LanDroid wrote:

Mr. Tulip wrote:Climate change is a finite problem. Humans add about ten cubic kilometres of carbon to the air every year, and this is destabilising the atmosphere. Remove that extra carbon, and presto, climate change is solved.

You seem to be saying the Paris Agreement should be ditched because carbon reductions don't work and only carbon removal will solve the situation.

Hi LanDroid, thanks very much for these comments, and sorry for delay in response. Just on this first point you are correct in your summary of my view, except your term ‘carbon reductions’ is an ambiguous phrase. The more precise description is ‘emission reduction’.

LanDroid wrote: Several problems with that:
- I've asked and you responded there are no large scale carbon removal projects coming on line.

True. As per my response just now to Interbane, a likely reason is that the Paris call for ‘global peaking’ of emissions is viewed by the climate establishment as something that would be undermined by large scale carbon removal projects. Hence one main avenue for such projects, ocean iron fertilization, is specifically banned by the Convention on Biological Diversity, even though the main proven benefit of such projects is to improve biological diversity. That official hostility creates unacceptable risk to investment. Go figure.

LanDroid wrote: - There is no reason to believe ditching the Paris Agreement would cause a move towards carbon removal.

True, but ditching Paris would allow such a move, even if not causing it. At the moment such a move is not even allowed, let alone impelled.

LanDroid wrote:- Stopping or reversing carbon reductions at a point where we're adding 2ppm annually without having a strong global carbon removal system would make the problem worse.

No, cancelling Paris wouldn’t make the climate problem worse. Per my reply to Interbane, the so-called ‘reductions’ that were vaguely agreed at Paris are actually ‘additions’, on track to a 50% emission rise by 2030.

Your comment is like saying to Abraham Lincoln to just keep chopping with a blunt axe, when he has told you he would like to sharpen it instead. The time spent sharpening an axe is well repaid in the greater effectiveness of chopping.

To heighten the absurdity, the Paris agreement is the equivalent of the instruction from the Knights Who Say Ni! to cut down the tallest tree in the forest with a herring.

LanDroid wrote: - The current problem may be finite, but it is gigantic, adding 40 billion tons of CO2 annually.

Yes, and a vast problem needs an equally vast solution.
That is why we have to use the ocean, the only location on our planet with enough available space, resources and energy to remove 40 GT of CO2 every year.

LanDroid wrote: - Even if carbon removal starts up, as emissions increase (as we stop or reverse efforts at emission reduction), there is no guarantee that carbon removal will increase sufficiently to decrease total CO2.

Whereas there is an absolutely clear guarantee that the Paris path of 15 GT of carbon emissions each year (55 billion tonnes of CO2) by 2030 will increase CO2 and put us on a perilous warming path.

The only thing that will decrease CO2 is actively and directly removing CO2 from the air. Simple but clear. A journey starts with a step. Emission reduction amounts to pushing on a string with the hope the other end of the string will move.

My calculation is that intensive operation of algae factories on one percent of the world ocean would solve the global warming problem, removing more carbon than we add from both air and sea, reversing acidification, reducing water temperature, increasing biodiversity, saving coral reefs from extinction, delivering abundant fishery resources, removing air pollution from source cities, and providing carbon-based material for fuel, food, feed, fertilizer and fabric.

Apart from winning the MIT Energy and Water Nexus CoLab competition in 2015, where the judges said my proposal is compelling, and delivering a public address to the University of Queensland Mining Department, I have not found anyone so much as willing to even discuss all that. I am a pariah as far as climate policy is concerned, which is why I am so pleased to see Trump enabling the rise of the pariahs with his John Galt approach to public policy.

LanDroid wrote: - It doesn't seem you think there is any benefit to doing both carbon emission reduction and carbon mining. But you linked to the Center For Carbon Removal, whose motto is "Solving the other half of the climate equation." Instead you see a conflict, not a way to attack a problem from two sides (if two sides existed).

Emission reduction has no benefit except local efficiency. The Center for Carbon Removal is part of the climate establishment, whose guild entry pass includes mouthing such nonsense whether you believe it or not. The real climate equation is that full delivery of Paris might stop 1% of emissions this century, as Lomborg proved. It is purely political to assert that 99% = 1%, which is the implication of the CCR ‘equation’ motto.

But then as Orwell said in 1984, Big Brother can easily convince you that 2 + 2 = 5.

LanDroid wrote:
Disclaimer: I'm asking, not attacking...

Sure, and I appreciate that. As you can see, the fact that I post this material on booktalk rather than anywhere else is because my experience elsewhere is that it generates automatic fallacious hysteria and ad hominem dismissal or is just ignored. Booktalk is an oasis of civil conversation.

People in climate related areas have such vested interests and are so consumed by the Paris delusions that they treat any criticism as malevolent idiocy, whereas I, like Lomborg, am simply asking for a calm and rational analysis of data and options, something conspicuously absent from the 'Emperor’s New Clothes' court of Paris.

Robert wrote:

Interbane wrote:We should strive for zero impact, and get as close as politically and economically possible.

The popular term for that strategy is “cutting off your nose to spite your face”, a needlessly self-destructive reaction to a problem, acting out of pique, pursuing revenge in a way that would damage any prospect of achieving climate stability.

No, cutting off your nose to spite your face is not zero impact. A more fitting analogy for non-zero impact is taking a belt sander to your face and hoping it regrows faster than you tear it off. Zero impact means leaving your face alone. As I said before, you're trying to wordsmith your way around this unassailable wisdom. It doesn't work.

You will find that mentions of NET are mainly by people who are lobbying to revise the existing fixation on emission reduction alone.

Isn't that self evident, and doesn't it also show that there isn't only a fixation on reducing emission? You admit that people are focused on NET, and from what I've seen it isn't some small cult, but many large groups.

Sadly, to call the current approach ‘responsible’ is nonsense. It is based partly on baseless scare campaigns, such as your GMO spectre, and on the grain of truth that geoengineering ideas like space mirrors could prove dangerous.

Caution is not nonsense. Geoengineering ideas could prove dangerous. Waiting to implement them could prove more dangerous. Don't shine a spotlight on one side of the dichotomy and blame others for asking about the darkness, even if you're ultimately correct. I'm not advocating either position, I don't know enough about this topic. But I have faith in the process of science to sort through it. At least, when the process isn't aborted or subsumed by politics, as when Trump slashes science funding for many Climate related research projects, and wipes any mention of climate change from the EPA website.

Regarding GMO's, that was never my spectre. It's an anti-science movement just like ACC denialism, creationism, and anti-vaccines. I don't champion the left or the right.

President Trump has rightly called the UN on this masquerade of decarbonisation, due to the massive damage that emission reduction poses to the world economy.

I think you grossly underestimate the ability of the world economy to decouple economic activity from carbon emissions. What makes you think there will be damage, rather than merely shifting? Massive challenges breed massive innovations, and open up new markets and new technologies as a result. Yes, there is "massive damage" to some sections of the world economy, but that damage is offset by the resulting growth in other areas. There are statistical reviews that support this, where over 20 countries have increased GDP while lowering emissions.

By contrast, climate change is more like an approaching freight train than a mirage, threatening to actually smash the world economy. The Trump camp has not got its thinking clear on climate, but its instincts are correct, that the Paris Accord is a vast hoax that costs a lot and delivers nothing.

From what I see, the debate isn't between emission reduction and NET's. It's between whether or not ACC is real. Half my friends and family don't believe it, in part because our leader doesn't believe it. There's polarization going on that's making people stupid. None of these people could give a crap about cutting emissions or farming carbon. In fact, they're against both, due to political allegiances.

I have a couple friends I've discussed this with who are disdainful of the idea that we're changing the climate. One of them mentions issues with NOAA studies, Venice water levels, etc. The other refused to go on a field trip with his son to plant trees, because he thought it smacked of political manipulation.
Planting trees is, after all, a NET activity. Given perspective, it's vastly inferior to the task. But the point is the polarization. I guess that's evidence that even NET's are frowned upon by those who support Trump's anti-climate agenda.

Claiming Trump and his administration as any kind of ally in the cause of combating climate change is just weird. The administration has proposed slashing the Energy Dept.'s budget for research into alternative energy. These cuts affect not only wind and solar--forms Robert is against--but also biofuel research.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/clim ... .html?_r=0

DWill wrote:Claiming Trump and his administration as any kind of ally in the cause of combating climate change is just weird. The administration has proposed slashing the Energy Dept.'s budget for research into alternative energy. These cuts affect not only wind and solar--forms Robert is against--but also biofuel research.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/clim ... .html?_r=0

I know it looks like that, and I admit it is a bit embarrassing and difficult for me to present these ideas. However, the big story is that the only way we will combat climate change is through a paradigm shift from emission reduction to carbon mining. The logic behind that argument is too compelling to ignore.

We are now in a flux state, with the emission reduction paradigm unable to respond to the questions that Lomborg has raised. That puts science in an irrational position, due to politics.

Trump has exploded the debate, forcing science to better justify its views and reject its own errors, which are on abundant display in the baseless assertions of the Paris Accord. That forcing of discussion is a good thing, even though Trump's extremism is dangerous, incoherent and unbalanced.

Last night I skimmed the kindle version of http://www.drawdown.org/ Although on the whole it is very good, it has narrow political blinders which mean that it does not see a need to shift the climate repair paradigm.

Drawdown maps, measures, models, and describes the 100 most substantive solutions to global warming. For each solution, we describe its history, the carbon impact it provides, the relative cost and savings, the path to adoption, and how it works. The goal of the research that informs Drawdown is to determine if we can reverse the buildup of atmospheric carbon within thirty years. All solutions modeled are already in place, well understood, analyzed based on peer-reviewed science, and are expanding around the world. Learn more.

Drawdown would be a good Booktalk non-fiction selection, building on the interest in climate change as a topical issue.

Robert Tulip wrote:
Trump has exploded the debate, forcing science to better justify its views and reject its own errors, which are on abundant display in the baseless assertions of the Paris Accord. That forcing of discussion is a good thing, even though Trump's extremism is dangerous, incoherent and unbalanced.

Last night I skimmed the kindle version of http://www.drawdown.org/ Although on the whole it is very good, it has narrow political blinders which mean that it does not see a need to shift the climate repair paradigm.


Drawdown would be a good Booktalk non-fiction selection, building on the interest in climate change as a topical issue.

For several reasons, the worst path we can take is one where we're told that we, individually or as small collectives, cannot and should not do anything to address the problem of climate change--because unless we have something vaguely and grandly called a "paradigm shift," anything we may do is useless. By your counsel, Robert, we would be best off by pumping all of the remaining oil and gas hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, because we can then scoop them out and have a useful product for which there will be a healthy market. Saying that the barriers to such a future are "political" is to severely downplay the extremeness of that proposed solution and to bet on something that will appeal to almost nobody as rational. The way to reducing human impact on the climate--it will never get to zero impact--is to restructure our economy and technology, a goal that may be grand in itself but one to which some countries have shown actual commitment. Not ours, unfortunately. How about Australia?

Interbane wrote:cutting off your nose to spite your face is not zero impact.

?? That is not relevant to the issue here, that pushing for zero emissions does more harm than good.

Interbane wrote:

mentions of NET are mainly by people who are lobbying to revise the existing fixation on emission reduction alone.

Isn't that self evident, and doesn't it also show that there isn't only a fixation on reducing emission?

No it is not self evident. If the Paris Accord had included any mention of Negative Emission Technology, there would be no need to lobby to revise this omission. The fixation on emission reduction is among the official decision makers. That is where the government power sits. The fact that people like me have interest in changing the official line is separate from the problem that the official policy is narrow and delusional.

Interbane wrote: You admit that people are focused on NET, and from what I've seen it isn't some small cult, but many large groups.

The idea that carbon mining could outweigh emission reduction is marginal to the climate policy debate because it is too disruptive. The new book I linked to above, Drawdown, discusses sequestering carbon and provides a useful overview of current status, but remains fixated within the leftist thought bubble of prevailing climate policy.

Interbane wrote: Caution is not nonsense. Geoengineering ideas could prove dangerous.

The current UN ban on geoengineering research and development cannot be called cautious. Stupid is a better description. Caution would mean encouraging testing of methods with good prospects, to ensure safe implementation. Instead, because the UN has put all its climate eggs in the emission reduction basket case, it spins its political ban as responsible caution.

Interbane wrote: Waiting to implement them could prove more dangerous. Don't shine a spotlight on one side of the dichotomy and blame others for asking about the darkness, even if you're ultimately correct.

We are already geoengineering the planet and have been for ten thousand years. Neolithic humans emitted vast amounts of methane from domesticated rice and agriculture. Without this extra methane warming the planet, the natural orbital cycle would have caused a new ice age instead of the anomalous level sea of the Holocene. And now industrial CO2 emissions are rapidly cooking the planet, in a vast geoengineering experiment. The urgent need is to implement some equal and opposite countervailing measures, of which the best possible is large scale algae production.

Interbane wrote: I'm not advocating either position, I don't know enough about this topic. But I have faith in the process of science to sort through it. At least, when the process isn't aborted or subsumed by politics, as when Trump slashes science funding for many Climate related research projects, and wipes any mention of climate change from the EPA website.

President Trump is reacting to how the climate lobby politicised climate change under Obama, with the Democrat assumption that anyone who was not on the emissions reduction gravy train was a moronic devil. By going overboard in the opposite direction, Trump is simply restoring some balance to the debate, recognising the enduring core role of fossil fuels in delivering power and wealth to the whole world, and not just to the 1%. I expect the outcome will be a more balanced position, where the climate lobby is humbled so it enters conversation with its critics.
Incidentally, a good reply from Lomborg to one of his critics is at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bjorn-lom ... 80974.html

Interbane wrote: Regarding GMO's, that was never my spectre.

You said “I could easily see a scenario where genetically modified algae is tested in one area and spreads across the globe.” That is a spectre. My view is that by sourcing concentrated CO2 as feedstock from coal fired power stations and mines, plastic bags floating at sea can be used as bioreactors to develop strains of algae that will only survive in a high CO2 environment, with much higher yield than in low CO2 natural environment. If such algae bags broke, their contents would be eaten by fish, and the algae would just die due to having adapted to the artificial factory location. That is not genetic tinkering but just traditional plant breeding agronomy adapted to industrial scale, with a ready cautious strategy for safety, beginning in rivers such as the Mississippi to test methods, produce valuable commodities and fix the dead zone in the Gulf. Bag breakage at sea can be avoided by sinking the bags during storms, as Dr Jonathan Trent, former head of the NASA Offshore Membrane Enclosure for Growing Algae OMEGA project proposed.

Interbane wrote:
What makes you think there will be damage, rather than merely shifting? Massive challenges breed massive innovations, and open up new markets and new technologies as a result. Yes, there is "massive damage" to some sections of the world economy, but that damage is offset by the resulting growth in other areas. There are statistical reviews that support this, where over 20 countries have increased GDP while lowering emissions.

That is an interesting and legitimate debate. I think your source is http://www.wri.org/blog/2016/04/roads-d ... rowing-gdp which discusses whether climate stabilization can drive growth. My first concern in such arguments is that national level statistics like these are hopeless, since the industrial countries listed have mainly just exported their emitting polluting industries to poor countries, so the emissions still occur, and are still often owned by companies from these rich clean countries, but they are accounted against the poor of China and India. And these rich countries import consumer goods from poor countries, but have manipulated the accounting so the poor manufacturer country is lumped with responsibility for the emission. Wind and solar are important innovative technologies, but issues such as intermittency and scale may make them unsuitable to deliver efficient baseload power. http://accf.org/wp-content/uploads/2017 ... Report.pdf was a source for Trump’s assertion of annual harm in the order of trillions of dollars. If anyone can find a worthwhile critique of it let me know.

Interbane wrote: From what I see, the debate isn't between emission reduction and NET's. It's between whether or not ACC is real. Half my friends and family don't believe it, in part because our leader doesn't believe it. There's polarization going on that's making people stupid. None of these people could give a crap about cutting emissions or farming carbon. In fact, they're against both, due to political allegiances.

Trump did not make denialist claims in his Paris withdrawal speech. Instead, he cited MIT research expecting four degrees warming this century. At bottom, the problem here is that denial of climate change is highly confused. It is sensible to deny that emission reduction is a good idea. But that is complicated, so politically it is much easier to deny that man is changing the planetary climate. I hope to help shift the deniers away from rejecting science toward rejecting the corrupt policy that the UN has built upon the science.

Interbane wrote: I have a couple friends I've discussed this with who are disdainful of the idea that we're changing the climate. One of them mentions issues with NOAA studies, Venice water levels, etc. The other refused to go on a field trip with his son to plant trees, because he thought it smacked of political manipulation. Planting trees is, after all, a NET activity. Given perspective, it's vastly inferior to the task. But the point is the polarization. I guess that's evidence that even NET's are frowned upon by those who support Trump's anti-climate agenda.

None of that matters. NETs will be developed by the fossil fuel industry, and this will give those companies credibility in the climate lobby, profitable lines of business, and ability to sustain fossil fuel extraction for ever, by converting the produced CO2 into useful stable products.

DWill wrote:Then taking into account several large barriers, are we in fact left with mitigation as the only real avenue for action against climate change? The barriers I allude to are the insufficiency of emission control, the insufficiency of carbon capture, the costs of complying with agreements, and the risks and uncertainties of geoengineering. Mitigation means moving people and structures out of the way, erecting physical barriers to rising waters, abandoning areas no-longer-productive for growing food, finding alternative foods such as insects--and other means could be suggested.

Hi DWill, I think you are mixing up mitigation and adaptation. Mitigating means reducing an effect. Adapting means changing how we live. Your examples above are about adapting, by moving people and building infrastructure etc. Adaptation is expensive and dangerous, and vastly less preferable compared to mitigation. The main real viable mitigation strategy, reducing the danger of the extra carbon we put in the air, is taking that carbon out of the air. But the religious fatwa from the UN and the political left bans any practical work on carbon removal at the scale required. Many on the right think that is because the UN has a secret world government plan to make their failed emission reduction policy the only mitigation response. So actual response to the sixth extinction is subordinated by the UN to its dreams of state power.

DWill wrote:The hardest part about mitigation is that we could perhaps have less disastrous consequences if as we pursue mitigation we also keep trying to reduce carbon. But if disaster is going to be the outcome anyway, we might just say the hell with it and not go through a painful process for modest results.

Assuming again that by mitigation you mean adaptation, it is absolutely not the case that disaster is inevitable. Sensible rapid discussion of methods to remove carbon from the air can enable the world to step back from the precipice. Forget the corrupt joke of emission reduction and convince the Trump Administration to work with the fossil fuel industry on carbon mining.

What ever came of the OMEGA project? I heard of it and read about it a few years ago, and haven't heard anything since.

Robert Tulip wrote:Hi DWill, I think you are mixing up mitigation and adaptation.

Yes, I had wondered if I used the wrong word after I posted. Of course, adaptation is even now going on, with projects to better manage rising waters in coastal cities as one example. And much more of this will need to happen, sadly--or maybe not entirely sadly, as some of these efforts improve overall livability.

DWill wrote:the worst path we can take is one where we're told that we, individually or as small collectives, cannot and should not do anything to address the problem of climate change-

In terms of emotional comfort, the idea that we as individuals and small groups can take action to affect climate change resonates well. However, the moral philosophy advanced by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, that capitalist efficiency depends on economies of scale and the profit motive, presents an alternative path with a stronger basis in evidence. These heartless capitalist drivers of business have delivered all the fabulous wealth of the modern world, and they operate at industrial orders of magnitude that render small artisanal craft operations uncompetitive. Local activity is essential for social capital and democracy, for involvement and belonging, but the best local activity is to understand and debate the global problems, not to pretend that personal emission levels make any difference to global warming.

DWill wrote:-because unless we have something vaguely and grandly called a "paradigm shift," anything we may do is useless.

This issue of paradigm shift is something I have been thinking about a lot. Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions proved the strong role of psychology in people’s beliefs, even in scientific matters that seem to be objective and rational. The paradigm shift required in climate science is from emission reduction to carbon mining.

An old paradigm begins to crack when researchers identify anomalies that its defenders cannot answer or explain. The Paris Accord has just such anomalous language, in its untrue statements that emission reduction is essential to climate stability. That is untrue, because if the world removes more carbon than we add to the air, then a path to stability does not need to involve emission reduction.

That simple logic of carbon mining hits up against the paradigm of the UN and its supporters, who are doubling down on the failed emission reduction agenda, seeing ever greater reductions as the only path. Trump has called them out, even if he does not fully understand the likely consequences of his decision and is mainly doing from the limited attitude of back to the future with coal.

DWill wrote: By your counsel, Robert, we would be best off by pumping all of the remaining oil and gas hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, because we can then scoop them out and have a useful product for which there will be a healthy market.

In the long term, the productive use of all the world’s carbon is the path to universal planetary abundance. Carbon will be used to build vast cities floating around the world ocean. Eventually, over thousands of years, we should see all the carbon in the earth’s crust as a resource that can be mined and used productively, while keeping the CO2 level at the stable Holocene level of 280 ppm to ensure stable sea level and protect biodiversity. As to whether hydrocarbons should be burnt before being converted again to useful products, it could be that some complex molecules will have higher value unburnt, but in any case, the idea that we should ‘decarbonise’ the world economy is foolish.

DWill wrote:Saying that the barriers to such a future are "political" is to severely downplay the extremeness of that proposed solution and to bet on something that will appeal to almost nobody as rational.

Such a future, using industrial technology to generate abundance from the space, resources and energy of the world ocean, offers a hopeful and practical path for humanity and the rest of nature to flourish in a world of peace and prosperity with resources devoted to creative activity.

DWill wrote:The way to reducing human impact on the climate--it will never get to zero impact--is to restructure our economy and technology, a goal that may be grand in itself but one to which some countries have shown actual commitment. Not ours, unfortunately. How about Australia?

With seven to ten billion people living on earth, the only stable future is from active scientific regulation of the global climate, keeping carbon at the stable Holocene level. The current excess carbon is highly volatile and dangerous.

As I alluded recently, the Holocene stable temperature and sea level is entirely a result of human impact, from agricultural methane emissions. The stability of the future requires that we recognise and continue this impact to protect stability, and not allow Holocene stability to become a platform for future instability. This map of Greenland temperature over the last hundred thousand years from ice core data, http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/temperatu ... ndTemp.jpg shows the impact of the rise of agriculture ten thousand years ago, flat-lining through the Holocene in marked difference to the jagged previous pattern.

This change is purely due to technology. The situation for humans since the Holocene is like having grabbed the tiger’s back: we must continue the ride, as to dismount would mean to be eaten.

Zero climate impact is not a meaningful goal, given the enormous scale of existing impact. The better path is ensuring stability, fecundity and durability, the great evolutionary values of genetic adaptation.