Please use this thread to discuss Ch. 14: A call to arms.

A recent podcast and paper on saving the Arctic: "Crazy Ideas Have Potential"

https://climateseries.com/climate-chang ... ngineering

“Surely if you are going to be intervening with some risk in something where the risk is greater if you don’t intervene then let’s research the intervention!”

Welcome to Shaping The Future - From Pandemic to Climate Change. In this episode, I am speaking with Cambridge University’s Dr Hugh Hunt who is also working as part of the Centre For Climate Repair In Cambridge looking at ways to repair the climate by various interventions.

Hugh makes the point that the risks of Geoengineering are less than the risks from climate tipping points that we are facing if we don’t do it.

He also gives us an overview of the Centre For Climate Repair set-up by former UK Chief Government scientist, Sir David King, and discusses why funding on a scale to meet the enormity of the climate crisis means unconventional sources maybe be necessary.

The paper that this interview is based on coauthored by Hugh Hunt and Dan Bodansky can be downloaded free here: https://bit.ly/3ich6Yw

I'll listen to this later. I like, now, thinking in terms of climate repair or climate reparation. I don't think that previously there was a strong goal implied in simply reducing emissions.

Chapter Fourteen – A Call To Arms
Prof Wadhams opens this chapter with a discussion of how the climate is far more sensitive than used to be thought. Planetary temperature responds directly to the CO2 level, so much that the popular concept of a “carbon budget” makes no sense – the real carbon budget is negative. We have to now look at ways to cut the CO2 level back toward the stable Holocene level of 280 ppm. Even if it might once have been possible to rely on emission reduction as a main climate strategy, that is manifestly no longer so. Preventing catastrophe requires CO2 removal at large scale. Currently proposed methods look expensive, at the scale needed which is bigger than total emissions. But research can cut costs.

The next rather provocative comment is that removal of CO2 is psychologically more congenial than emission reduction. In a way that is obvious. Most people don’t want to have to cut their energy use but would prefer to use even more energy, especially since our fossil fuel infrastructure is so familiar. Yet there are many climate activist comments who see things in reverse, saying they find cutting our standard of living more congenial. That is what Pope Francis argued in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, with its seemingly contradictory concept of an integral ecology that would combine care for nature and care for people, while encouraging people to live more simply.

After the dystopian Trump interregnum, perhaps there is prospect for what Wadhams calls the “can-do” spirit of America to focus attention on climate change. But considered scientifically, the slow pace of CO2 removal means that urgent cooling methods are essential, ie geoengineering. Despite side effects and weaknesses, the basic problem of planetary heating is like a fever that has to be cooled. The immediate priority is mindful technology, overcoming the mindless mentality that still dominates economic thinking.