I'm probably not ideally aware of some of the points in this debate, but one strong feeling I have is that it's not leftist resistance that retards action on geoengineering. Yes, that faction opposes geoengineering, but since when has that edge of politics been so powerful against industry? I fundamentally can't believe that industry pays so much attention to the left or that the left has much ability to call the shots. The implication of what Robert says is that industry would be a great partner in geoengineering without the left butting in. That's up in the air, speculation. The right pretty much prevails in the U.S. Where is the support for geoengineering?

Sometimes counterintuitive ideas turn out to be prophetic, but many turn out to be just wrong or wishful. That's the way I look at going full throttle with the fossil companies so that they will be incentivized to become geoengineering companies. That is too close to solving environmental problems by adding population, or making the U.S. safer from gun violence by adding more guns.

My brother reminded me yesterday that methane removal requires separate actions from CO2 removal. Just another challenge to think about, as if we needed more.

DWill, I always appreciate your comments as intelligent, curious and courteous. So often the climate debate is rancorous and arrogant, so a more measured conversation is a good thing. It is highly perplexing why such a major central planetary security problem cannot even be properly discussed, let alone resolved. That is why I think the cultural politics need to be examined so carefully. I have already written another reply to the earlier comment from Harry Marks, but will first reply to your latest remarks before going back to that earlier conversation.

DWill wrote:I'm probably not ideally aware of some of the points in this debate, but one strong feeling I have is that it's not leftist resistance that retards action on geoengineering.

Essentially, geoengineering has no political constituency, because all the oxygen in the climate debate is sucked up by the precursor question of whether climate change even matters at all. Only the left care about climate change, since the right has largely accepted the false and dangerous delusion that denies the truth of science about global warming. Yet the left basically rejects geoengineering in favour of the fool's view that emission reduction could stop global warming.

DWill wrote: Yes, that faction opposes geoengineering, but since when has that edge of politics been so powerful against industry?

The first challenge is to convince anyone that geoengineering is needed. That hurdle has not been cleared as far as any mass political audience is concerned. The scientific engagement is limited to a tiny number of experts who can see the catastrophic implications of failure to immediately ramp up geoengineering, in view of the sensitivity of the complex earth system to the changes in atmospheric chemistry brought by greenhouse gases.

Notions of a remaining carbon budget produce a dangerous complacency. The real carbon budget is minus 635 billion tonnes, the total of anthropogenic emissions to date.

The left say all we need to do is cut emissions, while the right say it is no problem because we can live in fairy land. Both sides are engaged in purely mythological thinking based on emotional comfort rather than scientific evidence. The task is to simplify the scientific evidence on the imperative for climate engineering. So far no one has been able to do that, partly because it seems there is no interest or will in the mass media to engage on the topic.

DWill wrote: I fundamentally can't believe that industry pays so much attention to the left or that the left has much ability to call the shots.

The problem is that industry just does not pay attention to climate change at all, except through lip service to the prism of the scientific policy prescriptions provided by the left, ie the Paris Accord proposals to decarbonise the economy. The left has set the climate agenda, but has done so in a way that sets the debate up for failure, since its central premise of the need to shut down the fossil fuel industry is basically unacceptable to the right. Denial has only emerged as a holding argument to enable the right to ignore the calls for decarbonisation.

DWill wrote:The implication of what Robert says is that industry would be a great partner in geoengineering without the left butting in. That's up in the air, speculation.

The situation is that no one asks the political right to support geoengineering, basically because the left has created this bugaboo fear of the whole topic, so there is no oxygen to discuss a strategic vision that says mining carbon from the air and sea could replace emission reduction as a climate strategy.

I do blame the left for this failure of public private partnership. The existential question is whether humanity wants to sustain a modern enlightened scientific rationality or collapse into primitive poverty. The last decade has been wasted on futile headbutting for emission reduction, when people could have been supporting field trials of stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening, marine permaculture, industrial biochar for agriculture, ocean iron fertilization, ocean alkalinity, iron salt aerosol and other practical systemic geoengineering projects.

Yes there has been small investment in direct air capture, but there has been blockage of anything perceived as tinkering with earth systems, even when such ‘tinkering’ is designed purely to reduce the massive impact of emissions.

DWill wrote: The right pretty much prevails in the U.S. Where is the support for geoengineering?

The only support is from those like me who live in the desert of the real, the wilderness of factual analysis that is not beholden to prior barriers of political feasibility. The scientific evidence indicates that geoengineering is necessary for human flourishing. People are not willing to engage on evidence because in politics they start by asking if something is popular, not if it is needed for technical reasons.

DWill wrote: Sometimes counterintuitive ideas turn out to be prophetic, but many turn out to be just wrong or wishful.

Sure, and that is why scientific field trials are urgently needed for geoengineering proposals to test safety and efficacy on the model of pharmaceutical trials. No one wants the situation in 2025 of a perception that dangerous waterfall tipping points are obvious to all, and the world has not done the due diligence to create consensus on which are the most safe and effective immediate responses. Risks of unforeseen consequences of geoengineering will have to be managed and balanced against the much bigger direct risks of a warming planet.

DWill wrote:That's the way I look at going full throttle with the fossil companies so that they will be incentivized to become geoengineering companies.

Exactly, and that is the counter-intuitive argument that those who have caused the problem are the only ones who can fix it, bringing their resources, skills, interests, contacts and funds to bear. But whoever wants to sup with the devil should bring a long spoon. At the moment, the fossil industry is full bore on mining the Arctic, so welcomes warming to melt the ice and open the sea lanes for exploration and trade, as Trump, Putin and Xi see it.

Unfortunately, a melted Arctic poses the risk of a new Great Dying, a planetary extinction event on Permian scale caused by shutting down the main ocean currents like in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, due to the extreme geological rapidity of the anthropogenic change in the planetary system. Climate change is the primary planetary security problem. Only when warming moves into the military security context will the will emerge to fix the problem.

DWill wrote:That is too close to solving environmental problems by adding population, or making the U.S. safer from gun violence by adding more guns.

On environment, the counter-intuitive argument is that well-regulated economic growth is the best way to protect ecology. The support for that comes from the observation that poor countries lack the resources and skills to protect their biodiversity. For example now Tim Flannery is arguing that Africa’s wildlife might only survive in wilderness parks created in Europe. We could talk about his new book Europe A Natural History as the Booktalk non-fiction selection.

As I have said here before, my view is that humanity stands at the cusp of a great new frontier of engaging with the massive scale of the world ocean, which offers the only way to build a sustainable global civilization. A high carbon ocean-based economy, mining the massive resources of nutrient and carbon in the billion cubic kilometres of water on our planet, can enable human flourishing orders of magnitude greater than the current world economy while generating methods to restore climate stability and biological diversity.

DWill wrote: My brother reminded me yesterday that methane removal requires separate actions from CO2 removal. Just another challenge to think about, as if we needed more.

Methane removal is the focus of the proposal I have put to the UN Climate Restoration Summit to be held in New York on 17 September via the Healthy Climate Alliance. National Geographic has just reported on a paper showing that the US fracking boom has concealed its fugitive methane emissions, so all the claims about the US shift to gas as cutting emissions are wrong. The only known way to remove methane at scale is iron salt aerosol, adding iron chloride to the air to generate free chlorine radicals that will hunt out methane molecules and destroy them. Such interventions in atmospheric chemistry require well managed scientific field trials, of the type that are now blocked by the UN political fatwa against geoengineering.

Harry Marks wrote:the question is whether denialists have any useful views on climate change. Serious conservatives took a stand for market-like approaches to mitigating CO2 emissions and other GHGs long ago - at latest in 1990. Then something else happened.

Hi Harry, many thanks for these comments, even if you find it hard to suppress your irritation at my perceived obtuseness. Well I am not being obtuse. The facts are that this so-called ‘market-like approach to mitigating CO2 emissions’ has a snowball’s chance in hell of slowing down climate change, and that is due to its inherent defects, not the opposition of denialists. Mitigating emissions, slowing the speed at which we add carbon to the air, can at best remove 1.5% of the carbon problem of anthropogenic radiative forcing each year, not even enough to stop the situation getting continually worse. Emission reduction is a failed paradigm that has to be junked.

Denialists are not always the sharpest tools in the shed, but they can see a crock of shit when one is served up for dinner. Not only does emission reduction fail manifestly to fix the problem it sets out to fix, but it fails at the cost of enormous expense and disruption. Renewables have some great benefits - cleaner air, economic efficiencies and industrial innovation. But their theory of change on global warming does not exist. Meanwhile the planet will keep cooking until we bite the geoengineering bullet. That needs to reverse the taboo against direct climate management, which will need the fossil fuel industries and military to manage it.

Harry Marks wrote:As with Creationists, I am interested in understanding their motivated reasoning process. Respect is too much to ask in either case.

Sure. The motivated reasoning for climate denial has a number of pertinent factors whose relative weight can be debated. The distrust of elitist progressive culture has been carefully cultivated by the agitprop wing of the political right, with echoes of the fascist mentality of belonging to local place and fearing cosmopolitan values.

Trump set out the issues fairly clearly in his speech announcing the decision to leave the Paris Accord. The Paris agreement is not fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers; it punishes the United States while imposing no meaningful obligations on the world’s leading polluters; it transfers jobs from the USA to other countries; it creates high risk of energy shortages; and, in the most crucial statement of all,

President Trump wrote:“Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree — think of that; this much — Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount. In fact, 14 days of carbon emissions from China alone would wipe out the gains from America — and this is an incredible statistic — would totally wipe out the gains from America’s expected reductions in the year 2030, after we have had to spend billions and billions of dollars, lost jobs, closed factories, and suffered much higher energy costs for our businesses and for our homes.”

I appreciate that people don’t like hearing these arguments from Trump, but they seem to me to be evidence based, and to provide a fairly cogent explanation for why so many people are unwilling to accept scientific arguments about climate change when these are packaged to require ignoring the problems the President has outlined.

Further to these points, I also believe that religious fundamentalism has an intimate connection to climate denial, due to the ideological separation between spirit and nature creating a rapturous belief in heaven that overrides empirical observation.

Harry Marks wrote: Liberty is part of the common good.

There is massive political tension and difference between concepts of freedom and equality. Freedom is associated with individual liberty and equality is widely seen as the main goal of the common good. Liberty and the common good serve as primary structuring factors for the political spectrum from extreme equality on the extreme left to extreme liberty on the extreme right, with the centre involving both in balance. Woodard makes the good point that ideologies of the common good have often been perceived as unduly constraining personal liberty, with communism the extreme case.

Harry Marks wrote: We know with a high degree of confidence when it is not worth sacrificing the common good for the sake of a utopian ideal of unlimited liberty.

Really? The gun debate in the USA shows how contested such ‘a high degree of confidence’ can be. Reasonable as it may seem to say gun nuts are mad, some respect for their perspective is needed in efforts to achieve a negotiated solution. One person’s reasonable choice is another’s utopian fantasy. Similar issues arise with climate change, with perceptions that the elitism of the United Nations and its progressive culture creates unacceptable risks to liberty and local decision making power.

Harry Marks wrote: Rhetorical appeal is not at all the same thing as intellectual respectability.

True, but their boundary is quite fluid. When you have an emotional distaste for a person’s argument, you will dismiss their reasoning as rhetoric. In climate change there are rival echo chambers, denial and emission reduction. Both engage in mythological thinking with a weak basis in evidence. The climate movement uses the intellectual respectability of climate science to claim its politics are objective, when its decarbonisation policies actually have no prospect of achieving their stated goal of preventing warming.

Harry Marks wrote: Milton Friedman, George Schultz and James Baker were not smuggling in any secret agendas, much less secret longings for equality and internationalism, when they advocated charging an appropriate price for the damage done by GHG's. This business of trying to turn denialism into a defense against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not credible, and I will not mention what I think of the morality of it.

There is no question a carbon tax has an economic elegance that is attractive to the mainstream conservative attitude. The problems are that taxing carbon is just too small, slow, expensive and divisive to offer much useful contribution in the war on warming. Too small: taxing carbon only slows the speed at which we add to the warming problem, doing nothing about the massive committed warming due to past emissions. Too slow: there is major risk of dangerous tipping points being crossed in the Arctic in the next decade, which presents a primary planetary security problem that can only be addressed through immediate geoengineering, driven by political decision, not abstract economic incentive. Too expensive: an energy tax puts sand in the gears of the world economy, forcing a shift away from fossil fuels at a faster rate than is needed, with massive transition costs. Far cheaper to mine carbon from the air than to stop people burning stuff. Too divisive: the broad conservative mistrust will not be turned around by Baker and Schultz, and nor will the global momentum of ongoing fossil fuels be slowed. New ideas are needed that put these divisive debates about decarbonising the economy to one side, and instead look to profitable methods to mine carbon while also re-freezing the North Pole.

Harry Marks wrote: the not-so-secret agenda of Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, Exxon-Mobil and Newt Gingrich played a direct and devastating role in prying America's conservative party away from responsible conservatism, and blather trying to blame it on "internationalism" is a sick self-deception that does not warrant even the least consideration. Sure, anybody can gin up oppositional rhetoric by demonizing hypothetical conspiracies, but the policies began in the hands of Republicans because the appeal was to reason, not secret agendas, and nothing short of the force of unreason is responsible for undoing that.

The political debate on climate change is not between reason and irrationality. The so-called rational side of decarbonisers simply ignore the evidence that their policies have no prospect of stopping warming, and largely refuse to countenance discussion of methods that would achieve their goals.

Harry Marks wrote: Motivated reasoning may be politically powerful (see Antebellum Slavery for a fairly complete example) but it has nothing to do with morality or, in this case, rationality. If skeptical conservatives are to be convinced, they are going to have to gather the moral courage to face facts.

That analysis applies equally to the motivated reasoning of decarbonisation, with its political attitude of speeding up the end of fossil fuels leading to an irrational rejection of geoengineering. The moral courage to face facts is as absent on the left as on the right.

Harry Marks wrote: There have been, for decades, reasonable conservative arguments and considerations favoring a moderate response. If such reasonable analysis had been listened to, we would not be in the fix that you so often cite.

No, that is just not true. People have listened to emission reduction advocacy, and have concluded that its costs are too high and its benefits too uncertain. As I mentioned, the warming problem is due to the 635 billion tonnes of carbon that people have already added to the air, with the sensitivity of the climate system to this change of conditions. That is a fix that no amount of emission reduction can solve. Until the climate movement grasps the key counter-intuitive point that slowing the speed at which we add to this committed warming is marginal to stopping it, on the sanitation model, the two sides of politics will continue to talk past each other on climate change. Again, we don’t fix sanitation by cutting faecal emissions, and nor can we fix climate by cutting carbon emissions.

Harry Marks wrote: I am not sure why you can't see that the same idiocy that blocked reasonable action when it had a chance of making a difference is probably also going to block geoengineering.

No, it is a different idiocy that is blocking geoengineering. Geoengineering offers a practical path to salvage and sustain the capitalist business model of fossil fuel extraction. Carbon removal has major direct benefits for industries such as shipping, insurance, mining, energy, agriculture and fisheries, enabling them to continue business as usual by investing in offsets that will be bigger than their total emissions, achieving a regulatory model that makes profit and biodiversity compatible, and also working to reverse the worsening business risks of warming, such as the greater intensity of storms, droughts, floods, fires and sea level rise. The idiocy that is stopping geoengineering research is the inability to discuss a pro-capitalist model that is entirely factual about the security risks of climate change.

Harry Marks wrote: The casual willingness of the super-rich to sacrifice the truth and the public good for the sake of another billion dollars is not something history will remember them with respect for. Sometimes people who extract at the expense of others are just wrong.

That critique of the capitalist system is far too simplistic, bitter, resentful and oppositional to provide a practical way to stop climate change. The public benefits of the products that have generated super profits are immense. Far better to try to forgive the capitalist system for its mistakes, and look to work constructively to use capitalist processes to solve climate change.

Harry Marks wrote: What is near certain already is that the Florida peninsula will be underwater in the lifetime of my students, and our actions to stop it will continue to be an average of diddley with squat.

It is entirely possible to achieve net zero by 2030 and a restored climate by 2050, but not via emission reduction. We need a different paradigm to stop the looming danger of sea level rise.

Harry Marks wrote:If you genuinely believe Creationism is worse than climate denialism

You misread my comment. I was saying creationism is worse than the myth that emission reduction can solve climate change.

Harry Marks wrote:I have no time for arguments trying to blame the left for denialism.

There is certainly some very confusing and complicated political psychology at work in generating people’s opinions about climate change. I don’t see blame as a constructive theme since we are all in the same boat. Denialism has arisen as a psychological and political defence mechanism against the false claim that massive cuts to emissions is a sensible public policy. Both are equally irrational, and can only be overcome by geoengineering as a new climate paradigm.

Harry Marks wrote: Yes, they ought to give serious attention to the opportunities provided by geoengineering issues. I'm sure there are people thinking that anyone who advocates a larger role for government is more insidious than the special interests who have made a hostage of the earth itself. Speaking of motivated reasoning.

Actually, both sides of the climate debate are now holding the earth hostage. It would really help if the IPCC could develop a constructive approach to climate engineering. The UN tried to progress serious attention to geoengineering this year via UNEP. People blame the US and the Saudis for blocking this proposal, but the situation is not clear. The toxic partisan lack of trust in this space is illustrated by the analysis suggesting that the political agenda of the UNEP proposal was just to prevent any geoengineering deployment, which is an option that the Trump government would prefer to manage unilaterally. Given the craziness of the Trump administration, vetoing the UNEP proposal was a mistake, since any such global system is intrinsically multilateral. Hopefully the next US administration will be able to put fears of UN over-reach aside and work constructively on this global problem.

Robert, we can count on you to be informed about U.S. politics, so you will have heard that Jay Inslee has dropped out of the race for president. That's a great shame in my view. Inslee might have had the broadest range of experience of any candidate, and he had his eye on the ball as far as the major threat we face. But as a signature issue, climate change doesn't make it with the public. One might argue that it's not individual acts that matter most, anyway, so whether my neighbors think action is needed doesn't really matter. However, if leaders who have made real commitments to fixing climate aren't elected, the larger actions of corporations and national governments won't come about, either.

Inslee said nothing about geoengineering as far as I can tell. His program addressed clean energy solely. I have questioned whether a leader of any country can initiate geoengineering, since the effects will occur beyond national boundaries. The most a president could do would be to advocate for international geoengineering trials. I therefore strongly disagree that a program such as Inslee's isn't worth pursuing because it doesn't go far enough. It's a walk in the right direction. We've shown some ability to cut back emissions, though granted we won't be able to cut enough without political revolution to redistribute the wealth from a crippled economy. In some sense, taking action does matter even if the action isn't sufficient. The alternative seems to be to wait for capitalism to decide to fix everything. How long do we wait?

I've also already opined that while it's true that the left doesn't want to go down the geoengineering road, that isn't why there's a roadblock. In fact, if the left said, "fine, let's do it," wouldn't that become a point of resistance, rather than clearing the way? The left is like a bunch of rubble in the road, not a big impediment compared to the landslide making it impassible.

To assess the climate situation in terms of problem analysis and proposed solutions requires a practical effort to identify and remove ideological bias, recognising the actual dangers of climate tipping points in order to prevent global warming. The emerging emotional danger is clumsy attempts to exploit climate fears to gain support for extreme left wing political ideology.

Unfortunately, a widespread mentality has emerged in the climate movement that subordinates climate science beneath political action, as seen in the vacuous arguments of the Green New Deal. There is immediate appeal in the idea that solutions lie within the grassroots, in communities, in reconnecting with inter-reliance on each other and the natural world, building a united climate movement. Sensible analysis should flatly reject these assertions as diversions from practical climate strategy.

The reality of climate change is that solutions can only be achieved through industrial investment, by mobilising the resources of capital to mine carbon from the air at far larger scale than annual emissions, while also developing technology to directly cool the planet. These strategies offer real prospect to stabilise and restore the global climate. Scaling up carbon removal offers potential to achieve net zero emissions by 2030, creating a trajectory of increased carbon removal toward climate restoration by 2050.

By comparison, efforts to decarbonise the world economy are marginal and probably harmful. Emission reduction offers only a recipe for conflict, cost and delay, while aiming to fix less than 2% of the warming problem and setting up roadblocks for carbon removal. The counterintuitive reality is that efforts to cut fossil fuel use achieve nothing to stop global warming.

Anthropogenic emissions to date total 635 billion tonnes of carbon equivalent, more than 60 times the annual emissions of 10 billion tonnes. If we can mine 2% of past emissions each year, transforming CO2 into useful products such as fuel, food, feed, fertilizer, fish, forests and fibre, we can achieve net zero emissions with no need at all to cut fossil fuel use, except where justified for economic and environmental reasons. It is probable that such carbon mining activities would create major profitable new industries, especially based on large scale ocean-based algae production.

Working out how to stabilise and restore the planetary climate should be the top security priority for national governments. The IPCC has severely underestimated climate sensitivity, so in fact there is no remaining “carbon budget.” Rather, avoiding dangerous warming means firstly cooling the planet with solar radiation management and then mining carbon from the air and sea to remove the excess carbon humans have already added to the air, measures generally termed geoengineering. The third priority should be to worry about reducing the carbon emissions we add every year. The popular climate movement gets these scientific priorities entirely backwards, producing a dangerous complacency about climate tipping points.

Much climate advocacy is entirely unscientific, despite its manipulation of climate science to give a veneer of logic. An evidence-based approach to climate restoration involves working out what activities cause the most warming, and what methods can address those activities at least cost. This involves measurement of radiative forcing, a theme that seems entirely absent from the popular perspective that focuses only on emission reduction. Most removable radiative forcing comes from past emissions, which have more than 60 times the global warming potential of annual emissions.

This analysis leads me to the view that community level organisation for climate change is counterproductive in terms of avoiding dangerous warming. It is essential for climate response to be transparent and accountable, but such governance needs to rest on evidence not ideology. The only thing that will reverse dangerous warming is industrial investment at global level, based on rigorous scientific data, aiming to identify activities that will safely abate climate change at least cost. That requires alliance between scientists, capitalists and governments, not populist mythology.
 
Most supporters of action on climate change are not extreme leftists. That is the same story for green movements around the world, that the base of the movement consists of realistic practical people who are just concerned about fixing and preventing environmental damage. However, such movements are prey to the problem of ‘entryism’, a political strategy in which supporters of extreme organisations join in order to influence policy. The classic signs of entryist politics include subordinating the climate change problem to social justice priorities and insisting that movement unity is a key priority.

It is equally true that not wanting to solve the climate crisis is an extreme rightist attitude. The problem here is that solving the crisis requires cooperation between left and right, for example between those on the left who understand climate science and those on the right who can mobilise investment capital. The increased polarization of politics makes dialogue and cooperation increasingly difficult, illustrating the great value of input from a range of voices about how to actually achieve climate restoration.

I think it is immensely helpful to discuss these policy issues, as it provides great opportunity for productive conversation on whether suggestions have any hope of achieving the stated goals. My argument is that the decarbonization agenda does not offer anything practical to stop global warming. More broadly, pointing out that weakness in prevailing climate ideology is essential to define a workable strategy to cool the planet.

I am not deliberately setting myself against the people who hold the widespread but false assumption that emissions reduction to net zero can solve the climate crisis and avoid catastrophe. Scientists who say that achieving net zero emissions will stop temperatures rising and halt climate change are much to blame. There is a fine distinction here, between opposing somebody and pointing out that their ideas are factually wrong. The obvious risk is that when people continue to insist on incorrect ideas, such as that emission reduction can fix climate change, they will not be able to cooperate with people who disagree.

The need is for factual recognition that net zero is only a milestone on the path to climate restoration, and that the path to that milestone must radically shift focus from emission reduction toward carbon removal. An article supporting this point argues that “the approach to climate control has been badly unbalanced. The last three decades have seen intense international attention to emission control, with no parallel plan to test, scale and implement carbon removal technologies.” Getting the balance right involves a challenge to the underlying political assumptions that have so badly unbalanced climate policy and prevented the needed focus on carbon removal.

All this shows the widespread lack of clarity in views on climate solutions. I find this an important conversation, as the more I study it the more I am surprised at the low intellectual quality of climate policy discussion, so I welcome anyone who can bear with us in exploring these themes here.

I wish it were true that scientists don’t believe emission reduction alone can solve the climate crisis. My impression is that acceptance of other methods (geoengineering) is isolated, grudging, repressed, delayed, opposed and unfunded. The general attitude reflected in the IPCC 1.5° Report, and picked up in the popular climate movement, seems to be ‘let’s give emission reduction a red hot go, and only look at carbon removal down the track if emission reduction fails’. That is an incredibly high-risk and unscientific strategy for such a global existential problem. The context is an unrealistic belief in the prospects of emission reduction. The assumption is that cutting emissions as fast as possible should be the main priority, without balancing that against cost-benefit analysis of geoengineering.

Hence the critical importance of work to discuss and develop a coherent climate strategy focused on freezing the Arctic and taking carbon out of the air, with policy based on evidence.

Far from the IPCC being a reliable guide on these matters, Professor Eelco Rohling, in his excellent recent book The Climate Question suggests that climate sensitivity at decadal scale is far greater than IPCC models indicate. Rohling says “avoidance of 2°C warming requires stabilisation of CO2 levels below 400 ppm”. That flatly contradicts the IPCC notion of “a remaining budget of about 420 GtCO2 for a two-thirds chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C (medium confidence).” Rohling’s calculation suggests no confidence in these IPCC numbers. I would go further to argue that climate sensitivity suggests the precautionary principle should demand immediate global focus on measures to cool the Arctic and remove carbon from the air.

As Thomas Goreau commented in his review of Rohling’s The Climate Question, “the sensitivity of global temperatures and sea levels to carbon dioxide are many times higher than IPCC projections that miss almost all of the long-term climate response.” This is a basic dangerous scientific observation, unfortunately repressed and ignored by the dominant paradigms, both climate denial on the right and net zero emission goals on the left.

This discussion prompted me to look again at some sources, for example this astoundingly confused but very prominent statement of the apparent ongoing scientific consensus – Zero emission targets as long-term global goals for climate protection, published in Environment Research Letters in 2015. The title alone shows a weird psychological blockage about climate arithmetic. It should be obvious that net zero emissions offer no hope for climate protection due to committed warming from past emissions. The need is for net negative emissions as the long-term global goal, but this ERL article, like many others, fails to engage with this basic point.

Claiming to clear up confusion while actually making it worse, it wrongly says “Halting global warming requires virtually zero annual CO2 emissions”. But it gets worse: “Because of the authoritative character and the high visibility of these scientific assessments, these insights were quickly taken up by policymakers… An aspirational end point for CO2 emissions can catalyse and facilitate choices that enable the required long-term transition to net zero carbon emissions.” No, the real “end point” required is to net negative emissions, not net zero. That means the goal should be restoring 280 ppm CO2 as fast as possible, something very different from the IPCC policy of cutting emissions as fast as possible.

Contrary to the view of 350.org in its ‘people’s dossier’, the hard truth is that we must engineer our way out of the climate change mess.

A friend of mine recently challenged a climate change professor at a leading Australian university on this point about the need for net negative emissions, and was stunned by the statement of faith in emission reduction. The big problem is that sole reliance on emission reduction is a popular myth among climate activists, politicians and media. That attitude looks to have strong influence.

That focus on emission reduction is reflected in opposition to Carbon Capture and Storage. There are good economic arguments against storing carbon in the form of CO2, as we should aim instead to convert CO2 into productive commodities, especially through marine permaculture and concrete production. But the popular argument is different; it is that CCS provides the fossil fuel industry a license to stay in business. That moral hazard reasoning is an unscientific argument against carbon removal. It implies that the world should avoid developing carbon removal technology in order to increase political pressure to decarbonize. That political pressure strategy fails to optimize factors for climate stability, ignoring the need to scale up carbon removal to larger than total emissions.

The idea seems to be that limiting geoengineering research will reduce the social license to operate of fossil fuel industries. That is highly dubious as a political analysis. Heavily restricting research, if not an outright ban, seems to be the position, except with ‘natural solutions’ and technologies seen as marginal such as painting roofs and direct air capture. One suggestion is to use natural solutions to draw down atmospheric carbon as much as possible, with technological intervention only considered when they are coupled with policies to ensure that it does not prolong the use of fossil fuels or create new harms or inequities. How this policy coupling would work is a mystery. It looks like code for broad opposition to research and development of negative emission technology, as such technology would inevitably ease pressure to cut emissions. There is no good scientific reasoning why that is a problem, since carbon removal is likely to provide lower abatement cost than emission reduction.

There is more mythology in the claim that IPCC has modeled scenarios consistent with keeping global temperature increase below 1.5°C that rely entirely on natural solutions for carbon removal. These alleged models are unrealistic, ignoring or deriding ocean methods that might be the main contribution to climate stability. Rewilding and increased forest cover on land is great for conservation, but does not provide major impact on warming. The situation is that accelerating warming feedbacks create immense pressure to reduce forest cover, against efforts to increase tree planting. The romantic anti-industrial mentality of ‘grow more trees’ offers no prospect to achieve sustainability at scale of any methods that could have a material effect on warming.

There is broad support for calls to immediately protect, restore and enhance natural ecosystems – such as forests, wetlands, peatlands, and marine ecosystems. The IPCC has not modelled these well, especially regarding the role of biochar and ocean based solutions. There seems to be a disconnect between discussion of these gigatonne scale carbon removal methods and the IPCC.

Another popular argument is that continued use of fossil fuels would needlessly harm communities, despoil the natural environment, diminish public health, and waste money. Such argument has some truth, but it ignores the perceived benefits of fossil fuels, setting up a conflict that climate activists cannot win.

The BP 2019 Energy Outlook predicts a 30% increase in world energy demand by 2040, with only half that growth met by renewables and the rest coming from ongoing growth of fossil fuels. It is unbalanced to list the negatives for fossil fuels while failing to recognise the economic and social drivers for increased energy use, with significant poverty reduction impact, beyond the potential for renewables. Projected energy demand cannot possibly be met by low emission sources. This economic and political reality illustrates the urgent need for carbon removal to balance ongoing emission growth, on the sanitation model of removing waste at the end of the pipe.

King Canute knew he could not stop the tide. Similarly, it is time that climate activists saw that the focus should shift to working out ways to restore the climate that adopt a realistic political stance on future world energy growth. Rather than advocating inefficient and ineffective political measures to cut emissions, the challenge is to promote public private partnerships that will quickly ramp up to remove more carbon from the air than total emissions.

Robert Tulip wrote: The debate is about whether conservatives can have any useful views on climate change.

I disagree. I think the question is whether denialists have any useful views on climate change. Serious conservatives took a stand for market-like approaches to mitigating CO2 emissions and other GHGs long ago - at latest in 1990. Then something else happened.

Robert Tulip wrote:Harry has likened them to creationists who apply magical talismanic thinking to exclude any views outside their cult. I understand the comparison, but in both cases there is a danger that the obvious error in their views leads to an inability to explain or respect why they hold that view.

As with Creationists, I am interested in understanding their motivated reasoning process. Respect is too much to ask in either case.

Robert Tulip wrote:for climate conservatives it touches strongly on the theme of the new Booktalk non-fiction selection, the epic struggle between individual liberty and the common good.

Liberty is part of the common good. We know with a high degree of confidence when it is not worth sacrificing the common good for the sake of a utopian ideal of unlimited liberty. Rhetorical appeal is not at all the same thing as intellectual respectability.

Robert Tulip wrote: I particularly liked his [Sixsmith's] comment that “conservative premises could have lent themselves to environmentalism. Conservatives believe—or ought to believe—in low time preferences, prudence and restraint, the fragility of order, and the love of home. The Left’s apparent use of environmental matters as Trojan horses for egalitarian and internationalist ambitions has no doubt raised hackles on the Right.”

That is so much eyewash. Milton Friedman, George Schultz and James Baker were not smuggling in any secret agendas, much less secret longings for equality and internationalism, when they advocated charging an appropriate price for the damage done by GHG's. This business of trying to turn denialism into a defense against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not credible, and I will not mention what I think of the morality of it.

Robert Tulip wrote: So it seems curious that conservatives are so suspicious of climate action. Sixsmith exactly nails the politics with his observation of how the left uses climate to conceal its real egalitarian and internationalist ambitions.

Sorry, but the not-so-secret agenda of Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, Exxon-Mobil and Newt Gingrich played a direct and devastating role in prying America's conservative party away from responsible conservatism, and blather trying to blame it on "internationalism" is a sick self-deception that does not warrant even the least consideration. Sure, anybody can gin up oppositional rhetoric by demonizing hypothetical conspiracies, but the policies began in the hands of Republicans because the appeal was to reason, not secret agendas, and nothing short of the force of unreason is responsible for undoing that.

Robert Tulip wrote:analysing left wing condescension toward right wing perceived stupidity, concluding that "if skeptical conservatives are to be convinced, the Left must learn to reframe the issue in a way that is more palatable to their worldview."

Their worldview is of a place the sun doesn't shine. Motivated reasoning may be politically powerful (see Antebellum Slavery for a fairly complete example) but it has nothing to do with morality or, in this case, rationality. If skeptical conservatives are to be convinced, they are going to have to gather the moral courage to face facts.

There have been, for decades, reasonable conservative arguments and considerations favoring a moderate response. If such reasonable analysis had been listened to, we would not be in the fix that you so often cite. I am not sure why you can't see that the same idiocy that blocked reasonable action when it had a chance of making a difference is probably also going to block geoengineering. The ass-inine worldview is the problem, not something that will be magically gotten around by proposing a more right-friendly approach.

The casual willingness of the super-rich to sacrifice the truth and the public good for the sake of another billion dollars is not something history will remember them with respect for. Sometimes people who extract at the expense of others are just wrong. The question is beginning to be whether there will be anyone left studying history in 100 years. What is near certain already is that the Florida peninsula will be underwater in the lifetime of my students, and our actions to stop it will continue to be an average of diddley with squat.

Robert Tulip wrote: The close alignment between climate advocacy and the renewable energy industry is one example of such a barrier. Creationism is obviously far worse, with its contempt for evidence and logic as moral values.

If you genuinely believe Creationism is worse than climate denialism, I think I would like to try some of what you've been smoking.

There. Dopamine fix arranged.

But really, I have no time for arguments trying to blame the left for denialism. Yes, they ought to give serious attention to the opportunities provided by geoengineering issues. I'm sure there are people thinking that anyone who advocates a larger role for government is more insidious than the special interests who have made a hostage of the earth itself. Speaking of motivated reasoning.

To unleash the military industrial complex on anthropogenic global warming would seem to be in line with the current economic trend of sovereign security first. Strange how in this current version of history with all this lament for the supposed loss of individual liberty and that most gov’t is bad. The go to solution is the growth of that military industrial state. It’s become a bore and fatiguing. Massive industrial complexes are the stuff of science fiction nightmares, yet here we are entertaining notions of just that. I am in a quandary? Do I allow my inner misanthrope to just resign itself to the almost certain extinction of the human species? Or do I accept RT’s dystopian version of the lifestyles of the libertarian rich and morally dysfunctional?.

That second question is a bit harsh, I do credit RT with his presentation of the moral authority the libertarian right could capture would they champion AGW and I suppose we may just see some form of lip service towards AGW during the run up to the 2020 campaign by PSfB in desperation, but as I wrote, There is fatigue in the U.S. and his name is Trump. . The right wing is going to be steamrolled come November 2020 and along with that will be these false notions about industry voluntarily stepping up to the plate to do what needs to be done to alleviate a problem that they are largely responsible for, by which I mean, Both AGW and Trump.

That mighty military industrial complex has simply got to put its money where their mouth is. Fat lot that will happen. But the real moral question is...Governance. Libertarianism cannot answer the question of governance because it cannot reconcile the global need of individual rights and a solution to AGW, only social democracy has the moral flexibility to accomplish what needs to be done. The hypocrisy invariably, by necessity, would come from the political right, in particular, the libertarian right, what I call.. Economic Social Darwinist, For them it would be a hypocrisy of a philosophical level that is and strangely would be... unacceptable.

Harry Marks wrote:the question is whether denialists have any useful views on climate change. Serious conservatives took a stand for market-like approaches to mitigating CO2 emissions and other GHGs long ago - at latest in 1990. Then something else happened.

Hi Harry, many thanks for these comments, even if you find it hard to suppress your irritation at my perceived obtuseness. Well I am not being obtuse. The facts are that this so-called ‘market-like approach to mitigating CO2 emissions’ has a snowball’s chance in hell of slowing down climate change, and that is due to its inherent defects, not the opposition of denialists. Mitigating emissions, slowing the speed at which we add carbon to the air, can at best remove 1.5% of the carbon problem of anthropogenic radiative forcing each year, not even enough to stop the situation getting continually worse. Emission reduction is a failed paradigm that has to be junked.

Denialists are not always the sharpest tools in the shed, but they can see a crock of shit when one is served up for dinner. Not only does emission reduction fail manifestly to fix the problem it sets out to fix, but it fails at the cost of enormous expense and disruption. Renewables have some great benefits - cleaner air, economic efficiencies and industrial innovation. But their theory of change on global warming does not exist. Meanwhile the planet will keep cooking until we bite the geoengineering bullet. That needs to reverse the taboo against direct climate management, which will need the fossil fuel industries and military to manage it.

Harry Marks wrote:As with Creationists, I am interested in understanding their motivated reasoning process. Respect is too much to ask in either case.

Sure. The motivated reasoning for climate denial has a number of pertinent factors whose relative weight can be debated. The distrust of elitist progressive culture has been carefully cultivated by the agitprop wing of the political right, with echoes of the fascist mentality of belonging to local place and fearing cosmopolitan values.

Trump set out the issues fairly clearly in his speech announcing the decision to leave the Paris Accord. The Paris agreement is not fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers; it punishes the United States while imposing no meaningful obligations on the world’s leading polluters; it transfers jobs from the USA to other countries; it creates high risk of energy shortages; and, in the most crucial statement of all,

President Trump wrote:“Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree — think of that; this much — Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount. In fact, 14 days of carbon emissions from China alone would wipe out the gains from America — and this is an incredible statistic — would totally wipe out the gains from America’s expected reductions in the year 2030, after we have had to spend billions and billions of dollars, lost jobs, closed factories, and suffered much higher energy costs for our businesses and for our homes.”

I appreciate that people don’t like hearing these arguments from Trump, but they seem to me to be evidence based, and to provide a fairly cogent explanation for why so many people are unwilling to accept scientific arguments about climate change when these are packaged to require ignoring the problems the President has outlined.

Further to these points, I also believe that religious fundamentalism has an intimate connection to climate denial, due to the ideological separation between spirit and nature creating a rapturous belief in heaven that overrides empirical observation.

Harry Marks wrote: Liberty is part of the common good.

There is massive political tension and difference between concepts of freedom and equality. Freedom is associated with individual liberty and equality is widely seen as the main goal of the common good. Liberty and the common good serve as primary structuring factors for the political spectrum from extreme equality on the extreme left to extreme liberty on the extreme right, with the centre involving both in balance. Woodard makes the good point that ideologies of the common good have often been perceived as unduly constraining personal liberty, with communism the extreme case.

Harry Marks wrote: We know with a high degree of confidence when it is not worth sacrificing the common good for the sake of a utopian ideal of unlimited liberty.

Really? The gun debate in the USA shows how contested such ‘a high degree of confidence’ can be. Reasonable as it may seem to say gun nuts are mad, some respect for their perspective is needed in efforts to achieve a negotiated solution. One person’s reasonable choice is another’s utopian fantasy. Similar issues arise with climate change, with perceptions that the elitism of the United Nations and its progressive culture creates unacceptable risks to liberty and local decision making power.

Harry Marks wrote: Rhetorical appeal is not at all the same thing as intellectual respectability.

True, but their boundary is quite fluid. When you have an emotional distaste for a person’s argument, you will dismiss their reasoning as rhetoric. In climate change there are rival echo chambers, denial and emission reduction. Both engage in mythological thinking with a weak basis in evidence. The climate movement uses the intellectual respectability of climate science to claim its politics are objective, when its decarbonisation policies actually have no prospect of achieving their stated goal of preventing warming.

Harry Marks wrote: Milton Friedman, George Schultz and James Baker were not smuggling in any secret agendas, much less secret longings for equality and internationalism, when they advocated charging an appropriate price for the damage done by GHG's. This business of trying to turn denialism into a defense against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not credible, and I will not mention what I think of the morality of it.

There is no question a carbon tax has an economic elegance that is attractive to the mainstream conservative attitude. The problems are that taxing carbon is just too small, slow, expensive and divisive to offer much useful contribution in the war on warming. Too small: taxing carbon only slows the speed at which we add to the warming problem, doing nothing about the massive committed warming due to past emissions. Too slow: there is major risk of dangerous tipping points being crossed in the Arctic in the next decade, which presents a primary planetary security problem that can only be addressed through immediate geoengineering, driven by political decision, not abstract economic incentive. Too expensive: an energy tax puts sand in the gears of the world economy, forcing a shift away from fossil fuels at a faster rate than is needed, with massive transition costs. Far cheaper to mine carbon from the air than to stop people burning stuff. Too divisive: the broad conservative mistrust will not be turned around by Baker and Schultz, and nor will the global momentum of ongoing fossil fuels be slowed. New ideas are needed that put these divisive debates about decarbonising the economy to one side, and instead look to profitable methods to mine carbon while also re-freezing the North Pole.

Harry Marks wrote: the not-so-secret agenda of Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, Exxon-Mobil and Newt Gingrich played a direct and devastating role in prying America's conservative party away from responsible conservatism, and blather trying to blame it on "internationalism" is a sick self-deception that does not warrant even the least consideration. Sure, anybody can gin up oppositional rhetoric by demonizing hypothetical conspiracies, but the policies began in the hands of Republicans because the appeal was to reason, not secret agendas, and nothing short of the force of unreason is responsible for undoing that.

The political debate on climate change is not between reason and irrationality. The so-called rational side of decarbonisers simply ignore the evidence that their policies have no prospect of stopping warming, and largely refuse to countenance discussion of methods that would achieve their goals.

Harry Marks wrote: Motivated reasoning may be politically powerful (see Antebellum Slavery for a fairly complete example) but it has nothing to do with morality or, in this case, rationality. If skeptical conservatives are to be convinced, they are going to have to gather the moral courage to face facts.

That analysis applies equally to the motivated reasoning of decarbonisation, with its political attitude of speeding up the end of fossil fuels leading to an irrational rejection of geoengineering. The moral courage to face facts is as absent on the left as on the right.

Harry Marks wrote: There have been, for decades, reasonable conservative arguments and considerations favoring a moderate response. If such reasonable analysis had been listened to, we would not be in the fix that you so often cite.

No, that is just not true. People have listened to emission reduction advocacy, and have concluded that its costs are too high and its benefits too uncertain. As I mentioned, the warming problem is due to the 635 billion tonnes of carbon that people have already added to the air, with the sensitivity of the climate system to this change of conditions. That is a fix that no amount of emission reduction can solve. Until the climate movement grasps the key counter-intuitive point that slowing the speed at which we add to this committed warming is marginal to stopping it, on the sanitation model, the two sides of politics will continue to talk past each other on climate change. Again, we don’t fix sanitation by cutting faecal emissions, and nor can we fix climate by cutting carbon emissions.

Harry Marks wrote: I am not sure why you can't see that the same idiocy that blocked reasonable action when it had a chance of making a difference is probably also going to block geoengineering.

No, it is a different idiocy that is blocking geoengineering. Geoengineering offers a practical path to salvage and sustain the capitalist business model of fossil fuel extraction. Carbon removal has major direct benefits for industries such as shipping, insurance, mining, energy, agriculture and fisheries, enabling them to continue business as usual by investing in offsets that will be bigger than their total emissions, achieving a regulatory model that makes profit and biodiversity compatible, and also working to reverse the worsening business risks of warming, such as the greater intensity of storms, droughts, floods, fires and sea level rise. The idiocy that is stopping geoengineering research is the inability to discuss a pro-capitalist model that is entirely factual about the security risks of climate change.

Harry Marks wrote: The casual willingness of the super-rich to sacrifice the truth and the public good for the sake of another billion dollars is not something history will remember them with respect for. Sometimes people who extract at the expense of others are just wrong.

That critique of the capitalist system is far too simplistic, bitter, resentful and oppositional to provide a practical way to stop climate change. The public benefits of the products that have generated super profits are immense. Far better to try to forgive the capitalist system for its mistakes, and look to work constructively to use capitalist processes to solve climate change.

Harry Marks wrote: What is near certain already is that the Florida peninsula will be underwater in the lifetime of my students, and our actions to stop it will continue to be an average of diddley with squat.

It is entirely possible to achieve net zero by 2030 and a restored climate by 2050, but not via emission reduction. We need a different paradigm to stop the looming danger of sea level rise.

Harry Marks wrote:If you genuinely believe Creationism is worse than climate denialism

You misread my comment. I was saying creationism is worse than the myth that emission reduction can solve climate change.

Harry Marks wrote:I have no time for arguments trying to blame the left for denialism.

There is certainly some very confusing and complicated political psychology at work in generating people’s opinions about climate change. I don’t see blame as a constructive theme since we are all in the same boat. Denialism has arisen as a psychological and political defence mechanism against the false claim that massive cuts to emissions is a sensible public policy. Both are equally irrational, and can only be overcome by geoengineering as a new climate paradigm.

Harry Marks wrote: Yes, they ought to give serious attention to the opportunities provided by geoengineering issues. I'm sure there are people thinking that anyone who advocates a larger role for government is more insidious than the special interests who have made a hostage of the earth itself. Speaking of motivated reasoning.

Actually, both sides of the climate debate are now holding the earth hostage. It would really help if the IPCC could develop a constructive approach to climate engineering. The UN tried to progress serious attention to geoengineering this year via UNEP. People blame the US and the Saudis for blocking this proposal, but the situation is not clear. The toxic partisan lack of trust in this space is illustrated by the analysis suggesting that the political agenda of the UNEP proposal was just to prevent any geoengineering deployment, which is an option that the Trump government would prefer to manage unilaterally. Given the craziness of the Trump administration, vetoing the UNEP proposal was a mistake, since any such global system is intrinsically multilateral. Hopefully the next US administration will be able to put fears of UN over-reach aside and work constructively on this global problem.

Robert Tulip wrote:The facts are that this so-called ‘market-like approach to mitigating CO2 emissions’ has a snowball’s chance in hell of slowing down climate change, and that is due to its inherent defects, not the opposition of denialists. Mitigating emissions, slowing the speed at which we add carbon to the air, can at best remove 1.5% of the carbon problem of anthropogenic radiative forcing each year, not even enough to stop the situation getting continually worse. Emission reduction is a failed paradigm that has to be junked.

You've made these claims before, of course, but in this case it is a shift of the terms of the discussion, as well as being wrong-headed. My point was that the opposition to inaction on the climate was not a left-wing initiative but a level-headed conservative and Republican response to scientific findings. You are trying to paper over that to suit your rhetorical purposes, but it's essentially a dishonest move.

Furthermore, your "at best" claim is an attempt to smuggle the question of political practicality into an assessment of technical possibility, all in an attempt to sell a politically nowhere effort whose technical workability remains unproved.

Robert Tulip wrote:Denialists are not always the sharpest tools in the shed, but they can see a crock of shit when one is served up for dinner.

In fact they have detected 27 of the last 2 crocks served to them.

Robert Tulip wrote:Not only does emission reduction fail manifestly to fix the problem it sets out to fix, but it fails at the cost of enormous expense and disruption.

Not at all. First, as I observed already, it would have fixed the problem by now if wealthy corporate special interests had not interfered with a realistic response. So it is not an inappropriate strategy, just an appropriate strategy that was rejected for inappropriate reasons. Second, the expense and disruption are not necessarily implied, since the implementation of incentives will generate cost-effective responses not recognized as of yet. For example, the strategy you claim to be a net positive fiscal benefit would be provided with adequate incentive to motivate its implementation, while a do-nothing or Hail Mary response would simply let the problem get worse.

Just as happened with acid rain, the emissions will be confronted with whatever cost-effective means the private sector can find, but only when they have incentives. Innovation such as the approach you advocate is likely to lead to mitigation at a fraction of the cost estimates made so far, because they necessarily are made without benefit of the technological improvements that are waiting to be unleashed.

Robert Tulip wrote: The distrust of elitist progressive culture has been carefully cultivated by the agitprop wing of the political right, with echoes of the fascist mentality of belonging to local place and fearing cosmopolitan values.

You think? Then whence comes this business of blaming it on flaming socialists (like Milton Friedman)?

Robert Tulip wrote: The Paris agreement is not fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers; it punishes the United States while imposing no meaningful obligations on the world’s leading polluters; it transfers jobs from the USA to other countries; it creates high risk of energy shortages;

That is the usual pack of lies coming from a jerk-off who has done his level best to make the problem worse and has done nothing to address the Agreement's perceived shortcomings.

Robert Tulip wrote:in the most crucial statement of all,

President Trump wrote:“Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree — think of that; this much — Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount. In fact, 14 days of carbon emissions from China alone would wipe out the gains from America — and this is an incredible statistic — would totally wipe out the gains from America’s expected reductions in the year 2030, after we have had to spend billions and billions of dollars, lost jobs, closed factories, and suffered much higher energy costs for our businesses and for our homes.”

We all know Paris was inadequate, but that does not argue for doing even less.

Robert Tulip wrote:I appreciate that people don’t like hearing these arguments from Trump, but they seem to me to be evidence based, and to provide a fairly cogent explanation for why so many people are unwilling to accept scientific arguments about climate change when these are packaged to require ignoring the problems the President has outlined.

You find them "evidence-based" because you have put all your intellectual eggs in the geo-engineering basket. Speaking of motivated reasoning.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:Liberty is part of the common good.

There is massive political tension and difference between concepts of freedom and equality. Freedom is associated with individual liberty and equality is widely seen as the main goal of the common good.

By whom? It is a secondary goal at best. The common good can be framed entirely in terms of efficiency of resource allocation and still argues loudly for intervention against externalities, a point Friedman made many times.

Robert Tulip wrote:Liberty and the common good serve as primary structuring factors for the political spectrum from extreme equality on the extreme left to extreme liberty on the extreme right, with the centre involving both in balance. Woodard makes the good point that ideologies of the common good have often been perceived as unduly constraining personal liberty, with communism the extreme case.

A red herring. Or would that be a Red herring?

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: We know with a high degree of confidence when it is not worth sacrificing the common good for the sake of a utopian ideal of unlimited liberty.

Really? The gun debate in the USA shows how contested such ‘a high degree of confidence’ can be.

I do not argue that goals for the common good win every debate or tension with liberty, and I have already pointed out that liberty is part of the common good. Rather I argue that there is a totally unrealistic ideal of complete liberty advocated on the right in the U.S. (and guns make a good example) that idealogues promote without regard to rational balancing. The result is obvious in the loss of albedo that has been cooking the Northern Hemisphere countries in summer, the runaway release of methane from the permafrost, and the dangerous acidification of the oceans.

Robert Tulip wrote:Reasonable as it may seem to say gun nuts are mad, some respect for their perspective is needed in efforts to achieve a negotiated solution.

Respect for their perspective has been shown over and over in our country. Single-issue voters tend to command inordinate power. Unfortunately in this case their "perspective" has been created by an industry so consumed with its own profits that they have taken to advocating the arming of teachers as the solution to our mass-murder problems. Anyone who has been a teacher for a year knows this would lead to an increase in the problem, not a decrease, but then Wayne LaPierre and the gun lobby would not at all be unhappy to see teachers killing their students.

Robert Tulip wrote:Similar issues arise with climate change, with perceptions that the elitism of the United Nations and its progressive culture creates unacceptable risks to liberty and local decision making power.

Kinda weird to have you quoting the Rupert Murdoch talking points. The problem so far has been doing nothing, not threatening liberty, and the claims of threats to liberty have been a smokescreen financed by special interests who mean "my profits" when they say "our rights."

Robert Tulip wrote: which presents a primary planetary security problem that can only be addressed through immediate geoengineering, driven by political decision, not abstract economic incentive.

Economic incentives are the opposite of abstract.

Robert Tulip wrote: Far cheaper to mine carbon from the air than to stop people burning stuff.

Fine, bring on the incentives and lets do it the cheap way. Or we can talk about what we wish the government would do, "by political decision," as if we know all the answers.

Robert Tulip wrote: Too divisive: the broad conservative mistrust will not be turned around by Baker and Schultz,

That's been proved definitively, but it does not change the fact that Murdoch and his cronies are gutting the environment and the "broad conservative mistrust" consists of a lot of paranoiacs being led around by the nose by plutocrats who laugh at them the whole time. There's a sucker born every minute.

Robert Tulip wrote: New ideas are needed that put these divisive debates about decarbonising the economy to one side, and instead look to profitable methods to mine carbon while also re-freezing the North Pole.

You have contributed, and are contributing, more than your fair share to the divisiveness of the debate.

Robert Tulip wrote: The political debate on climate change is not between reason and irrationality. The so-called rational side of decarbonisers simply ignore the evidence that their policies have no prospect of stopping warming, and largely refuse to countenance discussion of methods that would achieve their goals.

I have responded to your false dichotomy many times, including in this post. I am not going to repeat the reasons why this is fallacious just because you insist on repeating the rhetoric.

Robert Tulip wrote:That analysis applies equally to the motivated reasoning of decarbonisation, with its political attitude of speeding up the end of fossil fuels leading to an irrational rejection of geoengineering. The moral courage to face facts is as absent on the left as on the right.

Good point, but what-aboutism doesn't justify lack of moral courage on either side.

Robert Tulip wrote: People have listened to emission reduction advocacy, and have concluded that its costs are too high and its benefits too uncertain.

Most of the economists, such as Geoffrey Heal, who disputed the report led by Nicholas Stern on intellectual grounds have since repented. They meant to argue for moderation, and instead their arguments led to squandering an opportunity to actually face the problem.

Robert Tulip wrote: nor can we fix climate by cutting carbon emissions.

Well, actually we can, and the technology is already within our grasp. Germany has 26% of its energy from renewables, and France has even lower carbon emissions. That with pitifully small incentives and (in Germany's case) a foolish decision to phase out nuclear power. The incentives for technological response are ridiculously weak, so the requirements of carbon neutrality might turn out to be, as the esteemed Robert Tulip argues, nil. But we will never see them, because ideologues talk people out of their own self-interest on the risible claim that it is bad because it is only for the public good.

Robert Tulip wrote: The idiocy that is stopping geoengineering research is the inability to discuss a pro-capitalist model that is entirely factual about the security risks of climate change.

Sure, the academics and activists who are most committed to de-carbonisation may, for the most part, have this "inability". But even in an Administration supposedly committed to conservative ideology, there is no action, because they drank the "there is no problem" Kool-Aid served up by Murdoch and the Koch brothers. Engineering departments, by contrast, are interested and getting more so.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: The casual willingness of the super-rich to sacrifice the truth and the public good for the sake of another billion dollars is not something history will remember them with respect for. Sometimes people who extract at the expense of others are just wrong.

That critique of the capitalist system is far too simplistic, bitter, resentful and oppositional

No, it isn't nearly bitter or resentful enough. These are the Huns and the Mongols of our day. They are proud to pile up the skulls of Syrians and Yemenis and pat themselves on the back for it. These are evil people, and their pretense to be value creators does not make them less evil.

Robert Tulip wrote:The public benefits of the products that have generated super profits are immense.

Sure, and they will still be piling up benefits after we force them to pay for the damage they are doing, just as the opioid makers will. That doesn't excuse us for ignoring the damage and listening to their lies.

Robert Tulip wrote: Far better to try to forgive the capitalist system for its mistakes, and look to work constructively to use capitalist processes to solve climate change.

This is a non-sensical formulation. Forgive them when they repent and make restitution? Sure. But their criminal fraud and political manipulation is doing real harm, has done real harm, and they do not deserve to be let off from it for having earned some profits any more than the rapist who is also an athlete should be forgiven his misdeeds for the sake of his athletic career. False dichotomy sounds appealing if you phrase it just so, but the fact is they could be paying for the full costs they are imposing and still contribute to the common good. In fact, of course, they would contribute more and have some actual reason for pride.

Robert Tulip wrote:It is entirely possible to achieve net zero by 2030 and a restored climate by 2050, but not via emission reduction. We need a different paradigm to stop the looming danger of sea level rise.

We need every paradigm we can lay our hands on, and above all the one that respects the true strengths of capitalism by providing it with the proper incentive to provide value to its customers.

Robert Tulip wrote: People blame the US and the Saudis for blocking this proposal, but the situation is not clear.

Yes, and Jamal Kashoggi may have dismembered himself. It isn't clear. Unless you are willing to face facts.

Harry Marks wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:The facts are that this so-called ‘market-like approach to mitigating CO2 emissions’ has a snowball’s chance in hell of slowing down climate change, and that is due to its inherent defects, not the opposition of denialists. Mitigating emissions, slowing the speed at which we add carbon to the air, can at best remove 1.5% of the carbon problem of anthropogenic radiative forcing each year, not even enough to stop the situation getting continually worse. Emission reduction is a failed paradigm that has to be junked.

You've made these claims before, of course, but in this case it is a shift of the terms of the discussion, as well as being wrong-headed. Opposition to inaction on the climate was not a left-wing initiative but a level-headed conservative and Republican response to scientific findings. You are trying to paper over that to suit your rhetorical purposes, but it's essentially a dishonest move. Furthermore, your "at best" claim is an attempt to smuggle the question of political practicality into an assessment of technical possibility, all in an attempt to sell a politically nowhere effort whose technical workability remains unproved.

Harry, you continue to misunderstand the empirical critique I am presenting of emission reduction as a primary strategy to fight climate change. The basic arithmetic, considered at planetary aggregate level, shows that the “technical workability” of emission mitigation is marginal to effective climate response. The 1.5% figure is the ratio between annual emissions of ten cubic kilometres of carbon (km3 C) and the total carbon content of the extra radiative forcing that humans have caused (635 km3 C).

Emission reduction only addresses the 1.5%, one sixtieth of the annual warming problem. Even within this marginal quantity, we are going backwards, with the annual emission rate increasing by about 5% per year, under both Paris Accord and Business As Usual (BAU). The intense political and economic drivers for continued emissions illustrate that taxing carbon offers no hope to incentivise change, and other methods are needed.

Some good analysis putting this debate into a scientific context is in an excellent book published this year, The Climate Question, by Australian ocean science professor Dr Eelco Rohling. The key observation is that the IPCC has severely underestimated the sensitivity of the earth system to the committed warming from past emissions. Even if all emission stopped today, the 635 billion tonnes of carbon that we have already added to the air would still cause at least two degrees of warming this century, due to the accelerating feedbacks that are inherent to climate systems, such as the loss of Arctic ice. That would eventually stabilise the sea level at about sixty feet above the present shores, while sending many species extinct by changing their habitat much faster than they can evolve or move.

That means the concept of the ‘carbon budget’ central to the emission reduction theory is intellectually bankrupt. Our real carbon budget is massively negative, contrary to the complacent quixotic fantasy that says we have a decade to change policy and shut down fossil fuels. If we want a stable climate, carbon removal is the main game, alongside solar radiation management, while emission reduction is marginal.

To stay below two degrees of warming the only option is to remove a lot more carbon from the air than we add. But efforts to do so are stymied by the vacuous political argument that it would undermine emission reduction. Tail wags dog.

Consider the rival scenarios.

Scenario A: Carbon removal is attempted at scale. Under this scenario, the world agrees a climate policy to mine sixteen km3 of carbon from the air every year by 2030. This would deliver net zero emissions, even while fossil emissions continue with Business As Usual (BAU), and would create a trajectory and momentum towards mining fifty km3/y C by 2050, enabling climate restoration (280 ppm CO2) this century, even with emissions continuing at BAU.

This trajectory pulls back from the climate precipice, but depends on the trade-off that we stop pretending emission reduction is the main climate game. Climate stability would be helped at the margin (<1.5 km3 C) by current Paris commitments where these make economic sense, but harmed by trying to speed up emission reduction plans beyond what makes economic sense. Subsidising the shift from fossil to renewable power has appalling wasteful opportunity cost. Such funds should be used for climate repair, targeted at least cost abatement.

Scenario B: Carbon removal is not attempted at scale. Under this scenario, nothing is done to invest in physically removing carbon from the air except small tokenistic measures such as planting trees. The planet puts all our eggs in the basket of doubling down on emission reduction. Even if we heroically achieve triple the emission reduction now agreed under the Paris Accord, the result by 2030 will be annual increase of ten cubic kilometres of carbon in the air. If we miraculously cut emissions by 60% from BAU, the annual increase would still be six cubic km of C, with no method in place to reduce that number quickly.

Unlike the carbon removal path, this trajectory creates no momentum to build a transformative carbon mining industry on the scale of aviation. The 2030 situation would be the world has no mechanism in place to stabilise the climate. Like a canoe caught in the current, civilization then goes straight over the waterfall.

These numbers show that without carbon removal at scale, the planetary future is entirely bleak, whereas carbon removal offers prospect for sustained shared abundance, even while emissions continue with business as usual.