I do not have enough time to comment on this one, but I think the story will be appreciated by members of this forum:

RUSSIAN SCIENTISTS FIELD TEST GEOENGINEERING
Chris Mooney. The Intersection. 14 December 2009.

... because we have geoengineering.

I will assume that most of you know what geonengineering is. In a sense we have been active participants in this type of engineering much longer than most imagine; the current climate crisis is a direct result of the unintentional engineering of our planet's atmosphere. While it has been a taboo subject (a 'green' transformation being the only politically correct response to AGW these days), the reality of intentional geoengineering is something analysts need to come to terms with.

Many have predicted that unchecked AGW shall reap destruction upon the civilizations of the Earth. The author of this forum has gone so far to say that predicting anything past 2030-2040 is near impossible as AGW means that "all bets are off everywhere." (I ask skeptics and moderates (i.e. the IPCC) to accept this characterization of future warming for the sake of argument.) Clearly climate change poses a near existential threat to developing and developed countries alike.

This is why it will never happen. Three things guarantee that sometime in the next fifty years major climate changing geoengineering projects will come to pass.

The first is that geoengineering is cheap. This is a relative of course - something cheap to the Pentagon is not cheap to the rest of us. But this is exactly my point: geonengineering is just another government project. In comparison to military budgets and social welfare safety nets, geoengineering comes off the cheaper, to say nothing of the trillions of dollars that will be needed to mitigate emissions on a large scale.

The second is that geoengineering can be done unilaterally. Countries are hesitant to commit to C02 reductions without guarantees that the rest of the world will walk off the cliff of economic suicide with them. The unequal distribution of the ill effects of climate change also makes states hesitant to pitch in - by doing so they are doing little more than underwriting the security and stability of regions across the poorer areas of the world with their own precious gold. Making things worse is that emissions can only be lowered multilaterally. If one big emitter does not go along with the plan, then the whole scheme amounts to nothing.

Not so with geoengineering. One state is all that you need to engineer the climate. Granted, the state must have a secure source of funds, but this does not provide a problem to the largest emitters. And if the effects of climate change are to be as dangerous as has been suggested, there is no reason that a country particularly susceptible to ecosystem collapse (say, China or India) will not unilaterally cool the world's climate, international consensus be damned.

The final pertinent aspect of geoengineering is its timescale. The dirty secret of the climate debates is that emission reductions won't have an affect for a good 40-50 years; this is within the timespan of doom prophesied by Lymas et al. Making things worse, we have almost undoubtedly passed the point of systematic risk - a positive feedback loop has been established that ensures that warming will continue regardless of emissions.

Geoengineering is the only way to stop this loop. It is also a policy whose ramifications will quickly be felt - we possess the power to cool the Earth for years at a time. The implications of this are frightening (think of a world in which we change climatic conditions to favor one side or another that is engaged in war), but they are real nonetheless.

FIN

Over the last month and a half a significant news story has come forth that has not deserved its relative lack of attention. See, as it turns out, the IPCC was wrong. Dead wrong.

The IPCC put forward the claim in its last working report that if CO2 emissions were released unabated then the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035, and by way of consequent drought, kill millions of people dependent on rivers whose source lies in the Himalayas glacial run off. (That includes, off the top of my head, the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Ganges, the Meghna, and the Indus.)

Two months ago the Indian environmental ministry published their own report that claimed the opposite -- the Himalayas were in no way about to dry off the face of the Earth.

Coming as it did before Copenhagen, most Western environmentalists dismissed the report as a cheap ploy to strengthen their negotiating position before the conference. (To see my thoughts on that conference, see here.

But, it turns out the Indians may have been onto something. A few scientists and reporters dug into the report... and discovered that the 2035 figure was baseless. The real number was not 2035, but 2350.

I could tell the story of how all this happened, but others have already blazed that trail better than I can. And I present:

By the Way, there will still be glaciers in 2035.
John Nielsen-Gammon. Atmo.Sphere. 12 December 2009.

Peer Review in the IPCC
Roger Peilke Jr. Roger Peilke Jr’s Blog. 23 December 2009.

Seperating Climate Facts from Fears
Editors. New Scientist. 13 January 2010.