group of scientists, venture capitalists and conservative think tanks is coalescing around the idea of reproducing this cooling effect by injecting sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to counter climate change.

Despite the enormity of what is being proposed - nothing less than seizing control of the climate - the public has been almost entirely excluded from the planning. Up to now, governments have been reluctant to talk about geoengineering. The reason is simple: apart from its unknown side effects, it would weaken resolve to reduce emissions.But it may soon prove an irresistible fix. This form of geoengineering is extremely attractive because its costs are estimated to be trivial compared to those of cutting carbon. It also gets powerful lobbies off governments' backs, gives the green light to burning more coal, avoids the need to raise petrol taxes, permits yet more unrestrained growth and is no threat to consumer lifestyles.No government is yet willing to lend support to geoengineering, but the day when a major nation backs it cannot be far off.

It is even possible that a single nation suffering the effects of climate disruption may decide to act alone. Indeed, Russia has already begun testing. Yuri Izrael, a scientist who is both a global-warming sceptic and a senior adviser to Prime Minister Putin, has tested the effects of aerosol spraying from a helicopter. He now plans a large-scale trial.Izrael is the latest in a long line of scientists who have advocated planetary engineering. Two of the earliest and most aggressive were Edward Teller and Lowell Wood. Teller, who died in 2003, is often described as the "father of the hydrogen bomb" and was the inspiration for Dr Strangelove, the eponymous mad scientist of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film. Wood was one of the Pentagon's foremost weaponeers, which led his critics to dub him "Dr Evil". He led Ronald Reagan's ill-fated Star Wars project.

The Royal Society has published the findings of a major study into geoengineering the climate.

The study, chaired by Professor John Shepherd FRS, was researched and written over a period of twelve months by twelve leading academics representing science, economics, law and social science.

Man-made climate change is happening and its impacts and costs will be large, serious and unevenly spread. The impacts may be reduced by adaptation and moderated by mitigation, especially by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. However, global efforts to reduce emissions have not yet been sufficiently successful to provide confidence that the reductions needed to avoid dangerous climate change will be achieved. This has led to growing interest in geoengineering, defined here as the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change.

However, despite this interest, there has been a lack of accessible, high quality information on the proposed geoengineering techniques which remain unproven and potentially dangerous. This study provides a detailed assessment of the various methods and considers the potential efficiency and unintended consequences they may pose. It divides geoengineering methods into two basic categories:

1. Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) techniques, which remove CO2 from the atmosphere. As they address the root cause of climate change, rising CO2 concentrations, they have relatively low uncertainties and risks. However, these techniques work slowly to reduce global temperatures.
2. Solar Radiation Management (SRM) techniques, which reflect a small percentage of the sun's light and heat back into space. These methods act quickly, and so may represent the only way to lower global temperatures quickly in the event of a climate crisis. However, they only reduce some, but not all, effects of climate change, while possibly creating other problems . They also do not affect CO2 levels and therefore fail to address the wider effects of rising CO2, including ocean acidification.

The report recommends:

• Parties to the UNFCCC should make increased efforts towards mitigating and adapting to climate change and in particular to agreeing to global emissions reductions of at least 50% on 1990 levels by 2050 and more thereafter;
• CDR and SRM geoengineering methods should only be considered as part of a wider package of options for addressing climate change. CDR methods should be regarded as preferable to SRM methods.
• Relevant UK government departments, in association with the UK Research Councils, should together fund a 10 year geoengineering research programme at a level of the order of £10M per annum.
• The Royal Society, in collaboration with international science partners, should develop a code of practice for geoengineering research and provide recommendations to the international scientific community for a voluntary research governance framework.

The Royal Society issued a call for submissions and convened a small ethics workshop as part of the evidence gathering process. More information is available in the main report. Royal Society