What To Do About Climate Change – And When To Do It
Senior energy analyst and frequent commenter Glenn Doty writes:
Farmers are getting hit by the drought and heat wave. Wealthy southern landowners are getting hit by increased tropical storm activity… and everyone has to spend more to keep the air conditioning running. Within six years we will likely see satellite pictures of Earth with no ice in the arctic seas. It is becoming impossible even for the most uneducated people to deny global warming… and when it becomes impossible, they’ll give up the fight, and everyone will claim they knew it all along.
Great perspective; I agree with you 100%. I guess the question is: Exactly what will we do when the lies and obfuscations finally stop, public awareness comes up, and we have broad-spread agreement about the reality of climate change? I’d like to see a sane and honest process by which cleantech ideas that are based on solid science that could possibly scale to address the problem receive the funding they need to move through the R&D process rapidly. But how real is that, given the level of incompetence and corruption associated with the allocation of the ARPA-E money in today’s world, coupled with the poisonous political environment?
I know I don’t have to convince you of this, of all people. The fact that Doty Windfuels can’t get the few million dollars it needs to develop its breakthrough approach to synthetic fuels is unconscionable.
Would it be impossible to begin covering large areas of the polar ice with huge sections of white or even reflective sheets of materials reinforced and secured to the ground to prevent wind damage? I realize this would need to be massive and expensive, but is not the damage by global warming much more expensive? If everyone gets on line with the problem, would this offer a solution?
Tim,
That’s truly impractical to the point of impossible.
I’ve heard many people mention the possibility of either cloud brightening or atmospheric aerosol dispersion (Pinatubo option) for reducing the insolation of the polar cap… but these options just don’t make any sense either.
The truth is the only options that make any sense whatsoever are mitigation (reducing GHG emissions), and accommodation (figuring out how to live with the climate change that is occurring and will occur). That’s all we have.
With respect to the disappearance of polar ice, it’s too late to mitigate that, so the best thing that can be done is to determine what shoreline we’ll be willing to save (and begin an insurance-type fund for shoreline buildup in those areas), and determine what we’ll be willing to lose – and have a gradual re-zoning timeline that will let the seas claim that shoreline. With the disappearance of the sea ice, Greenland ice loss will begin increasing rapidly, and the seas will rise far faster than the IPCC report projects… but all we can do is accommodate that. We don’t need to try to re-learn the lesson King Cnut learned long ago.
Of course, there is a great deal of talk about geoengineering; there are several different concepts one comes across. But they’re uniformly quite scary, to put it mildly. The potential for unintended consequences when you’re changing the chemistry of the atmosphere, or of entire oceans is hard to overestimate. Usually, I’m for swift action; here, I’m glad to see this discussion progressing so slowly.
In essense, you’re right; we either reduce GHG emissions or we’ve had it.