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Why Increasing Albedo is More Urgent than Cutting Emissions

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Robert Tulip

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Why Increasing Albedo is More Urgent than Cutting Emissions

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I have made a YouTube Video – 16 minutes - https://youtu.be/MzZDDjHYAnk - explaining this topic.

The Problem
Cutting emissions and removing greenhouse gases can’t stop climate tipping points
Politics and economics make cutting emissions difficult, expensive and slow.
The world situation is like a canoe headed for a waterfall
Viable cooling technologies lack funds, publicity and political support
The Solution
Reverse the IPCC priority order and put increasing albedo first
A brighter planet can avoid the climate danger zone.
Cooling technologies such as Marine Cloud Brightening are quick, safe and cheap
Fund large scale solar geoengineering research
Governments must cooperate to implement direct cooling measures.
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DWill

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Re: Why Increasing Albedo is More Urgent than Cutting Emissions

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That was great, Robert. Tough to argue with your logic. I wondered about the hundreds of millions of tonnes of S02 for injection up to 2070, vs. your statement about using misted seawater to cool the Antarctic. The latter substance would seem better. In the case of SO2, what are the likely expected effects on the acidity of rainwater? In other words, how serious would the side effects be--(and would the perception of those effects become a major drawback for implementation)?
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Re: Why Increasing Albedo is More Urgent than Cutting Emissions

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DWill wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 11:07 am That was great, Robert. Tough to argue with your logic.
Thanks very much DWill.
I find in general that my logic is something people ignore rather than try to argue against.
There is a strong cognitive dissonance between the arguments I present and the whole public climate debate between emission reduction and climate denial.
DWill wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 11:07 am I wondered about the hundreds of millions of tonnes of S02 for injection up to 2070, vs. your statement about using misted seawater to cool the Antarctic. The latter substance would seem better.
I agree Marine Cloud Brightening should be the priority. It is safe and simple and cheap and fast, as I mention in the video talk. It also has the advantage that it will enable governance systems to be established that will allow governments to have a sound consideration of more seemingly risky methods like stratospheric aerosols and iron in the oceans.
DWill wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 11:07 amIn the case of SO2, what are the likely expected effects on the acidity of rainwater? In other words, how serious would the side effects be--(and would the perception of those effects become a major drawback for implementation)?
Acid rain is likely to be a minor problem according to https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com ... 09jd011918

The perception is a major political issue. As I mention in my talk, it led the IPCC to extremely negative criticisms, which I and many critics regard as spurious. It is quite bizarre to have an existential global problem with a clear solution which is flatly rejected on baseless grounds. The psychology of this debate is fascinating, with the climate action movement making the unity of the left a far higher priority than actually finding solutions to the world's top medium term stability and security challenge.
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Re: Why Increasing Albedo is More Urgent than Cutting Emissions

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Random thinkery:
  • Interesting how solutions have evolved. Carbon emission reduction was the first priority. When that appeared inadequate carbon mining and sequestration was proposed, but it seems little has been done. Now that probably isn't enough so geoengineering such as increasing albedo is proposed.
  • We have been reducing sulphur dioxide pollution, but now we might increase that to brighten the atmosphere? Here's a brief song from the musical Hair about that.
  • As difficult as selling emission reductions as well as carbon mining and sequestration has become, geoengineering will be impossible to enact. Consider the levels of paranoia and hysteria just on Covid. Even in the face of over 580 million cases and nearly 6.5 million deaths, many people still believe Covid is a hoax. Even after over 12 billion covid vaccines have been administered, many people still believe they are incredibly dangerous, even more so than the "fake virus."
  • Leaving aside many other areas of paranoia and hysteria, consider how the public will evaluate the safety of geoengineering given the above covid conspiratorial thinking. (It will be contrails, medieval secret societies, and Satan on steroids.)
  • How permanent would Marine Cloud Brightening be? Could it be reduced, dispersed, or reversed if unintended consequences become too severe?
Thanks...
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Re: Why Increasing Albedo is More Urgent than Cutting Emissions

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LanDroid wrote: Thu Aug 11, 2022 9:56 am Random thinkery:
[*] Interesting how solutions have evolved. Carbon emission reduction was the first priority. When that appeared inadequate carbon mining and sequestration was proposed, but it seems little has been done. Now that probably isn't enough so geoengineering such as increasing albedo is proposed.
There is quite a bit of work happening on carbon dioxide removal, but the problem is that no one will pay for it and that it is too small and slow to make any difference to rising temperatures.
LanDroid wrote: Thu Aug 11, 2022 9:56 am [*] We have been reducing sulphur dioxide pollution, but now we might increase that to brighten the atmosphere? Here's a brief song from the musical Hair about that.
The banning of high sulphur fuels in coal and oil does have a significant warming effect. The biggest sulphur emission in recent times was Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, which cut world temperature by half a degree. Targeted addition of sulphur to the stratosphere could cut temperature by one degree with a fleet of 100 planes at annual cost of $5 billion, a tiny fraction of the amount governments are wasting on cutting emissions.
LanDroid wrote: Thu Aug 11, 2022 9:56 am [*] As difficult as selling emission reductions as well as carbon mining and sequestration has become, geoengineering will be impossible to enact. Consider the levels of paranoia and hysteria just on Covid. Even in the face of over 580 million cases and nearly 6.5 million deaths, many people still believe Covid is a hoax. Even after over 12 billion covid vaccines have been administered, many people still believe they are incredibly dangerous, even more so than the "fake virus."
I don’t think scientists are particularly trained at telling a coherent and reassuring story of how to implement a policy designed to cool the planet. Much more wholistic thinking is needed than is possible through the silo approach of academic science. The advantage of geoengineering over emission reduction is that the science indicates it will be safe, cheap, fast and effective. The only problem is that it means the climate activist community has to eat crow over their failed policy prescriptions that say decarbonising the economy is an effective climate strategy
LanDroid wrote: Thu Aug 11, 2022 9:56 am [*] Leaving aside many other areas of paranoia and hysteria, consider how the public will evaluate the safety of geoengineering given the above covid conspiratorial thinking. (It will be contrails, medieval secret societies, and Satan on steroids.)
What is needed is debate within technocratic circles among rational people of good will to develop the policy rationale for direct cooling. One controversial point for this process is that the climate action community see the unity of the left as more important than stabilising the climate. The left are united around the lowest common denominator of cutting emissions, which has acquired a quasi-religious mythical status as the necessary and sufficient political strategy. That means they do not want to consider a political strategy that involves reconciliation with the right. By contrast, geoengineering involves cooperation with the fossil fuel industries to bring their assets, interests, skills and contacts together to support scientific research. That can support their ongoing social licence to operate in ways that will be strongly questioned by the political left whose strategy is to cut emissions as fast as possible. The broader community would prefer a softer landing in the transition toward a decarbonised economy, avoiding the energy catastrophes caused by forcing a too rapid shift away from coal and gas and the uncertainties around the ability of renewable energy to fill the gap.
LanDroid wrote: Thu Aug 11, 2022 9:56 am [*] How permanent would Marine Cloud Brightening be? Could it be reduced, dispersed, or reversed if unintended consequences become too severe?
Thanks...
Not permanent at all. Effects last a few weeks. That means the bigger risk is termination shock, that if for some reason an MCB program suddenly stopped, the latent warming masked by the brightening process would come roaring back. So the governance framework to ensure continuity is important, within a security framework. The biggest technical problem is that the mist droplets need to all be of the same optimal size, and the technology does not yet exist to deliver this, although compared to a moon landing it is a simple problem. The termination problem shows that it is essential that brightening be seen only as a stopgap until new technologies emerge to remove CO2 at gigatonne scale. My view is that seaweed and soil are likely to be the best, able to operate at a bigger scale than new emissions. I am keen to read Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson which looks at related issues.
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Re: Why Increasing Albedo is More Urgent than Cutting Emissions

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From my point of view, success would be COP27 in Egypt agreeing to the program of the Healthy Planet Action Coalition for planetary cooling, as a practical and constructive priority for international cooperation and peacebuilding. Shift Russian attention from Ukraine to re-freezing the north, possibly with Arctic shipping canals through the ice. Military security has to be integrated with climate security on a global basis. Geoengineering with solar radiation management should become the main climate policy priority for this decade, quickly cooling the planet alongside work on GHG emission reduction and removal.

Irreversible changes such as species extinction are worsening under current policies. Brightening the planet would produce rapid cooling that would help to reverse these damaging environmental impacts. Higher planetary albedo/reflectivity would also help avoid irreversible tipping points and reduce extreme weather and sea level rise. Governments will need to regulate the planetary atmosphere for the foreseeable future, with increased albedo a key objective. There is no case to reverse brightening as that would increase warming. More albedo means more cooling, as a primary measure of radiative forcing. A whiter planet is a cooler planet.

Solar radiation management has projected benefits and protections far exceeding its costs and risks. Work to increase albedo by brightening the planet will remain necessary for a long time to cool the biosphere and reverse the harms caused by emissions. Albedo is the most immediate trigger for climate temperature change, with CO2 a slower factor. An albedo focus for COP27 could easily prevent warming rising above 1.5°C.

Ecological security is part of climate security, which also includes the human security dimensions of climate change. Climate security can link to military security, by creating opportunities for peaceful international cooperation to build confidence and trust. Cooling the poles is a climate goal that would improve ecological and human security.
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Re: Why Increasing Albedo is More Urgent than Cutting Emissions

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COP27 should enable interested governments to dedicate funds to international cooperation for direct climate cooling.

David Keith estimates that investment of $2 billion to assess technologies could avert climate damage costing $10 trillion.

The exclusion of SRM from the Summary for Policy Makers for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report reflects a political rather than a scientific assessment.

Governments need to base climate policies on science, but in this case it is IPCC ignoring the science.

A coalition of interested nations should agree at COP to freeze the polar regions as a first step toward climate restoration.
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Re: Why Increasing Albedo is More Urgent than Cutting Emissions

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The approach of unifying the environment movement around the goal of getting off fossil fuels as quickly as possible, is broadly supported across the climate action movement. If that would cool the planet, I would say fantastic, lets do it. The problem is that this accepted strategy has no chance of achieving its aims.

Cutting fossil fuel use, or even ramping up GHG removal, cannot prevent the predicted dangerous climate tipping points. A different strategy is needed. COP27 should aim for political agreement to use direct climate cooling technologies as a primary climate response.

One of the rallying cries around climate change is ‘follow the science’. The problem with this call is that the science of climate change is clear, but the science of what to do about it is not. The popular assumption that speeding up decarbonisation can prevent dangerous warming is just unscientific. The tipping points are hitting harder and bigger and earlier. A strategy led by emission cuts will just get overwhelmed by the scale and rapidity of climate change, like a ten foot levee in a thirty foot flood. The same problem applies for GHG removal. The only action that will actually stand a chance of slowing the growing momentum of tipping points is brightening the planet. That is the climate action we have to speed up. That is why the technical scientific problem we face is to work out what are the fastest and most effective actions that will prevent climate damage.

In this context, politics to build the environment movement is often a constraint, not a strategy. Sticking with actions that can unify the environment movement, as you suggest, won’t stop dangerous warming. While activists are fixated on political justice, they are distracted from the empirical science of warming. The immediate aim should be to slow warming. That means expanding research on technologies such as marine cloud brightening, mirrors for earth energy reflection and the potentially decisive method of stratospheric aerosol injection.

In an emergency, triage requires determining what action will make a difference to life or death. Climate triage requires accepting that direct climate cooling is the decisive question of our time, and that other concerns need to be put on hold until the cooling problem is addressed. When you face a thirty foot flood with a ten foot levee, planning to increase the levee by six inches is pointless, but that is what a focus on carbon amounts to. It will not affect tipping points if decarbonisation takes three decades or ten, as long as immediate steps are taken to cool the planet, while putting policies in place to remove GHGs on a scale larger than emissions.

An article in The Guardian put this problem into stark relief, wrongly asserting that the “climate crisis is not a scientific or technical problem, it is an issue of justice and political will.” This is a call to fiddle while Rome burns, given that the proposed “political will” involves social and economic conflict to dismantle our current energy system against strong resistance, with no prospect of cooling effect and high risk of creating widespread energy poverty and climate delay.

Achieving climate stability is a very difficult technical problem. At the moment, the advocates of “justice” are totally preventing action to solve the technical problem. It is a serious moral scandal that the wrong political strategy of the climate movement is the single most flexible lever that could be moved to start the world on a path of climate repair and restoration.
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Re: Why Increasing Albedo is More Urgent than Cutting Emissions

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I fully share concerns about the ecological and health damage caused by our capitalist system. The problem is finding a practical path forward that will save the world from climate disaster and ecological collapse.

Recent commentary has likened fossil fuel industries to tobacco. That is reasonable as far as their record of deceit is concerned, but there is a big difference in that smoking has negative economic value and is directly deadly to its users, whereas fossil energy totally underpins the world economy and has high enduring value. Fossil fuels are only deadly, in terms of global warming, if we do not work out how to mitigate their effects.

Rapid decarbonisation of the economy would cause chaos, poverty and conflict. This is increasingly seen by the majority of voters, who will not support emission cuts that go well beyond their economic interests. That makes the idea of shutting down emissions a futile and unworkable objective in the coming decades. The formidable alliance between fossil fuels and the military and intelligence world, with all their industrial, political and media supporters, dwarfs the power of their opponents, even if their opponents gain state power.

What is needed is a bit like a ‘judo climate policy’, using the weight and momentum of the opponent to achieve victory. That would mean allying with fossil energy industries on direct climate cooling. But the difference from judo is that this alliance would serve mutual interests in a flourishing planetary future.

I read the Stanford petition condemning university partnership with the fossil fuel industry and was appalled by its vain and shallow analysis. That whole line of thinking is wrong.

Demonising fossil fuels is perfectly fair in terms of their duplicity about climate change and their arrogant destruction of people’s health. However, partisan attack is a highly risky and counterproductive strategy when it comes to defining a path out of our climate peril.

Direct climate cooling through technologies such as Marine Cloud Brightening is the only method that could mitigate extreme weather in this decade. CDR and emission reduction are too slow.

Who has the assets, the skills, the networks, the incentive, the funds and the overall material interest to implement direct climate cooling? The fossil fuel industry certainly does have all these. Direct climate cooling would support the commercial interest of fossil fuel companies in securing their future by enhancing ongoing climate stability. It would also benefit the insurance industry.

If the fossil fuel industry shifted its policy to support planetary brightening, we would see an immediate transformation of the climate debate. They should make this policy shift. It would directly mitigate the harm their products are causing as extreme weather worsens, and it would also be in their commercial interest, justifying the inevitable slower transition to renewables than that demanded by the IPCC.

The danger is that the prospect of an energy transition has been over-hyped. This northern winter is expected to be a costly disaster for Europe. The prospect of energy rationing is due in significant part to the failing fantasy of shifting too fast to renewables. There is talk of a coal renaissance.

People are most unlikely to agree to decarbonise at a speed that would mitigate climate change. The world needs to buy time to delay catastrophic tipping points that would swamp carbon-based climate policies. The only way to do that is solar geoengineering.

Fossil fuel companies are the main organisations able to switch world policy to accept solar geoengineering, and to cooperate with governments in ensuring its deployment is safe, fast and effective. I hope they will talk about brightening the planet at COP27. Climate activists should engage this debate, not shun it on ideological tribal grounds.
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Re: Why Increasing Albedo is More Urgent than Cutting Emissions

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I wonder if the countries most threatened by climate change--and accounting for the smallest contributions to atmospheric GHG--will begin to demand action on planetary brightening. So far, I think their reasonable demands are that the big polluters decarbonize and that vulnerable countries receive a great deal more adaptation funding.

Whether the scenario you lay out could ever come to pass, who knows. It sounds unlikely, but history is full of strange turns. The fossil fuel industry, worldwide, is a complex of companies belonging to many organizations. We might speak of it as an entity, but it's a hydra-headed beast with only one common goal, to make money. At least some of these industries are concerned about future viability, though, in view of regulatory pressure and the public's growing disillusion with fossil fuels. That fear is probably contributing to their investments in alternative energy, and it could also motivate some of them to pay for brightening the planet--if they saw that their core business would survive longer if warming worries decreased.

Three problems I see are that 1) any geoengineering proposals are bound to be accepted only as stop-gaps on the way to full decarbonization; 2) the most vulnerable countries might cry out that the industrialized world now wants to implement a risky plan rather than do the harder work of decarbonizing, and 3) the governance issues are really thorny.

However, tobacco companies found a way to diversify their businesses in order to survive and grow. Maybe fossil fuel energy companies will be able to do the same, and will use an indirect route like planet brightening to help make that happen.
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