Does geoengineering have to continue for thousands of years?

Cloud whitening, one geoengineering strategy

Chris Reynolds at Dosbat expresses the basic pro-science critique of geoengineering:

With the seriousness of the situation regards AGW becoming more clear, talk of geo-engineering has increased. I think that rather than try to stem population increase, examine our economic system and expectations, and reduce CO2 emissions, this will be seen as a viable option in the years to come.

However geo-engineering will, I am confident, be used as an excuse to carry on emitting CO2 and avoiding dealing with the fundamental flaw in our civilisation; exponential growth in a finite world. It is dangerous and is a recipe for disaster.

He may be absolutely correct on all points; the only parts I take issue with are the bolded ones (and the finite growth thing, a bit.)

The first point, the "rather than," is one we have to confront on a regular basis with the adapt-nik ("Don't mitigate -- adapt!) subspecies of lukewarmer. To wit: we can (and must) do more than one thing at a time. The resources required to investigate and prepare for the possibility that we may need to geoengineer are miniscule relative to mitigation, adaptation, or even population control.

If we were only going to do one thing, it sure as hell wouldn't be geoengineering. But we're going to have to do more than one thing.

The second point, that geoengineering may be used as an excuse to defer action, is a serious concern. Geoengineering would only work as a temporary bridge to allow intensive mitigation to bear fruit. But would it, actually, become an excuse for inaction?

This is a different, and slightly more upbeat, counterargument compared to the related riposte: "We don't need an excuse for inaction; we're excusing it fine as it is." In that fatalistic outlook, geoengineering becomes like a clean needle program for heroin addicts: we wish we could fix the underlying issue; we can't; we're going for damage control.

I am not such a fatalist; and I do not necessarily think that the availability of geoengineering will make mitigation less attractive. Consider, for example, how the adapt-vs-mitigate debate has unfolded (or failed to unfold) after Hurricane Sandy. Experts looking at the flood surge have suggested we could have prevented a large portion of the roughly $50 billion damages using $10-$15 billion dollars in floodgates. So my question is: Where are the adaptniks screaming for these new defenses?

I was able to find a tepid endorsement from Bjorn Lomborg which radically lowballed the cost of said adaptation.

Much of the risk could be managed by erecting seawalls, building storm doors for the Subway, and simple fixes like porous pavements – all at a cost of around $100 million a year.

If you follow the link, it leads to an article from Popular Science which includes this:

If New York—part of the Northeast megaregion—suffers a direct hit, workers will spend weeks pumping a billion gallons of brackish water out of its subway and train tunnels. The salt will corrode power lines, transformers and thousands of brakes and switches that control the trains. Some subsystems could take a year or more to restore.

To avoid such a scenario, New York state recommends the city invest well over $100 million a year in storm protections. City planners are already experimenting with dozens of low-tech fixes, says Adam Freed, deputy director of the Mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability.

 Note "well over $100 million" not "around $100 million." And while the original source describes these "dozens of low-tech fixes" as merely able to mitigate the nightmare scenario, in Lomborg's retelling they eliminate "much of the risk."

Lomborg also repeats the fallacy that the risks of a damage storm surge have nothing to do with climate change -- even though sea level rise, by definition, makes storm surges more destructive.

And that tepid, dishonest, weasel-worthy endorsement was really about all we heard from the "adapt, don't mitigate" crowd after Sandy. Judith Curry had a guest poster make the pitch for more weather satellites. Lucia Liljegren, not a word. So why not pitch adaptation in this brave new world?

My theory is, actual real-world adaptation makes the problem of global warming too real. It's one thing when "adaption" is an abstract concept describing something we may do in the future. But when it actually comes down to spending tens of billions of dollars on flood defenses, planned retreat from parts of the coastline, restoring wetlands, lowering levees, hardening the power grid, and beefing up the first responder network -- well, if you start spending that kind of money (hundreds of billions for starters, talking about the US alone), people might get to wondering why this global warming stuff is so gosh darned expensive and getting more so. And that might lead them to ask when we are going to stop adding to the bill by spewing billions of tons of CO2 into the air.

Geoengineering might similarly offer the public some clarity on this issue. I assume it will be far more expensive that it currently seems, it will be highly controversial on the world stage, it will have unwanted side effects and limited efficacy. Researching and preparing such a system might have the opposite of the effect Chris expects; it might focus the public's mind on what a god-awful problem this is and how we need to get busy fixing it.

If we research and prepare this tool (not deploying it until/unless we win an international consensus and after warming has crossed a specific threshold or we see evidence of rapid catastrophic feedbacks) the debate which ensues may, as Sandy has, stimulate the public and international debate on mitigation, so as to prevent or minimize the use of such desperate measures.

Another major concern with geoengineering schemes is the impracticality of keeping them running for a long, long time:

Why do I say we would need to keep up SRM for millennia?

Archer & Brovkin's 2006 paper "The Millennial Atmospheric Lifetime of Anthropogenic CO2", PDF, shows that the emissions of CO2 will remain in the atmosphere/ocean system for thousands of years. Their abstract sums up their findings perfectly:

The notion is pervasive in the climate science community and in the public at large that the climate impacts of fossil fuel CO2 release will only persist for a few centuries. This conclusion has no basis in theory or models of the atmosphere/ocean carbon cycle, which we review here. The largest fraction of the CO2 recovery will take place on time scales of centuries, as CO2 invades the ocean, but a significant fraction of the fossil fuel CO2, ranging in published models in the literature from 20–60%, remains airborne for a thousand years or longer. Ultimate recovery takes place on time scales of hundreds of thousands of years, a geologic longevity typically associated in public perceptions with nuclear waste.

So if we take any geo-engineering scheme that doesn't involve massive emissions reductions or active draw-down of CO2, we need to keep it up for at least 1000 years, the more CO2 we emit the longer the recovery of CO2 back to pre-industrial will take.

And if we falter...

That's obviously a legitimate concern. There isn't a single government on the face of the Earth that has maintained its present form of government for even a single millennium. If we are expecting them to maintain a stable geoengineering scheme for thousands of years, that's obviously impractical. And since solar radiation management strategies mostly poop out within a few years of stopping, you confront the possibility of decades or centuries of global warming hammering the world in the space of a few years.

Brrrrrrrrrr. I've scared myself. But perhaps the picture is not so dire. What if we look at geoengineering not as a mono-strategy, but, as I suggest, as one component of a threefold strategy of adaptation, mitigation, and geoengineering?

Let's say we get serious about mitigation and end up with 1,200Gt of CO2 equivalent added to the atmosphere (either it took too long to forge agreement, or the cuts could not be made fast enough, or the carbon feedbacks hit us too hard; we missed the 1,000Gt goal for 2C, but only just.) About 60% of that shows up in the atmosphere; the rest is immediately taken up by the carbon cycle. 720Gt. That's us, permafrost melting, forest dieback, what have you.

Let's say 50% of that remains in the atmosphere 300 years later. That's 360Gt. Meanwhile we are practicing some solar radiation management with cloud whitening and contrails and aerosols injected into the stratosphere. But we also have been doing some carbon sequestration.

Carbon sequestration is hard: suppose we don't get it off the ground for 20 years and it then takes us 30 years to ramp up sequestration to a grand total of 3Gt/year (that's about 9% of current emissions). We then practice that for about 150 years. That would take out 450Gt, but some of that would have been sequestered anyway -- we will only count 2/3 of the 450Gt as actual sequestration -- 300Gt. 

That leaves us with 60Gt above preindustrial -- about 330ppm of CO2 -- and we can probably stop spewing stuff into the sky at that point, the 200-year mark. Two hundred years is a very long time, but it is a lot less than thousands of years. Many governments have been more or less stable for 200 years, including the United States.

The exact figures are subject to debate, but the basic thrust is clear: two ideas that seem impractical on their own (solar resource management and carbon sequestration) get much more reasonable if you intelligently combine them with each other and intensive mitigation. Without mitigation, none of this works: you're continuing to shoot holes in the bottom of the boat as you're bailing it out.

Geoengineering as Critical Care

A smoking-cessation skeptic

Suppose your grandmother comes into the emergency room with a severe pneumonia. Probably she should have gone to her doctor last week when she started with a wet cough and a low-grade fever, maybe a little short of breath, but she decided to tough it out. Now her respirations are shallow and fast, she is pale and sweaty, and the toxic byproducts of the bacteria in her bloodstream have stunned her heart, dropped her blood pressure and shut down her kidneys.

She's dying. What do you want the ER doctor to do?

The first option is to do what should have been done last week; prescribe some oral antibiotics, bedrest, lots of fluids. But while that's was right thing to do last week, today that therapy will accomplish exactly nothing, unless you put the nurse in your personal time machine and send him back to last week.

So we are going to come at this a little harder; we are going to treat it like the emergency it is. IV fluids to correct dehydration, IV antibiotics to tackle the infection, supplemental oxygen to give a head start to her struggling lungs.

But sometimes that doesn't work either. The blood pressure doesn't correct with IV fluids; other organs begin to fail; her lungs cannot maintain her body's oxygenation requirements, even with the supplemental O2. She is still breathing fast and shallow and now starting to have heart and liver dysfunction to go with the kidney failure.

At this point your only option(*) is critical care. A breathing tube will do what her lung muscles no longer can. Vasopressive drugs will support her blood pressure. She may need supplemental electrolytes; she may need insulin to control an elevated glucose.

An important fact to realize about critical care is that all of these interventions -- all of them -- are terrible for the body and fraught with life-threatening side effects. None of them are remotely as safe and effective as going in to see your family doctor when you(**) are coughing with a fever and shortness of breath. But, again, no time machine.

Those vasopressors will clamp down your peripheral circulation and can cause skin ulcers, gut ischemia, maybe further cardiac damage. Intubation can lead to long-term respiratory failure, barotrauma (you put too much air in the lungs!), or oxygen toxicity. The IV fluids will leak out of the vessels and cause edema, and so on.

Critical care -- all medicine, really, but especially critical care -- is a matter of trade-offs. We support your critical needs -- especially adequate and well-oxygenated blood flow to your heart and your brain -- at the expense of the normal, orderly functioning of your body. That makes them temporizing measures. Only an idiot would do these things and not also treat the underlying infection with powerful IV antibiotics. Without the antibiotics and functioning immune system, none of the other measures are likely to accomplish anything except to briefly prolong a painful death.

Geoengineering is similar to critical care. It is absolutely inferior to timely mitigation. However we have not carried out timely mitigation, and are now sitting on a massive stockpile of melting permafrost and an inefficient economic system generating huge volumes of CO2 and other GHGs with a large amount of inertia. Even if we were to embark on an ideal program of mitigation today, we would likely end up over the 2C threshold.

There is no point in geoengineering if we do not also intensively mitigate. It is bound to be at best a partial solution, with many side effects, and much more expensive than it looks on paper. Mitigation is like the antibiotics; the critical care in essence buys time for the real solution to work.



-----------------------------------------------
* Other than hospice, which doesn't really work with this metaphor.
** Grandmother/otherwise elderly you. If you're under fifty, it's probably just a cold, you big baby.

Adapt, Geoengineer, Mitigate (AGM)

Source: National Research Council. 2011. Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts over Decades to Millennia. p.101. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press

So it's time to talk about geoengineering. Like it or not.

The reality that a significant amount of carbon dioxide and methane are going to emerge from melting permafrost seems at last to be making an impression on the popular press (thanks latterly to a recent UN report). The implication, that it is extraordinarily improbable that mitigation alone will be able to limit warming to < 2C above preindustrial, does not seem to have sunk in yet, but the logic is fairly inescapable.

Investigations of climate sensitivity continue to come back with values clustering around 3C/doubling. Based on those values, the total amount of CO2 that can be added to the atmosphere and still leave us with the hope of keeping warming below the 2C target is about 1,000 gigatons or a trillion tons. Total CO2e emissions to date are between 500 and 600 gigatons. Permafrost emissions by 2200 are estimated to be between 246 to 415 gigatonnes. Take the midpoints of both ranges and add them together and you get 880 gigatons. Right now the world is adding to that figure at a rate of 30 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year, plus sundry other GHGs.

Even if you could instantly cut GHG production by 90%, you'd still cross the threshold within 40 years or so.  Any sort of a realistic program -- and in that I include a WWII-style crash program to cut emissions, consuming a significant chunk of the planet's GDP over the next few decades -- would come nowhere close to meeting the trillion ton target.

Taking the most likely case -- that scientists' warnings continue to fall on deaf ears for at least a half a decade -- we will commit ourselves absolutely in four to five years -- perhaps less, if the world economy grows at a brisk pace.

It's possible, of course, to stick with the party line despite the inevitability of crossing the trillion-ton mark. Emission cuts as fast as possible; adaptation; and hold on to something, because the 21st century is looking like a bumpy ride. But it is more in the spirit of climate realism to face the facts honestly and, where necessary, change our strategy.

What are those facts? Fact number one: carbon-cycle feedbacks will put the 2C target out of reach through mitigation alone. Fact two: the severity of the climate impacts we are seeing at 0.8C above preindustrial suggests the 2C is a hard target. Two and a half times the warming we have seen to date is already, probably, outside any reasonable boundary of "safe" temperatures. Fact three: the Arctic permafrost is not the only game in town. There is also carbon under Antarctica. There are methyl hydrates. There is carbon locked up in the Amazon and other forests vulnerable to die-back.

If you take the 2C limit seriously, you have to consider that the time may be approaching where we will need geoengineering as a bridge to lower levels of GHGs.

Geoengineering has a bad reputation. People fear it as a quick fix, a barrier to the changes we need, and a long walk off a short pier into the Bay of Unintended Consequences. It has the potential to be all of those things. But it seems increasingly unlikely that we will get through the next two centuries in one piece without it.

The AGM strategy has three elements:

Adapt: Prepare our defenses and infrastructure for multi-meter sea level rise and the storms of the 21st century. Prepare our water resources for droughts, salinization, and flooding. Prepare our emergencies services, diversify our food crops, improve the robustness (and efficiency) of our infrastructure.

Geoengineer: Start planning with small-scale tests now; larger-scale tests as soon as feasible; infrastructure for large-scale deployment as soon as we have a workable technology or set of technologies. Then set a hard upper limit well back from the 2C boundary -- like 1.5C, or at the first sign of a catastrophe like massive methyl hydrate degassing. At 1.5C over preindustrial, geoengineering kicks in.

Mitigate: Agreement to severe and ongoing cuts in GHG emissions between a few large powers, with serious diplomatic and economic arm-twisting as necessary to enlist the rest of the world. Our goal should be to get back to 350ppm CO2e

Could wildly successful geoengineering decrease the pressure for an agreement on serious mitigation? Sure it could. But you have to ask yourself if you believe the science.

If you do believe the science, and understand that as we approach 2C our civilization and most of the species we share the earth with are in mortal danger, then while that perverse incentive matters, it can't be paramount, any more than the fear that people will eat too much and not exercise is a reason to not put a heart attack survivor on blood pressure and cholesterol-lowering medications. Yes, they have side effects. Yes, they are in some respects an artificial compensation for a failure in self-control. Nevertheless, letting the patient drop dead is a bad option. Better to use the artificial support, and continue to campaign for the lifestyle changes.