See Dr. Margaret Leinen, Climos Chief Science Officer, lecturing at the recent MIT Earth System Initiative / Center for Global Change Science Symposium, October 9.

View the video here

Read an overview of her lecture here 

On the symposium:

One of the most baffling questions in science - where did life come from?  - opened the first “Earth System Revolutions: Key Turning Points in the History of Our Planet,” a symposium on Oct. 9 sponsored by MIT’s Earth System Initiative and the Center for Global Change Science.

Before the daylong event concluded, the audience was pondering an equally significant question: “Where is life on earth going?”

These two questions bracketed a series of presentations that ranged from the primordial rise of oxygen to the impact of increased carbon dioxide and higher global temperatures to alternative energy sources to how humans could “geoengineer” the earth to mitigate climate change. A consistent thread tied together the various topics: conditions on earth led to life and life has changed the earth itself.  Long before we evolved, the planet’s biosphere was in a state of flux; humans have, perhaps, just speeded up the rate of change.

As Penny Chisholm, ESI Director, noted in her opening remarks: “You have to know where you have come from to understand where you might be headed.”

Margaret followed Dr. Paul Falkowski and Ron Prinn.

About her lecture:

 The pace of global carbon emissions may be such that humanity’s best efforts to stabilize them below current levels by 2050 won’t be enough to prevent a significant increase in Earth’s temperatures. Margaret Leinen, drawing on the U.N.’s recent climate reports, and the latest research from the field, shows the dire graph: a red line of CO₂ emissions marching steadily upward, with accompanying graphics depicting hoped-for impacts of international efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas release.

The current global abatement “wedges” consist of technologies not yet developed or widely deployed, such as energy efficiencies, cellulosic biofuels, solar, wind, and nuclear. Leinen notes that most of the abatement in renewables “comes into play 20-30 years out,” and the “reality is there will be increases in CO₂ in the atmosphere for the next 20-30 years while we try to address the problem.” Policy makers have not begun to grapple with the notion of delayed onset of emissions, says Leinen. Among scientists, there’s growing concern that “we’re going to be dealing with catch-up for a long enough time that we will suffer the consequences of emissions regardless of whether we put policies in place.”

These projections suggest to some scientists that we must take more radical, immediate steps and geoengineer our way out of global warming. But other scientists, says Leinen, are loath to discuss these approaches, much less let them see the light of day. Carbon capture and sequestration, “viewed as necessary mechanisms for emissions reductions by some” says Leinen, and which have captured the interest of politicians, are viewed by another scientific camp “as soft engineering, or geoengineering light.” When a Nobel scientist wrote an article proposing the use of stratospheric aerosols to decrease sunlight hitting the earth, alarmed scientists lobbied prestigious journals not to publish it. Leinen’s own area of research, ocean iron fertilization, attempts to stimulate phytoplankton activity, which would help sop up atmospheric CO₂. These approaches all face opposition because of their possible, negative impacts. But, says Leinen, these arguments “ignore the fact that we’re faced with a situation in which we must have an entire portfolio of activities” for reducing CO₂. She worries that lack of discourse, or constant dispute will put scientists in a position “where policy makers want to move to (the new) techniques … and we won’t have studied them sufficiently to provide good scientific answers about whether they work.”

Categories: Ocean Fertilization
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