Geoengineering - cuckoo clock solutions

Not such a bright idea: cooling the Earth by reflecting sunlight back to space is a dangerous distraction

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James Kerry, James Cook University; Aarti Gupta, Wageningen University, and Terry Hughes, James Cook University

The United Nations Environment Assembly this week considered a resolution on solar radiation modification, which refers to controversial technologies intended to mask the heating effect of greenhouse gases by reflecting some sunlight back to space.

Proponents argue the technologies will limit the effects of climate change. In reality, this type of “geoengineering” risks further destabilising an already deeply disturbed climate system. What’s more, its full impacts cannot be known until after deployment.

The draft resolution initially called for the convening of an expert group to examine the benefits and risks of solar radiation modification. The motion was withdrawn on Thursday after no consensus could be reached on the controversial topic.

A notable development was a call from some Global South countries for “non-use” of solar radiation modification. We strongly support this position. Human-caused climate change is already one planetary-scale experiment too many – we don’t need another.

A risky business

In some circles, solar geoengineering is gaining prominence as a response to the climate crisis. However, research has consistently identified potential risks posed by the technologies such as:

• unpredictable effects on climate and weather patterns

• biodiversity loss, especially if use of the technology was halted abruptly

• undermining food security by, for example, reducing light and increasing salinity on land

• the infringement of human rights across generations – including, but not limited to, passing on huge risks to generations that will come after us.

Here, we discuss several examples of solar radiation modification which exemplify the threats posed by these technologies. These are also depicted in the graphic below.

An infographic showing the effects of solar engineering methods. Authors provided

A load of hot air

In April 2022, an American startup company released two weather balloons into the air from Mexico. The experiment was conducted without approval from Mexican authorities.

The intent was to cool the atmosphere by deflecting sunlight. The resulting reduction in warming would be sold for profit as “cooling credits” to those wanting to offset greenhouse gas pollution.

Appreciably cooling the climate would, in reality, require injecting millions of metric tons of aerosols into the stratosphere, using a purpose-built fleet of high-altitude aircraft. Such an undertaking would alter global wind and rainfall patterns, leading to more drought and cyclones, exacerbating acid rainfall and slowing ozone recovery.

Once started, this stratospheric aerosol injection would need to be carried out continually for at least a century to achieve the desired cooling effect. Stopping prematurely would lead to an unprecedented rise in global temperatures far outpacing extreme climate change scenarios.

Injecting aerosols into the atmosphere may lead to more droughts. Shutterstock

Heads in the clouds

Another solar geoengineering technology, known as marine cloud brightening, seeks to make low-lying clouds more reflective by spraying microscopic seawater droplets into the air. Since 2017, trials have been underway on the Great Barrier Reef.

The project is tiny in scale, and involves pumping seawater onto a boat and spraying it from nozzles towards the sky. The project leader says the mist-generating machine would need to be scaled up by a factor of ten, to about 3,000 nozzles, to brighten nearby clouds by 30%.

After years of trials, the project has not yet produced peer-reviewed empirical evidence that cloud brightening could reduce sea surface temperatures or protect corals from bleaching.

The Great Barrier Reef is the size of Italy. Scaling up attempts at cloud brightening would require up to 1,000 machines on boats, all pumping and spraying vast amounts of seawater for months during summer. Even if it worked, the operation is hardly, as its proponents claim, “environmentally benign”.

The technology’s effects remain unclear. For the Great Barrier Reef, less sunlight and lower temperatures could alter water movement and mixing, harming marine life. Marine life may also be killed by pumps or negatively affected by the additional noise pollution. And on land, marine cloud brightening may lead to altered rainfall patterns and increased salinity, damaging agriculture.

More broadly, 101 governments last year agreed to a statement describing marine-based geoengineering, including cloud brightening, as having “the potential for deleterious effects that are widespread, long-lasting or severe”.

A cloud brightening field trip in 2021 (Southern Cross University)

Balls, bubbles and foams

The Arctic Ice Project involves spreading a layer of tiny glass spheres over large regions of sea ice to brighten its surface and halt ice loss.

Trials have been conducted on frozen lakes in North America. Scientists recently showed the spheres actually absorb some sunlight, speeding up sea-ice loss in some conditions.

Another proposed intervention is spraying the ocean with microbubbles or sea foam to make the surface more reflective. This would introduce large concentrations of chemicals to stabilise bubbles or foam at the sea surface, posing significant risk to marine life, ecosystem function and fisheries.

No more distractions

Some scientists investigating solar geoengineering discuss the need for “exit ramps” – the termination of research once a proposed intervention is deemed to be technically infeasible, too risky or socially unacceptable. We believe this point has already been reached.

Since 2022, more than 500 scientists from 61 countries have signed an open letter calling for an international non-use agreement on solar geoengineering. Aside from the types of risks discussed above, the letter said the speculative technologies detract from the urgent need to cut global emissions, and that no global governance system exists to fairly and effectively regulate their deployment.

Calls for outdoor experimentation of the technologies are misguided and detract energy and resources from what we need to do today: phase out fossil fuels and accelerate a just transition worldwide.

Climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity, and global responses have been woefully inadequate. Humanity must not pursue dangerous distractions that do nothing to tackle the root causes of climate change, come with incalculable risk, and will likely further delay climate action.

James Kerry, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, James Cook University, Australia and Senior Marine and Climate Scientist, OceanCare, Switzerland, James Cook University; Aarti Gupta, Professor of Global Environmental Governance, Wageningen University, and Terry Hughes, Distinguished Professor, James Cook University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Is Environmental engineering the answer ?

Southern Cross University

 Could ‘marine cloud brightening’ reduce coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef?

Daniel Patrick Harrison, Southern Cross University

It might sound like science fiction, but “marine cloud brightening” is being seriously considered as a way to shield parts of the ocean from extreme heat.

We’re using water canons to spray seawater into the sky. This causes brighter, whiter clouds to form. These low marine clouds reflect sunlight away from the ocean’s surface, protecting the marine life below from the worst of climate change.

Australia’s Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program – a collaboration between several universities, CSIRO and the Australian Institute of Marine Science – is exploring whether cloud brightening could reduce coral bleaching. As an oceanographer and engineer I lead the program’s research into cooling and shading techniques.

We started exploring cloud brightening after the mass bleaching event in 2016. First, we needed to develop and test the underlying technologies in the lab. Then we began pilot testing in the central Great Barrier Reef near Townsville during January 2020. After several iterations we have now moved beyond “proof of concept” to investigating the response of the clouds themselves.

The Cloud Brightening Field Trip of 2021 (Southern Cross University)

A bright idea

British cloud physicist John Latham originally proposed cloud brightening in 1990 as a way to control global warming by altering Earth’s energy balance. He calculated that brightening clouds across the most susceptible regions of the world’s oceans could counteract the global warming caused by a doubling of preindustrial atmospheric carbon dioxide. That’s a level likely to be reached by the year 2060.

Recently, scientists have begun to consider regional rather than global application of cloud brightening. Could brightening clouds directly over the Great Barrier Reef for a few months reduce coral bleaching during a marine heat wave?

Modelling studies are encouraging and suggest it could delay the expected decline in coral cover. This could buy valuable time for the reef while the world transitions away from fossil fuels.

Lowering the heat stress on the ecosystem would produce other benefits when combined with other reef interventions – such as improved control of invasive crown of thorns starfish and planting of corals with increased heat tolerance.

But these studies also show there’s a limit to what can be achieved. Long-term benefits are only possible if the cloud brightening activity occurs alongside aggressive emissions reductions.

Cloud brightening does have risks as well as benefits, but the prospect of intermittent regional use is very different to large-scale “solar geo-engineering” proposals for shading and cooling the whole planet.

We expect the regional effect will be short-lived and reversible, which is reassuring. The technology must be operated continuously to modify clouds and could be stopped at any time. The sea salt particles sprayed in the process typically only persist in the atmosphere for one to several days.

Southern Cross University’s aerosol and cloud microphysics aircraft operating over the Southern Great Barrier Reef. Southern Cross University

How do you brighten a cloud?

A warm cloud (as opposed to an ice cloud) is a collection of small water droplets floating in the air.

A cloud of many small droplets is brighter than one with fewer large droplets – even if both clouds contain the same amount of water overall.

Every droplet begins with the condensation of water vapour around a nucleus, which can be almost any kind of tiny particle suspended in air.

Typically, in the lower atmosphere over land there are thousands to tens of thousands of these tiny particles suspended in every cubic centimetre of air. We call these airborne particles “aerosols”.

Aerosols may be natural such as dust, sea salt, pollen, ash and sulphates. Or they may come from human activity such as burning fossil fuels or vegetation, manufacturing, vehicle exhaust and aerosol spray cans.

In very clean maritime air, the aerosols available to form clouds are mainly sulphates and sea salt crystals. And they are few and far between, only a few hundred per cubic centimetre.

When a cloud forms under these conditions, water vapour is forced to condense around fewer nuclei, creating larger droplets and fewer of them. Large droplets reflect less light for the same volume of cloud water.

To brighten such clouds, we can spray large quantities of microscopic seawater droplets into the air. This process of atomising seawater mimics the generation of sea salt aerosols by wind and waves in the ocean. If these are incorporated into a cloud and create extra droplets, the cloud will be brightened.

Sea salt also provides additional shade by direct scattering of light.

The latest cloud brightening generator (V model) in action. Southern Cross University

Testing the theory

Although scientists have researched cloud brightening for more than 30 years, no one had ever directly tested the theory. In Australia, we have now developed technology to a point where we are starting to measure the response of the clouds.

We are beginning such tests with the support and permission of Traditional Owners, who have sustainably managed their Sea Country for tens of thousands of years.

Our research program involves more than 15 research institutions and has multiple levels of governance and oversight.

Not so far-fetched

Most people probably don’t realise we are already inadvertently brightening the clouds. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates humanity’s unintentional release of aerosols offsets around 30% of the warming effect due to greenhouse gases.

Sulphates in ship exhaust are such a potent source of aerosols for droplet formation, the passage of ships leaves cloud trails called ship tracks.

When the International Maritime Organisation introduced new rules limiting the sulphur content of marine fuels, the number and extent of ship tracks drastically reduced, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. A recent study even suggests the devastating heat wave that swept the Northern Hemisphere earlier this year was worsened by the absence of ship tracks.

The world-first research we are conducting in Australia aims to determine if we could harness the clouds in an effective, environmentally responsible and socially acceptable manner for the future conservation of one of our most precious ecosystems.

Daniel Patrick Harrison, Senior Lecturer, Southern Cross University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Environmental, social and governance - the ESG direction

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ESG, the abbreviation for environmental, social and governance (as in corporate governance) has become the latest buzz method for performance measurement and reporting for large corporate entities. It covers a myriad of activities (for example, climate change, biodiversity, pollution, risk management, diversity, employee engagement and so on) and there are a plethora of ways of measuring ESG and weighting various scores with the result that there is not an overall single rating determined. Different ESG audit companies use different methods that can and do lead to different ESG ratings being given to the same client company. Confusing it can be.

ESG is not directly the same as environmental sustainability as ESG involves measuring against a set of criteria which are focussed on company process and practices. Sustainability in contrast is focussed on outcomes. Highly polluting and environmentally damaging industries would use ESG as a risk management tool to ensure that they have best practice processes to mitigate pollution, avoid accidents,  reduce the need for expensive regulatory requirements/compliance and hence the risk of costly litigation. Sustainability in contrast is focussed on the impact of the company's activities on people and the environment including the sustainability of the services and products.

In one respect ESG has evolved as a result of the strong movement to ethical investing and increasing demands from funding bodies (such as banks), investors and consumers for greater corporate responsibility to be demonstrated. Such demands also focus attention on company's social licence to operate in a range of industries that may have high impacts on communities. Where corporations do not demonstrate responsibility, the social licence to operate is placed at risk. 

Public perceptions about climate change - the good, the bad and the ugly

Diagram 1

The climate change issue is as complex a topic with global community engagement and communication as much as it is about the science and technological solutions to address it. While there is strong support for action in Europe, the Pacific and many parts of Asia, there continues to be very divided opinions in the United States and Australia.

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication has provided valuable insights into the communication challenge with climate change and the US population. Flowing from research and survey work started in 2009, the Yale program has demonstrated that there are six distinct and unique audiences in the US.  These six audiences have very different levels of engagement on the climate change issue due to varying psychology, culture,  risk perception, attitudes and political affiliation.

The Alarmed  are fully convinced of the reality and seriousness of climate change and are already taking individual, consumer and political action to address it. The Concerned are also convinced about global warming but are not engaged with it personally.

The three other groups being the Cautious, the Disengaged, and the Doubtful represent different stages of understanding and acceptance that climate change is a problem. None of these groups are actively engaged with the issue.

The real concern are the Dismissive who are very sure that climate change is not happening and are actively involved as opponents of a national effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The distribution and size of the six groups are shown in Diagrams 1 and 2.

There are signs that perceptions are changing and that public opinion in the United States is slowly shifting to greater engagement and concern about climate change. Comparing Diagram 1 (above) with Diagram (2) below which covers a 12 month period from 2018-2019, a discernible movement to greater alarm can be detected.

Diagram 2

From an Australian point of view, similar categories of community engagement would almost certainly be identified here with key political leaders being within the Dismissive group.

Link to the Yale study -
Yale climate communication - global warming

COP21 Paris - Climate Change - Conference Agreement

COP21 media coverage

COP21 has reached the end of its negotiations and the host nation, France, has submitted the draft text for voting by the 195 nations. At around 20 pages this is significantly shorter than the previous 29 pages and contains a number of critical elements -

• the draft climate agreement would seek to limit global warming well below 2 degrees Centigrade aiming for around 1.5 degrees Centigrade,
• a system of five-yearly reviews and monitoring of each nation's progress is proposed,
• climate financing for developing nations of at least $100b by 2020 would be provided.

Despite the relative logic of these core elements there remains considerable barriers to achieving full agreement and compliance with the multitude of nations whose support is essential.

UN Climate Change Negotiations: Conference of the Parties - Paris - 2015

The latest round of climate change negotiations are soon to start later this month running from 30 November to early December 2015. The twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the eleventh session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP) will take place from 30 November to 11 December 2015, in Paris, France. While there has been some level of doubt as to the likelihood of achieving agreement, research by the United Nations has found that considerable action has been undertaken across a range of functions by most of the parties to the Framework Convention. The chances of a Copenhagen-style COP failure are significantly less than previous years with widespread acceptance of the target of a temperature increase of no greater than 2 degrees Celsius from the pre-industrial baseline.Yet many doubts exist on the capacity of various countries to deliver fully on their stated intentions. A significant number of countries are still reliant on fossil fuels for energy generation with the resultant use of coal and emissions of CO2.

The information hub for COP21 is accessed here: 

COP 21 Paris Information Hub

A copy of the UNs synthesis report from the Parties to the Framework Convention is accessed here:

UN Report - Synthesis of responses from the parties

DOHA 2012 - Climate Change Negotiations

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) took centre stage this week when the 18th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC to the Kyoto Protocol opened on Monday, 26 November 2012. COP18, as it is commonly referred, continues for two weeks until Friday, 7 December in Doha, Qatar, and expectations of major developments in various negotiations to mitigate the impact of climate change are very low. Ever since the debacle at the Copenhagen conference in 2009 (COP15), the reality of the quite substantial divisions between various groups of nations has been clearly apparent. The issue remains what can possibly provide a future step beyond the Kyoto protocol than to have some form of agreement such as Kyoto II. However genuine agreement remains elusive even with recent reports such as the World Bank warning of the a serious risk of a 4 degree Celsius rise in temperature actually occuring. The research findings of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) at COP18 that the permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere is melting should provide an incentive for an agreement to be reached. But will there be any such agreement ?

Geoengineering - the Royal Society's View

In 2009 The Royal Society released an authoritative and detailed report on geoengineering and its potential use in combatting climate change. Titled "Geoengineering the climate: science, governance and uncertainty" the report cautioned against seeing geoengineering solutions as a magic bullet to solve climate change. This caution is warranted and little has changed in the past three years.

The report can be accessed here http://bit.ly/udIaKE

The media conference can be viewed below (please click)

Geoengineering in the ocean: a solution or not ?

The recent publication of a geoengineering trial using phytoplankton to remove carbon dixoide from the atmosphere again raises the question as to whether this course of action is either sensible or safe notwithstanding the difficulties in controlling CO2. The trial called Eifex was carried out in the Southern Ocean in 2004 and involved adding iron to the ocean in order to stimulate plankton to grow. In many ocean regions, iron is not plentiful so the theory operates on the basis that if iron was added, phytoplankton would grow and in turn remove carbon dioxide. The plankton then die and sink to the bottom of the ocean taking the CO2 with them. A similar trial called Lohaflex was run in 2009 but failed after causing an algae bloom instead so the idea was considered a failure. But how sensible is this solution of iron fertilisation ? And what impacts on other species and various oceans will this artifical intervention cause ? And why was there a delay in publishing the results of a 2004 trial in 2012 ?

Geoengineering is seldom as straighforward as it appears and risks are rarely fully understood.  

Accounting and the environment

One of the most pronounced weaknesses identified with the current economic system worldwide has been the lack of measuring or attempting to measure, the externalities of environmental assets required for the production of goods and services. Two newer schools of thought in the economics profession which have evolved, now attempt to address this situation - environmental economics and ecological economics specifically are concerned with including these 'externalities' vis the environmental goods and services (rivers and water, forests, arrable land, and other natural resources) on which we all depend.

Without these externalities, the economics system would collapse and yet, until recent years, Neoclassical, Keynesian and later schools never included these finite resources in their models, so the environment was left to be plundered and exhausted with little recognition of its actual true worth (known in environmental circles as the 'Tragedy of the Commons'). But change has come with the United Nations and some Member States, including the European Union, adopting the 'System of Environmental-Economic Accounts (SEEA). This has occured only this year and Australia has followed suit. SEEA has four types of accounts in its framework and in summary these are:

Physical flow accounts record flows of natural inputs from the environment to the economy, flows of products within the economy and flows of residuals generated by the economy. These flows include water and energy used in production (e.g. of agricultural commodities) and waste flows to the environment (e.g. solid waste to landfill).

Functional accounts for environmental transactions record the many transactions between different economic units (i.e. industries, households, governments) that concern the environment. The relevant transactions are identified by first defining the set of environmental activities - i.e. those activities that reduce or eliminate pressures on the environment and that aim to make more efficient use of natural resources. Examples include investing in technologies designed to prevent or reduce pollution, restoring the environment after it has been polluted, recycling, conservation and resource management. Environmental activities are classified as being either environmental protection activities or resource management activities.

Asset accounts in physical and monetary terms measure the natural resources available and changes in the amount available. Asset accounts focus on the key individual components of the environment: mineral and energy resources; timber resources; fish/aquatic resources; other biological resources; soil resources; water resources; and land. They include measures of the stock of each environmental asset at the beginning and end of an accounting period and record the various changes in the stock due to extraction, natural growth, discovery, catastrophic loss or other reasons.

Ecosystem accounts are a developing area and not yet part of the international statistical standard. Ecosystems are areas containing a dynamic complex of plant, animal and micro-organism communities and their non-living environment interacting as a functional unit. Ecosystem accounts are structured to summarise information about these areas, their changing capacity to operate as a functional unit and their delivery of benefits to humanity.

The benefits received by humanity are known as ecosystem services. They are delivered in different forms and are grouped into three broad categories. The first category of ecosystem services is provisioning services. These are the benefits received from the natural inputs provided by the environment such as water, timber, fish and energy resources. The second category is regulatory services. These include the benefits provided when an ecosystem operates as a sink for emissions and other residuals, when an ecosystem provides flood mitigation services or when an ecosystem provides pollination services to agriculture. The third category is cultural services. These are the benefits provided when an ecosystem such as a forest, provides recreational, spiritual or other benefits to people.

These measures are long overdue but whether Governments and private industry take heed and utilise the data produced is another question. 

Climate change fatigue - community interest wanes

New research to be released in early May 2012 from the Melbourne Business School and the University of Technology, Sydney will show that climate change is no longer listed amongst the top concerns of the general community in Australia. The survey of 1500 adults who completed questionnaires in Australia were compared against similar cohorts in parallel studies in the US, UK and Germany indicating the key concerns were food, health, crime and safety and access to public services. This reflects a major change from surveys in 2007 when industrial pollution, renewable energy, climate change and environmental sustainability were ranked at the top of global issues. The survey shows that the focus for most people has returned to the regular concerns and issues which routinely rank in opinion polling. Of particular interest is the disengagement with party politics which correlates to climate change fatigue - after the carbon tax and ETS debate, Australians wish to simply get on with their lives.

Svalbard: Securing the world's food supply - optimism or faint hope ?

Svalbard - Courtesy: Norwegian Ministry of Food and Agriculture

Svalbard is not a name which evokes much recognition apart from the novels of Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials trilogy) and polar bears, however it has special significance being the largest and most ambitious of the world's seed banks, located at this desolate spot managed by the Norwegian Ministry of Food and Agriculture as part of the arrangements under the UN Convention on Biodiversity. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a backup for all the world's seed banks (around 1,400 of them) and holds samples of all of the planet's food crop seeds stored in vaults deep inside the permafrost of a sandstone mountain, where even global warming cannot reach them.Svalbard has an isolated position far out in the ocean, between 74° and 81° N and only 1000 kilometres from the North Pole. and the archipelago is characterised by an undisturbed nature. Of note, the vault was originally established by conservationist Cary Fowler and is still supported by a not-for-profit foundation which has redoubled its efforts this year to search the earth for the last remaining wild relatives of wheat, rice, barley, lentils and chickpeas to arm agriculture against climate change.

How important is Svalbard? Immeasurably. The world's population will cross the 7 billion mark in September 2011 and food security (and 'scarcity') has never been more pronounced. Coupled with this continuing demand is the sobering fact that the number of plant species available for food sources has been in near catastrophic decline with fewer and fewer varieties of fruit and vegetable available. In 1983 the Rural Advancement Foundation International concluded, after surveying listings of seeds sold in commercial seed houses in the US, that 93 % of varieties had gone extinct. Humans are now dependant on a handful of commercial varieties of fruit and vegetables and many of these are susceptible to changes in climate.

Global warming - facing an unpopular truth

The second Festival of Dangerous Ideas was held at the Sydney Opera House over the October 2010 long weekend featuring an array of topics in 24 separate panel debates and individual presentations. From a climate change perspective, the message remained clear with a projected grim outlook for the planet from 2020 onwards. Of note, the session titled 'We are all Climate Change Deniers' presented by Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethcis at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics demonstrated the stark reality that global warming is occuring and is on a trajectory for a major impact within this century. Even the 2 degree C target would still result in Artic summer ice, Himalayan Tibetan glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet melting. The evidence now shows a temperature rise of between 2 and 4 degrees C which will result in the loss of Amazon rainforest (one of the World's main oxygen generators) and the West Antartic ice sheet as well as many other effects. Yet despite the evidence, there remains vocal and powerful interests that seek to deny there is any risk as well as nullify any debate.