It is proposing to create the first United Nations expert group to “examine risks and opportunities” of solar radiation management (SRM), a suite of largely untested technologies aimed at dimming the sun.

The panel would be made up of experts appointed by member states of the UN’s environment programme (Unep) and representatives of international scientific bodies, according to a draft resolution submitted by Switzerland and seen by Climate Home.

Governments will negotiate and vote on the proposal at Unep’s meeting due to start at the end of February in Nairobi, Kenya. It has been formally endorsed by Senegal, Georgia, Monaco and Guinea.

A Swiss government spokesperson told Climate Home that SRM is “a new topic on the political agenda” and Switzerland is “committed to ensuring that states are informed about these technologies, in particular about possible risks and cross-border effects”.

Split scientific opinions

Solar geoengineering is a deeply contested topic and scientists are divided over whether it should be explored at all as a potential solution.

Ines Camilloni, a climatology professor at the University of Buenos Aires, welcomed Switzerland’s proposal, saying the UN “is in a good position to facilitate equitable, transparent, and inclusive discussions”.

“There is an urgent need to continue researching the benefits and risks of SRM to guide decisions around research activities and deployment”, she told Climate Home.

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But Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, head of climate science at Climate Analytics, says he is concerned about that prospect.

“The risk of such an initiative is that it elevates SRM as a real solution and contributes to the normalisation of something that is still very premature and hypothetical from a scientific perspective”, he added. “You need to be careful about unintended consequences and consider the risks of opening a Pandora’s box”.

An open letter signed by more than 400 scientists in 2022 called for an international “non-use agreement” on solar geoengineering. It also said United Nations bodies, including Unep, “are all incapable of guaranteeing equitable and effective multilateral control over the deployment of solar geoengineering technologies at planetary scale”.

Poorly understood risks

Long touted as a futuristic climate hack, solar geoengineering has risen in prominence in recent years as the prospect  of curbing emissions enough to limit global warming to 1.5C has faded.

The technologies aim to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the planet’s surface. This could be achieved by pumping aerosols into the high atmosphere or by whitening clouds.

Its supporters say it could be a relatively cheap and fast way to counter extreme heat. But it would only temporarily reduce the impact of rising emissions, without tackling the root causes.

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The regional effects of manipulating the weather are hard to predict and large uncertainties over wider climate, social and economic implications remain.

Solar geoengineering could “introduce a widespread range of new risks to people and ecosystems, which are not well-understood”, the IPCC’s scientists said in their latest assessment of climate science.

Its critics argue that putting the SRM option on the table undermines existing climate policies and relieves pressure on polluters to reduce emissions as quickly as possible. There are also questions about how long this technology would be needed and what happens after it is stopped.

Space for discussion

In its proposal to the Unep assembly, Switzerland acknowledges the “potential global risks and adverse impacts”.

The 25-people-strong group would first be tasked with writing a comprehensive scientific report on solar geoengineering.

But the main goal would be to establish “a space for an informed discussion” about research on the potential use of SRM, giving the possibility for future decisions on how that should be governed, according to an accompanying technical note seen by Climate Home.

It is not the first time Switzerland brings a resolution on solar geoengineering to the Unep summit. In 2019, its attempt to get countries to agree to the development of a governance framework failed as a result of opposition from Donald Trump’s USA and Saudi Arabia – who didn’t want restrictions on geoengineering.

Calls for more research

Last year, Unep produced an “independent expert review” of the subject, concluding that “far more research” is needed “before any consideration for potential deployment” of SRM.

A Unep spokesperson said the exact characteristics of the group proposed by Switzerland would need to be negotiated at the upcoming summit. But, if approved, it would differ from any previous panel “because it would have a clear mandate from member states” with experts directly appointed by them.

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Ines Camilloni was one of the authors of last year’s UNEP report. She says “managing the risks of climate change requires a portfolio of policy responses”, of which mitigation and adaptation would be the most important and urgent.

But she added that “SRM has been proposed as a complementary approach” and more research is needed to weigh its benefits and risks against the impact of adverse climate scenarios.

A panel of leaders called the Overshoot Commission also recommended last year that governments expand research into solar geoengineering while placing a moratorium on large-scale experiments outdoors. 

A rogue SRM experiment conducted by a US startup in Mexico led the Mexican government to announce a ban on solar geoengineering in January 2023.

‘Precautionary approach’

Mary Church, a campaigner at the CEnter for International Environmental Law, says “it’s hard to see what could be gained from establishing an expert group under Unep”.

“There’s a real risk that such a group could undermine the existing regulatory framework and inadvertently provide legitimacy for solar geoengineering technology development and experimentation”.

Countries should instead “take a precautionary approach, commit to non-use, and prioritise a fast, fair and funded phase out of fossil fuels”, she added.

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The Overshoot Commission was set up last year to examine ways of reducing risks if and when global heating surpasses 1.5C.

In a report published on Thursday, it called for an acceleration in emission reductions, more resources to adapt to the impact of climate change and scaling up technologies to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The Commission also called for international discussions and scientific research on solar radiation modification (SRM). The technology aims to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the planet’s surface. This could be achieved by pumping aerosols into the high atmosphere or by whitening clouds.

The Overshoot Commission is talking about solar geoengineering. Not everyone thinks it should

Its proponents say it could be a relatively cheap and fast way to counter extreme heat. But it would only temporarily mask the impact of rising emissions, not tackle the root cause. The regional effects of manipulating the weather are hard to predict and risk worsening climate impacts in some places.

The report acknowledged the technology’s potential drawbacks, but refused to take the option off the table. “It would be imprudent not to investigate or discuss SRM because present evidence suggests the possibility it could complement other approaches,” the Commission wrote.

During a press conference, its president Pascal Lamy said appeals not to discuss solar geoengineering “feel fickle” and “not the way to go”.

A fractured debate

Scientists Climate Home News were divided on the wisdom of this approach.

“The report creates a sort of parity between acknowledging the need for emission reductions and elevating technologically uncertain or even dangerous management options,” said Ben Sanderson, a climate scientist at CICERO. “By expanding research, the idea of SRM gets increasingly normalised, while distracting from real climate mitigation”.

James Haywood, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Exeter, argued the Commission struck a reasonable balance between risks and opportunities. “Current conventional mitigation efforts are widely acknowledged to be insufficient to maintain global mean climate temperatures below 1.5C,” he said. “It therefore makes a great deal of sense to research whether SRM proposals could be used to reduce the worst impacts of climate change.”

‘No stone unturned’

Hosted by the Paris Peace Forum, the commission comprises 13 global leaders, including former presidents and ministers.

Its president Pascal Lamy said “we have to leave no stone unturned”, as the world is on track to exceed the 1.5C goal set by the Paris Agreement. Temperature rises of up to 2.6C can be expected based on current climate plans, according to the UN’s global stocktake report released last week.

As efforts to reduce emissions fall short, geoengineering options become increasingly tempting. Most are highly speculative and there are no global rules on what countries or companies can do.

A rogue SRM experiment conducted by a US startup in Mexico’s northern state of Baja California led the government to announce a ban on solar geoengineering.

Moratorium calls

The Commission said countries should introduce a moratorium on “the deployment or large-scale experiments” of SRM. The ban should apply to any activity with “risk of significant transboundary harm” and should stay in place until the scientific community gains a better understanding of the technology.

Chukwumerije Okereke, professor of Global Climate Governance and Public Policy at Bristol University, argues the moratorium is poorly defined and calls for a total pause on experiments. “What does large-scale mean? This could lead to rogue researchers making a test at a time when we don’t even know the full effects,” he added. “This is not a position that is ethical, sensible and recognises the dangers.”

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Many scientists are concerned SRM could create damage the ozone layer or inequally distribute extreme weather events like droughts or flooding across the world.

There are also questions about how long this technology would be needed and what happens after it is stopped. Ben Sanderson says early modelling indicates that cessation could fast-track severe disruption, with the potential to experience decades’ worth of changes in a year. “We would live in a high-risk world,” he added.

Moral hazard

Central to the geoengineering debate is the so-called moral hazard argument: the idea that researching technologies to remove CO2 or mask its effects undermines support for existing climate policies.

The Commission says the priority is to accelerate emission cuts by replacing fossil fuels and transitioning to clean energy. It also says technologies like SRM and carbon removal should only be seen as additional measures.

Laurence Tubiana, one of the commission’s members, tweeted that “we cannot be fooled by the false promises of simple techno-fix solutions”.

The Climate Overshoot Commission, an independent high-level political group, launched its report on potential approaches to address overshoot
Our main takeaway: climate change impacts the most vulnerable & equitably accelerating deep emissions cuts remains the utmost priority 1/5

— Laurence Tubiana (@LaurenceTubiana) September 14, 2023

But Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, a scientist at Climate Analytics, believes simply putting the option on the table relieves pressure from the obligation to reduce emissions. “Giving it a prominent space on the agenda has a negative effect,” he said.

Carbon removal push

Alongside SRM, the Commission pushed for a faster development of carbon dioxide removal (CDR). The term comprises a vast number of methods to remove CO2 from the atmosphere: from natural activities like tree planting to technological ones such as direct air capture.

The report says governments should promote a rapid expansion of “higher quality CDR at scale” by incentivising innovation, including through subsidies.

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The use of CDR is the subject of much debate in the climate policy world. Activities like tree planting need vast swathes of land and carry the risk of releasing pollutants back into the atmosphere in case of a forest fire.

Direct air capture is energy hungry and expensive at the moment.

The International Energy Agency estimates that removing a ton of carbon dioxide costs between $135 and $135 with DAC today – although this could drop to below $100 by 2030.

According to the IPCC scientists, this is far more expensive than reducing emissions with renewable energy or energy efficiency.

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Their recommendations could have broad influence on how the world considers the technology. For some insiders, it’s been uncomfortable. For critics, it’s seriously problematic. The Overshoot Commission was set up last year to discuss accelerating emissions cuts, helping the world adapt to climate change, carbon dioxide removal and solar geoengineering.

The idea of blocking the sun’s warming effect by pumping aerosols into the high atmosphere – a technology known as solar radiation management (SRM) – was once of the realm of science fiction.

But as global efforts to reduce emissions fall short, solar geoengineering is attracting growing attention as a potential cheap and fast solution to relieve the world from extreme heat. However, the technology carries major uncertainties and risks, which are not well understood.

A moral hazard

SRM won’t protect the planet from rising greenhouse gases but only temporarily offset some of the warming caused by climate change – acting as a band aid rather than a cure.

Opponents argue it is a distraction from addressing the root causes of climate change and offers polluters an avenue to avoid taking climate action.

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Frank Biermann is a professor of Global Sustainability Governance at Utrecht University, who opposes the technology and gave the commission a 10-minute online presentation.

He fears the group, which was initiated by geoengineering researchers, was set up “to put SRM as an option on the table” and “build its global legitimacy”.

Several young people selected to engage with the commission told Climate Home about feeling used to give legitimacy to the technology.

Some commission members are uneasy about the discussions too. Documents obtained by Climate Home News show four commissioners raised concerns about the lack of time to discuss sensitive issues before the group publishes its recommendations in September.

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One concerned commissioner is Frances Beinecke, former president of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). She told Climate Home she has been “extremely worried…from the get go” about the focus on SRM.

“There are a number of us that are very aware of these concerns and are focusing on making this a useful endeavour,” she said, hoping the report will prompt the world to “double down on mitigation – and fast”.

No stone unturned

Hosted by the Paris Peace Forum, the commission comprises 13 global leaders, including former presidents and ministers, and is chaired by its president Pascal Lamy.

With the world on track to breach 1.5C, at least temporarily, Lamy told Climate Home “we have to leave no stone unturned”.

Lamy said that the commission recognises that “SRM remains – and rightly so in my view – a very controversial option".

"But", he said, "it’s not because it is controversial that it should not be looked at seriously".

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Those expecting the report to support the technology “will be strongly deceived,” he added. But “if the critic[ism] is: ‘this option should never be considered’, we disagree with that.”

Ruling out solar geoengineering isn’t an option for the world’s most vulnerable nations.

Commission member Anote Tong is a former president of the sinking islands of Kiribati. He said solar geoengineering is "another attempt by humanity to control nature".

But, he added, “we are facing a catastrophe and we’re trying to survive. What other options do we have?”

Wrong priority

Margot Wallström, Sweden’s former foreign minister, disagrees. Discussing SRM is “the wrong priority,” she said. “We know what we have to do [to address climate change] so let’s focus on that”.

Originally a member of the commission, Wallström left the group after being unable to attend the first meeting, citing a lack of time to participate.

In private, Wallström felt uneasy about the focus on SRM in briefing documents and felt the discussions were edging towards “how do we take this on,” she told Climate Home.

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After disengaging and learning more about the technology, Wallström said she felt leaving the group had been “the right thing”. “I’m totally against it. I think it’s crazy,” she said of solar geoengineering.

Others are concerned too. Youba Sokona, vice chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was one of 11 members of a steering committee convened to shape what an overshoot commission would look like.

Sokona declined to join the group arguing it was “very premature” to discuss SRM and would distract attention and resources away from reducing emissions, he told Climate Home.

The origins

The commission was set up by academics involved in geoengineering research. The idea was first floated by Edward Parson, who leads the Emmett Institute’s Geoengineering Governance Project at the University of California.

Supported by the Paris Peace Forum, the Emmett Institute and Harvard University – where applied physics professor David Keith launched a major solar geoengineering research programme – began a consultation on geoengineering governance which led to the commission’s creation.

Diplomatic discussions on the issue became critical to research advocates when Keith’s group halted high-profile testing in the atmosphere above Sweden after outcry by indigenous Saami people.

Both Parson and Keith remain involved with the commission’s secretariat, which includes geoengineering researchers Joshua Horton, of Harvard’s research group, and Jesse Reynolds.

Feeling used

Several members of the youth engagement group told Climate Home they were concerned about the secretariat’s “one-sided” views. Two of eight have left the group.

“We were only there to make them seemingly more open to engage with diverse people and opinions,” said a youth who spoke to Climate Home on condition of anonymity.

Gina Cortés Valderrama, of Colombia, who left earlier this year, said young people and former politicians with no extensive knowledge of SRM were being “instrumentalised” to normalise discussing how to govern the technology in view of potential future deployment.

Creeping "techno-fixes into the political agenda…results in a very dangerous distraction from the just and equitable phase out of fossil fuels that we need,” she said.

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In a letter in February, the youth group accused the secretariat of “a lack serious intention to facilitate meaningful and genuine participation”.

This prompted the Children Investment Fund Foundation to pull the plug on a $500,000 grant to the commission, email correspondence shows.

The secretariat apologised for initial “suboptimal” participation. Since then, Lamy said the youths had been playing an important role and were now considered like “advisors”. The youth group presented its recommendations in person at a meeting in Nairobi in May.

‘Can’t put genie back in the bottle’

Commissioners insist their deliberations are independent from the secretariat’s views. “This will be the commissioners’ report, not the secretariat’s,” said Beinecke.

The recommendations, she said, will be “very cautious” on SRM but “somebody has to be talking about it”.

“It’s out there now, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You need more research, you need broader participation across the world, you need a governance mechanism,” she said, citing the risks of a repeat of a rogue experiment that took place in Mexico this year.

But for a growing group of scientists, calls for more research is cause for alarm. Writing in the New York Times, Chukwumerije Okereke, a climate and development expert from Nigeria, argued “more studies into this hypothetical solution look like steps toward development and a slippery slope to eventual deployment”.

More than 440 scientists have signed an open letter advocating for an international non-use agreement on solar geoengineering, including a ban on outdoor experiments.

Biermann, who led the initiative, said: “Some American philanthropists who have made their fortunes with technology seem to believe that quick technofixes can now also save humanity and global capitalism from the climate crisis. Yet solar geoengineering is only a false solution that would make the climate crisis even worse.”

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The Mexican government said it will develop a strategy to ban future experimentation with solar geoengineering, which will also include an information campaign and scientific reports. However, the government did not announce more specific actions.

“Mexico reiterates its unavoidable commitment to the protection and well-being of the population from practices that generate risks to human and environmental security,” said the government in a statement.

Geoengineering refers to the act of deliberately changing the Earth’s systems to control its climate.

One theoretical proposal has been to spray sulphur particles to cool the planet —which has been documented to briefly happen after volcanic eruptions.

A recent United Nations report found that this practice, known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), “has the potential to reduce global mean temperatures”.

But, it found, it “cannot fully offset the widespread effects of global warming and produces unintended consequences, including effects on ozone”.

The UN convention on Biological Diversity established a moratorium on geoengineering in 2010, in the absence of enough scientific data and regulations.

Rogue experiment

In 2022, the US startup Making Sunsets launched an unauthorised experiment from two sites in the northern Mexican state of Baja California. The company claims it launched balloons injected with sulphur dioxide particles into the atmosphere, which were not monitored nor recovered.

The company’s co-founder Luke Iseman said he conducted the experiment in Baja California because he lives there.

The Mexican government said the experiment was carried out “without prior notice and without the consent of the Government of Mexico and the surrounding communities”.

Making Sunsets is already selling “cooling credits” for future balloon flights with larger amounts of sulphur dioxide for $10 each.

“Your funds will be used to release at least 1 gram of our ‘clouds’ into the stratosphere on your behalf, offsetting the warming effect of 1 ton of carbon dioxide for 1 year,” the company claims on its website.

Lily Fuhr, deputy program director at the Center for International Environmental Law (Ciel), said in a statement that by offering a “cheap and easy quick fix” to the climate crisis, the company “plays into the hands of the fossil fuel industry”.

“Solar geoengineering is too risky and ungovernable to pursue. We support the Mexican government in their plan for a ban and call on them to immediately stop the new flights that ‘Make Sunsets’ has announced for January 2023,” Fuhr said.

Side effects

James Haywood is a professor of atmospheric science at Exeter University and co-wrote the recent UN report on SAI.

He told Climate Home that Make Sunsets experiment was not dangerous as the amount of sulphur was so small.

“It is more of a [public relations] stunt,” he said, adding “it’s not going to make a blind bit of difference”.

But putting larger amounts of sulphur in the atmosphere can be dangerous, he said.

While many of the side-effects of SAI can be avoided if it is done properly, he said, some are very difficult to avoid.

For example, he said, putting large amounts of sulphur into the atmosphere is likely to increase winter rainfall over northern Europe and reduce it over southern Europe, particularly in Spain and Portugal.

Speaking before the Mexican statement, Haywood said that at the moment there “is no government, no governance” of geoengineering and that he wasn’t aware of any governments proposing regulations.

Ciel called on more governments to announce bans on the practice.

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Switzerland withdrew its resolution at the summit in Kenya on Wednesday evening, after several failed attempts at compromise, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), an observer organisation, reported in a summary of the talks.

The proposal would have directed the UN agency to study controversial geoengineering technologies, as a first step towards discussing if and how they should be regulated internationally.

But the US and Saudi Arabia opposed any move that could crimp their ability to tackle climate change through geoengineering – and continue producing fossil fuels, according to two sources observing the negotiations, who asked not to be named. Brazil also voiced opposition, but less forcibly, they said.

The Trump administration has teamed up with Riyadh to push back in a number of international climate change negotiations over the past year, including over a strategy to reduce emissions from the shipping sector and on a statement welcoming the latest UN climate science report.

Indonesia’s Agus Justianto, one of the facilitators of the talks in Kenya, “expressed regret that several delegations had been unable to accept the final compromise proposal, and anticipated further discussions beyond UNEA on this issue”, IISD reported.

New Zealand, Bolivia, Norway and the European Union “paid tribute” to Switzerland for its efforts, it added. A diverse group of countries backed the resolution, including Burkina Faso, Micronesia, Mali, Mexico, Montenegro, Niger and South Korea.

Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative, said he was disappointed countries could not find consensus on a motion that would have kickstarted a much-needed international discussion.

“We will continue to work with different intergovernmental organisations and other international processes to try to raise the issue and expand the conversation,” said Pasztor, the former UN assistant secretary-general on climate change. “We’re actually very pleased with what happened in Nairobi in terms of engagement.”

Geoengineering refers to a number of techniques for modifying the climate system. The most controversial are untested ideas for dulling solar radiation, such as releasing aerosol particles into the sky to reflect sunlight away or spraying seawater drops into the clouds to make them more reflective. Others involve drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, including by planting forests.

There are significant uncertainties around how an intervention like solar radiation management would affect weather patterns.

One of the biggest concerns is that countries would use geoengineering as cover to keep polluting – and force the world to continue using the technologies or risk a catastrophic shock to the system.

Campaigners calling for tight governance of these technologies were also frustrated by the outcome in Kenya.

They’d hoped the UN Environment Assembly would build on limits already placed in other international agreements, including a moratorium set by the Convention on Biological Diversity.

“Deployment of geoengineering, including solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal, would jeopardise not only ecosystems and livelihoods but also human rights, sustainable development goals and international security,” said Barbara Unmüßig, President of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

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Geoengineering techniques that reflect away sun rays and suck carbon from the atmosphere have long been talked about as last-resort solutions to stem the worst effects of climate change.

But as greenhouse gas emissions remain stubbornly high and geoengineering research gets underway, there is growing concern these technologies could be deployed without protections against their serious risks – and that the prospect of a technofix will be taken as a licence to keep on polluting.

To kickstart the conversation, Switzerland will introduce a resolution at the UN Environment Assembly in Kenya in mid-March, calling for an assessment of the potential methods and governance frameworks for each one by August 2020. It would be an early step towards an international system for regulating the suite of technologies.

“There is a risk that geoengineering could be applied by someone without any international control, and we are very concerned about that,” Franz Perrez, head of the international affairs division at Switzerland’s Federal Office for the Environment, told Climate Home News. “Some are already testing solar radiation management, scientific research is already going on. We cannot close our eyes anymore and say ‘This is only science fiction’.”

The resolution is backed by Burkina Faso, Micronesia, Georgia, Lichtenstein, Mali, Mexico, Montenegro, Niger, South Korea and Senegal, according to the latest version dated 25 February.

Geoengineering refers to a wide range of techniques for modifying the climate system, from planting trees to fiddling with clouds.

Untested technologies to manage solar radiation – essentially, dim the sun –  pose the biggest concerns. Ideas include releasing aerosol particles from airplanes to reflect sunlight away (mimicking the effects of volcanic eruptions) and spraying seawater drops into clouds to make them more reflective. But they could also change weather patterns, disrupting agriculture and exacerbating geopolitical tensions.

And if this is not accompanied by emissions reductions, more will be needed to sustain the temperature effect – “practically forever”, Douglas MacMartin, a leading geoengineering scientist working at Cornell University and Caltech, told a Chatham House conference in London last week.

Yet with government oversight, it may be preferable to runaway global warming. “You would not take chemotherapy drugs just for fun, you would not sit in your car and set off your airbags just for fun,” MacMartin said. “There are clearly serious challenges to solar geoengineering, but they only make sense to face in context with the challenges of climate change itself.”

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Better-known options, which remove CO2 from the air, include afforestation and combining biomass power plants with technology to catch and store their emissions (known as BECCS). But even simple interventions like tree-planting may call for international rules to ensure that emissions cuts in one place aren’t cancelled out somewhere else.

Attention to geoengineering is growing as the global temperature remains on course to rise by at least 3C compared to pre-industrial levels. The UN’s panel of climate scientists suggested last October it would be difficult to meet the Paris Agreement’s stretch limit of 1.5C without some of these more radical techniques.

“The reality is that [carbon dioxide removal] is no longer a question of whether or not [according to the UN science report]. It’s which one, which technology, how much, when do you start, who pays for it,” said Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative and the former UN assistant secretary-general on climate change.

“But there has been very little debate [about solar radiation management] in the circles beyond scientists… it’s still looked at as esoteric, science fiction, crazy, difficult, challenging – and all of those things apply,” he told CHN at the Chatham House conference.

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For some, however, geoengineering is so dangerous that it should be banned altogether.

It could worsen the climate, be weaponised and exacerbate geopolitical imbalances, said Silvia Ribeiro, Latin America director at ETC Group, an organisation that looks at socioeconomic and ecological issues around new technologies. “Investments in geoengineering are already providing justifications for high greenhouse gas emitters to continue emitting and postpone real reductions.”

The UN has so far taken a cautious, piecemeal approach. Th 190-plus parties to its Convention on Biological Diversity extended a moratorium on all climate-related technologies in 2016, while a 2013 convention on marine pollution prohibited geoengineering of the oceans. The UN’s climate change secretariat regulates global emissions accounting, including from forestry and bioenergy.

ETC Group worries the Swiss resolution implicitly assumes that geoengineering is acceptable and just needs international governance.

Perrez countered that the country wants the UN Environment Programme to assess the state of the science and the research gaps, the risks, benefits and uncertainties, the actors working on research and deployment, and how it could all be governed. Then, he said, countries can start talking about what to allow and how.

But the way emissions are going now, “it’s hard to say that it will not be needed”, Pasztor said, referring to CO2 removal. “The reality is that emissions reductions alone are no longer enough, because we have already put so much carbon into the atmosphere that even if we stop today we’re still going to keep this climate change for hundreds of years.”

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Janos Pasztor, who served with Ban at the UN from 2008-2012 and 2015-2016 will launch the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance initiative (C2G2) in New York on 16 February.

Speaking from Nairobi where he was discussing his plans with officials at the UN Environment Programme, Pasztor said all options to tackle climate change should be discussed.

“As much as the Paris [climate] Agreement was a major step forward we know that even if all countries meet their targets we’re still looking at warming of 3C,” he tells Climate Home.

“To assume it will be 100% [successful] is not realistic, and we are saying to reach these ambitious goals we need to think seriously on what else to add in to massive mitigation efforts.

“Some scientists are saying this is not enough, and we should consider solar radiation management to make sure we don’t go beyond 1.5C to 2C. These are plausible scenarios and we need to think seriously about all options.”

UN to extend freeze on climate change geoengineering: https://t.co/XcVN2IkYOF pic.twitter.com/tpAMK7MMDm

— Climate Home News (@ClimateHome) December 7, 2016

The term geoengineering covers a wide range of technologies and proposals. These include spraying fine particles into the atmosphere to filter rays from the sun and fertilising oceans with iron filings to promote growth of carbon-sucking organisms.

Less exciting but currently more realistic are vast tree planting schemes and capturing emissions from burning bioenergy crops (BECCS).

The problem, Pasztor explains, is that many of these technologies have potentially planet-altering consequences, and there are few rules in place to govern basic experiments.

“There is hardly anything,” he says, pointing to the London Protocol as an example. It regulates the dumping of “materials” into the ocean for geoengineering purposes but aside from that offers little guidance.

Last last year the UN’s biodiversity body extended its warning against large-scale geoengineering, although it did urge countries to cooperate on future research projects.

“There is practically no real discussion in climate risk management. There is a debate in the scientific community but little in the policy community,” he says.

“That’s where we need the big change. We need to shift debate from academia to policy communications at international level in order to encourage government action.”

Report: US opens door for climate geoengineering research

Using some geoengineering techniques could buy the planet time to fight climate change, says Pasztor, but don’t expect quick results.

He sees this as a 5-year project, one that will take him around the world as he builds a picture of how governments and policymakers see this vexatious issue and what they want to do about it.

This week he meets UNEP director Erik Solheim, next stop is India to work out how officials in Delhi could feed into rule-making.

And there’s a far bigger issue lurking.

Countries taking an active interest in radical climate technologies include the US, Germany, UK, China and Japan – but the impacts of firing mini-mirrors into the atmosphere may not be equal everywhere.

A 2013 study by a team at the UK Met Office revealed that while the release of fine particles in the Northern Hemisphere stratosphere could manage solar radiation, it would also cause a massive drought in the Sahel.

“Geo-technologies may produce a global good of somehow improving the climate… but there could be local impacts and these could be quite bad and negative. How do you deal with a global good but some end up suffering more than others?” asks Pasztor.

“I could envisage an agreement where we decide to do cloud seeding and recognise Sahel will be hit and triple development assistance to the region to make sure water wells are dug and whatever else is needed to counteract negative impacts.”

Thank you @ErikSolheim and @UNEP colleagues for an excellent discussion today of issues related to governance of climate geoengineering pic.twitter.com/EDxGn89Wbb

— Janos Pasztor (@jpasztor) February 2, 2017

Still, he’s preparing for a rough ride. Opposition to the use of land in developing countries for energy crops is intense, suspicion over how and who would “seed the clouds” with sun-blocking particles rages across social media (conspiracies galore on twitter at #chemtrails).

Many argue the priority should be mitigation technologies, which Pasztor says is a “false argument,” as he too agrees the priority must be cutting carbon.

This is not an either-or he contends, but it must an option.

“It could possibly give a breathing space for decarbonisation or make sure that if we overshoot [the 2C warming limit], we don’t overshoot for too long,” he says.

“Government officials, intergovernmental officials, some of my craziest conservationist friends… they agree unanimously we must deal with this.

“They’re not all pro – some are very much against it. But all agree it must be discussed, we need a dialogue and to bring it to the level where politicians can deal with it.”

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The post Geoengineering rulebook could be ready by 2020s appeared first on Climate Home News.

The latest sign comes in a report from the US government – more specifically the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) – which was sent to Congress this week.

It’s an update on research plans from 2012-2021, and while there’s a chance these could be defunded under a Donald Trump presidency, it offers a sense of US thinking on the issue.

“While climate intervention cannot substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the changes in climate that occur, some types of deliberative climate intervention may someday be one of a portfolio of tools used in managing climate change,” reads the update.

“The need to understand the possibilities, limitations, and potential side effects of climate intervention becomes all the more apparent with the recognition that other countries or the private sector may decide to conduct intervention experiments independently from the US Government.”

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This is not a sign that the US is about to ramp up its geoengineering plans all of a sudden, according to Oliver Morton – author of one of the best books on the subject.

But it is a soft suggestion that the US should start to explore the parameters of how geoengineering experiments could start to be rolled out.

“An immediate next step for USGCRP is defining the scale and scope of observations and modelling capabilities necessary to detect the signal of any future field experiments above baseline conditions and natural variability, and to evaluate their consequences,” the report recommends.

“Such research would also define the smallest scale of intervention experiments that would yield meaningful scientific understanding.

“USGCRP will use its scientific understanding of natural processes, such as natural carbon sequestration or dynamics of atmospheric particulates, to inform potential pathways for carbon removal and albedo modification.”

Geoengineering could take various forms, from injecting sun-blocking sulphur particles in the atmosphere, to seeding the oceans with iron fertilisers to draw CO2 from the atmosphere. All are highly controversial and despite a push from Russia was not included in the UN’s Paris climate agreement as a potential pathway to control global warming.

Modelling by scientists at the UK Met Office has highlighted the danger that plans to deflect solar rays by spraying fine particles in the northern hemisphere atmosphere could disrupt weather patterns and cause drought in the Sahel.

But given the world is on a record run of hot years, and given scientists recorded a significant leap in concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through 2015 and 2016, it offers an option.

During 2015 and 2016, atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa jumped by +5.8 ppm: Highest growth in any 2-year period on record pic.twitter.com/rMqZatuxZU

— Kees van der Leun  (@Sustainable2050) January 11, 2017

Last year countries at the UN’s biodiversity summit indicated a widespread unwillingness to authorise large-scale experiments, but left the door open for smaller trials.

Simon Nicholson – a professor in international relations at American University who focuses on climate engineering – described the US intervention as “ironic and extraordinarily sad”.

Speaking to Science Magazine, he said the idea you could circumvent traditional carbon cutting policies with a bit of atmospheric magic could prove a distraction.

“The most important work to do with the new administration is to be sure they keep intact important international work on climate mitigation and adaptation.”

Another sign that geoengineering is starting to be discussed at the top level came on Wednesday with the launch of the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risks Report.

It’s likely this is the first time the issue got a mention, Morton reports on his Medium blog, and that’s not down to one or two wacky writers, but a poll of governments, business and academia.

The data from the poll suggests there’s a lack of confidence in technologies like solar radiation management (SRM) to deliver net benefits, and fears it could lead to the polar opposite.

Report: UN to extend freeze on climate change geoengineering

What the report does offer is a sense of how further studies could be regulated, emphasising the dangers of governance regimes that fail to generate trust and awareness among the public.

“For example, autonomous vehicles will inevitably cause some accidents; whether this leads to calls for bans will depend on whether people trust the mechanisms that have been set up to govern their development,” it says.

Work on better global governance is underway: former State Department climate official Andrew Light and Ban Ki-moon’s ex climate advisor Janos Pasztor are among those working on initiatives.

As Morton argues, it’s a fairly light start from the WEF, but perhaps a sign that we’ll see more of this debate in the coming years.

“It would be interesting to see the WEF engage more on this, though there is no evidence that they will do so at this year’s Davos meeting,” he writes.

“It might be a bit tricky for them; in general their model of technology is one that fits it into business practices and concerns, an approach that makes sense for things like IT and biotech, but not so much for geoengineering.

“But they have at least opened up some data on what people are thinking, and that’s a help in itself.”

The post US opens door for climate geoengineering research appeared first on Climate Home News.

That’s the nub of a decision expected to be taken at the UN’s biannual biodiversity summit taking place in Cancun, Mexico this week, emphasising a “precautionary approach” to such projects.

With greenhouse gas emissions closing in on levels that could guarantee warming of 1.5C above pre industrial levels and an El Nino-boosted 2016 likely to be the hottest year on record, some scientists are looking to emergency measures.

But the UN is sticking to a familiar line: pumping the atmosphere with tiny mirrors to deflect sunlight, boosting the uptake of CO2 in oceans by stimulating plankton growth, or burning wood and pumping the emissions underground could be a bad idea.

Tuesday's version of the UN @CBDNews's plea to countries not to start #climate geoengineering #COP13 pic.twitter.com/AhtymkgKLK

— Ed King (@edking_I) December 7, 2016

“We’re concerned that with any initiative regarding the use of geoengineering there needs to be an assessment,” UN biodiversity chief Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias told Climate Home.

“These can have unforeseen results and spin-offs. If you capture carbon in the oceans, this is effective through all the food chains.”

Even national risk assessments on individual geoengineering projects would still form an “incomplete basis for global regulation” says the latest iteration of the UN draft decision, echoing previous Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) decisions in 2010, 2012 and 2014.

“More trans-disciplinary research and sharing of knowledge among appropriate institutions is needed,” it says, citing potential impacts on ecosystems and potential ethical issues.

For instance, one study by scientists at the UK Met Office in 2013 said the release of fine particles into the northern hemisphere atmosphere could lower temperatures, but heighten drought risk in the Sahel.

There’s a secret UN #climate adaptation summit taking place in Mexico https://t.co/QrNuZIyKPE pic.twitter.com/6ZYZpjbskI

— Climate Home News (@ClimateHome) December 7, 2016

Still, Bristol University academic Matt Watson – one of the UK’s top geoengineering researchers – told Climate Home there are still a “range of experiments that would not have any effect on biodiversity”.

“We are not doing a great job of protecting biodiversity now (the IPCC’s projections are truly terrifying) – how will we know if geoengineering would exacerbate (or reduce) impacts on biodiversity unless we research it?” he said in an email.

That view was echoed by Richard Darton, co-director of the Oxford Geoengineering Programme, who said controlled tests allowed under CBD rules should continue “to verify the science and engineering” but that more research was inevitable given the scale of warming

“Whilst I thoroughly agree that we can best cut anthropogenic emissions as the best way to manage climate change, the CBD will have to face the fact that it simply isn’t happening fast enough,” he said.

“Learning more about geoengineering is absolutely necessary. At the moment we have the bizarre circumstance that climate scenarios which will meet 2C assume BECCS [bioenergy with carbon capture and storage] will be applied on a very big scale – an assumption at odds with the resolution of CBD apparently.

“We simply must explore BECCS and all the other techniques to understand what (if anything) they can do for us, and what the entire earth-system and human-system impacts might be.”

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The last publicised large-scale geoengineering trial took place in 2012 when a US businessman dumped tonnes of iron filings into the sea off Canada, in violation of the UN moratorium.

The aim was to suck carbon from the atmosphere by stimulating the growth of plankton which would then die and sink to the ocean floor, thus sequestering the CO2.

In 2013, leaked documents revealed Russia pushed for the UN’s climate science body to support the potential of geoengineering to lower global temperatures in its major AR5 climate report.

In the event the the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) study did cover geoengineering, warning of “numerous uncertainties, side effects and risks” of efforts to manage solar radiation.

Since then, information on other programmes has been thin. Germany is conducting indoor experiments while the UK government recently stumped up £8·3 million (US$10.5m) for research into technologies to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Policy inertia

The UN CBD draft decision notes “very few countries” have provided “information on measures they have undertaken”.

Poor reporting and the lack of debate around the issue are a concern, said Andrew Light, a former US senior state department climate official and a professor at George Mason University, who interpreted the CBD text as a “plea” rather than a ban.

“If we are ever to have a conversation about governance we need to normalise reporting,” he told Climate Home, suggesting this would be a first step before out-of-laboratory experiments are authorised.

“We need to be looking into the full range of activities, especially when we’re talking about the need to move towards net decarbonisation by 2050 or thereafter.”

“Countries have not provided information because they are not talking about it,” said Janos Pasztor, climate advisor to outgoing UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon and head of the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Project.

“There is practically no discussion at a policy level – it’s a big gap and we need to shift the debate.”

The post UN to extend freeze on climate change geoengineering appeared first on Climate Home News.

Algae absorbs carbon dioxide and theoretically could help stabilise the climate (Flickr/Glenna)

By Alex Kirby

One keenly-argued possible way of moderating the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may not work, scientists have concluded.

They say there is evidence that seeding the oceans with iron so that the algae that live there will multiply and devour more CO₂ − thus preventing it reaching the atmosphere and intensifying the human contribution to global warming – is not as promising a solution as its supporters hope.

The extra iron can certainly stimulate the algae to grow more vigorously, but at a cost. More algae in one part of the oceans may mean there will be fewer in other areas, the researchers say.

Report: Scientists warn against geoengineering as short-term climate fix

They report in Nature journal that the depths of the central Pacific Ocean contain ancient sediments that cast doubt on iron’s ability to slow the Earth’s steady temperature rise.

In parts of the oceans that lack the iron that plants need, algae are scarce. Experiments have shown that dumping iron into these areas can encourage algal growth, so large-scale fertilisation could theoretically reduce atmospheric CO₂.

The seafloor sediments the team studied show that, during past ice ages, more iron-rich dust blew from cold and barren landmasses into the oceans, apparently producing more algae in these areas and, presumably, a creating natural cooling effect.

But the researchers say increased algal growth in one area can inhibit growth elsewhere, because ocean waters are always on the move and algae also need other nutrients, such as nitrates and phosphates.

If you give them heavy doses of iron, the researchers say, the algae in one region may consume all those other nutrients, leaving the water with little to offer by the time it circulates elsewhere, so that adding iron achieves nothing.

“The basic message is, if you add to one place, you may subtract from another”

The study’s lead author, Kassandra Costa, a doctoral student at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), says: “There’s only a limited amount of total nutrients in the oceans. So if there’s greater use in one area, it seems you’d have lesser concentrations in other areas. The basic message is, if you add to one place, you may subtract from another.”

Much of the equatorial Pacific’s near-surface water comes from the Southern Ocean, where powerful winds circle Antarctica, helping to dredge large amounts of nitrates, phosphates and other nutrients from the depths where they tend to settle.

The nutrients are so abundant that the resident algae cannot use them all, and artificial fertilisation experiments have shown that adding iron there does cause more algae to grow.

Much of this nutrient-rich water eventually sinks and, in a century or two, reaches the mid-Pacific, where it meets opposing currents from the north and rises, making the nutrients available to near-surface algae. But most of these nutrients pass on by; the mid-Pacific is too far from iron-rich dust sources on land for algae to make much use of them.

Rhetoric or reality? Climate scientists divided on 1.5C warming goal

In 2012, LDEO scientists took cores from the seabed in the region. Costa and her colleagues analysed sediments from the cores dating back to the last ice age, 17,000 to 26,000 years ago. They found two or three times more dust reaching the area compared with today, because of reduced plant cover in the cold, dry climate.

Marine plant growth might have been expected to have increased accordingly, but it didn’t. The sediments showed that productivity stayed the same, or even declined.

The team concluded that algae in the southerly latitudes, which were also dusted at the same time, snapped up the iron, along with most of the other nutrients, leaving the Pacific algae high and dry.

One of the study’s co-authors, Jerry McManus, LDEO professor of geochemistry, says: “This shows how different parts of the system are connected. If you push hard in one place, the system pushes back somewhere else.”

The study itself does not say so, but McManus adds that it suggests “we should be very careful about thinking we can use artificial fertilisation to combat climate change”.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

The post Scientists pour cold water on ocean geoengineering idea appeared first on Climate Home News.

The plume from an eruption at the Pinatubo volcano in 1991. Scientists investigated aerosols released into the atmosphere for its effect on the ozone (Wikimedia commons)

By Alex Pashley

Controversial methods to engineer the climate are no substitute for cuts to greenhouse gas emissions over the next decades, European researchers have concluded.

Stripping carbon gushed by industrial plants or dimming the sun’s rays through spraying sulphates have been proposed as techniques to keep a global temperature rise to a “safe” level.

But a consortium of 14 institutes, EuTRACE, warned against such targeted interventions due to issues developing the nascent technologies and high costs, in a report published on Wednesday.

“It is not yet clear whether it is possible to develop and scale-up any proposed climate engineering technique to the extent that it could be implemented to significantly reduce climate change,” said Naomi Vaughan at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia.

The planet cannot warm more than 2C from pre-industrial levels by 2100 to avoid catastrophic climate change, countries and scientists have agreed.

Report: Is avoiding 2C of global warming possible?

To stay within that target, emissions will have to fall to net zero at some point in the next half-century, according to the UN’s science panel, the IPCC.

With emissions on course to overshoot the target, scientists are exploring geoengineering options to keep the planet cool.

Countries shouldn’t count on these untested methods, the report cautions.

(credit: IASS Berlin)

“It is important to understand the possibilities and problems associated with climate engineering proposals, in order to make decisions on them in a responsible manner,” said Mark Lawrence, the project’s coordinator and scientific director of the IASS Potsdam.

“But it would be irresponsible, based on all we know so far, to expect climate engineering to significantly contribute to solving the problem of climate change in the next several decades.”

The report stated it was “sensible” to continue to investigate techniques such as carbon capture and storage, stratospheric aerosol injection, or ocean iron fertilisation to understand their potential.

Report: UK’s dirtiest region sets out pitch to bury CO2 in Europe first

Existing research on climate engineering is limited, mostly based on climate models and small-scale field trials, researchers said.

Carbon re-capture was not an “easy option” to stop climate change, said Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture at the University of Edinburgh.

“Inventing and constructing climate engineering is far too slow, it is not clear who will pay, and there can be negative impacts on many countries, often poorer nations. Who will choose?”

The post Scientists warn against geoengineering as short-term climate fix appeared first on Climate Home News.

Pic: abrinsky/Flickr

By Tim Radford

Geoengineering – which sometimes seems to be the despairing climate scientist’s Plan B – simply won’t work.

It won’t offer a quick fix to the planet’s burden of global warming, and it will be difficult to convince anybody that it could work at all.

Geoengineering is any deliberate, large-scale intervention in the workings of the climate machine that might offer a way of containing global warming. The accent is on the word deliberate.

Humans are already “engineering” the climate just by continuously adding carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels, but the climate change that will follow is an unhappy consequence, not a deliberate plan.

Since governments have been either slow, or very slow, to agree on systematic plans to drastically reduce dependence on fossil fuels, researchers have in the last decade or so begun to propose ways in which deliberate steps might counter global warming.

Problems

They have suggested darkening the skies with deliberate discharges of sulphate aerosols to block incoming radiation.

They have proposed “seeding” the ocean with iron to encourage photosynthesis and increase carbon uptake by phytoplankton, they have suggested brightening the clouds by spraying salt particles into them to make them more reflective.

Now British researchers have taken a long hard look at three aspects of geoengineering research and arrived at a bleak conclusion: it would just be better not to emit greenhouse gases on a prodigal scale.

Geoengineering projects would certainly never offer an easy answer: they may not be disastrous, but they don’t look good, or popular.

The public would prefer more investment in renewable energy to, for example, the deployment of artificial volcanoes that pumped fine particles into the stratosphere.

Piers Forster, professor of physical climate change at the University of Leeds, said: “The devil is in the detail. Geoengineering will be much more expensive and challenging than previous estimates suggest, and any benefits would be limited.”

This is consistent with a number of studies within the last two years.

Researchers have repeatedly concluded that such schemes either won’t work or could actually generate more heat or could upset rainfall patterns or could have serious consequences for specific regions or could simply generate intractable problems for governments, science ministries and international agencies that might have to make the big decisions.

But the interest in geoengineering continues. One good reason is that – at least as a theoretical exercise – it could help climate scientists better understand the fine detail of the workings of the planet.

Major volcanic eruptions can discharge so much ash and sulphate aerosols into the upper atmosphere that they actually cool the planet for years, and a recent study has argued that the slowdown in global warming in the last decade could be a consequence of a series of relatively minor eruptions.

But human attempts to replicate the effect would be fraught. “The potential for misstep is considerable,” said Matthew Watson, a natural hazards scientist at the University of Bristol, UK.

The British scientists don’t dismiss geoengineering outright. That is because if, under the notorious “business-as-usual” scenario, nations go on burning fossil fuels, then by 2100 the consequences could be catastrophic.

Dr Watson said: “Full-scale deployment of climate engineering technologies will be the clearest indication that we have failed in our role as planetary stewards. But there is a point at which not deploying some technologies would be unethical.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

The post Could geoengineering make climate change worse? appeared first on Climate Home News.

A spring bloom of phytoplankton in the Atlantic Ocean off Iceland captured by NASA in June 2014 (Pic: NASA/Jeff Schmaltz)

By Tim Radford

Technology’s answer to climate change in a world in which humans go on releasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has just had another setback. 

The idea of fertilising the planet’s oceans with iron filings to stimulate green growth and turn the oceans into a carbon sink isn’t so simple as hoped.

Two studies – both involving experiments at sea – have confirmed that trace elements such as iron affect plankton growth, and that more iron can mean more carbon dioxide exported to the sea bed in the form of dead and buried life forms.

But new research in Nature Geoscience shows that the story is more complex.

Ian Salter, bioscience researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute’s Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Germany, and colleagues report that they took a closer look at what happens around the Crozet Islands in the Southern Ocean − basaltic islands that deliver a steady natural supply of iron to the surrounding waters.

Comment: It’s time we stopped talking about ‘geoengineering’

More iron meant more phytoplankton, which meant that more carbon was pumped into deeper waters.

But more phytoplankton also meant more little creatures such as foraminifera, which graze on phytoplankton, and then make shells of calcium carbonate − a process that puts carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

Dr Salter and his colleagues estimate that the carbonate manufacture in waters naturally fertilised by iron reduced the overall amount of carbon transferred to the deep ocean by between 6% and 32%, whereas in waters not fertilised by iron, the reduction was 1% to 4%.

So added iron might make the phytoplankton grow, but it also soups up the return of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

The finding is not conclusive. It doesn’t settle the question of whether the presence of trace iron ultimately assists the removal of more carbon from the atmosphere in the long term.

It also doesn’t answer questions about how things might work in warmer waters, and doesn’t offer a guide to the overall effect of iron deliberately added to waters where the phytoplankton don’t bloom in profusion.

Analysis: Geoengineering creeps from sci-fi to reality

But it does provide a snapshot of science in action, and is yet another reminder that the climate system – and especially the traffic in carbon between rock, water, air and living tissue – is immensely complex, and still puzzling.

And if that wasn’t already clear, new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences confirms that there is a lot more to be learned about the role of oceans in climate science.

Researchers report that ocean temperatures have been far more variable over the last 7,000 years than anyone had realised.

Thomas Laepple, a climate scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, and Peter Huybers, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, US, combed the climate archives, examined indirect evidence from sediment cores and corals and other sources, and reconstructed sea surface temperatures in a range of different locations over a period of thousands of years.

Then they picked 20 climate models and conducted more than 100 test runs to see if they could simulate the same pronounced fluctuations in ocean temperatures in the same places over the same timescale

Greater discrepancies

They could − but only for short periods. The longer the time sequence, the greater the discrepancies. Over timescales of a thousand years, the models underestimated the variations by a factor of 50.

“Fundamentally, there are only two explanations,” Dr Laepple says. “Either the climate archives do not provide reliable temperature data, or the climate models underestimate the variability of the climate. Or both may be true to some extent.”

Neither finding suggests that climate scientists don’t know what they are doing. In fact, quite the reverse: researchers are establishing just what they can be sure about, and what remains uncertain.

Nor does either finding suggest that long-term alarm over the consequences of increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide is based on uncertain science.

Dr Laepple says: “We are in the middle of an experiment we cannot reverse, but which we still don’t understand well enough to make clear statements at the regional level on longer timescales.

“Unfortunately, we will just have to continue with this uncertainty for some time.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

The post Geoengineering: Pumping iron into oceans could backfire appeared first on Climate Home News.

Pic: abrinsky/Flickr

By Mike Hulme

In Berlin last week, the conference ‘Climate Engineering 2014: Critical Global Discussions’ attracted the largest single gathering of researchers who scrutinise a range of technologies for deliberately engineering the Earth’s climate. 

Over 300 scientists, social scientists, policy analysts, philosophers and public intellectuals from around the world met for three days to consider and debate the pros and cons of developing and possibly implementing such technologies.

The technologies range from ‘capturing’ carbon dioxide from the free atmosphere and burying it underground, to injecting tiny particles into the stratosphere to mimic the cooling effect of volcanoes – called sulphate aerosol injection (SAI).  And there are many others besides.

Implementation of such technologies is usually referred to using the collective term ‘geoengineering’.

But grouping together such radically different practices under a single term may hinder us from sorting out the viable technologies from the unviable, the risky ones from the not so risky.

Important distinctions

The term ‘geoengineering’ was first used in relation to climate change back in 1977; it then referred solely to technologies which captured carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion process before burying it in land or ocean.

But over the last 40 years, and especially over the last decade, the term ‘geoengineering’ has come to be used to define an increasingly eclectic set of technologies.  They have just one thing in common: the goal of reducing or offsetting the heating of the planet caused by greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere.

The idea of ‘geoengineering’ the climate was given a boost in 2006 by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen.  He wrote an article suggesting that it was time to consider seriously the development of a technology which could mimic volcanic eruptions and thereby cool the climate.

Three years later, the Royal Society of London commissioned a report called ‘Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty’.  They evaluated a range of technologies and although they grouped some as Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) and some as Solar Radiation Management (SRM) technologies, the Report gave much greater public visibility to the overall project of ‘geoengineering’.

I agree with the notion of evaluating the feasibility and legitimacy of these types of technologies and of estimating their efficacy in reducing the magnitude of future climate change. It is also important to find out what people think about such technological ‘solutions’ to climate change.

But all this should be done on a case-by-case basis, one technology at a time.  For example, the risk profiles of iron fertilisation of the oceans, soil biochar and SAI, to name but three ‘geoengineering’ technologies, are each very different.  The first two seek to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, unlike SAI.

SAI is relatively fast-acting, unlike the first two.  Both iron fertilisation and SAI introduce further risks for unenclosed global commons, unlike biochar.  And so on.

Science fiction?

Conflating the widely different risks, benefits and politics of these technologies by using the umbrella term ‘geoengineering’ to describe them all is unhelpful and misleading.

This is especially so since the ‘geoengineering’ technology that has attracted the most research attention and public comment is also the most environmentally, socially and politically risky – namely SAI.  The danger of using imprecise language is that all ‘geoengineering’ technologies end up being ‘guilty by association’ with the most risky.

For example on this news site last week, an article on the Conference was titled ‘Geoengineering creeps from sci-fi to reality’, drawing its rhetoric of ‘geoengineering’ as science-fiction from SAI.

At the Berlin Conference last week it was SAI which gained the most attention from delegates’ presentations.  And it was proposals from some scientists to commence experimental research into SAI which led to vigorous exchanges amongst experts at the conference about how such research should be governed.

Separating it out

There are a large number of interventions that can be taken by different human actors and institutions at different scales to slow and reduce the consequences of human actions for the climate.  They each yield different risks and benefits and they each carry different political and ethical implications.

Just as we should discriminate between different types of ‘climate action’ – nuclear energy vs solar or carbon taxes vs carbon trading – so too we should discriminate between the different technologies that are still too frequently lumped together under ‘geoengineering’.  A spade should be called a spade; an apple called an apple.

Some analysts have argued that there is political value in maintaining a degree of ambiguity about the precise definition of the nomenclature ‘geoengineering’.

I disagree.  The world needs wide-ranging discussions about the risks and benefits of many types of responses to human-caused climate change.  Failing to be clear about the different potential technologies and policies on offer, and their radically different implications, does no-one any favours.

Mike Hulme is Professor of Climate and Culture at King’s College London.

The post Why we need to stop talking about ‘geoengineering’ appeared first on Climate Home News.

Pic: NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

By Sophie Yeo

In a world where robots hitchhike across Canada and spacecrafts deliver “cosmic grains” to Earth, there are few ideas left in science fiction which haven’t been rendered just science.

Geoengineering is the exception. Hacking the planet to rewind the damage done by humanity remains one of science’s final frontiers – and one of its biggest taboos.

“I’m pretty terrified by geoengineering,” Dr Matt Watson, who leads the UK-based Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (Spice) project told RTCC.

He is one of around 300 scientists, artists, historians, philosophers and engineers who have congregated in Berlin this week to try to make the geoengineering frontier a little less distant – conceptually, if not practically.

The conference has brought together interested parties to talk about how geoengineering could help reverse the warming that over one hundred years of industrialization has produced.

They are talking about whether it should be done. And they are talking about whether they should talk about it.

Introspective science

There are good reasons for all this navel gazing. Geoengineering raises questions not only of science, but of what it means to be human.

“In the same way as we have to consider the deeper meaning of the possibilities presented by genetic modification and cloning, we also need to consider the deeper meaning of what it would imply if humanity ever were to decide to try to take coordinated control over the Earth System on a global scale,” said Mark Lawrence, scientific director at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, opening the conference.

Another concern is the potential for unintended consequences that would almost inevitably accompany large scale attempts to change the climate of an entire planet. Others worry that it could be seen as a “quick fix” and quell the urgency around deploying traditional mitigation tools, such as renewable energy.

Scientists have tiptoed around the topic, worried that even talking about it could lend legitimacy to those wanting to play God with the planet. But it’s crunch time, says Hugh Hunt, an engineer at the University of Cambridge.

“I want us to make decisions and then proceed. We’ve either got to move forward and do research, or we don’t do research. But we can’t keep talking about maybe doing research,” he tells RTCC.

He tends towards the idea that research should be happening – like chemotherapy, he says, geoengineering could turn out to be a nasty necessity. But funds are low – the UK government is currently spending just over £5 million on geoengineering research.

“What gives us the right to play with our climate? It’s a crazy thing to even be considering doing. But considering how badly we’ve screwed up the climate, then maybe we’ve got to fix it,” he says.

“I’ve been involved the Scouts movement for a long time and the motto is ‘Be prepared’. I think we ought to be prepared.”

Banishing taboos

The UN’s climate science panel, while stopping short of endorsing geoengineering, did suggest it could be one possible method of dealing with extreme climate change in the future.

“In the face of potential extreme impacts, the ability to quickly offset warming could help limit some of the most extreme climate impacts although deploying these geoengineering systems could create many other risks,” it said.

The Royal Society, one of the most august scientific institutions, also released a report in 2009 that helped to break the taboo around discussing the topic.

But not everyone wants to see geoengineering given the green light, and the Berlin meeting has convened to bring these views together, rather than quietly usher in a new age of exotic experimentation.

Mike Hulme, a professor of climate and culture at King’s College London, wrote in a blog on the conference website, that geoengineering remains an undesirable “fantasy”.

“They offer technologies that will not just compensate for a disturbed global heat balance; they will end up doing far more.  They will inaugurate an era of never ending experimentation with the global sky,” he said.

“In their search for ever more control and adjustment, they will convert the world’s climate – all our climates – into something relentlessly unnatural.”

Experiments

One of the dangers is the blurred line between experimentation and actual geoengineering.

While the scientists to whom RTCC spoke agreed that no one really wanted to do engineering, and certainly not any time soon, small scale projects to test the waters might be sensible – after all, it remains unclear whether geoengineering is even feasible.

But, says Watson, there is “no bright line – at a large scale, research and deployment blur.

“To do it at full scale you’d have to learn as you went along. Small experiments may have no realistic risk, but they carry indeterminate possible societal risks. Does it open a door for people to do bigger experiments?”

Steve Rayner, the co-director of the Oxford Geoengineering Programme, proposed during the conference a new framework to monitor geoengineering experiments according to a uniform set of principles.

It suggests ideas for regulating this new territory, which could help to banish the image of geoengineering as a perilous no-man’s land. The document had a mixed reception and is unlikely to be universally endorsed any time soon.

But already an alternative has been proposed, suggesting it could only be a matter of time until this eerie realm of planetary meddling becomes chartered, regulated – and, with it, acceptable.

“At the moment there are no rules. It’s because it’s a new field. People are feeling their way around what the rules need to be,” says Hunt.

“Everyone has a gut feel for what is acceptable and what is not. But because it’s all so new everyone’s gut feel is different.”

The post Geoengineering creeps from sci-fi to reality appeared first on Climate Home News.

(Pic: Karindalziel/flickr)

By Tim Radford

Geoengineering – the frustrated climate scientist’s last-ditch solution to global warming – is not likely to be a very popular choice.

Members of the public have “a negative view” of deliberate large-scale manipulation of the environment to counteract climate change, according to new research in Nature Climate Change.

Geoengineering has been repeatedly proposed as a response to the steady build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and increasingly cited as a potential necessity as global emissions from fossil fuels have continued to increase.

If political action fails, some scientists reason, then perhaps technology could stop global average temperatures from getting too high.

Among these options is the injection of aerosols into the stratosphere to block or dim the sunlight, or the release of reflecting devices in Earth orbit to actually reflect sunlight away from the planet, on the principle that if you can’t turn down the atmospheric temperature, you could at least put up a sunscreen to cool the planet a little.

Such ideas have failed to find universal favour in the scientific community, if only because such action could seriously upset rainfall patterns and trigger disaster in the arid parts of Africa.

Consistent reluctance

But until now, nobody has seriously put the question to the public. Ordinary people don’t like the idea, say Malcolm Wright and Pamela Feetham of Massey University in New Zealand, and Damon Teagle of the University of Southampton, UK.

They consulted large samples of opinion in both Australia and New Zealand, and found “remarkably consistent” responses from both countries, “with surprisingly few variations except for a slight tendency for older respondents to view climate engineering more favourably,” says Pamela Feetham.

The trio report in Nature Climate Change that where there had been engagement with the public, this had been “exploratory, small-scale, or technique-specific.”

So the researchers tried another approach, one used by big corporations to evaluate marketing brands. Such approaches use psychological techniques to find out what people associate with different ideas, and have done so successfully for two decades.

The researchers systematically examined and compared in a controlled fashion the public reaction to six potential climate engineering techniques, among them, for instance, robot ships that would spray seawater droplets over the ocean to reflect sunlight – it’s called cloud brightening – and air capture, the design of structures to filter CO2 from the air.

Charcoal is popular

They found that people were not in favour of deflecting or blocking sunlight, but were more likely to have positive reactions to techniques that might reduce carbon dioxide levels.

“It was a striking result and a very clear pattern”, said Professor Wright. “Interventions such as putting mirrors in space or fine particles in the stratosphere are not well received.

More natural processes of cloud brightening or enhanced weathering are less likely to raise objections, but the public react best to creating biochar (making charcoal from vegetation to lock in CO2) or capturing carbon directly from the air.”

The message is that if scientists want to save the planet by climate engineering, they had better ask around first. “If these techniques are developed the public must be consulted”, said Professor Wright.

“Our methods can be employed to evaluate the responses in other countries and reapplied in the future to measure how public opinion changes as these potential new techniques are discussed and developed.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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1 – Geoengineering may be necessary for 2C world, says IPCC draft
Governments may have to extract vast amounts of greenhouse gases from the air by 2100 to achieve a target for limiting global warming, backed by trillion-dollar shifts towards clean energy, according to a draft the UN’s IPCC report. A draft version of the summary for policymakers, seen by Reuters, says that to get on track, governments may have to turn ever more to technologies for “carbon dioxide removal” from the air, ranging from capturing and burying emissions from coal-fired power plants to planting more forests that use carbon to grow.

2 – China becomes one of world’s largest historical emitters
China, India and Brazil, three of the largest developing nations, joined the U.S. in a list of the biggest historical contributors to global warming, according to a study by researchers at Concordia University in Canada. Bloomberg reports that the seven nations – including Russia, UK and Germany – together accounted for more than 60% of all heat-trapping gas emissions between 1750 and 2005.

3 – Senators push for Keystone approval
A bipartisan group of senators met separately on Wednesday with top Canadian officials to push for a speedy approval of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Senator Mary Landrieu met with Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs John Baird and Gary Doer, ambassador to the US, to promote the TransCanada pipeline, reports The Hill. “I keep telling the president that this is really important for the manufacturing renaissance and economic security,” Landrieu told reporters.

4 – Tasmanian prime minister sacks Green ministers
Tasmanian Labor Premier Lara Giddings is sacking two Greens ministers who supported her minority government as she prepares to announce an election date. Labor has been in government in Tasmania with Greens backing since 2010, but Giddings has been under pressure from Labor backbenchers to sever ties as Labor attempts to build voter support for power in its own right. The Age reports that she called Education Minister Nick McKim and Human Services Minister Cassy O’Connor on Thursday morning to tell them she was terminating their commissions.

5 – Beijing suffers worst smog in a year
Beijing’s skyscrapers receded into a dense gray smog on Thursday as the capital suffered the season’s first wave of extremely dangerous pollution, with the concentration of toxic small particles registering more than two dozen times the level considered safe, reports the Guardian. The density of PM2.5 was about 350 to 500 micrograms and had reached as high as 671 at 4am at a monitoring post at the US embassy in Beijing. That is about 26 times as high as the 25 micrograms considered safe by the World Health Organisation and was the highest reading since January 2013.

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(Pic: NASA)

By Tim Radford

Two German scientists have just confirmed that you can’t balance the Earth’s rising temperatures by simply toning down the sunlight.

It may do something disconcerting to the patterns of global rainfall.

Earlier this year a US-led group of scientists ran sophisticated climate models of a geo-engineered world and proposed the same thing. Now Axel Kleidon and Maik Renner of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, have used a different theoretical approach to confirm the conclusion, and explain why it would be a bad idea.

The argument for geo-engineering goes like this: the world is getting inexorably warmer, governments show no sign of drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions, so why not control the planetary thermostat by finding a way to filter, block, absorb or reflect some of the sunlight hitting the Earth?

Such things can be done by pumping soot or aerosols into the stratosphere to dim the skies a fraction, or even floating mirrors in Earth orbit to reflect some of the sunlight back into space.

Either way, the result is the same: you have global temperature control, tuned perhaps to the average at the beginning of the last century, and you can then go on burning as much petrol or coal as you like.

But now the two biogeochemists at Jena report in the journal Earth System Dynamics that they used a simple energy balance model to show that the world doesn’t work like that. Water simply doesn’t respond to atmospheric heat and solar radiation in the same way.

No simple fix

If you make the atmosphere warmer, but keep the sunlight the same, evaporation increases by 2% per degree of warming. If you keep the atmosphere the same, but increase the levels of sunlight, evaporation increases by 3% per degree of warming.

Kleidon uses the simple analogy of a saucepan on a kitchen stove. “The temperature in the pot is increased by putting on a lid, or by turning up the heat – but these two cases differ by how much energy flows through the pot,” he says.

A stronger greenhouse effect would act as a kind of tighter-fitting atmospheric lid. In the kitchen a lid keeps the water from escaping from the saucepan and at the same time reduces the energy cost. But planetary energetics are not really comparable to kitchen economics.

That is because evaporation itself, and the traffic of water vapour around the planet, plays a powerful role in the making of climate. To change the pattern and degree of evaporation would inevitably disturb weather systems and disrupt agriculture, with unpredictable and potentially catastrophic consequences.

The authors say: “An immediate consequence of this notion is that climate geo-engineering cannot simply be used to undo global warming.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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(Pic: David Clarke)

Australia: After abolishing the Climate Change Commission, the newly elected Abbott government wants to scrap the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) set up by Labor to provide loans for renewable energy and efficiency. Treasurer Joe Hockey wrote to the CEFC, asking it to stop investments until its repeal. However, independent legal advice backed by one of the country’s top constitutional lawyers says the CEFC is legally obliged to ignore the minister’s request. (ABC)

US: Delegates to the 2013 International Women’s Earth and Climate Initiative Summit, which took place this week sent a letter to President Barack Obama this week calling on President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. They wrote that ignoring climate change is like sending “a child with a 105 fever” to school. (Think Progress)

Research: Genetic modification of animals so that they can deal with changing climate and habitats may be the only way to save some of the most endangered species from becoming extinct, according to biologists at Idaho State University in Pocatello, and his colleagues in a comment article for the journal Nature. (Guardian)

Germany: Angela Merkel’s experiment to wean Europe’s biggest economy off nuclear and fossil fuels and push it into renewables is at risk and her best hope of saving her bold energy revolution may lie in a coalition with the center-left Social Democrats, who could agree to modest cuts to costly incentives for green power which are, paradoxically, driving up energy prices. (Global Post)

ICAO: United Nations aviation chiefs said Tuesday that thorny issues still loom heading into two weeks of negotiations aimed at finalising a deal to address greenhouse gas emissions from the global aviation sector. The UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization is attempting to iron out one of the worst aviation disputes in years, which has pitted the EU against its trade rivals. (Planet Ark)

Mexico: Latin America is likely to see more floods like those wreaking havoc in Mexico, as the effects of climate change make themselves felt. Already highly vulnerable to natural hazards, the region will be one of the most affected by increased flooding and droughts, reduced arable lands and the possible loss of low lying regions caused by climate change said Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez, World Bank director for sustainable development. (Eco Business)

Research: There is a chance that the world can keep below dangerous levels of global warming, said co-chair of the UN’s climate science panel Thomas Stocker on Monday. Opening a weeklong conference in Stockholm, where the IPCC report will be scrutinised by governments and policymakers, Stocker said that the world still had a choice in whether to avoid climate-related catastrophe. (RTCC)

Research: Economists are partly to blame for the vacillations that have stopped climate policy from moving forward quickly enough, said Lord Stern at the Royal Society on Tuesday. (RTCC)

Research: Europe’s largest solar energy research centre Fraunhofer ISE, Soitec, which manufactures the cells, and research organisations CEA-Leti and the Helmholtz Center Berlin measured a new world record efficiency of 44.7%. (RTCC)

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Geoengineering could be a way of slowing ice melt in the polar regions (Pic: Stig Nygaard/Flickr)

By Martin Lukacs, Suzanne Goldenberg and Adam Vaughan, the Guardian

Russia is pushing for next week’s landmark UN climate science report to include support for controversial technologies to geoengineer the planet’s climate, according to documents obtained by the Guardian.

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UK: Tory campaigners on climate change are embarking on a fightback against sceptics on the right of the party who have tried to “smother” debate in recent months, according to party sources. (Guardian)

Geoengineering: Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal, claims that launching mirrors into space, triggering algal blooms in the oceans and seeding clouds are just some of “Plan B” schemes which will have to be considered by world leaders unless carbon emissions can be cut in the next 20 years. (Telegraph)

US: Rare torrential downpours unleashed flash flooding in Colorado that killed at least three people, left one missing and forced thousands to flee to higher ground on Thursday as rising water toppled buildings and stranded motorists, officials said. (Reuters)

Ghana: The Cabinet has approved the National Climate Change Policy, Dr Joe Oteng Adjei, Minister for Environment, Science, Technology, and Innovation announced yesterday. (Ghana Government)

UK: All three leading political parties in the UK have failed to demonstrate strong environmental leadership, a new report claims. (RTCC)

Indonesia: The National Council on Climate Change predicts that half of Jakarta will be under water by 2030 due to global warming. (Asia One)

Serbia: The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (ERBD) has confirmed that it will no longer finance as 750MW lignite power plant project near Belgrade, Serbia. Confirming the decision, the bank said the project would “have to be assessed against the new energy strategy” if it were to become active again. (tcktcktck)

Peru: Peru’s cloud forests could face near extinction as their fragile ecology means they are ill equipped to deal with the changing climate. The forests, home to a third of Peru’s mammal, bird and frog species, are highly sensitive to changes in the temperature. (RTCC)

Energy: Global oil prices have climbed after the International Energy Agency raised its demand outlook for next year. The continuing geopolitical uncertainty over a diplomatic solution to Syria’s chemical weapons underpinned the market, analysts said. (WA Today)

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By Tim Radford

Here’s a new twist to the geoengineer’s dilemma: just change the climate locally – over the bit you want to protect – and leave the rest of the planet alone.

Dr. Alan Gadian, from Leeds University in the UK, wants to make the marine clouds brighter and in effect raise a parasol over the ocean’s most sensitive structures, the coral reefs.

Carbon dioxide dissolves in water to make a very weak carbonic acid and there’s a continuing argument about the eventual fate of the world’s coral reefs as the planet warms and the oceans become more acidic.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere look set to double. Can the corals adapt to changes in the pH of sea water as yet more carbonic acid pours from the skies and drains from the rivers?

And carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Can the coral reefs – with a well-documented tendency to “bleach” with rises in sea surface temperatures – survive a global average warming of anything from 2° to 6°C?

Since living coral reefs provide natural protection for tropical coasts, a tourist attraction, a fishery resource and above all the richest habitat in the entire oceans, their survival is vital.

Cloud brightening

Gadian and colleagues report in Atmospheric Research Letters that spraying fine seawater droplets on the clouds over the reefs to make them brighter could provide a level of protection for the reefs.

“Our research focuses on how Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) could quickly lower sea temperatures in targeted areas” says Gadian.

Gleaming cloud tops will reflect more sunlight back into space, and lower the temperatures over the ocean below.

Most geoengineering schemes are global in ambition, but to damp down warming over the whole planet would in effect be a deliberate form of manmade climate change, with unintended consequences that might create huge geopolitical problems.

The marine cloud brightening strategy has this advantage: it puts local assets under local control, without extending the impact over a whole ocean, or a whole continent.

Gadian has already proposed that Atlantic hurricanes could be damped down by the same technique. This time, he and his colleagues looked at simulations of warming and the brightening of marine stratocumulus clouds over the Caribbean, French Polynesia and the Great Barrier Reef, over a 20 year period.

Less bleaching

Without any attempt to spray the clouds, the impact of the projected bleaching was severe. Once the saltwater sprays were factored in, the sea surface temperatures dropped, and there was less risk of bleaching, the calculations suggested.

The research was entirely hypothetical, and does not address the additional global hazard that arrives with changes in sea water chemistry. The authors argue that there is no alternative to a global reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but marine cloud brightening could at least buy time and ensure survival for corals in sensitive areas.

The researchers propose that the technique could be tested on a small scale, over blocks of 100 square metres: too small to have any long term effects, and too limited to provoke much political objection. But the process would not be cheap.

“We estimate that MCB would have an annual cost of $400 million, however, political, social and ethical costs make a true figure difficult to estimate,” Gadian says.

“Whatever the final figure, it will be less expensive than the damage the destruction of coral could wreak on neighbouring countries, the local food chain and global biodiversity.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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If Bill Gates was so inclined, he could reduce the world’s temperature by one degree.

All it would takes is a fleet of high altitude planes, releasing millions of tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, deflecting the sun’s rays from planet earth.

The start-up costs of this technique, called Solar Radiation Management (SRM) are around $10 billion, with running costs of around $5 billion a year. That’s peanuts compared to current climate mitigation and adaptation estimates.

Solutions to global warming that do not require large cuts in emissions are likely to become increasingly popular as reports of soaring carbon dioxide levels, melting Arctic ice and high warming projections continue to make the news.

SRM is one of a flock of schemes that comes under the geoengineering umbrella. Others include cloud whitening, carbon capture and storage and ocean fertilization.

As interest in these grow, international efforts to agree on a global climate treaty grind on – with any deal unlikely to come into effect before 2020. By then some analysts say 1.5-2°C of warming may already be ‘locked into the system’.

The rate of melt in the Arctic could be slowed by spraying aerosol particles into the stratosphere – reducing the sun’s power (Pic: NASA Goddard)

In January the World Economic Forum listed the hijacking of the global climate by ‘rogue geoengineering’ as one of the major risks in 2013.

Microsoft founder Gates, who has funded research into geoengineering, is unlikely to pay for a small airforce to change the world’s weather. Nor has he indicated he has any intention of doing so.

But it is instructive to learn that the planet’s climate could be so dramatically altered by one very rich person or a few determined countries, and scientists who are studying these techniques warn they come with profound risks.

“We have never tried any large scale weather or climate manipulation, so I don’t know we know how well it works,” Matt Watson, who runs the Spice project at Bristol University, told RTCC.

“My position is that I am terrified about the loss of Arctic sea ice, it’s a profound and hugely visual signal of our failure to act as stewards of the planet, but at the same time I don’t want to be pumping 5-10 million tonnes of sulphuric acid into the stratosphere, because I have no idea what it would do.”

Volcanic evidence

The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines illustrates the link between temperature and particles in the stratosphere.

That event caused the world to experience a 0.5°C temperature drop for two years (it later returned to previous levels), although Watson says it’s only now, 20 years on, that the true effects are being understood.

At the same time, we are getting a better idea of what some radical schemes could achieve.

A paper by Jim Haywood from Exeter University published in the journal Nature Climate Change indicated attempts to release sulphate particles about the Equator over a 50 -year period could also dramatically affect rainfall patterns in Africa.

“If you inject just into one hemisphere that’s where you start to have hemispherical imbalance in the energy budget, and that’s what the paper was looking at,” he told RTCC.

“As soon as you get that, you start to move the ITCZ (Intertropical Convergence Zone) which carries an awful lot of the precipitation.

“So if you cooled down the northern hemisphere what you will do is move the ITCZ to the south – you’ll move monsoon circulation south. Alternatively if you did it in the southern hemisphere you could move it north.”

Connected ecosystems

Haywood’s research, based on the Met Office’s HADGEM2 modelling software illustrates how complex the earth’s systems are.

Particles injected into the northern hemisphere would cause drought in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Chad. Move that into the south and while the Sahel would flourish, north-eastern Brazil would suffer.

Haywood warns that another side-effect of greening the Sahel would be to increase Atlantic hurricane frequency by about 20% – that’s 20% more Hurricane Katrina’s hitting the US East Coast.

“With geoengineering there is no magic bullet. You will improve conditions in one part of the planet, but they will deteriorate in others,” he said. “There are winners and losers. Then you get into the whole moral and ethical deliberation – who chooses?”

Moral considerations

It is currently unclear who would have a final say on a global geoengineering effort: “no body exists that will take ownership of the problem, and there are no rules and regulations,” said Watson.

A Royal Society report in 2009 stressed that geoengineering was no alternative to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but recommended research continue in the event of a climate emergency.

The Oxford Principles are often cited as guidelines for deployment – these focus on transparency, independent governance and public participation in decision-making. And the hostile use of ‘environmental modification techniques’ is banned under the ENMOD Convention agreed at the UN General Assembly in 1976.

Last October the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) agreed that small-scale experiments in a “controlled setting” could take place, but urged caution, insisting that they should not detract from climate mitigation efforts.

A UK Government statement released in February admitted current regulations were “inadequate”, committing to work with the CBD to review regulatory instruments. It did support further “responsible” research, stressing that decision “does not imply an intention to deploy geo-engineering”.

Catch-22

The trouble for scientists is that unless they can conduct larger experiments in the real world, it will be hard to work out the potential and the consequences of various techniques.

The unauthorised dumping of 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific by an American businessman in 2012 is a worst-case example, but there is an evident need for theories to be put to the test.

Limited SRM experiments have taken place, along with the ‘real life’ evidence volcanic eruptions provide. But given a full deployment would likely affect the entire planet, there is currently a glaring gap in our knowledge.

“It’s difficult to imagine any scheme that affects the atmosphere that wouldn’t have an effect on the entire atmosphere, but there are scales,” says Watson.

“So on one extreme we have sulphuric acid and aerosols, and if you inject that near the equator you’re going to cover pretty much every part of the stratosphere in the atmosphere at some point.

“Conventional wisdom goes that the stuff that draws down, called Carbon Reduction Methods (CDR) tend to be expensive, slow and you have a massive problem with storage, but relatively safe.

“SRM tends to be large scale. A sledgehammer to crack a nut, but really cheap. And it depends whether you think cheap is good – I happen to think it isn’t.”

Piers Forster, Professor of Physical Climate Change at Leeds University, believes deployment timescales for technologies are “optimistic”, and says larger trials are inevitable if governments are serious about exploring their potential.

“I think what is really difficult to do is to try and evaluate the impacts, and that is definitely the impact on the global mean temperature, and other things like precipitation,” he said. “I just think that to try and get a significant response you have to do a big experiment. You can’t get away without one.

“This is where we become quite dependent on our computer simulations, and you have to have a lot of confidence in these simulations if you are going to use them to begin geoengineering, is what I would say. You perhaps have to have more confidence in them than you do for mitigation experiments.”

Climate panacea

Various techniques are expected to be explored in the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5^th Assessment Report, due out later this year.

It is expected to offer a view on the effectiveness, feasibility and scalability of geoengineering, but is unlikely to back any particular method as a silver bullet in the battle to address climate change.

At best, many view the various technologies  as a ‘sticking plaster’, given they do not address the underlying causes of global warming.

“If you are to consider any geoengineering it has got to be part of a larger strategy,” says Haywood.

“You would be crazy to say ‘we’ll just geoengineer’, you’d be crazy to say ‘let’s just adapt’. You need mitigation, and potentially geoengineering – and different types. Solar radiation management or CO2 capture. I don’t think there’s a simple answer.”

Forster agrees, suggesting it could be decades before man’s ability to alter the world’s thermostat either by sucking out carbon or by blocking out the sun becomes a reality.

“Perhaps it could still be done by an individual country – but I do think that people are very optimistic of how much of a technological development you have to take,” he says.

“I also think it’s quite difficult to get stuff up to the altitude to really have a big effect, I do still think with that technology there’s a lot of stuff to do.

“There is one experiment we’re currently undertaking – we’re trying to look at rescuing Arctic Ice by simulating aeroplanes flying from Spitzbergen in Norway – and dump out a lot of Sulphur Dioxide, and we’re trying to look at that as a very short term protection against the loss of Arctic Ice.

“Perhaps you could do something relatively short term like that but I do still think that to introduce a big transformation it will take a big tech development.”

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Less than three weeks after two US researchers called for global agreement on the governance of geo-engineering research, British meteorologists have provided a case study in potential geo-engineering disaster.

Jim Haywood from the Met Office Hadley Centre and colleagues report in Nature Climate Change that fine particles concentrated in the stratosphere could precipitate calamitous drought in the Sahel region of Africa.

The team analysed historical observations from 1900 to 2010 and found that substantial volcanic eruptions in the Northern hemisphere – substantial enough to lift huge clouds of aerosols into the upper atmosphere – preceded three of the four driest summers in the region.

Furious volcanic blasts have been historically associated with climate change: an eruption of Mt Tambora in what is now Indonesia in 1815 was followed by Europe’s notorious “year without a summer” in 1816, along with widespread harvest failure, famine and outbreaks of disease.

The eruption of Mt Pinatubo in 1991 was followed by what climate scientists were later to call “the Pinatubo effect” – noticeable global cooling in the following years.

Volcano eruptions offer an idea of how attempts to engineer the atmosphere could work (Pic: Turtle Bay Apartments/Flickr)

But what concerns Professor Haywood and others is not the random nature of volcanic eruption – difficult to predict and impossible to prevent – but the possibility of deliberate injection of aerosols into the stratosphere to moderate global warming.

The Sahel is the name given to a 1,000-kilometre band of savannah in Africa south of the Sahara, stretching from Mauretania in the west to Eritrea on the Red Sea coast.

The four driest periods in this relatively arid region – these periods bear the deadpan scientific label of negative Sahelian precipitation anomalies – were in 1913, 1972, 1983 and 1984. Three of these dry spells followed an eruption of Katmai in Alaska in 1912 and of El Chichon in Mexico in 1982.

“…a global governance agreement for geo-engineering is essential before any practical geo-engineering system is deployed…”

The extended drought between 1970 and 1990 in the Sahel region claimed 250,000 lives and created 10 million refugees: it was one of the world’s biggest humanitarian disasters.

All kinds of causes were evoked, including overgrazing, natural variability and industrial exhausts, but Professor Haywood and his colleagues think that volcanic eruptions also strongly influence the sea temperatures in the Atlantic, which are associated with Sahelian drought.

Uncertain conclusions

Such associations are difficult to prove conclusively. They concede in their paper that “correlation does not prove causality and the sparsity of significant hemispherically asymmetric volcanic eruptions in the recent historical record hampers definitive attribution.”

In other words, the jury is still out.

They simulated the impact of continued global warming into the future and found that – provided there was no geoengineering – only 11 of the 50 years between 2020 and 2070 would have negative Sahelian precipitation anomalies.

Deliberate geoengineering, however, by loading aerosols into the northern hemisphere stratosphere would cause Sahelian drought.

This could possibly be countered by injecting particles into the southern hemisphere stratosphere, which might have the effect of increasing rainfall in the Sahel countries. But any good there might be countered by a consequent failure of the rains in north-east Brazil.

“Clearly, the juxtaposition of impacts leads us to believe that a global governance agreement for geo-engineering is essential before any practical geo-engineering system is deployed, and much further research is needed,” they conclude.

This story was produced by the Climate News Network

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The world may need to turn to geoengineering in order to tackle climate change effectively, scientists think – and that would raise a whole lot of tricky questions.

Geoengineering of the climate is fraught with all manner of technical, ethical and governance issues but needs to be taken into consideration if targets for limiting global temperature increases are going to be met.

Steve Rayner, James Martin Professor of Science and Civilisation at Oxford University, UK, says that while climate geoengineeering is at a “very early, imaginary stage” at present, it should neither be lauded as the potential saviour of humanity nor dismissed as completely fanciful.

Climate geoengineering is defined as the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment in order to counteract anthropogenic climate change. In an Oxford lecture Professor Rayner said various ideas were being put forward – each with its own set of challenges and potential problems.

Solar radiation management includes putting giant mirrors into space in order to deflect sunlight. This has considerable disadvantages – not least the vast cost and enormous technical difficulty of lifting such devices up into orbit.

Another scheme involves sulphate particulate injection into the stratosphere: backers of this idea say it is the most cost-efficient method and would, like the impact of an exploding volcano, produce cooling most rapidly.

Who decides?

Other scenarios include machines to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, and schemes to enrich tracts of the world’s seas with iron in order to enhance their role as a carbon sink.

“Generally these ideas are seen as a complement to and not a substitute for adaptation and mitigation”, says Rayner. “And the challenges are enormous.

“For example, to put the sulphate injection idea into action would mean we would have to create an enterprise something on the scale of the global cement industry.”

Issues of governance and ethics are even more challenging than the technical aspects of climate geoengineering. There is the question of what sort of consent would be needed to do something on a global scale – a global treaty would likely be needed.

Then there is the issue of what would happen if something went wrong with a project – and who would pay to put it right? Perhaps referenda would be needed to ensure public approval and participation in such schemes.

“The general consensus is that on the present trajectory of emissions it’s not possible to meet targets limiting global temperature rises.”

“Is there something fundamentally unethical about interfering with nature?” asked Rayner. Many had already concluded that climate geoengineering was dangerous – crazy and incompatible with democracy, he said.

Professor Rayner is among a team of scientists and academics who have drawn up a set of guiding principles for climate geoengineering. Such principles include full disclosure, independent assessment of the impacts of such projects, and public participation at each stage of decision-making.

“Unlike the case of the pharmaceutical industry, the negatives as well as the positives at each stage of research must be published,” said Rayner.

He said that within the scientific and engineering community he had generally found an overwhelming reticence on climate geoengineering, and even on the idea of doing any research into it.

“Some would prefer not to talk about climate geoengineering at all,” Rayner told the Climate News Network. “But the general consensus is that on the present trajectory of emissions it’s not possible to meet targets limiting global temperature rises.

“We do need research and investigation,” he said. “It all needs careful governance – transboundary issues need particularly careful attention. Above all, hubristic claims should be avoided – the watchword is caution.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

Video: Carbon Engineering’s plan to suck CO2 from the air

The post Geoengineering could create more questions than answers appeared first on Climate Home News.

Marine scientists in Germany have calculated the effectiveness of “fertilising” the oceans with minerals to change their chemistry and absorb more of the atmospheric carbon dioxide they receive and thus reduce the risk of further global warming.

The technique would work. But it would also involve the massive additional use of energy on a global scale and in the course of doing so release further quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

And in the end, it could make only a small difference to overall emissions.

Almost since climate change was first identified as a looming challenge, scientists have been considered technological ways of countering the worst impacts.

Their advice is that the most effective answer is to limit emissions in the first place.

In July 2012 an American businessman dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean as part of a geoengineering scheme off the west coast of Canada

But they have also proposed global “sunshades” created by the release of sulphate aerosols into the upper atmosphere; spraying fine mists of seawater high into the air to intensify the reflective surfaces of clouds; and seeding the oceans with minerals to alter their capacity to serve as a natural “sink” for the extra carbon dioxide.

Modest results

Around 70% of the planet is blue water: it is home to teeming algal life that harnesses sunlight to exploit carbon dioxide for growth. But this growth is limited by the availability of other nutrients – among them iron.

Peter Köhler and colleagues from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven considered the advantages of spreading finely crushed olivine rock – a common magnesium-iron silicate – in the seas.

They report in Environmental Research Letters that three billion tonnes of this marine manure spread every year could at best compensate for only about nine per cent of present-day discharges of carbon dioxide from factory chimneys, power plants, vehicle exhausts and agricultural systems.

The olivine would have to be crushed into tiny particles with a diameter measured at around a millionth of a metre, to sink very slowly and dissolve at levels where it could be most effective.

No simple answer

Rainwater dissolves carbon dioxide to become a weak carbonic acid, and the oceans have been gradually growing more acidic as greenhouse gas emissions rise. So the delivery of minerals would make the oceans more alkaline, and thus able to take up even more carbon dioxide.

As a bonus, the same minerals would also encourage plant growth.

This geoengineering solution is in a sense the extension of a natural one – rivers deliver fine particles of rock to the ocean in huge quantities every year – but the researchers warn that it would require a rock mining industry as big as the global coal mining industry.

Huge amounts of energy would also be needed to crush the rock to the finest dust, and an armada of 100 large ships would need to go in and out of ports 32 times a year each to ferry just one billion tonnes – one Gigatonne (Gt) – of olivine to the right stretches of sea.

It would take 40 gigatonnes a year to balance the present-day emissions of carbon dioxide.

“Taking all our conclusions together – mainly the energy costs of the processing line and the projected potential impact on marine biology – we assess the approach as rather inefficient,” said Dr Köhler. “It is certainly not a simple solution against the global warming problem.”

RTCC VIDEO: Could giant sunshades hovering above the earth help cool the planet?

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

The post Climate geoengineering: Is crushed rock the answer? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Guidelines on the deployment of geoengineering have been agreed at the UN biodiversity summit in Hyderabad following intense negotiations.

Countries agreed on a text that specifies what geoengineering means, outlines when it should be used, acknowledges its potential impacts on biodiversity and the potential cross-border consequences of its use.

The document stresses the priority of addressing climate change through mitigation measures, such as increasing natural carbon sinks, and calls on all experiments to take into account international laws and conventions, including the UNFCCC, the UN’s climate change convention.

It also reaffirms the decisions taken at COP10 in Nagoya that called for scientific evidence for the need of geoengineering before any experiments take place.

Geoengineering is designed to tackle the effects of climate change by either removing CO2 from the air – by pulling gas from the atmosphere or increasing absorption in the sea – or limiting the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface.

Large scale projects are still largely in the concept phase but given the deadlocked state of mitigation efforts, many think geoengineering will be essential for the world to avoid dangerous climate change.

The document aims to address the potential impacts to biodiversity from large scale geoengineering projects aimed at mitigating climate change (Source: CBD/Flickr)

This agreement  will come as unwanted to news to the companies and countries wanting to invest in these technologies as climate change predictions worsen. This year there have been two major efforts to test methods of sucking CO2 from the atmosphere.

In May a UK-backed project that planned to inject 150 litres of water into the atmosphere to create a cooling effect was cancelled at the last minute over concerns that certain researchers had a conflict of interest.

But in July, the largest experiment to date took place off the west coast of Canada when 100 tonnes of iron sulphate was dumped into the ocean. Iron in the sea can create a ‘bloom’ of plankton that absorbs carbon dioxide and then sinks to the ocean bed – storing the carbon there.

Scientists have, however, raised concerns that it can harm ecosystems, produce lifeless waters and worsen ocean acidification. It was also revealed earlier this week that the Canadian government may have known of the plans before they went ahead.

The test was criticised by the international community who said the experiments breached moratoriums of two UN conventions, one under the CBD – set out in the Nagoya outcome – and the other in the 1972 London Convention that prohibits the for-profit dumping of iron into the sea.

Test ban

Ahead of the conference, groups including Bolivia, the Philippines and African nations, as well as indigenous peoples groups called for an enforceable test ban on geoengineering experiments.

However, the paragraph calling on parties to ensure all tests of geoengineering technologies take place in “controlled laboratory conditions” was removed from the text, despite protests from countries including Peru and Argentina.

Countries traded giving up the paragraph with text that ‘reaffirms’ – over a weaker ‘recalls’ – decisions agreed in Nagoya:

“No climate-related geo-engineering activities that may affect biodiversity take place, until there is an adequate scientific basis on which to justify such…with the exception of small scale scientific research studies that would be conducted in a controlled setting.”

Under a separate paragraph the parties also noted that a ‘precautionary approach as well as international customary law’ should be considered when geoengineering plans are being made, as well as other conventions work in this area, including the London Convention.

Geoengineering?

There was also some discussion between parties about what constitutes geoengineering. The outcome text called parties to be aware of all existing definitions, and the ongoing work in this area.

It also lists several broad descriptions of such methods including reducing solar insolation, carbon sequestration from the atmosphere and large-scale manipulation of the global environment.

The sub-point on the ‘deliberate intervention in the planetary environment of nature’ caused some concerns between countries.

Brazil warned that this text could be interpreted to include projects such as REDD+ or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), which could also be considered as ‘deliberate interventions’.

The document will now be absorbed into the final outcome document to be approved on the last day of the conference tomorrow.

The post UN agreement urges caution over geoengineering tests appeared first on Climate Home News.

– The day’s top climate change stories as chosen by RTCC
– Tweet @RTCCnewswire and use #RTCCLive hashtag
– Updates from our team at the UN Convention in Biological Diversity summit in Hyderabad
– Send your thoughts to jp@rtcc.org
– Updated from 0830-1700 BST (GMT+1)

Thursday 18 October

Last updated: 1710

CBD COP11 in Hyderabad: Negotiators at the biodiversity talks in Hyderabad have agreed on a set of restrictions for geoengineering experiments. Tests will not be limited to the laboratory as had been proposed previously, however. The document encourages climate action through emissions reductions and the promotion of natural sinks rather than through “deliberate intervention in the planetary environment of nature”.

Qatar: Organisers of the upcoming UNFCCC climate talks in Doha recently announced that the Gulf state would be aiming to produce 20% of its growing electricity demands from renewable sources. Qatar Solar Technologies (QSTec) has backed the pledge and will produce its own polysilicon, the key ingredient to solar panels, in its own manufacturing facility on the peninsula. (Gulf Times)

EU: The EU has mapped out its emissions reduction plan up till 2020 for those sectors not covered by its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). Targets for member states up till 2020 have been set out covering most forms of transport, waste, agriculture and buildings. (Platts)

CBD COP11 in Hyderabad: More interesting material from Achim Steiner, the head of UNEP. He has said that developing nations are putting more money on the table to tackle environmental issues than more developed economies.

“The contribution of developing nations to conserve bio-diversity is significant. Developed nations cannot argue that they are putting more money on the table,” said Steiner. (Khaleej Times)

EU: The rise in occurrences of a number of exotic diseases not previously common in Europe is being attributed to climate change. The Usutu, Dengue and Chikugunya viruses have all been found in the EU recently thanks to the northward expansion of mosquito breeding grounds. (Public Service Europe)

CBD COP11 in Hyderabad: The head of UNEP, Achim Steiner, has said dismissed claims that talks on finance have stalled. Steiner told journalists that it was the purpose of the COP to reconcile difficult positions.

“What is happening right now is rational, logical and chronologically correct – I would say this COP is at work and that is exactly what it should be doing,” he said.

EU: The EU published its new regulation for biofuels with earlier, less sustainable forms of the technology set to become ineligible for EU support.

“Climate-wise, some of the biofuels [currently receiving EU subsidies] are as bad as, or even worse than the fossil fuels that they replace,” said EU Climate Action Commissioner Connie Hedegaard. (EurActiv)

China: A Chinese company suing President Barack Obama after its US-based wind farm was blocked on security grounds, has said it will takes its resultant legal action all the way. Ralls Corp’s project was vetoed by the President owing to its proximity to a military base and was the first business transaction blocked by the Whitehouse on security grounds since the cold war. (Reuters)

UK: The British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change has reiterated that the country’s impending overhaul of its energy infrastructure will be done so in-line with its legally binding climate change targets. Ed Davey also dismissed claims of “a conspiracy to develop a secret nuclear energy subsidy”. The coalition government pledged not to subsidise nuclear power but some say its guaranteed prices for power suppliers amount to just that.

South Korea: The board of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) is holding its second meeting in South Korea this week. With procedural matters dominating the first meeting in August, the flagship international climate fund will turn its attention toward finding a host city. Namibia, Poland, Switzerland, Germany, Mexico and South Korea are in the running.

The post EU ditches subsidies for unsustainable biofuel technologies appeared first on Climate Home News.

RTCC in Hyderabad 

– Live coverage from CBD COP11
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– Email ts@rtcc.org or message @rtcc_tierney

PM Singh’s visit: The local papers are filled this morning with news of the Prime Minister’s visit to COP11 yesterday. He addressed the main plenary where he reaffirmed India’s commitment to the Nagoya Protocol which he said the Indian government had recently ratified. He also pledged $50 million for biodiversity here in India over the next two year’s while the country holds the COP Presidency.

Fire at the HICC: My personal favourite of the PM Singh stories this morning is that a small fire broke out near the spot where the Prime Minister was set to make his speech. It is said to have been caused by a short circuit and interrupted the meeting of the working group taking place at the time. It was small enough not to be noticed by any attendee outside of the hall though and was quickly extinguished.

Banned from the proceedings: There are also a couple of reports of those who were banned from the proceedings. Firstly, not all journalists were given access to the main hall, with rumours that those not emitted entry were from publications who openly sympathise with the Telangana cause. Three Greenpeace activists wearing tiger suits were also refused entry. They staged a small protest outside, where lots of pictures were taken of them and their banners – possibly their aim in the first place.

Power shortages: The Central Power Distribution Company Limited in Hyderabad has warned the power situation is going from bad to worse, as the gap between demand and supply widens. They say the power crisis could continue till May 2013.

REDD+:  It was REDD+ Day at the Rio Conventions Pavilion here in Hyderabad yesterday. The main event was the launch of the Little Forest Finance Book which offers different options to scale-up forest financing. Speakers at the event discussed the importance of forest financing to achieving the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and called for the mobilisation of the private sector to provide sustainable forest funding.

Geoengineering: The Contact group on geoengineering met again yesterday and continued to discuss how to ensure geoengineering techniques take place in controlled laboratory conditions, within national jurisdiction and in accordance with international law – without having negative impacts outside a country’s own exclusive economic zone.

Video of the day: Andrew Mitchell, Executive Director of the Global Canopy Programme talks about the Little Forest Finance Book and how it is aims to make complicated topics understandable…

Andrew Mitchell from Responding to Climate Change on Vimeo.

The post Hyderabad biodiversity talks: day 9 diary appeared first on Climate Home News.

A geoengineering technique referred to as “marine cloud-brightening” (MCB) could cancel out the effects of global warming in a world with double the CO2 concentration of the pre-industrial world, according to a new study.

The MCB method could now be tested in the real world after scientists published a proposal for an experiment to test the long-held theory.

An artist's impression of an unmanned "albedo yacht". (Credit: John MacNeill)

The process involves spraying a jet of small sea water particles into the atmosphere, which encourages the development of clouds. The additional cloud cover then reflects a greater proportion of the sun’s energy back into space creating a cooling effect at the earth’s surface.

The idea is not an especially new one with designs of so-called “albedo yachts”, named after the scientific principle of the earth’s varying absorption and reflectivity of the sun’s energy – appearing several years ago.

The latest paper, published in the journal of the Royal Society, pushes the prospect of a real world experiment closer however.

It gives more details on optimum article size, potential test sites off the coast of Peru, California and Namibia and predicts the scale of the methods effects.

Climate models including the addition of MCB suggest that the practice could “balance” global warming up until a point whereby atmospheric CO2 levels are double that of the pre-industrial era at around 560 ppm.

The current concentration is around 394 ppm with a level of 350 ppm thought to be necessary to prevent catastrophic warming beyond 2°C.

Critics of geoengineering say that further human-induced changes to our climate system, regardless of good intentions, are unwelcome and could lead to alterations that we cannot predict.

The authors of the research seek to address these concerns stating that before the scheme is implemented it must be determined that “the undesirable climatic responses to geoengineering perturbations are minimal; certainly, they should be no worse than those associated with changes induced in the climate system from the inadvertent human activity that geoengineering is aiming to mitigate.”

VIDEO: How cloud  seeding works, from the BBC’s ‘Five Ways to Save the World‘

Related stories:

China’s 20 top technologies to combat climate change

Could climate change answer lie 20,000 leagues under the sea?

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– The day’s top climate change stories as chosen by RTCC
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– Updated from 0900-1700 BST (GMT+1)

Latest news – Monday 13 August

1715 A study in Australia has estimated the related health costs of coal power at A$2.6 billion. The report by Climate and Health Alliance and the Climate Institute says tackling climate change can reduce hospital admissions, boost life expectancy and improve productivity by cutting sick days.

1630 Al Gore has knocked both US Presidential candidates for their silence on climate change issues.

1600 Are we about to see the rise of the radical protester and just how much inspiration have they taken from the environmental movement?

1430 Ex-Shell chairman Lord Ron Oxburgh has said that the world is going backwards on carbon cutting. He said the lack of political will had resulted in a dangerous delay in emission reductions.

1330 Nobody likes a parasite but it appears parasites like climate change. Researchers have found that a number of virulent free-loaders, including tapeworms, will become better able to infect their hosts as climate variability increases.

1215 Brazil struggles with the black carbon legacy of decades of slash and burn in the Amazon. Remnants of charred vegetation are now leaching into the marine ecosystem.

1030 Climate aid represents less than 2% of all aid in Malawi according to new figures. A study by the Strauss Center of 700 projects in Malawi, found that only 1-2% were “climate-coded”.

0910 New data from an ice monitoring satellite suggests that the rate of sea ice loss from the Arctic is 50% greater than previously thought. Scientists believe the Arctic could be free of sea ice in the summer within a few years.

0835 Mitt Romney has named his presidential running mate. Paul Ryan was announced on Saturday morning. The Grist has provided a run down of the proposed Ryan Budget, which includes $40bn in tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry. A glance at his voting record in congress also has some worrying signs for environmentalists.

0830 The curtain has fallen on the Olympic Games here in London. The days of glittering gold are over for now but one new climate study continues the bling theme. Diamond particles could be an effective geoengineering aerosol according to the report. Sulphur has been mooted most frequently of late however concerns over its effect on the ozone layer have led scientists to look at alternatives. Thankfully,  titanium dioxide can have a similar result for rather a lot less cost.

Top tweet

Paul Ryan voted to prevent USDA from preparing for climate change. How’s that look now? thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/0…

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) August 11, 2012

Reading list

Ed King looks at what is holding Russia back at the UN climate negotiations…

Great blog from PwC about what the recession has done for climate change and sustainability.

Image of the day

Great shot from the China Daily of an official removing a manhole cover to relieve a flooded street. The paper spoke to a number of experts who have attributed increasing rainfall with climate change.

(Copyright: China Daily, Photographer: Yang Duoduo)

The post Climate Live: Are diamonds the new weapon of choice for geoengineering? Romney’s running mate’s environmental record unveiled appeared first on Climate Home News.

China has identified 20 technologies that it will focus on to limit the effect of climate change and help it adapt to resulting impacts.

The strategy has been highlighted by the NGO The Climate Group and was unveiled last month as part of the country’s 12th Five-year plan.

Shanghai and China's other megacities are set for an energy efficiency drive. (Source: Flickr/trioptikmal)

A recent report showed that contrary to previous estimates, per capita emissions in China are now approaching the same level as in the EU. The technologies will be key to delivering on China’s aim to reduce its energy intensity by 16%, to cut its carbon intensity by 17% and to source 11.4% of its energy from non-fossil fuel sources.

Some environmentalists may not be pleased to see shale gas, carbon capture and storage and geoengineering on the list of mitigation technologies. These are viewed by some at best as a distraction to low-carbon energy generation and at worst dangerous follies.

A triple pronged energy efficiency strategy is likely to be more popular however.

The “Specially Designated National Plan on Science and Technology Development in Tackling Climate Change” demonstrates the country’s commitment to clean technology and is consistent with warnings that other nations could swiftly fall behind if they don’t keep up.

Speaking at the UN climate negotiations in Durban last year Christiana Figueres, the UN’s climate change chief said: “It’s concerning and sad that the US has lost leadership, not just politically but perhaps more importantly for them, in their economy.

“The fact they are losing out on the green economy, losing out on investments in clean energy, losing out on the possibility of being a large exporter of clean energy and technology. It’s something that’s very difficult to understand and one wonders when they are going to wake up to that,” added Figueres.

Collaboration versus competition

Despite the competitive nature of developing clean technology sector, Changhua Wu, Greater China Director at The Climate Group, believes the scale of the challenge means no single country will go it alone.

“Tackling climate change is a game of we-are-all-in-it-together,” she said. “A global-level cooperation will provide the right platform for shared innovation and know-how to accelerate the technology R&D, the application of those technologies, as well as the scale up of the applicable and feasible solutions to address the common challenge we all face today.”

John Ashton, former Special Representative on Climate Change for the UK Foreign Secretary previously told RTCC that there was a role for China to play in kick-starting the development of many of these technologies due to the scale it is able to achieve.

Adam Matthews, Secretary General of Globe International, which looks to build a critical mass of legislators to agree and advance effective environmental policies, backs the idea of cooperation. He warns however that there is still much work to be done before this collaboration can be done effectively.

“There is a long way to go before China has a fully-fledged carbon market, or one that could be linked to the EU. But the potential is clear,” he said. “Such co-operation could build low carbon industries in both regions and align the EU to the world’s future largest economy, improve political ties and strengthen business links.”

The Ten Mitigation Technologies

-High efficiency super-critical power generation technology

-Holistic coal gasification-based integrated combustion-cycle technology

-Non-conventional natural gas exploration and development technology

-Large-scale renewable energy power generation, storage and grid connection technology

-New energy automobile technology and low carbon fuel substitute technology

-City energy supply and end-use energy efficiency and emission reduction technology

-Building energy saving technology

-Energy saving and scale-up technology of waste energy and waste heat in the production process of iron and steel, metallurgical, chemical and building material industries

-Carbon sink technology in agriculture, forestry, husbandry and wetland

-Carbon capture and storage technology

The Ten Adaptation Technologies:

-Forecast and pre-warning technology of extreme weather events

-Drought-ridden region water resource exploration and high-efficiency water utilization, and optimized allocation technology

-Drought-resistant and high-temperature-resistant plant species selection and cultivation, and pest-prevention and control technology

-Typical climate-sensitive ecosystem protection and remediation technology

-Climate change impact and risk assessment technology

-Human health integrated adaptation technology

-Typical coastal land adaptation technology

-City lifeline engineering safety guarantee technology in response to extreme weather events

-Standards and regulation amendment of some key sectors in adaptation to climate change

-Human-controlled weather manipulation technology

The post China’s 20 top technologies to combat climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.

– The day’s top climate change stories as chosen by RTCC
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– Updated from 0900 BST (GMT+1) Last updated 1700

Latest news

The UK wind energy sector has received a much needed boost with the announcement that Dong Energy has purchased 300 Siemens turbines. The purchases could produce just less than 2% of the UK’s power needs.

The carbon price has collapsed in Europe to less than €3. The latest drop is off the back of news that details of an impending tweak to the system have been delayed.

British firm Good Energy is pushing ahead with plans to build a 225 acre solar farm. It would be the largest in the UK.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has praised China’s work on sustainable development during a visit to Beijing. “China has taken up this challenge as energetically as any other country in the world. It is already a leader in wind power,” said Ban. “It is the world’s largest solar manufacturer. China is doing this through far-sighted use of incentives, subsidies, and regulations – through smart policy-making.”

The EU Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger has said the bloc is putting itself at a competitive disadvantage because of its failure to “take risks” with oil and gas drilling projects. He said that while they are happy to drill in the Gulf of Mexico and exploit tar sands for their own use, the is left with an oil import bill and high taxation.

A technique that adds iron to the ocean to trigger a plankton bloom in order to store more carbon in the seas has been given a seal of approval by a new study. The research has shown the practice could work, with the dead plankton sinking into deep water storage for centuries.

‘Belief’ in climate change in the US has risen by 70% as a result of the recent heatwave. Despite those results, a separate study found that only 1 in 5 of so-called ‘Generation X‘ adults feel the same way.

Denmark has announced plans meet half the country’s electricity needs with wind power by 2020.

Question of the day

What will it take to make an electric Nissan Leaf as cheap as a Volkswagen Golf?

Picture of the day

A chunk of the Petermann Glacier in Greenland has broken off, here’s NASA’s best shot of the difference. The lost ice area is twice the size of Manhattan Island.

Top tweets 

Noah’s Ark would never make it through a GOP vote. A large scale transportation project to protect wildlife, based on climate change.

— Matthew Wheeler (@Matt_Wheel) July 19, 2012

You do realise, if we sorted the EU carbon price we would not need these endless, debilitating rows over subsidies… businessgreen.com/bg/news/219284…

— James Murray (@James_BG) July 19, 2012

The post Climate Live: EU commissioner says bloc should “take more risks” in pursuit of oil and gas appeared first on Climate Home News.