Scalable, fast, easy and cheap solutions when we get serious about avoiding climate doomsday

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New York Magazine David Wallace-Wells decided to go full doomer with “When the Earth will become uninhabitable”. They got their most read article ever, so they will probably keep it up.

The combination of dooms proposed
* maximum climate warming per models which have overestimated warming to this point
* adding in maximum feedback effects in particular having all carbon released from the permafrost by 2050 or 2100. The 2012 paper suggest that if 5-30% of the permafrost carbon was released by 2100 that it would be 0.13-1.7 degrees celsius of warming by 2300
* agricultural collapse
* acidic oceans
* economic collapse
* Hydrogen sulfide poison release for mass extinction

Nature Geoscience (2012) – significant contribution to climate warming from the permafrost carbon feedback

Permafrost soils contain an estimated 1,700 Pg of carbon, almost twice the present atmospheric carbon pool. As permafrost soils thaw owing to climate warming, respiration of organic matter within these soils will transfer carbon to the atmosphere, potentially leading to a positive feedback. Models in which the carbon cycle is uncoupled from the atmosphere, together with one-dimensional models, suggest that permafrost soils could release 7–138 Pg carbon by 2100. Here, we use a coupled global climate model to quantify the magnitude of the warming generated by the feedback between permafrost carbon release and climate. According to our simulations, permafrost soils will release between 68 and 508 Pg carbon by 2100. We show that the additional surface warming generated by the feedback between permafrost carbon and climate is independent of the pathway of anthropogenic emissions followed in the twenty-first century. We estimate that this feedback could result in an additional warming of 0.13–1.69 °C by 2300. We further show that the upper bound for the strength of the feedback is reached under the less intensive emissions pathways. We suggest that permafrost carbon release could lead to significant warming, even under less intensive emissions trajectories.

Scalable ways that could prevent and reverse climate change and CO2 with ten years of conditions getting sufficient to get serious

A “cocktail” of geoengineering tools to reduce changes in both temperature and precipitation caused by atmospheric greenhouse gases.

The good news is that their simulations showed that if both methods are deployed in concert, it would decrease warming to pre-industrial levels, as desired, and on a global level rainfall would also stay at pre-industrial levels. But the bad news is that while global average climate was largely restored, substantial differences remained locally, with some areas getting much wetter and other areas getting much drier.

Researchers including Carnegie’s Ken Caldeira, Long Cao and Lei Duan of Zhejiang University, and Govindasamy Bala of the Indian Institute of Science—used models to simulate what would happen if sunlight were scattered by particles at the same time as the cirrus clouds were thinned. They wanted to understand how effective this combined set of tools would be at reversing climate change, both globally and regionally.

Caldeira’s key contributions to science are his relatively early recognition of the threats posed by ocean acidification, his pioneering investigations into the environmental consequences of intentional intervention in the climate system (“geoengineering”), and the first peer-reviewed study to estimate near-zero-emission energy needs consistent with a 2°C climate stabilization target. Kenneth Caldeira is an atmospheric scientist who works at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Global Ecology. He researches ocean acidification, climate effects of trees, intentional climate modification, and interactions in the global carbon cycle/climate system. He also acted as an inventor for Intellectual Ventures, a Seattle-based invention and patent company headed up by Nathan Myhrvold.

The cost to construct a Stratospheric Shield with a pumping capacity of 100,000 tons a year of sulfur dioxide would be roughly $24 million, including transportation and assembly. Annual operating costs would run approximately $10 million. The system would use only technologies and materials that already exist—although some improvements may be needed to existing atomizer technology in order to achieve wide sprays of nanometer-scale sulfur dioxide particles and to prevent the particles from coalescing into larger droplets. Even if these cost estimates are off by a factor of 10 (and we think that is unlikely), this work appears to remove cost as an obstacle to cooling an overheated planet by technological means.

Preliminary modeling studies suggest that two million to five million metric tons of sulfur dioxide aerosols (carrying one million to 2.5 million tons of sulfur), injected into the stratosphere each year, would reverse global warming due to a doubling of CO₂, if the aerosol particles are sufficiently small and well dispersed. Two million tons may sound like a lot, but it equates to roughly 2% of the SO₂ that now rises into the atmosphere each year, about half of it from manmade
sources, and far less than the 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide released over the course of a few days by the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo. Scientific studies published so far conclude that any increase in the acidity of rain and snow as several million additional tons a year of SO₂ precipitate out of the atmosphere would be minuscule and would not disrupt ecosystems. The new work indicates that additional cloud thinning would offset side effects.

A 2016 study that claims feeding cows a diet with 2% seaweed along with their normal diet of grass can reduce methane emissions by up to 99 per cent. This would reduce the equivalent of global CO2 by 2-4 billion tons per year.

Seaweed production can be ramped up to offset all CO2 production.

Macro-algae forests covering 9% of the world’s ocean surface, which could produce sufficient biomethane to replace all of today’s needs in fossil fuel energy, while removing 53 billion tons of CO2 per year from the atmosphere, restoring pre-industrial levels. This amount of biomass could also increase sustainable fish production to potentially provide 200 kg/yr/person for 10 billion people. Additional benefits are reduction in ocean acidification and increased ocean primary productivity and biodiversity.

Iron can be placed into the ocean to restore iron levels to what they were centuries ago. Every 100 tons of iron placed into the ocean can be used to trigger algae blooms which would die in a few weeks.

Treating 20 million square miles of ocean each year would sink 3.5 billion tons of CO2 every year. In 2009, researchers, aboard the Royal Navy’s HMS Endurance, have found that melting icebergs off the coast of Antarctica are releasing millions of tiny particles of iron into the southern Ocean, helping to create huge ‘blooms’ of algae that absorb carbon emissions. The algae then sinks to the icy depths, effectively removing CO2 from the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

Iron releasing systems could be towed behind container ships and cruise as they move about the oceans.

* Iron in some parts of the Ocean are at 2-4 parts per trillion when it should be at 10-15 parts per trillion for healthy amounts of plankton and algae.
* Tens of millions of tons of soil is blown into the ocean from deserts. That soil is 1 to 5% iron. Volcanoes also naturally deposit a lot of earth materials with iron into the oceans
* The 120 ton iron dumping in 2012 generated record salmon harvests in 2013 and 2014. The 2012 iron fertilization generated an algae bloom that fed salmon at the right time to boost the salmon population
* the salmon bloom died in days and then fell to the bottom of the ocean taking large amounts of CO2 with them

The combinations of putting iron into the oceans, more seaweed, geoengineering cocktail might be a few tens of billions of dollars per year but the doomsday scenarios talks about tens of trillion per year in damage. So eventually the choice will be easy. Geoengineering will be fast, easy and cheap versus other proposals for trillions to be spent on modifying the global economy and how everyone lives.

Harassing people to do the expensive, hard and so far futile changes has not worked. We should shift to things that will work and are affordable and relatively easy.

Meanwhile we get articles like NYMag. Temperatures will rise a degree per decade but you will do nothing and the world will die. Now repent and sign onto the stupid plans to upend the world economy because you are a carbon sinner. Your plans to restore iron levels in the oceans and to cheaply restore the climate does not make everyone suffer enough.

35 thoughts on “Scalable, fast, easy and cheap solutions when we get serious about avoiding climate doomsday”

  1. “..ready to come to help those who need it..”

    People who need help tend to be people with little money. Nothing will be permitted to happen unless a profit can be made.

  2. The climate is really changing very rapidly. It’s really a good initiative to take some action to solve this problem, but I think the most important thing that people can do is change their attitude towards the world and be ready to come to help those who need it. The programme ‘It is coming’ https://allatra.tv/en/video/it-is-coming dwells on this issue very well. If you listen to what it is being told there, then it will not be scary if all of a sudden my house burns down, since I can be welcomed in any other house.

  4. Saving the planet isn’t hard and isn’t expensive. If you use less it cost less. For example I used CFL bulbs and LED bulbs and they save me money and save me the hassle of changing bulbs all the time. So it isn’t true that polluting less costs more.

    • price per kwh is higher for batteries+solar is still quite a large bit more expensive than Natural gas. So the expensive part is fairly accurate. CO2 intensive operations account for a little more than half of global gdp. I don’t know about replacing half of all jobs in the world but I’m going to guess its probably not easy. So not hard is also not true. replacing light bulbs is easy if you can afford 4x the price of the incandescent its replacing, I’ll grant you that. But that is hilariously not even close to the kind of sacrifices you’d need to make to get to a carbon neutral society today.

  5. E. O. Wilson’s last book: Half Earth:

    http://www.half-earthproject.org/book/

    proposes setting aside half of Earth as biodiversity preserve. He argues that geoengineering is inadequate — that a superior goal is preserving biodiversity because it subsumes mitigating the anthropocene’s global changes as a goal. Moreover, he lambasts those who proclaim it is “too late” to preserve biodiversity and/or that mixing up Earth’s ecosystems is producing a cornucopia of ecological and evolutionary foment that substitutes for biodiversity evolved over millions of years.

    He is correct.

    Although I’ve presented it here before, it bears repeating that 15 years is enough to remediate civilization’s environmental footprint — all of it including agriculture — in effect urbanizing the entire world’s population in spacious beachfront condos in a fraction of the eastern Pacific doldrums.

    http://jimbowery.blogspot.com/2014/05/introduction-extinction-of-human-race.html

    So we’re really talking about 90% Earth. And this is long before space migration/settlement.

    There is a low-hanging fruit in that proposal that needs to be fleshed out: Replacing carbocrete with CPVC (probably graphite fiber reinforced) — as the current proposal’s pH balance requires geologic sequestration of excess chlorine. Even though geologic sequestration of the excess acidity looks doable, a localized sequestration in the form of CPVC removes the biggest scalability challenge.

  6. The cost of restoring ocean iron levels is negative. The increased fishery productivity will more than pay for the iron. Any CO2 benefits are bonus. If corporations owned fisheries, they would actively manage iron concentrations.

    Restoring plankton populations also restores cloud cover. Plankton increase cloud condensation nuclei: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/07/tiny-sea-creatures-are-making-clouds-over-southern-ocean

    Because the goal is to RESTORE iron levels to their HISTORIC levels, NOT raise it to higher levels, the risks are minimal.

    In a rational world, this technology would be racing towards commercialization. In this world, it is currently somewhat illegal – being considered by some as the illegal dumping of waste at sea.

  7. Models & Simulations! …because they are NEVER wrong or even outright rigged, eh?

    Also, the Greentarded Watermelon Left are not interested in the least to any potential solution(s) to their manufactured crisis that they are milking for as much power/wealth as they can.

  8. And in reality, because all the evidence human released CO2 is causing any problematic climate change is produced by adjustments to the measured data, and there is no physical model of the world which even reproduced the recent past from the more distant past — what will happen is the the Three Degrees War as more southerly nations attempt to cool the planet and the more Northern ones try to warm it.

    Roman Scotland made wine, and Sweden was the granary of the Baltic. AGW India and Africa will claim they can kill Scots to them from it again.

  9. And in reality, because all the evidence human released CO2 is causing any problematic climate change is produced by adjustments to the measured data, and there is no physical model of the world which even reproduced the recent past from the more distant past — what will happen is the the Three Degrees War as more southerly nations attempt to cool the planet and the more Northern ones try to warm it.

    Roman Scotland made wine, and Sweden was the granary of the Baltic. AGW India and Africa will claim they can kill Scots to them from it again.

    • Scotland is int Gulf Stream. And Sweden is an example of why a few degrees can make a big difference. Believing that it is all a lie might be comfortable but not realistic.

      • Knowing it is a lie is a matter of reading the reports of the perfectly valid unadjusted values and seeing what the Warmists then claim what the values are after they cherry pick and adjust the data use they use to support their contentions–and how it does not relate to reality. It is no belief, it is self evident that AGW is a fraud.

      • Are you pretending the Gulf Stream left Scotland alone for the 1,500 years between the Rome and now? What CO2 are you pretending made Sweden warmer then than now?

    • I realize adjusting measured data sounds like “cooking the books”, and while sometimes that’s exactly what’s happening, other time it isn’t. For instance, is it a researcher’s ethical responsibility to, upon discovering a flaw in the data correcting process that can be corrected for, simply ignore the error?

      Some examples illustrating my point:
      https://phys.org/news/2016-03-revamped-satellite-global.html
      https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/feb/08/no-climate-conspiracy-noaa-temperature-adjustments-bring-data-closer-to-pristine

      Going back and correcting data to account for anomalies may seem like “cooking the books”, but analyzing the reason why the change is necessary can help discern what is nefarious from what is innocuous.

      • ” For instance, is it a researcher’s ethical responsibility to, upon discovering a flaw in the data correcting process that can be corrected for, simply ignore the error? ”

        And when AGW conspirators do perform their scientifically ethical duty and show their work. their work is demolished. Much the the AGW edifice is supported by papers where the AGW conspirators have refused to show their work.

        • Oh deary me, an error on my part has changed what I intended to say: “flaw in the data correcting* process” should instead be “flaw in the data collecting* process”.

          Even so, you quoted my question and then didn’t answer it. Given the article I linked that showed that satellite data needed to be corrected for anomalies discovered in the collecting process (satellites not maintaining their proper orbit, thus reporting cooler temps), should they just use the bad data instead? Even if the updated data showed that the Earth was in fact cooling during that same time period, they should still implement the correction.

          Narratives be damned, the truth is what matters. I care more about saving the ship than knowing who is to blame. In my opinion, knowing data can be corrected but publishing it anyway is as bad as cooking the books.

          • ” Oh deary me, an error on my part has changed what I intended to say ”

            It doesn’t really matter does it? The AGW conspiracists aren’t correcting anything. They are creating error.

            ” the article I linked that showed that satellite data needed to be corrected for anomalies discovered in the collecting process ”

            Bullshit. The only thing the satellite measurements can be corrected against are actual physical measurements of the air temperature, as with radiosondes and the like.

            • “It doesn’t really matter does it? The AGW conspiracists aren’t correcting anything. They are creating error.”

              I was merely saying that I had a typo, no hidden ill-will.

              “Bullshit. The only thing the satellite measurements can be corrected against are actual physical measurements of the air temperature, as with radiosondes and the like.”

              You’re right, in a sense. What affects measuring these physical measurements, though? Ground truth and physical parameters are the big ones, with one of those physical parameters being altitude.

              An example is this: a satellite is passively measuring the troposphere. Data is collected, sent, and analyzed using equations stating that the altitude of the satellite is “x” meters. Later, it is discovered that the satellite’s altitude is actually x-100 meters, meaning that more energy was in fact reaching the sensors than what is calculated. This produces “colder” data after correcting for the altitude change.

              And it should be corrected for, regardless of the implications. Would one not correct for a difference in air temperature for radiosondes discovered after-the-fact?

              • A useless hypothetical since the orbits are precisely known.

                The only plausible measure against which to adjust the satellite data is a physical measure of the same chunk of atmosphere, as with a radiosonde. For the interpolation of that correction with time and distance, you have to increase the error band of the satellite measure to the extent you do not know the occurrence was linear with time.

                And if you refer to some sort of optical pyrometetry, no, altitude does not give you a colder measure of temperature it gives you a larger area of temperature being averaged into the measure. Linear tomography can to a degree correct for that.

                • I’m not so sure it’s a useless hypothetical if the situation actually happened. As I recall, in that article the problem was that the dataset used measurements from a number of different satellites. Some of those satellites had defunct components which disallowed perfect orbits and which didn’t make it into the calculations. What they then did was correct the bad-orbit satellites data with the data from satellites who did maintain their orbits (I believe….the link isn’t loading for me at the moment…).

                  Also, yes active sensing is less affected by altitude as energy out/energy in can be measured. However, my example involved passive sensors, which are absolutely affected by changes in physical parameters like altitude.

                • ” Some of those satellites had defunct components which disallowed perfect orbits and which didn’t make it into the calculations. ” <– Then there is nothing to correct, is there?

                  " Also, yes active sensing is less affected by altitude as energy out/energy in can be measured. " <– Uhuh. Are these pyrometers, or like instruments bolometers? If they are then no, they will not have colder readings with altitude, they will be averaging the temperatures of larger areas. These links indicate most are such instruments.

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_temperature_measurements
                  http://www.weatherquestions.com/How_do_weather_satellites_work.htm
                  http://learningweather.psu.edu/node/23

                  Some use microwave radiometers.

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_radiometer

                  These could be more precise but still only average larger areas if they are farther from the surface than planned.

                  I note you are only discussing satellites which were further from the surface than planned, although orbits do not decay in this fashion. This would produce a falsely warmer result because a presumed cooling from altitude is added into what is in fact only the temperature of a larger area.

                • “Some of those satellites had defunct components which disallowed perfect orbits and which didn’t make it into the calculations. ” <– Then there is nothing to correct, is there?"

                  I suppose I was not as clear as was needed. Those satellite's intended measurements didn't make it into the calculations, such as along a specified orbit. Assuming a satellite has one orbit when it has a different orbit and having that discrepancy carry over into calculations is what they were correcting for.

                  "I note you are only discussing satellites which were further from the surface than planned, although orbits do not decay in this fashion. This would produce a falsely warmer result because a presumed cooling from altitude is added into what is in fact only the temperature of a larger area."

                  Exactly. Now reverse the situation, which is actually what happened in the one situation I linked, and you get falsely colder measurements because a presumed warming from altitude is added.

                  Also, I'm not sure what instruments were part of the satellites they were using for their dataset. It could very well be those you listed. And perhaps we've lost site of the original question at this point; if data is collected by instruments that can be corrected without altering the integrity of the information, one should do so as Science demands it.

  10. Is there actually any reason to use sulfur dioxide for geoengineering, aside from the fact that it’s the aerosol that volcanoes inject into the upper atmosphere, and so it’s already studied? Mightn’t some other compound actually be superior? Sodium chloride, maybe?

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