“HAARP is a weapon of mass destruction, capable of destabilising agricultural and ecological systems globally.”
“‘Climatic warfare’ potentially threatens the future of humanity, but has casually been excluded from the reports for which the IPCC received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.”
Weather Warfare by Michel Chossudovsky, The Ecologist, December 2007
Memorandum 152
15 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change Science http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm.pdf "Sea ice is projected to shrink in both the Arctic and Antarctic under all SRES scenarios. In some projections, Arctic late-summer sea ice disappears almost entirely by the latter part of the 21st century. (10.3)". Back
Submission from John C D Nissen
SUMMARY
- - Gravity of situation-global warming poses a threat to the survival of human civilisation.
- - State of denial-few scientists are prepared to admit that there is an issue of survival.
- - Role of geoengineering-it has the capability to save the day.
- - Different types of geoengineering-reflecting sunlight and sequestration.
- - Saving the Arctic sea ice-reflecting sunlight using stratospheric aerosols and reflecting sunlight through tropospheric cloud brightening are most promising.
- - Removing CO2 from the atmosphere-biochar has great potential.
- - Geoengineering discipline-understand the climate science.
- - Research and deployment-need for an engineering mentality and leadership.
- - Response from government-nobody alert to the dangers.
- - Conclusion-experimental trials of geoengineering with stratospheric aerosols and cloud brightening are urgently needed.
1. GRAVITY OF THE SITUATION
1. The earth's climate system shows signs of tipping into a new super-hot state (over 6°C warming), with barren lands, sterile seas, mass extinctions, a huge rise in sea level and almost inevitably the collapse of human civilisation. Over the past century, the earth's energy balance has been disturbed by a growing pulse of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, now more than sufficient to tip the system. Even if one could halt all CO2 emissions overnight, the acceleration of global warming towards the super-hot state would continue.
2. On top of this, there are growing positive feedbacks on global warming, acting both directly and indirectly:
- - global warming melts snow and ice, allowing greater absorption of sunlight, with the effect of increasing global warming directly;
- - global warming melts permafrost and frozen bogs, releasing CO2 and methane to increase global warming indirectly; and
- - global warming warms the oceans, reducing their CO2 absorption capability, thus increasing CO2 lifetime in the atmosphere, to increase global warming indirectly.
3. But global warming is not the only problem. If one could halt it overnight, the growing CO2 levels would eventually lead to sterile seas through ocean acidification, already considered a serious problem for shell-forming creatures.
2. STATE OF DENIAL
4. What is not generally appreciated among non-scientists is the seriousness of the situation with global warming. Scientists themselves do not want to believe what they are seeing, and certainly don't want to make others feel as scared as they may feel themselves. They shelter behind a cosy but false consensus, such as set up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which ignored the strong positive feedback in the climate system, especially the feedback resulting from Arctic sea ice retreat, thus giving us absurdly optimistic forecasts.[15] The real possibility of the Arctic Ocean becoming ice free in summer 2013, or sooner, is still not accepted by the Hadley Centre. Thus the sources of advice for the government are not stressing how immediate the danger is, nor how absolutely catastrophic it would be if we do not successfully counter the threat over the next few years. Martin Parry, ex-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said that "survival is not the issue", but that's exactly what it is.
3. ROLE OF GEOENGINEERING
5. We define geoengineering as engineering on a large scale intended to:
- - halt or reverse the rise in levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; and
- - halt or reverse the effects of excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere: global warming, increased climate variability, sea level rise, and ocean acidification.
6. The immediate goal of geoengineering must be to halt the summer retreat of Arctic sea ice, since this cannot be done by emissions reductions alone. The long term goal must be to stabilise the climate and counter ocean acidification. Fortunately at least one geoengineering technique has the capability of success for both goals, and at remarkably low cost.
4. DIFFERENT TYPES OF GEOENGINEERING
7. There are two principle types of geoengineering:
- - solar radiation management (SRM) for cooling; and
- - sequestration methods, including carbon capture and storage (CCS), for removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
8. Solar radiation management involves techniques to reflect solar energy back into space, typically using fine particles or aerosols in the atmosphere, but it can include techniques such as painting roofs and covering deserts with reflective material.
9. Sequestration generally involves absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere by photosynthesis of plants or marine creatures and then burying the carbon. This kind of geoengineering can embrace agricultural practice, bioengineering, genetic engineering, chemical engineering, constructional engineering and marine engineering to achieve particular goals.
Thus geoengineering covers an enormously wide range of disciplines.
5. SAVING THE ARCTIC SEA ICE
10. The halting the summer retreat of Arctic sea ice can be addressed by solar radiation management, but also some other techniques. There is so much at stake (including our own survival) that I believe we should pull out all the stops to restore the sea ice. We should try anything that:
- - can be scaled up to have a significant positive impact;
- - can be scaled up within two or three years;
- - has a low chance of significant negative impact; and
- - can be stopped before any unexpected negative impact becomes significant.
11. So main candidates include:
- (i) creating stratospheric clouds-using precursor injection to generate aerosols;
- (ii creating contrails-using an additive to aircraft fuel; and
- (iii) brightening of marine clouds over the North Sea to cool the surface water entering the Arctic Ocean.
12. These all involve solar radiation management. They are all remarkably cheap to deploy, and one might only need a few million pounds to start significant experimental trials. The eventual cost for the stratospheric cloud technique has been estimated as of the order of $1 billion per annum to counter the full effects of global warming over the next few decades.
13. Other possibilities for saving the sea ice include:
- (iv) covering of sea ice and adjacent land with reflective material;
- (v) covering of ice and adjacent land with fresh snow to increase reflection;
- (vi) prevention or removal of shrub growth in Siberia;
- (vii) creation of thicker sea ice, using ice breakers;
- (viii) prevention of break-up of ice, and its transport into open water;
- (ix) covering of sea and meltwater with floating reflective material;
- (x) removal of meltwater; and
- (xi) cooling of the sea water by increase thermal radiation into space.
14. However, these other possibilities all have practical problems, mainly of being scaled up quickly enough to have a significant impact in saving the Arctic sea ice.
15. Concerning the main three candidates, the creation of stratospheric aerosol clouds (to simulate the global cooling effect over several years of a large volcanic eruption such as that of Mount Pinatubo) has the greatest backing among the geoengineering community, and should be a top priority for immediate experimental trials. A seminal paper on this subject by Ken Caldeira et al[16] is included in the recent Royal Society Phil Trans special issue on geoengineering. The scientific aspects are well considered, and much modelling has been done. However no experimental work has been done (eg on obtaining an ideal droplet size), and this is needed as a matter of extreme urgency.
16. The creation of contrails can be regarded as simply reversing what has been done by removal of certain constituents ("impurities") of aviation fuel in order to reduce atmospheric pollution. For example, sulphur compounds could be reintroduced into the fuel tanks of fighter aircraft, which would produce a contrail diffusing to a haze. This would have a known net cooling effect (significantly greater for daytime flights). This technique could supplement the abovementioned solar radiation management from aerosol clouds in the stratosphere.
17. The brightening of marine clouds is the subject of paper by John Latham et al in the Royal Society special issue. Some early experimentation in the formation of the spray is urgently required. Once this has been mastered, it could be deployed immediately by ordinary ships plying the North Atlantic to start cooling that part of the Gulf Stream entering the Arctic Ocean off the west coast of Norway. This would slow the melting of sea ice in summer, and speed the reformation of sea ice in winter. A significant amount of heat is transported into the Arctic via the Gulf Stream. This transport is implicated in the positive feedback on GW as the mean annual sea ice extent reduces.
6. REMOVING CO2 FROM THE ATMOSPHERE
18. This is just a brief note, to say that Biochar techniques have remarkable potential for application in agriculture all over the world, to the benefit of farmers as well as the environment. Research and deployment should be supported by the government.
7. GEOENGINEERING DISCIPLINE
19. As you will see from section 4, geoengineering covers an enormously wide range of disciplines. It is not clear that geoengineering should be treated as a discipline in its own right. Anyhow it is early days-there are very few people who would call themselves geo-engineers. What is important is that every engineer should understand the climate science that makes geoengineering essential.
8. RESEARCH AND DEPLOYMENT
20. Up till now, nearly all work on the climate has been done by academic scientists, who will want to continue research and modelling. There is a desperate lack of engineers, and an engineering mentality, to take the geoengineering possibilities and turn them into practicalities. And there is an absolute lack of leadership from the government. This has to change, and change dramatically, considering the gravity of the situation we are in (see section 1).
9. RESPONSE FROM THE GOVERNMENT
21. Letters have been sent to ministers by myself, on behalf of stratospheric aerosol engineering, and by Stephen Salter, on behalf of cloud brightening. In every case the letters have been answered by officials from DEFRA who refuse to pass on the letters to politicians, despite the gravity of the situation we have described. These officials have raised many objections to our proposals, which we have been able to counter in every case. Yet still they refuse to accept the situation we describe, and the urgency for experimental trials of the geoengineering techniques we espouse. Not to use geoengineering, when it could rescue the world from the effects of global warming, is surely both stupid and irresponsible.
10. CONCLUSION
22. The most pressing need is for experimental trials of stratospheric aerosols, and cloud brightening techniques. Between them, these geoengineering techniques could save the Arctic sea ice, and thereby prevent a chain reaction of events leading to Armageddon. The same techniques could also be used to halt global warming and avoid the considerable costs of adaptation which have been widely anticipated (and thought inevitable).
September 2008
15 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change Science http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm.pdf "Sea ice is projected to shrink in both the Arctic and Antarctic under all SRES scenarios. In some projections, Arctic late-summer sea ice disappears almost entirely by the latter part of the 21st century. (10.3)". Back
16 Ken Caldeira et al, RoySocPhilTrans, 2008, theme issue "Geoscale engineering", seehttp://journals.royalsociety.org/content/84j11614488142u8 Back
Memorandum 155
Submission from John Gorman, Chartered Engineer
GEOENGINEERING FOR ZERO SEA LEVEL RISE
Summary
1. Sea level will probably rise more quickly and much more than the IPCC estimate of 40 centimetres by 2100.
2. The implications for London are obvious.
3. No reduction in CO2 emissions can avoid or significantly reduce sea level rise this century.
4. The only way to control sea level rise is screening of solar radiation (geoengineering).
5. There is very little geoengineering research because it is not "politically correct" in the climate academic community.
6. There are very practical well-defined research projects in geoengineering that need funding.
7. If shown to be technically feasible there are very practical proposals for implementation.
1. SEA LEVEL RISE
1.1 In most of the world there is not yet much negative effect of global warming. The danger lies in the Arctic and Antarctic where the temperature rise is about 10 times as great as that at the equator. Currently it is 3 to 4° compared with the global average figure of 0.7° (British Antarctic Survey position statement and IPCC.) The result is very significant summer melting of Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula (which protrude outside the Arctic and Antarctic Circle respectively.) This summer melting is far greater than has occurred at any time since the end the last ice age. (British Antarctic Survey)
1.2 Common sense and many anecdotal reports suggest that this will eventually result in the loss of much of these two ice sheets. (Not the main body of Antarctica where there is at present no summer melting.) This would result in a sea level rise of about 16 metres. The question is how quickly this could occur. This is obviously difficult to estimate. The predicted sea level rise in the IPCC report from March 2007 is 40 centimetres by 2100. This was widely publicised as was the fact that this figure had been reduced from that in the previous report.
1.3 Where does this figure of 40 centimetres come from?
In a nutshell it is the actual rise in the decade to 2003 multiplied by 10 for the 10 decades to 2100. (Which would give 31 centimetres +7 so 40 is slightly greater.)
This raises two questions:
- (i) The average rise in the previous three decades was 1.4 centimetres per decade. This rose to 3.1 in the decade to 2003. Is there any reason to believe that subsequent decades in the century will stay at four centimetres per decade? Isn't it far more likely that there will be a rapid escalation as temperatures rise?
- (ii) These are still small rises resulting from an increase in the same mechanisms, such as surface water runoff in summer, which are occurring today. Can we have any confidence that much more dramatic events will not occur such as rapid glacial acceleration following ice shelf breakaway? These are mentioned in the IPCC report but no allowance is made for them in the "executive summary figure" of 40 centimetres.
1.4 Many such possibilities are considered in the report (chapter five IPCC2007) and the difficulty in prediction is frequently mentioned. This difficulty in prediction is exemplified by the loss of Arctic Sea ice in summer. The IPCC median prediction was only a 22% loss by 2100 in the report published in March 2007. This figure was actually equalled in the summer of 2007! Many are now predicting total loss of Arctic summer sea ice as early as 2013-more than century earlier than the IPCC prediction. This loss of reflectivity (albedo) in the whole of the Arctic Ocean is obviously of enormous importance to the survival of the Greenland ice sheet.
1.5 It seems irresponsible of the IPCC to allow such credence to be given to the figure of 40 centimetres. It would have been far better to say "we cannot predict sea level rise". The New Scientist suggested in the issue of 10 March 2007 that there was political pressure to stop any alarmist comment or figure being included. (See page 9-Copy of leader page.)
1.6 The truth is that, with the summer melting that is occurring in Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula, and the loss of the Arctic Sea ice we haven't a clue how much or how quickly sea level will rise. If it is a slow and progressive rise, but quicker than we plan or build for, then the problems will always arise with a combination of high tide and exceptional storm as demonstrated in Burma recently. The same combination resulted in the flooding of New Orleans, of the English east coast in 1953 and very nearly of Rotterdam and London only last summer. The flood defences in Rotterdam would have been overwhelmed by another six inches of storm surge.
1.7 When you look at the man-millennia that went into the evaluation of sea level rise worldwide from 1960 to 2003 it seems to be a bad case of "not seeing the wood for the trees" to allow the results to be extrapolated to 2100.
2. LONDON
2.1 It seems unnecessary to point out how susceptible London is to any sea level rise, which is not predicted or which occurs more quickly than new sea defences can be erected.
2.2 Sea level rise could be almost instantaneous. The Nobel laureate economist Thomas Schelling, in his lecture to the World Bank, mentions one particular ice shelf in Western Antarctica but there are many such examples. Because this ice shelf is resting on the bottom of the ocean it will result in sea level rise if it breaks away as is happening to so many bits of ice shelf in both Antarctica and the Arctic.
2.3 In the lecture, Thomas Schelling also points out the danger in looking at the probability of such events. He suggests that the catastrophic nature means that we should prevent them if we possibly can and not apply economic cost benefit analysis.
3. EMISSIONS REDUCTION
3.1 It is important to realise that no reduction in CO2 emissions can stop sea level rise. If all CO2 emissions were stopped today we would still have a global warming problem in 100 and even 500 years (Caldera et al Recent paper) and Greenland would almost certainly be green. In fact most economists and those in business and politics see it as obvious that emissions will continue to rise for most of this century. The expected worldwide economic development (plus 500% by 2050-Reith lecture 2007) just can't be stopped.
3.2 Even if a large emissions reduction could be achieved, the CO2 already in the atmosphere will last more than a century and its net heating effect will persist. Temperatures will therefore continue to rise. This could only be avoided if the CO2 concentration could be reduced now to pre-industrial levels, which is obviously impossible.
3.3 In addition large-scale removal of CO2 from the atmosphere cannot help quickly because the technology simply doesn't exist yet.
3.4 If emissions continue to rise, as seems inevitable, the escalating CO2 concentration will have to be controlled by CO2 removal and storage (CRS). This massive volume technology will have to be developed but this is not the subject of this paper.
4. GEOENGINEERING
4.1 The only tools that we have available to limit sea level rise come into the category of geoengineering. There are several ideas that could be implemented quickly. Among these is my suggestion of a stratospheric sunscreen created by an aircraft fuel additive. (I now find that this was first suggested by a Russian called Budyeko in 1980) but there are several others including the well researched proposal for Ocean cloud enhancement from Stephen Salter, Professor of Engineering at Edinburgh.
4.2 Almost all of these geoengineering ideas aim at reflecting a proportion of the sunlight hitting the earth. Several ideas, including my own, are specifically aimed at the Arctic in order to stop sea level rise. Most rely on the "experiments" already done by nature in the form of volcanic eruptions. There have been 13 large volcanic eruptions in the last 250 years, which have given us invaluable information on the global cooling that can be achieved.
4.3 None of these ideas are yet sufficiently well researched for immediate implementation but some of the ideas, including my own, could be implemented within one or two years. There are scientific voices claiming catastrophic consequences of such implementation but it is difficult to envisage consequences as catastrophic as allowing significant and unpredictable sea level rise.
4.4 If the possibility of net loss from Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets can be eliminated by local geoengineering, then it should be possible to keep the total rise in sea level to zero.
4.5 About half of the rise in the last decade (about 3 centimetres total) is attributable to ocean expansion on warming and the ocean cloud enhancement proposal from Professor Salter could stop further warming of the sea water if researched, developed and implemented.
5. POLITICS
5.1 Why aren't we hearing these suggestions from the climate experts who should be putting them forward?
5.2 Any suggestion of geoengineering is very political among climate academics. Roger Pielke, an academic specialising in science policy summed up the situation very well saying:
- "some scientists think that scientists should not discuss the prospects for geoengineering because it will distract from other approaches to dealing with greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, decisions about what research to conduct and what is appropriate to discuss is shaped by the political preferences of scientists. This won't be news to scholars of science in society, but it should be troubling because it is unfortunately characteristic of the climate science community (who)-try to tilt the political playing field by altering what they allow their colleagues to work on or discuss in public. The climate debate has too much of this behavior already."
5.3 Anyone who looks at the debate quickly comes to the same conclusion. Oliver Morton, news editor of Nature, investigated geoengineering last year and wrote "-the climate community views geoengineering with deep suspicion or outright hostility". He also saw that "climate scientists have shown new willingness to study (geoengineering) although many will do so-to show that all such paths are dead-end streets."
5.4 Even the Nobel laureate (for his work on CFCs and the ozone layer) Paul Crutzen couldn't get his geoengineering paper published without the intervention of Ralph Cicerone, the President of the American Academy of Sciences who wrote "many in the climate academic community have opposed the publication of Crutzen's work-for reasons that are not-scientific."
5.5 Against this background there will need to be a strong political will to get proper, fully funded, research and development for several geoengineering schemes. Then there will need to be international political agreement on implementation.
6. GEOENGINEERING RESEARCH PROJECTS
6.1 There is a tendency, particularly among climate academics, to speak of geoengineering as a last resort to be used "if disaster strikes". I have to describe this as a completely unrealistic attitude to the problem that is developing in Greenland and western Antarctica. The problem is obvious and won't go away. We should therefore set about correcting it now.
6.2 There are geoengineering schemes, like mirrors in space, which might be interesting in the 22nd century, but at this moment stratospheric aerosols must be top of the list. From the 13 large volcanic eruptions since 1750, particularly from Mount Pinatubo in 1991, we already have masses of experimental data.
6.3 Most of the research and evaluation papers concentrate on the quantities and the atmospheric and climatic effects of stratospheric aerosols. There are various suggestions for distribution but most of these are not detailed. If it could be shown that aircraft fuel additives could distribute aerosols without the need to develop any new equipment this would have enormous advantages in allowing experimental distribution to be done inexpensively and very soon.
6.4 An Actual Research Project
6.4.1 I have recently proposed the following research project to Qinetiq (the former Royal Aircraft Establishment) but there is at present no available funding.
6.4.2 Experiments using only static engine test rigs would go a long way to proving the practicality of the system at limited cost. The two chemicals suggested are di-methyl sulphide to produce sulphur dioxide and tetra ethyl silicate to produce silica. (I have already done some preliminary experiments.)
6.4.3 Most of the research on stratospheric aerosols concentrates on sulphur dioxide which produces an aerosol of sulphuric acid droplets. This is because it is sulphur dioxide that is produced from a volcanic eruption and gives us most of the data that we have on the cooling effects. There are various disadvantages to sulphur dioxide in its chemical activity and because of these it is worth investigating the silicon dioxide (silica) alternative. It might have far less chemical effect on the ozone. The particles might be crystalline platelets which would float for much longer in the atmosphere. The particles might be much more reflective requiring far less material to be injected. It might be possible to choose particle size and therefore to select the wavelength of light which is preferentially reflected. (An extra ultraviolet sunscreen!)
6.4.4 If there is reason to believe that the turbine will be affected by the use of tetra ethyl silicate even in small concentrations then it would be nice to investigate the possibilities of injecting the fuel/additive mixture into an afterburner. It would be a pity to give up on the possibilities of silica particles and it is likely that initial atmospheric experiments would be done with military jets. Fighters using afterburners are well-known for using up the maximum amount of fuel in the minimum time and getting to the highest attitude.
6.5 Other Deserving Projects
6.5.1 With a developing emergency of the global warming kind it is sensible to develop any feasible project in parallel so that sensible choices can be made at a later stage. One obvious candidate is the well researched proposal by Professor Salter of Edinburgh University to spray sea water into the lower clouds to enhance the reflectivity of ocean clouds and cool the oceans.
6.5.2 This project would be least feasible in the freezing conditions of the Arctic and is therefore particularly compatible with the proposed use of stratospheric aerosols in the Arctic and Antarctic.
7. IMPLEMENTATION
7.1 It does seem sensible to have an application in mind in order to justify the preliminary experiments.
7.2 Even among those proposing stratospheric aerosols there is scepticism as to whether aircraft fuel additives could be a distribution system. The doubts expressed include:
- (i) aeroplanes don't fly high enough in the stratosphere;
- (ii) aerosols will fall out of the atmosphere too quickly;
- (iii) sulphur dioxide, which becomes sulphuric acid, will damage the ozone layer;
- (v) acid rain;
- (v) ozone layer damage will be particularly high in winter (Recent Simone Tilmes paper);
- (vi) aerosols will tend to cause high latitude warming in winter because of reflection of outgoing radiation during the longer nights relative to daytime; and
- (vii) damage to the jet engine.
7.3 The most likely first application of a stratospheric aerosol sunscreen is that proposed by Gregory Benfold, a planetary atmospheric scientist at the University of California. The title was "Saving the Arctic".
7.4 Combined with the aircraft distribution system, the proposal would be to spread the aerosol by aircraft flying between 40 and 60,000 feet from the time of first Arctic daylight (April approximately) until late July approximately.
7.5 I believe that this would "slip" neatly between the various disadvantages mentioned in the following way:
7.5.1 Doubts 1 and 2. Ideally for very long stratospheric life, aerosols need to be injected at about 80,000 feet. If they are only injected at 50,000 ft. they will fall out of the atmosphere in about three months. (Ken Caldera's lecture available on U tube). In this case that is exactly what we want so that they would fall out by the end of the Arctic summer and would not be present during the winter-solving 6. The aerosols will probably also be more effective, weight for weight, in the Arctic since there is no night during the summer when the night-time blanketing effect has to be subtracted from the daytime screening.
7.5.2 Most of the arguments that aerosols will damage the ozone layer assume that the aerosols are injected high in the stratosphere for long life. In this case most of the injection would not reach the ozone layer. In addition the aerosols would no longer be present in winter when the effect is greatest. (The damage to the ozone layer is not directly caused by the aerosols but by the aerosol droplets or particles forming nuclei on which the remaining CFCs have their chemical effect on the ozone. The level of CFCs in the atmosphere is dropping steadily now that controls are in place.)
7.5.3 The problem of acid rain, 4 above, has always been a bit of a red herring because the quantity of sulphur dioxide needed is only of the order of one per cent of that produced by industrial processes worldwide. It could however be eliminated if the silica particle version was used.
7.6 It seems very likely that implementation of this type would succeed in "saving the Arctic". In particular the target would be to eliminate significant melting of the Greenland ice sheet or sudden loss of parts of it. The same principle could then be applied to Antarctica.
7.7 The target should be zero sea level rise. If this could be achieved the saving in costs of construction, relocating populations and flood disasters would be absolutely enormous.
References have not been included in this paper. Most can be found in my poster/paper for the American Geophysical Union 2007 at http://www.naturaljointmobility.info/agu.htm
September 2008
Memorandum 144
INDOOR DEMONSTRATION OF THE TWOMEY EFFECT
Submission from Stephen Salter, Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design, Institute for Energy Systems, University of Edinburgh
1. SUMMARY
- - At a recent energy conference Simon Vasey, trading manager of the major electricity provider Eon, said that while profits of billions of Euros had been made from the first round of the European carbon trading scheme not one kilogram of carbon had been abated.
- - The monthly addition of points to the Keeling curve shows no reduction in the upward acceleration.
- - Discussions of carbon emissions have used per nation rather than per capita data. A judicious choice of baseline date and the removal of shipping, aviation and the proxy carbon associated with imported goods has allowed at least one country to claim carbon reductions when in fact there has been an increase.
- - The track record of the IPCC with regard to the timing of predicted events has been poor with several potential positive feed backs, such as the loss of Arctic ice, happening more rapidly than predicted in the earlier reports. People working for the IPCC report privately that there is intense pressure to modify wording from home governments.
- - Ice core records show that have been many abrupt rises in world temperatures of a size and rate that would be catastrophic to a high world population. People who know a great deal about the problem and who have been studying it from the time when others thought it unimportant, now say that a sudden rise, perhaps at the next el Niño event, is likely and that, because the full effects of emissions lag their release, we may already be too late.
- - Even if there are strong reasons for not deploying geo-engineering systems there is no case for not supporting vigorous research into every possible technique and for taking all feasible ones to the stage at which they could be rapidly deployed. This view is not yet shared by DEFRA and UK funding bodies.
- - After 35 years work trying to develop renewable energy systems I now believe that it may not be possible to deploy enough of them quickly enough to prevent very serious consequences of climate change. For the last four years I have been working full time on the engineering design of one of the several possible techniques. The idea, due to John Latham, former Professor of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Manchester and now at the Centre for Atmospheric Research at Boulder Colorado, is to increase the reflection of solar energy from marine stratocumulus clouds by exploiting the well-accepted Twomey effect. Engineering drawings and design equations for a practical system are well advanced and can be made available to your Committee.
- - Like everyone working in geo-engineering I do so with reluctance in the hope that it will not be needed but fearful that it may be needed with the greatest urgency.
2. THE TWOMEY EFFECT
1. Twomey says that, for the same liquid water content, a large number of small drops will make a cloud reflect more than a small number of large drops. We would expect something like this from calculations of reflecting areas. We can see it with jars of glass balls of different sizes. We talk of dark storm clouds gathering when the drops become large enough to fall.
2. Even if the relative humidity goes above 100% a cloud drop cannot form without some form of condensation nucleus on which to grow. Over land there are plenty of suitable nuclei, 1,000 to 5,000 per cubic centimetre of air. But in clean mid ocean air the number is lower, often below 100 and some times as low as 10. In 1990 Latham proposed that the number of condensation nuclei could be increased by spraying sub-micron drops of sea water into the turbulent marine boundary layer. Initially the drops would evaporate quite quickly to leave a salty residue. Turbulence would mix these residues evenly through the marine boundary layer. Those that reached the clouds would provide ideal condensation nuclei and would grow to increase the reflecting area and so the cloud albedo.
3. The equations in Twomey's classic 1977 paper can be used to produce the graph below.
4. This follows the presentation used by Schwarz and Slingo (1996) and shows cloud top reflectivity for a typical liquid water content of 0.3 gm per cubic metre of air for a range of cloud depths as a function of drop concentration. The vertical bars show the range of drop concentrations suggested by Bennartz (2007) based on satellite observations.
5. If we know the initial cloud conditions, most especially the concentration of condensation nuclei, we can calculate how much spray will produce how much cooling. The method needs incoming sunshine, clean air, low cloud and the absence of high level cloud. The position of the best places varies with the seasons so sources should be mobile. Because the ratio of solar energy reflected to the surface-tension energy needed to generate drops is so large, it turns out that the spray quantities are quite practical. In the right conditions a spray source with a power rating of 150 kW can increase solar reflection by 2.3 TW, a ratio of 15 million. This is the sort of energy gain needed if humans are to attempt to influence climate.
3. HARDWARE
1. The need to operate for long periods in mid-ocean and to migrate with the seasons points to a fleet of remotely operated wind-driven spray-vessels. These can obtain the electrical energy needed to make spray by dragging turbines like oversize propellers through the water. Thanks to satellite communications and navigation remote operation is now much easier.
2. Rather than solve the robotic problems of handling ropes and textile sails we propose to use Flettner rotors. Flettner rotors offer much higher lift coefficients and lift drag ratios than sails or aircraft wings but their main attraction is that a computer can control the rotation speed of a cylinder far more easily that it can tie a reef knot. Anton Flettner built a ship, the Baden-Baden, which crossed the Atlantic in 1926. She won a race against a sister ship with a conventional rig and could sail 20 degrees closer to the wind. The weight of rotors was one quarter of the weight of the rig that they replaced. Flettner won orders for six ships and built one, only to have the orders cancelled because of the 1929 depression. Modern bearings with spherical freedom and materials like Kevlar and carbon-fibre would make rotors even more attractive. Enercon, the major German wind turbine maker launched a 10,000 tonne rotor assisted ship on 2 August 2008. The television company Discovery Channel has funded successful trials of a 34 foot yacht conversion. They also carried out an experiment at sea which confirmed expectations of the very high energy gain offered by the Twomey effect.
3. Design calculations and general arrangement drawing of the first spray vessel are well advanced. It has a waterline length of 45 metres and a displacement of 300 tonnes. Early vessels have space for a crew as well as the option to transfer control to an auto pilot and from land. Future ones may be a little smaller. All sensitive equipment is in hermetically sealed cylindrical canisters which can be individually and thoroughly tested on land and quickly exchanged. With three spray systems it will be possible to spray 30 kg a second as 0.8 micron drops. A fleet of 50 vessels in well-chosen places could cancel the thermal effects of the present annual increase of greenhouse gases. Work packages and costings for a five-year development programme which would provide a reliable tested design for the ocean going hardware are available.
4. The change of cloud reflectivity necessary to stabilize global temperature despite a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 is about 1.1% globally or 6% if evenly spread in cloudy areas. The contrast-detection threshold for fuzzy irregular patterns is much higher, about 20%. It will be necessary to develop a method to convince non-technical decision makers that anything has changed. The spray generation modules have been designed so that one of them can be fastened to the hull of a conventional ship and can produce spray at 10 kg a second, drawing electrical power from the ship system. The ship would sail to a selected mid-ocean site and then drift to a sea anchor so as to minimize its own exhaust emissions.
5. The MODIS AQUA satellite system crosses most of the world at the same local time each day. We would download photographs of the shortwave radiation signals (channels 1, 3 and 4). These would be translated to align the ship positions and then rotated to bring the mean wind directions to be coincident. Multiple images of the cloud system would be added over a period of a few weeks. The random clouds should average to a medium grey with contrast of the wake improving with the square root of the number of photographs. Photographic superposition will allow the measurement of the result of a very small spray release.
4. POTENTIAL SIDE EFFECTS
1. Our understanding of the world's climate system is far from complete because it is so difficult to carry out controlled experiments over the size range from condensation nuclei to continental weather systems. All geo-engineers are anxious about unintended consequences. Early models show that very large spray injections can have effects in either direction at long distances from the injection site in the same way that el Nino events can influence climate far from Chile and Peru. We also know that release from different sites can have quite different results. We therefore must regard the world climate system as having a large number of possible controls set by when and where we choose to release spray. So far, we have no idea about which control does what. However it should be possible to learn by a series of very small experiments using release patterns modulated on and off at the right periods in a known sequence followed by the measurement of the long-term correlation of climate parameters with the known input. This pseudo random binary sequence technique works well with analysis of communication networks without being noticed by users.
2. Modern computers do allow increasingly sophisticated analysis and prediction. Recently there has been a great deal of progress on computer simulation of all the effects of albedo control. The leading team is at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research at Boulder Colorado and is led by Philip Rasch using the most advanced fully-coupled air/ocean model. This produces results for nearly 60 atmospheric parameters presented as maps, zonal graphs and mean values. Evenly spread releases are less damaging than large point injections.
3. The amount of salt that cloud albedo control will inject into the atmosphere is orders of magnitude below the amount from breaking waves, some of which falls on land. The difference is that albedo control uses a carefully chosen, narrow spread of drop diameters.
4. The immediate effect of cloud albedo control will be a reduction of solar energy reaching the sea. The ocean temperatures are the primary driver of world climate but oceans are a very large thermal store so the effect will be slow. Currents and winds are efficient ways of distributing energy and sharing it with the land so the eventual effects will be well distributed. A short term engineering approach to choosing a cooling strategy would be to look at historic data on sea temperatures and attempt to replicate a pattern thought to be good with regard to sea levels, harvests, hurricane frequency, floods and droughts. Rather than thinking of the side-effects of we should really be studying the side effects of NOT doing albedo control and letting sea temperatures rise. We would then decide which of the outcomes was the least damaging.
5. A first effect of warmer seas is greater evaporation. Even though it is left out of many diagrams showing the effects of greenhouse gases, water vapour contributes at least an order of magnitude more global warming than carbon dioxide.
6. The second effect of warmer water flowing north is the loss of summer Arctic ice.
7. A third effect is that surface water temperatures above 26.5 C increase the probability and severity of tropical cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons.
8. Warmer surface water increases the density difference between it and the nutrient-rich cold water below it. If nutrients cannot flow to where there is light there will be no phytoplankton to act as the start of the marine food chain or as the source of dimethyl sulphide and a sink for carbon dioxide. At present dimethyl sulphide accounts for about 90% of the cloud condensation nuclei, (Charlson 1987) and sea warming will reduce the area producing it.
9. The sea has been soaking up much of the anthropogenic CO2. Rising temperature will release it.
10. Very large amounts of methane are stored in permafrost and even larger amounts as clathrates in the seabed at depths of a few hundred metres. The release of either could be regarded as an extreme side-effect of warmer seas and has been linked to the Permian extinction.
11. So far the only suggested negative effect of increasing cloud condensation nuclei is the possibility of reduced rainfall, something that people in Britain and Bihar would greatly welcome. The production of rain is a very complex process. A gross engineering over-simplification is that rain needs quite large drops to fall through deep clouds collecting smaller drops in their path so that they get big enough not to evaporate in the drier air below the cloud before they reach the ground. It is known that too many small drops due to nucleation from smoke from bush fires can reduce rain.
12. Clearly we must be cautious about doing albedo control up-wind of a drought-stricken region. However the driest regions are dry because subsiding air prevents winds blowing in from the sea. Perhaps a larger temperature difference between land and sea could produce a stronger monsoon effect to oppose part of the subsiding flow.
13. The effects of the nuclei that we produce will fade quickly. The marine stratocumulus clouds we will be treating are usually not deep enough to produce rain. But we could argue that if they were, the immediate effect would be to stop the rain over the sea and coastal regions. This would leave more water vapour in the air to give rain further inland where its value will be greater.
14. If we do not yet know enough about the side-effects of albedo control, at least we know more than about those of uncontrolled temperature rise. But the strongest defence is that we can start with small steps, move away from places where problems occur and stop in a week if some natural event, such as a volcanic eruption, should provide unwanted cooling.
5. POLITICS
1. Control of the UK climate is in the hands of DEFRA. Official funding goes to many laboratories who tend repeat the conclusions from the previous funding that the climate problem is even more serious than previously thought and argue that more funding is necessary to find out how much more serious. There is a reluctance to fund any research into technology which is "not yet soundly proven". The present DEFRA policy is that carbon reductions are the best solution to the climate problem and also that they should be the only solution on the grounds that the possibility of alternatives might reduce pressure to reduce emissions. This is strikingly close to the view of senior officers in the RFC in world war I that issuing parachutes to pilots "might impair their fighting spirit". They were not even allowed to buy their own. The geo-engineering community agrees with the rank order of desirability of emission reduction to geo-engineering but asks "what progress in emissions reduction?"
2. People from the vigorous carbon trading market are emphatic that there could be, even should be, no parallel thermal trading equivalent and so it seems that, at present, there is none of the commercial return needed to attract research funding. Many geo-engineers agree that decisions about deployment should not be based on commercial considerations.
References
Bennartz R 2007. Global assessment of marine boundary layer cloud droplet number concentration from satellite. Journal of Geophysical Research, 112, 12, D02201, doi:10.1029/2006JD007547, Fromhttp://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006JD007547.shtml
Bower K, Choularton T, Latham J, Sahraei J and Salter S 2006. Computational assessment of a proposed technique for global warming mitigation via albedo-enhancement of marine stratocumulus clouds. Atmospheric Research 82 pp 328-336.
Charlson RJ, Lovelock JE, Andreae MO and Warren, SG April 1987. Oceanic phytoplankton, atmospheric sulphur and climate.Nature 326 pp 655-661.
Latham J 1990. Control of global warming. Nature 347 pp 339-340.
Latham J 2002. Amelioration of global warming by controlled enhancement of the albedo and longevity of low-level maritime clouds. Atmos Sci Letters. 2002 doi:10.1006/Asle.2002.0048.
Latham J, Rasch P, Chen C-C, Kettles L, Gadian A, Gettleman A, Morrison H, and Bower K, 2008 Global temperature stabilization via controlled albedo enhancement of low-level maritime clouds. Phil. Trans Roy Soc A Special issue October 2008.
Salter SH, Latham J, Sortino G, Seagoing hardware for the cloud albedo control of reversing global warming. Phil Trans Roy Soc A Special issue October 2008.
Schwartz SE and Slingo A 1996. Enhanced shortwave radiative forcing due to anthropogenic aerosols In Clouds Chemistry and Climate (Crutzen and Ramanathan eds.) pp 191-236 Springer Heidelberg.
Websites
About parachutes: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWparachutes.htm
Collected papers http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs
The jar on the left is contains 4 mm clear glass balls and has an albedo of about 0.6. The one on the right has glass balls one hundredth of the size and an albedo over 0.9.
September 2008
