Carbon must be sucked from air, says IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri

Pardon me, but can I just say that this took an awfully long time.
Should have been doing this months ago, and in a much more public
way.   Select committee on science and technology is too limited of a
forum for this.

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HEARING 12/2: State of Climate Science

UPDATED MEDIA ADVISORY FOR 10 AM, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2009

Contact: Select Committee, 202-225-4012
Select Committee Hearing: State of Climate Science
Drs. Holdren, Lubchenco to Show Urgency of Impacts, Risk

**This hearing will be WEBCAST LIVE.

WASHINGTON – With the international climate change talks in Copenhagen
fast approaching, there is real urgency to reach diplomatic consensus
on a planetary solution. In a hearing this Wednesday, the Select
Committee will explore with climate scientists from the Obama
administration the urgent, consensus view on our planetary problem:
that global warming is real, and the science indicates that it is
getting worse.

At the hearing, Chairman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) will host two of
America’s preeminent climate scientists, Dr. John Holdren and Dr. Jane
Lubchenco.

Dr. Holdren is the Director of the Office of Science and Technology
Policy, and was formerly a professor at Harvard University and the
director of the acclaimed Woods Hole Research Center.

Dr. Lubchenco is the Administrator of the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United States’ leading climate
office.

The past decade has been the hottest in recorded history, with all of
the years since 2001 being in the top 10 of hottest, according to
NASA. This summer, the world’s oceans were the warmest in NOAA’s 130
years of record-keeping. Meanwhile, global heat-trapping pollution
continues to rise.

WHAT: Select Committee hearing on the State of Climate Science

WHEN: 10 AM, Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

WHERE: B-318 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC
and on the web at globalwarming.house.gov

Interesting UK Guardian piece today:

"Climate change sceptics and fossil fuel companies that have lobbied
against action on greenhouse gas emissions have squandered the world's
chance to avoid dangerous global warming, a key adviser to the
government has said.

"Professor Bob Watson, chief scientist at the Department for
Environment and Rural Affairs, said a decade of inaction on climate
change meant it was now virtually impossible to limit global
temperature rise to 2C. He said the delay meant the world would now do
well to stabilise warming between 3C and 4C.

Watson backed controversial calls for research into geoengineering
techniques, such as blocking the sun, as a way to head off dangerous
temperature rise – one of the most senior figures so far to do so. "We
should at least be looking at it. I would see what the theoretical
models say, and ask ourselves the question: how can we do medium-sized
experiments in the field?"

An announcement today without much substance yet, from Phil Willis MP in charge of the UK House of Commons Science and Technology committee:

Commons Committee to work in unique collaboration with US Congressional Committee

The Science and Technology Committee has today announced a new inquiry into the regulation of geoengineering. The House of Commons inquiry is being coordinated with an inquiry into geoengineering which the US Congressional Science and Technology Committee starts today.

The Commons inquiry follows on from the major inquiry that the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee completed in March 2008, Engineering: turning ideas into reality, which took ‘geoengineering’ as a case study. The Report examined activities specifically and deliberately designed to effect a change in the global climate with the aim of minimising or reversing man-made climate change.

Building on the earlier work the new inquiry will focus on one aspect of geoengineering: the regulation of geoengineering, particularly international regulation and regulation within the UK. The following terms of reference will be used for the Commons inquiry.

• Is there a need for international regulation of geoengineering and geoengineering research and if so, what international regulatory mechanisms need to be developed?
• How should international regulations be developed collaboratively?
• What UK regulatory mechanisms apply to geoengineering and geoengineering research and what changes will need to be made for purpose of regulating geoengineering?

Six articles this month in an Environmental Research Letters focus issue on geoengineering.  Thoughtful pieces on a range of issues, particularly including questions of risk and ethics and the idea of ecological analogues of geoengineering.

Modification of cirrus clouds to reduce global warming
David L Mitchell and William Finnegan

Climate engineering and the risk of rapid climate change
Andrew Ross and H Damon Matthews

Researching geoengineering: should not or could not?
Martin Bunzl

Of mongooses and mitigation: ecological analogues to geoengineering
H Damon Matthews and Sarah E Turner

Toward ethical norms and institutions for climate engineering research
David R Morrow, Robert E Kopp and Michael Oppenheimer

On the possible use of geoengineering to moderate specific climate change impacts
Michael C MacCracken

Jamais Cascio asks the obvious in this fastcompany piece about the climate change activist group 350.org.  If we're already at 387, then how are we going to get back to 350?  It not only requires cutting emissions to zero, but removing CO2 from the atmosphere as well.  And there is scant discussion of how they would expect to do so... reforestation, biochar?  As Jamais points out, these are slow to act. 

"But getting back to 350ppm requires more than a rapid cessation of anthropogenic sources of atmospheric carbon. It requires an acceleration of the processes that cycle atmospheric CO₂. Planting trees is an obvious step, but it's slow and actually doesn't do enough alone. We'll also need to bring in more advanced carbon sequestration techniques, such as bio-char. The combination of the two would likely bring down atmospheric carbon levels, given enough time.

Unfortunately, we may not have enough time."

The point of the 350 framing is that we're already past what could be construed as a "safe" level.  In other words, it highlights the danger of potential tipping points and how we really have no idea how far ahead they lie.

UNEP today announces a report which highlights the importance of the ocean in the role of carbon sequestration, and also of the role that markets can perform.

"The Blue Carbon report, compiled in collaboration with the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), puts some hard figures on the carbon capturing potential of the marine environment and on the impact of marine degradation on climate change.

It also outlines the way markets might begin paying developing countries for conserving and enhancing the marine environment's carbon capture and storage services (CCS) and the links between healthy oceans and adaptation to climate change.

Currently, several developed countries are considering spending billions of dollar on CCS at power stations while the CCS services of natural systems, such as the seas and oceans, are tested and probably more cost effective."

NY Times Op-Ed "Are We Too Late?"

H.D.S. Greenway begins to talk about the elephant in the room, and asks what has really been forbidden territory in the climate discussion for most of the mainstream policymakers--up until now guided by 2 degrees C threshold thinking.  i.e. "What if the trend is irreversible?"  "What if it cannot be prevented?"

The effects of humanity’s industry, piggy-backing on a normal warming trend that has been going on since the 19th century, is causing temperatures to climb at an unprecedented rate. On that most of science agrees. But what if the centuries-long build–up of gasses and nature itself have conspired to make this trend irreversible?

This is not an argument against a strong effort on the part of mankind to at least slow down the warming. The United States and the world can and should make a big effort to stop making the problem worse.

But the world is not united. The developing countries feel it is unfair to demand caps just as they are industrializing, and we are moving into a post-industrial economy. It is simply not possible to shut down enough of the world’s smoke stacks, and a lot of cap and trade begins to sound like a shell game.

So when the world meets in Copenhagen to discuss climate change come December, I hope there will be more thought on what has to be done if climate change cannot be prevented.

The UK Guardian reports today on record CO2 numbers from a key arctic station.

"The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a record high, according to the latest figures released by an internationally regarded measuring station in the Arctic.

The measurements suggest that the main greenhouse gas is continuing to increase in the atmosphere at an alarming rate despite the downturn in dip in the rate of increase of the global economy.

Levels of the gas at the Zeppelin research station on Svalbard, northern Norway, last week peaked at over 397 parts per million (ppm), an increase of more than 2.5ppm on 2008. They have since begun to reduce and today stand at 393.7ppm. Prior to the industrial revolution, CO₂ levels were around 280ppm."

Nature calls for serious consideration of geoengineering in their lead-off editorial this last week.

"The latest scientific research suggests that even a complete halt to carbon pollution would not bring the world’s temperatures down substantially for several centuries.  If further research reveals that a prolonged period of elevated temperatures would endanger the polar ice sheets, or otherwise destabilize the Earth system, nations may have to contemplate actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Indeed, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is already developing scenarios for the idea that long-term safety may require sucking up carbon, and various innovators and entrepreneurs are developing technologies that might be able to accomplish that feat (see page 1094). At the moment, those technologies seem ruinously expensive and technically difficult. But if the very steep learning curve can be climbed, then the benefits will be great.

More radical still is the possibility of cooling the planet through some kind of ‘geoengineering’ that would dim the incoming sunlight (see page 1097). The effects of such approaches are much more worrying than those of capturing carbon from the air, however. The cooling from geoengineering would not exactly balance the warming from greenhouse gases, which would cause complications even if the technology itself was feasible — something for which the evidence has been circumstantial, at best.

But discussions about the possibilities offered by geoengineering could also lull the world’s leaders into complacency — if they lead them to believe that the technology will provide an escape hatch if the climate ever does reach a tipping point. This does not mean that the discussions should be avoided, but rather that the speculations need to be backed up with a solid body of research. Moreover, geoengineering research should be framed not as a hope for deus ex machina fixes to sudden global deterioration, but as a palliative cushion for the worst excesses of the peak years that are inevitable even after emissions start to be cut. A world slightly shaded from the Sun while its carbon levels are brought down by means of active capture would be a strangely unnatural place — but not necessarily a bad one, compared with the alternatives."

The AMS Draft Statement on Geoengineering the Climate System is available via the AMS home page now...

If you have comment on this draft AMS Statement currently under
consideration, you may transmit those comments to the AMS Council by
sending a message to the following e-mail address by April 23 2009:
statement_comments@ametsoc.org

AMS Policy Statement on Geoengineering the Climate System
Draft 7 March 2009

Human activities have very likely caused most of the well-documented
change in global climate over the last half century. Unchecked future
greenhouse gas emissions, particularly of carbon dioxide from the
burning of fossil fuels, will almost certainly lead to additional
climate impacts such as further global warming, continued sea level
rise, greater rainfall intensity, more serious and pervasive droughts,
enhanced heat stress episodes, ocean acidification, and the disruption
of many biological systems. The resulting inundation of coastal areas,
severe weather impacts, and loss of ecosystem services will likely
cause major negative impacts for most nations.

Geoengineering could conceivably offer targeted and fast-acting
options to reduce acute climate impacts and provide strategies of last
resort if abrupt, catastrophic, or otherwise unacceptable climate
change impacts become unavoidable by other means. However,
geoengineering must be viewed with great caution because manipulating
the Earth system is almost certain to trigger some adverse and
unpredictable consequences.

While I sympathize with the takeaway from the preamble of this truthout opinion piece by Australian paleoclimatologist Dr. Andrew Glikson, I think this frame is unhelpful to the reputable scientists and thoughtful individuals who are seeking funding and freedom to do the research needed to understand if these options are available to us at this advanced stage of warming.

"That global climate change has reached an impasse whereby the "powers-to-be" are entertaining climate geoengineering mitigation, instead of the urgent deep reduction of carbon emissions required by science, represents the ultimate moral bankruptcy of institutions and a failure of democracy"

Link to Article

Almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global
warming to 2C will succeed, a Guardian poll reveals today. An average rise of 4-5C by
the end of this century is more likely, they say, given soaring carbon emissions and
political constraints.

Some of those surveyed who said the 2C target would be met confessed they did so
more out of hope rather than belief. "As a mother of young children I choose to believe
this, and work hard toward it," one said.

"This optimism is not primarily due to scientific facts, but to hope," said another. Some
said they thought geoengineering measures, such as seeding the ocean with iron to
encourage plankton growth, would help meet the target.

Many of the experts stressed that an inability to hit the 2C target did not mean that
efforts to tackle global warming should be abandoned, but that the emphasis is now on
damage limitation.

Science Blogs covers the debate over the LOHAFEX results, which showed poor carbon sequestration as a result of fertilizing an eddy very poor in silica. Diatoms cannot grow without silica, and are the primary engines of the biological pump.

"But biogeochemist Kenneth Coale, director of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California, estimates that the silicon-rich southern part of the Southern Ocean would deliver up to twice as much potential carbon sequestration as the northern area Smetacek fertilized, in large part because of the diatoms and associated ecosystem dynamics. The predators that eat diatoms, it turns out, have large waste pellets that sink rapidly. Coale warns that calling iron fertilization a failed strategy on the basis of an experiment in low-silicon waters is just as unwise as declaring the technique a home run after a successful experiment would have been. "I would be reluctant to extrapolate from any one experiment anything having to do with the efficacy of iron fertilization as a carbon-sequestration strategy," says Coale.

"Another scientist, Margaret Leinen, is the head of a company, Climos, that is hoping to commercialize iron fertilization to gain carbon credits at sea. The former head of geosciences at the National Science Foundation, she says the 1-gigaton-a-year figure for atmospheric CO₂ was based on paleoclimate records. Chemical analyses of ocean cores show that the Southern Ocean drew down at least that much CO₂ millions of years ago during glacial periods. "In the paleorecord, we find a lockstep correlation between the amount of [phytoplankton growing] and temperature," says Coale.

"Smetacek had actually tried to find an area of ocean that would feature diatoms. Levels of silicon are generally higher south of 50° latitude. But Smetacek says the German government asked him to stay north of that line due to a treaty called CCAMLR designed to protect marine species in the Southern Ocean. Part of that restriction was no doubt connected to the fact that the LOHAFEX mission was controversial from the start, drawing criticism both from environmentalists and from the German environmental ministry. So Smetacek says he had to settle on a patch at 48° south latitude.

The New Scientist has an excellent summary of one of the melting Arctic, which is one of the greatest non-linear accelerators of climate change. As the sea ice vanishes, the permafrost melts, which contains over 1000 gigatons of organic carbon. This carbon will be converted to methane by microbes and released to the atmosphere. We need to seriously consider ways to save the Arctic sea ice from completely melting, which may not be possible with emissions reductions alone.

"The danger is that if too much methane is released, the world will get hotter no matter how drastically we slash our greenhouse gas emissions. Recent studies suggest that emissions from melting permafrost could be far greater than once thought. And, although it is too early to be sure, some suspect this scenario is already starting to unfold: after remaining static for the past decade, methane levels have begun to rise again, and the source could be Arctic permafrost.

"No one knows for sure how much carbon is locked away in permafrost, but it seems there is much more than we thought. An international study headed by Edward Schuur of the University of Florida last year doubled previous estimates of the carbon content of permafrost to about 1600 billion tonnes - roughly a third of all the carbon in the world's soils and twice as much as is in the atmosphere.

"Schuur estimates that 100 billion tonnes of this carbon could be released by thawing this century, based on standard scenarios. If that all emerged in the form of methane, it would have a warming effect equivalent to 270 years of carbon dioxide emissions at current levels. "It's a kind of slow-motion time bomb," he says.

Early results from the LOHAFEX experiment suggest that very little carbon was sequestered because the phytoplankton bloom did consist of diatoms. Diatoms have silica shells that both resist predation by copepods and cause the diatoms to sink rapidly upon their death. Unfortunately, LOHAFEX fertilized a patch of ocean very low in silica content. Prior ocean fertilization experiments, including the 2004 EiFEX experiment led by the same Dr. Victor Smetacek of LOHAFEX, had more silicic acid and observed much higher rates of carbon sequestration.

Coverage can be found at

New Scientist article

and the BBC article

Dr. Ken Coale comments in the BBC article:

But Kenneth Coale, director of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California, who has led several iron fertilisation experiments, said the initial burst of phytoplankton growth was consistent with previous findings.

"To date we've conducted experiments in what amounts to 0.04% of the ocean's surface," he told BBC News.

"All have indicated that iron is the key factor controlling phytoplankton growth, and most have indicated that there is carbon flux (towards the sea floor) - this is one that didn't."

A key aim for the future, he said, was to understand better the various ecosystems contained in the ocean in order that fertilisation could be conducted in areas containing the "right" kinds of organism.

Professor John Beddington, Chief Science Advisor for the UK, says that climate change and a growing world population will cause a "perfect storm" of food, energy and water shortages by 2030.

"We head into a perfect storm in 2030, because all of these things are operating on the same time frame," Beddington told the Guardian.

"If we don't address this, we can expect major destabilisation, an increase in rioting and potentially significant problems with international migration, as people move out to avoid food and water shortages," he added.

Also, the BBC has video interview with Dr. Beddington.

The LOHAFEX experiment on ocean iron fertilization is over. Key early results are that a phytoplankton bloom was stimulated, and that this caused significant increases in zooplankton abundance. Congratulations to the science team on board Polar Stern. We are looking forward to the research being published.

The final two reports from LOHAFEX are published here:

Weekly Report #7

Weekly Report #8