Thursday, April 21, 2011

Geoengineering - Not Quite The Fix They Thought It Was

In earlier posts I have raised concerns about scientists who think themselves so clever that they are willing to mess about with the environment in the hope that they produce a Geoengineered solution to a perceived problem. There are no guarantees that these solutions will not in fact make things much worse for us all if they are not as clever as they think they are. It seems Dr. Roger Pielke Senior shares those same concerns:

Pielke Senior on Geoengineering

Guest post at WUWT by Dr. Roger Pielke Senior

Comment on The BBC News Article By Richard Black On Climate Geoengineering

There is an article on BBC News on April 6 2011 by Richard Black titled

Climate ‘technical fix’ may yield warming, not cooling

The article starts with the text

“Whitening clouds by spraying them with seawater, proposed as a “technical fix” for climate change, could do more harm than good, according to research.’

Whiter clouds reflect more solar energy back into space, cooling the Earth.

But a study presented at the European Geosciences Union meeting found that using water droplets of the wrong size would lead to warming, not cooling.”

This article further underscores how little we know about the climate system. To deliberately alter the system by geoengineering is, therefore, quite a risky approach. The reason it is even being considered is that there remains the assumption that added CO2 is the dominate climate forcing that can “disrupt” the climate system from its current equilibrium.

Such a static view of the climate is not supported by observations (e.g. see) yet this simplistic view persists as illustrated by the 2007 IPCC, and, more specifically by the BBC news article. In the article it is written [highlight added]

“In an era when many climate scientists are frustrated by slow progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, cloud whitening has sometimes been held up as an example of a technology that could make a real difference, at least to “buy time”.

The technique’s prospects depend crucially on how droplet size affects reflectivity It has been calculated that a fairly modest increase in the reflectivity of these marine clouds could balance the warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – although even proponents admit it would do nothing to combat the other major consequence of carbon emissions, ocean acidification.”

One of the interviewees for the news article does realize this is a complex issue. As Richard Black writes

“…Piers Forster from the UK’s University of Leeds, who is leading a major UK project on geoengineering techniques, suggested more research would be needed before cloud whitening could be considered for “prime time” use.

“The trouble is that clouds are very complicated; as soon as you start manipulating them in one way, there are a lot of different interactions,” he said.”

The statement that “a fairly modest increase in the reflectivity of these marine clouds could balance the warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere” illustrates the failure of many to understand the real behavior of the climate system. Even with respect to just the radiative forcing effect of aerosols, in addition to any global average forcing, it is spatial heterogeneity that matters much more than a global average in terms of how weather and ocean patterns could be modified.

As we have shown with respect to inadvertant inputs of aerosols into the atmsophere by human activities; i.e. see

Matsui, T., and R.A. Pielke Sr., 2006: Measurement-based estimation of the spatial gradient of aerosol radiative forcing. Geophys. Res. Letts., 33, L11813, doi:10.1029/2006GL025974.

in regards to their effect on atmospheric circulations in the tropical and subtropical latitudes, in our study, their influence is ~60 times that of the radiative effect of CO2. The deliberate insertion of aerosols for geoengineering would similarly have a large effect on circulation patterns. There is no way to balance the effect of CO2 and of aerosols with the approach discussed in this paper. Adding aerosols as part of geoengineering is not a “climate fix” but a recipe for climate disruption.

The real question then becomes are willing to let these scientist mess about with the environment to fix a problem that may not even yet be a problem?

Sea Levels Don't Respond To Alarmism



In March 2011, The Gillard Government wheeled out it's Climate Change expert (Economist- not Climate Scientist) Professor Ross Garnaut to talk in support of it's newly proposed Carbon (read Carbon Dioxide) Tax. He gave an interview to The Australian newspaper where he predictably claimed: Climate Change may be worse than feared. As part of those wild, typically alarmist and breathless predictions was this:

Ross Garnaut, Julia Gillard’s climate change adviser, yesterday issued a gloomy review of the latest science on global warming, finding the “awful reality” is that previous research may have underestimated the impact of increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere…

While temperatures continue to rise around the midpoints of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change range of projections, he says ”the rate of sea-level rise has accelerated and is tracking above the range suggested by the IPCC”.

So according to Economist Professor Ross Garnaut the rate of sea level rises are "accelerating" if that is true then we should see a increasing up tick on the University of Colorado data from the JASON 1 and JASON 2 satellites that they use to check these rises.

Not so, claims Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That: The Latest Unsmoothed Global Sea Level Data From JASON Shows A Sharp Downtick And Slight Down Trend.

From these graphs put together it shows the recent sharp downturn in the readings.

The next shows a trend since 2002, which is clearly not an upward trend, nor an accelerating one.




So who is right and who is wrong? Going to the Journal of Coastal Research online journal we find this abstract:

Without sea-level acceleration, the 20th-century sea-level trend of 1.7 mm/y would produce a rise of only approximately 0.15 m from 2010 to 2100; therefore, sea-level acceleration is a critical component of projected sea-level rise. To determine this acceleration, we analyze monthly-averaged records for 57 U.S. tide gauges in the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) data base that have lengths of 60–156 years. Least-squares quadratic analysis of each of the 57 records are performed to quantify accelerations, and 25 gauge records having data spanning from 1930 to 2010 are analyzed. In both cases we obtain small average sea-level decelerations. To compare these results with worldwide data, we extend the analysis of Douglas (1992) by an additional 25 years and analyze revised data of Church and White (2006) from 1930 to 2007 and also obtain small sea-level decelerations similar to those we obtain from U.S. gauge records.

The full PDF of the above Abstract can be seen here.

If this is the quality of advice that Julia Gillard is receiving from her trusted advisors then is it any wonder she has been duped into proposing a Carbon (Dioxide) Tax only months after categorically ruling one out.

Two Important Interviews In The Carbon Dioxide Tax Debate





In the Australian Federal Election campaign in 2010 the current Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard announced that "there will be no Carbon Tax under the government I lead!", yet in February 2011 she announced plans for a carbon dioxide tax (referred to decitfully as a "Carbon" Tax) in coalition with her new Green partners in government. At first she denied she had lied to the public about introducing this tax, but eventually conceeded that she had indeed "changed her position"and sought to introduce a Carbon Tax.

As part of the debate that has continued in Australia since that announcement was these two interviews conducted by radio staion 2GB's Chris Smith with firstly Dr. John Christy and then Professor Richard Lindzen on whether Australia needs to introduce a Carbon (read Carbon Dioxide) Tax.

Both are very informative an well worth listening to:

Dr. John Christy interview

Professor Richard Lindzen interview