Climate ministers and top negotiators from dozens of nations at the UN last weekend, were unable to break the deadlock over the mitigation and adaptation effects of a warming planet and on how to go about in an agreed upon fashion to cut greenhouse gases from further polluting our atmosphere.
Now we ought to be really concerned. With less than three months before the next major international climate summit in Mexico COP16o we ought to prepare for some strong activism.
UN’s top climate officials at a high-level gathering Saturday, said that the key issues “are in an unbreakable deadlock” and the official negotiating text of Mexico, is bogged down by short term, national interests.
It’s not surprising, because this issue demands consensus to move forward, while most UN goals are not agreed upon by many countries anyway. They are usually carried by national interests that are horse traded for votes. Even when the results are important, UN goals are easily forgotten. They aren’t remembered, even a day after the goals are inaugurated. Same has now happened for Climate Change. Many countries outright deny it’s existence and most others are confused to the point of permanent lethargy and indecision. That surely is the effect of the adverse PR from the Climate Deniers, the Climate Profiteers, and the most degenerate Regressive elements of society. You know who You are…
And of course, the UN goals and the bureaucrat’s lax push for results don’t last for years. The country negotiators have the attention span of a gnat. The UN climate official has no leadership qualities to speak off. The UNFCCC staff are amateurs at best and with little to qualify them to swim against the sharks like the US and CHina country negotiators, they drown in their spit. No wonder they don’t even last a year, and so it is with Climate Change as an issue now. After Copenhagen’s brilliant luminescence, now it’s totally forgotten.
And the people at the UN also forget the paramount global issue of Climate Change at their peril. And by pretending to keep busy by shifting the focus on the easy stuff, they get by killing another year while practicing the old How to drill. ”How to corrupt the Aid process further, how to use creative accounting to show that a lot of people are rising from poverty so the MDGs can appear to be saved and How to save women from men…” The UN is finally getting into saving the family counseling business and psychoanalysis too now. But Climate Change remains forgotten and obscured through the self congratulatory parties with Royals, princes and nobles at the UN opening week of the General assembly. Something like Spring Break for the juvenile leaders gathered in New York. drink, party, make a speech, meet some friends, crack jokes, wine and dine, go crazy, have a toga party, buy some diamonds from Harry Winston for the GFs and some of Tiffany’s bling for the wives, WAGs et al, and generally screw around NY for a week or so before you go back to your country to claim victory in the serious business of dicking around.
But Climate remains. The Atmospheric problems don’t go away by denying their existence and being blind to them…
Our friend Anthony Giddens of LSE, author of the Politics of Climate Change, along with Martin Rees of the Royal Society published just now a very damning, Open letter to the world’s leaders; to caution them of the foolishness of doing nothing to address the onset of dangerous Climate Change and a warming planet.
And that’s the Moral Hazard of inaction that we are facing….
Because, Moral hazard occurs when a party insulated from risk behaves differently than it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk. It is what the rich do to the poor. The haves to the have nots. The natives to the strangers. The patriots to the nomads. The fools to their mothers and sons….
Seems to me Moral Hazard is very much like the familiar policy expounded and practiced by the masters of the Universe. The billionaires, the global leaders and the captains of industry, insulated from their people, and paying attention to their economic sponsors, simply don’t care to change business as usual. Ditto for business and religion. Ditto for most of the public sphere and the media. Ditto for the so called progressive business greens who use the old tobacco PR method of the Healthy Smoking institutes to finance inactivity for climate change.
The Leaders of the developed world and the Business elites along with the oilers, and the tar sand baddies, simply don’t care to change the fossil burning based economy’s Status Quo. A status quo, that favours their parochial short term economic interests, massively. And they have quite a funding agency for that from the amoralistic super rich. And then it is the Oil companies that fund Geoengineers, along with who the myopic Billionaires fund them and even those misguided governments seking a fast-food Plan B type of climate solution… And that makes the usually mousy geoengineers more arrogant, immoral, full of hubris and unjust than ever before.
Because where the cheese goes, there follow the mice. So to tagging along with the moneyed elites, now come the Climate Change Science Refusniks. Those fringe engineers are of two ilk. The main dominant group are the Nuclear Engineers and are the best funded apologists in the Art of doing nothing. After all they are schooled in destroying the world with Nuclear weapons, while fervently hoping their side will win the global meltdown, if their leader and few VIPs survive the ensuing long Nuclear winter. This was developed in the idiotic Reagan years of the winnable nuclear wars folly. The Alzheimer cowboy and the Dr Strangeloves rode together the MX missiles to oblivion starship of infamy; apparently well informed with good solid science. Science of the nuclear kind. And all of it was always starting with the nuclear research scientists of the Lawrence Livermore laboratory. They are all Geoengineers now. Bringing us closer to the brink of nuclear devastation than we’ve ever been before…
The second ilk of Geoengineers are those strange characters who have seen this climate change existential threat, like a future Las Vegas jack pot. A veritable cash bonanza and a money making machine to milk forever the teat of desperate governments who want to at least appear to be doing something. Anything. They are selling last minute airfares to the nowhere land. Thinking up fat dreams like the patented, giant garden hose, tethered to a giant stratospheric balloon and attached to a coal factory’s chimney – spewing CO2 directly up in the higher atmosphere. This shit passes as science to geoengineers, in order to provide global cooling. These hairy dope stoners, are now changing their stripes and are calling themselves from Geoengineers to Climate Engineers having attracted much unwanted attention to their hare brained schemes. Schemes that are a crude attempt at self beneficial christening, of their self chosen discipline – the discipline of saving the world, whether the world wants it or not. That is called Climate Engineering today…
Unfortunately the world is changing rapidly and with the UN inactive same as regional national governments in proper mitigation and adaptation of Climate Change through reductions of CO2 emissions and remediation of negative effects, it has become the job of these totally unregulated entities to provide for a Plan B.
When there is not an active Plan A with hope of implementation and leadership, either from the UN or the US or EU or the G8 or G20 or even the G2… or yours truly, then people are led to despair.
So, Controlling the climate with technology that was once the stuff of science fiction, is now a normal occurrence. And with many governmental tests already underway, there’s an urgent need for global governance of geoengineering and control of the runaway saviour-mice.
Because, Geoengineering increases moral hazard dramatically, we must not ignore the fact and focus solely on the scientific arguments at the expense of the consideration of the social arguments, the equanimity and the appropriate humbleness. But the think tanks, corporates, governments and even the kids on the street know that the best economic solution would be the secret development of geoengineering technology… Because that way the decision makers would be unaware of its benefits and pitfalls, when considering whether to cooperate or not, but yet were able to benefit when needed still declaring to their people that they are doing their best. Their absolute best. No doubt. Like the secret government operations. And that we all understand. What we fail to see though, is – however just – the idea of scientists forming secret societies and corporations in order to manipulate the world’s climate without external scrutiny and without inviting the public confidence in their midst is crazy beyond belief.
Add to that the real Hubris preformed daily by Aspberger suffering and dyslexic scientists wanting to engineer their own form of saving the world and You see where we are heading fast.
Understandably, when there is no light at the end of the tunnel, all manners of people go rolling forward with some certainty of solutions to limit the effects of global warming. The more certain – the more dangerous – they usually are.
Many crazy and sane solutions abound. No doubt. But the patented ones are the for the wackier exotic stuff….And we’ve got many diverse lists of them upon lists. Not talking here about seeding clouds to cause rain. That’s not geoengineering, as any industrial scale farmer/pilot/rocketeer and agriculturalist this side of Kansas, knows. I’m talking about the wacky techniques that have been proposed at the Asilomar geoengineering conference to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Wacked out jobs that include the following and all of them haven’t ever even, been tested under small laboratory conditions:
1) The cake belongs to the lawrence livermore laboratory lunatics and the Los Alamos nuclear expert scientists. They prove the old saw that if you only have hammers – all problems appear to you like nails… And of course that is reflected in the Nuclear Winter – atmospheric and climate cooling recipe. It’s simple yet effective. No doubt about it. Nuclear missiles exploding in the upper atmosphere [near space], in order to cause fallout that will block the sun. Fallout that will cause fpr us a ”controlled” nuclear winter. A winter of three years… That they think they can regulate the length of the Nuclear winter precisely gives you an idea of the crazy nuts the geoengineering variety of fruitcake contains. Nuts you can break your teeth biting into. Hard nuts that never think of the Social dimensions of experimental science. Never think of Morality, Justice and humility. Never ask for collective reasoning. Lurking in the shadows and avoiding the public eye. Operating in total secrecy taking advantage of the weaknesses of a stressed out global society and it’s vacuum of Laws on the subject. Snowing the leaders and the non-existence of protocols by any international body, so can they ride willingly with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse… The Climate engineers, never – absolutely never – do they mind the side effects.
Seems to me: We’ll surely end up killing ourselves if we listen to the Asilomar asylum maniacs.
And to be honest – I erred. This method was marginally tested in the nuclear sabre showing off between US and Russia when both of them exploded nuclear missiles in the atmosphere around 1963-65. All though this doesn’t constitute a nuclear winter – plenty of data were collected regarding the extreme harmfullness of nuclear weapons and their explosions’ long term after effects, fallout, radiation poisoning and the never ending half life.
2) Another interesting method of Climate Engineering, is installing in the ocean a vast number of floating funnels that draw nutrient-rich cold water from the deep to encourage algal blooms that suck carbon dioxide from the air, and construction of thousands of ’sodium trees’ that extract carbon dioxide directly from the air and turn it into sodium bicarbonate. Clearly an engineer’s bathtub plan with minimal intelligence to boot but sounding nice under candles and smoke. Relaxing reading too for willing ocean cruisers with floating palaces to bob around the ocean saving us all.
3) Solar radiation management. A supremely confident idea that provided that Buck Rogers would be alive and well, we could perform with Buzz Lightyear easily. The most prevalent of the ideas put forward to block the Sun’s heat would be far-fetched even in science fiction pulp comics. One idea is to send billions of reflective discs to a point in space known as L1 and located between the Earth and the Sun.
4) Another Geoengineering idea is to launch hundreds of thousands of special unmanned ships that plough the oceans sending up plumes of water vapour that increase cloud cover. I like that one. Cruise anybody?
5) And the winner is the idea of changing our forests. Listen to this. It was a serious Asilomar conference highlight attended by the best brains in the Geoengineering community. Literally it calls for destroying all the dark green forests. All the dark-coloured forests must be cut so the barren land could be converted into light-coloured grasslands that reflect more sunlight out of the earth… Crazy Mofos.
6) Fertilising the oceans with iron filings to promote the growth of tiny marine plants that absorb carbon dioxide. This was tried many times over, quietly, and away from prying eyes of journalists or environmentalists with the blessing of governments of India (Climate change denier) and Germany (Climate Progressive at the time) and it ended up literally killing all the plankton, increasing acidification, with zero positive effects and some other imponderable negative unknowns… In 2008 the project, named Lohafex was jointly created by India and Germany to fertilize the oceans and in a jiffy to sequester many tonnes of carbon by absorption. Victor Smetacek and his colleagues cruised to the Southern Ocean in January 2009, to pour ten tons of iron sulphate into the waters below. This kind of experiment had been done a dozen times before with little fanfare. The geoengineering scientists were mainly interested in understanding iron’s role in ocean ecosystems. But because their results would also be crucial for testing the feasibility of a particular plan to cool the climate, fierce opposition met the experiment by Smetacek — an oceanographer from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany — and his Indian collaborators. In theory alone, by infusing the ocean with iron, they could stimulate the growth of plankton blooms, which theoretically would draw carbon down into the deep sea, keeping it out of the atmosphere for hundreds or even thousands of years. The reality was a bit different… Smetacek and his Indian colleagues, they got approval from the German and Indian government ministries to go ahead with their experiment. The two countries didn’t consult any one else, but just went ahead with it. They sailed out to the open ocean, away from the island of South Georgia, and chose a spot where a vast, spiralling eddy would hold their iron sulphate in one spot, as if in a giant test tube. Cruising in a spiral covering 150 square kilometres, they poured in the ocean, the iron compound. And waited to save the planet… But their fertilization experiment sparked a bloom of plankton known as flagellates, which seem to have been dead on arrival, never happened, poisoned, killed or eaten by predators. Once in contact with the real world, the Geoengineers, ultimately failed to draw any additional carbon down from the surface waters. Ahhh the joys of Climate Engineering the oceans must be hard to come by, because a) dumping garbage into the oceans isn’t permitted, b) the second side effect was that they polluted and c) they increased the acidification of the very same ocean on whose waters they dumped their stuff into. Wonder how come Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd didn’t get wind of this…
And this massive scale international ocean seeding and fertilizing geoengineering experiment, rather than being a step toward acceptance of geoengineering and climate engineering, it poured cold water on the whole idea of ocean fertilization for sequestering CO2, according to Smetacek. Ever optimistic Smetacek says, the approach at it’s maximum, and done globally by many many nations, and only if succesful, at best, it might sequester one billion tons of carbon a year. A very optimistic at most to absorb roughly one-tenth of people’s emissions…
“But it’s not going to have much of an impact,” Smetacek says. “In that way, we were lucky, because we showed it didn’t work, so everyone shut up.” Indeed, doing some serious basic research and discovering that it doesn’t work and that in addition there are a bunch of problems that nobody had anticipated and serious side effects, might in fact make folks pause, think and shut up about it.
7) Enhanced dimming. This is the option that is taken most seriously and the one that is altogether grander in conception and scale. The scheme proposes nothing less than the transformation of the chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere so that humans can regulate the temperature of the planet as desired. Like volcanic eruptions, it involves injecting sulphur dioxide gas into the stratosphere to blanket the Earth with tiny particles that reflect solar radiation. Of course to have the desired effect we would need the equivalent of one Mount Pinatubo eruption every three or four years. To place this in scale, remember that the emissions from the eruption in April of Iceland’s volcano were less than a hundredth of those from Pinatubo, so to engineer the climate our way, we’d need the equivalent of one of those every week, every year for decades and centuries to come.
More cautious scientists recognise that attempting to regulate the Earth’s climate by enhancing global dimming is fraught with dangers. Most worryingly, the oceans are absorbing around a third of the extra carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by humans, which is raising their acidity, dissolving corals and inhibiting shell-formation by marine organisms. Turning down the dimmer switch may reduce incoming solar radiation but would do nothing to slow ocean acidification. The climate system is hugely complicated and tinkering with it might be akin to dropping cats from the sky fitted with tiny parachutes to control the runaway mice.
Now the Moral hazard is that Geoengineering unfounded and unscientific over exaggerated hopes will lull us into a dream like sleep of Climate inaction and we’ll miss the proverbial boat to reduce our emissions in the normal way of control, efficiency, economy, mitigation & adaptation…
Although ideas for climate engineering have been around for at least twenty years, until recently public discussion has been discouraged by the scientific community. Environmentalists and governments have been reluctant to talk about it too. The reason is simple: apart from its unknown side-effects, geoengineering would weaken our already waning or nonexistent resolve to reduce our global carbon emissions and to prepare our economies to de fossilize and our Energy Power and Utility industry to decarbonize…
Geoengineering, economically speaking, it’s an extremely attractive substitute because its cost is estimated to be “trivial” compared to those of cutting carbon pollution. While the international community has found it difficult to agree on strong collective measures to reduce carbon emissions, climate engineering is cheap, immediately effective and, most importantly, available to a single nation without having to ask anyone else. Especially if that nation has nuclear capacity as have more than twelve nations this far…
If they follow the nuclear winter theory, they can really choose to use the nuclear thermostat to fit their ”personal” needs. I have no doubt the rest of the nations of this earth – might have a different idea of what the optimum temperature might be - and the missiles will surely fly…
Among the most eager and most willing visible contenders for unilateral Climate Engineering intervention, one sees Russia, Pakistan and China. With the United States and Germany following closely. Hot to trot. And then the incredible ease of Climate Engineering can be applied also by Japan and Australia because they will need it the most. That is without discounting Israel, North Korea and Iran that they might use Geoengineering accidentally on purpose too. Think of this for a moment: Could the nations of this earth agree on a constant temperature? Could they all agree on a set of principles and the measure of Geoengineering allowable? It’s like a couple choosing the optimum temperature of the bedroom. Impossible. Now try this with twelve couples in the same room, each with their own thermostat and each with a different ideal temperature. You’ll go nuts…
The US, Africa, Latin America, SE Asia and China will be severely affected by warming, and will want to do something to cool it. But Canada, Greenland, Alaska and Russia might prefer the globe to be a couple of degrees warmer in order to increase their agricultural belts going north, in the high altitudes of Siberia and the frozen tundra and permafrost. Never mind the melting permafrost will release all kinds of methane and Co2 and augment the greenhouse gas problems…
And if there is no international agreement to reduce emissions and protect the planet’s temperature and Climate, then its conceivable that an impatient nation suffering the effects of climate disruption may decide to act alone. Unilaterally. ANd this isn’t science fiction. They’ve all got nukes and know how to deliver them i the upper atmosphere. For this is not out of the question and it shouldn’t be removed from the debate. It might be, that in three decades the climate of the Earth could be determined by a handful of corporate sponsored Senators in Washington, or a renegade Pyongyang or a few cadres of Communist Party officials in Beijing, or the re-emerging Czar of Russia. Or even the government of an Australia crippled by permanent drought, collapsing agriculture and ferocious bushfires, that could risk the wrath of the world by embarking on a climate control project.
Even more now, it’s the wingnuts of Geoengineering that can hijack the public discussion and take over the public space claiming they have all the answers. In Asilomar there was a conference about it this year and they all their particular wares, theories and advertised and discussed all the possible solutions.
Still the battered public, sensing the global warming and climate change unhappy effects and seeing the lack of leadership and absence of mitigating action, places an uneasy faith and hope in any plan B and allows itself to be offered the cures from the snake oil salesmen.
However well meaning yet misguided, ”pocket protector/calculator engineers” these might be, still the snake oil is just that. A dangerous if not fatal compound offered to easily led and in conjunction with some wealthy and influential ”actors” and even the old nuclear gray ghosts of the Department of Defense; they all contemplate bringing about Nuclear Winter as a solution to runaway climate Change and a warming planet.
They reason daftly, that by exploding some nukes in the upper atmosphere they will simulate nuclear winter that will only last a maximum of three growing seasons. Of course this will create a global famine, but the wealthy countries and rich folks are prepared with storerooms of food under lock and key. And the nuclear winter will certainly cool the planet too. No dispute there. The Dr Strangeloves are keen observers to the irony that their solution will solve two problems at once: Overpopulation and Climate warming….
Yes – simple – as that.
A Malthusian Hitler type solution is what the current crop of Geoengineers are all about. The Livermorites, led by Dr Strangelove and son, [the Hitlerite Edward Teller and his successor Lowell Wood] who want to provoke nuclear war against the atmosphere and the planet with the aim of creating a survivable Nuclear winter. That is their solution to cool the planet and by the way, also let the little brown and yellow people of the global south perish…. so the demure blondes survive in the cool shade of the nuclear mushroom clouds.
It gives a new meaning to radiation suntan.
Me thinks:
You must surely get a stronger SPF factor suntan lotion…
Yours,
Pano
The nuclear winter simulation hasn’t been tested before and it will surely bring a host of unintended consequences. Nuclear radiation in every square inch of this earth and a whole lot of other difficult to contemplate cataclysmic scenarios… Yet the Lawrence Livermore lavatory nuclear scientists think they got it all sorted…
Even the more benign forms of Geoengineering like ocean fertilization through iron sulphates and such have been tried and found destructive on a massive scale.
Good Luck is all I have to say.
