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Cloud ships on course to beat climate change, says Copenhagen study
Ben Webster and Hannah Devlin, The Times Online
They sound like ideas from a Jules Verne novel, but giant engineering schemes designed to alter the climate offer the cheapest way of avoiding catastrophic global warming, according to a growing number of scientists and green-minded entrepreneurs.
Most of the schemes have been dismissed as impossibly expensive or impractical, such as the proposal to create a space sunshade by using rockets to deploy millions of mirrors in the stratosphere.
One relatively cheap solution, however, is gaining favour among many different groups and is endorsed today by an independent study that compares the costs and benefits of all the main ideas. A wind-powered fleet of 1,900 ships would criss-cross the oceans, sucking up sea water and spraying it from the top of tall funnels to create vast white clouds.
These clouds would reflect a tiny proportion, between 1 and 2 per cent, of the sunlight that would otherwise warm the ocean. This would be enough to cancel out the greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide emissions. The ships would be unmanned and directed by satellite to locations with the best conditions for increasing cloud cover. They would mainly operate in the Pacific, far enough from land to avoid interfering with rainfall.
…The Royal Society is expected to announce next month that cloud-forming ships are one of the most promising ideas.
The Copenhagen study also looked at a scheme to mimic the effect of major volcanic eruptions, which have a global cooling effect lasting a year or more. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 sent billions of tonnes of sulphur dioxide and other particles into the atmosphere. These formed a haze that shielded the sun’s rays and reduced global average temperature by about 0.5C.
…The study concluded that the scheme would cost $230 billion and would be much harder to control than cloud-producing ships, which could be switched off if shown to have adverse effects. The study dismissed the space sunshade idea after calculating that the costs of launching the mirrors would be $395 trillion.
(7 August 2009)
The Copenhagen Consensus Center is run by Bjorn Lomborg, who has a chequered history with many environmentalists. -KS
Glacier melt accelerating, federal report concludes
Jim Tankersley, Los Angeles Times
The federal government Thursday released the most comprehensive study of melting glaciers in North America — and the results show a rapid and accelerating shrinkage over the last half a century because of global warming.
One of the glaciers in the study, the South Cascade Glacier in Washington state, has lost nearly half of its volume and a quarter of its mass since 1958, scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey said. The two others in the study, the Wolverine and Gulkana glaciers in Alaska, have both lost nearly 15% of their mass.
In all three cases, the melting has increased over the last two decades. The acceleration is the result of warmer, drier climates in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska caused by global warming, the researchers said.
“By having a 50-year record, you can look over what’s going on, look over the meteorological, climatological record, and really get an idea of what’s going on in the mountains,” said Edward Josberger, a scientist with the USGS Washington Water Science Center in Tacoma, Wash., who has worked for a decade on the study.
…For five decades, USGS researchers have periodically measured the glaciers’ size with tools including measurement stakes and photographic surveys. Their data include tallies of winter snow accumulation and summer melt.
In each case, the data show that summer melting accelerated in the last 20 years. At the same time, winter snowpacks have tapered off. The reduced accumulations and increased melts have resulted in shrinking glaciers…
(7 August 2009)
India attacks British and Western ‘hypocrites’ over cutting emissions
Dean Nelson, The Telegraph
Shyam Saran said the country would not take any measures that could restrict its growth. Instead, it would fund developments to reduce carbon emissions, increase the generation of green power and improve energy efficiency.
Any further measures demanded by developed countries would be taken only if full funding and technological support was provided.
Mr Saran said his government was planning to cut carbon emissions through fuel efficiency and would bring electricity to remote villages through projects to transform agricultural waste into power.
Measures would be taken in India’s national interest, he said, but the government would not yield to pressure from the “hypocritical” West.
“No one is prepared to touch their living standards,” he said. “If you say, ‘You’re producing Tata Nanos [India’s new £1,200 car], what will that do to the world?’ but not talk about your two or three cars per family, it’s hypocritical.
…Mr Saran said developed countries accepted that they must take responsibility for reducing carbon emissions, and to finance any reductions required of developing countries, at the Rio Earth summit in 1992 but most had forgotten their obligations because they were inconvenient.
“Should we be surprised if we end up with a least common denominator result [at Copenhagen]? That’s the way things are going,” he said.
Mr Saran said developed countries were approaching the issue as a commercial opportunity for their companies rather than an opportunity for scientific collaboration. Solar power held the key, he said, yet there had been no offers from developed countries to share technology.
…”I can’t tell people they can’t aspire to higher standards of living.” India was meanwhile reported to be preparing to transform its desert border with Pakistan into a £7 billion hub for solar energy. It plans to line its southern border in the Rann of Kutch, Gujarat, with solar mirrors as part of a scheme to create what officials have called a “solar city'”…
(5 August 2009)
Key to climate bill, offsets have plenty of critics
Erica Gies, Grist
America’s first major stab at tackling global climate change comes in the form of the American Clean Energy Security Act, a massive piece of legislation that would touch nearly every corner of the U.S. economy.
The bill, often referred to as “Waxman-Markey” after its principal sponsors in the House of Representatives, contains provisions for clean energy technology, energy efficiency, green building codes, green jobs, and adaptation measures to help ease people into a new world order. But its most talked about feature is the regulation arm, “cap and trade”: limit pollution to a finite amount, lower the allowable amount each year, and let polluters trade pollution permits to create market incentives for businesses to reduce emissions as cheaply as possible.
Modeled, in part, on the federal program created in the early 1990s to combat acid rain, the Waxman-Markey trading scheme would create a mandatory (or compliance) market in greenhouse gas emission credits for businesses regulated under the cap. Credits would be measured in carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), where each type of greenhouse gas is converted to its equivalent in CO2, the most common greenhouse gas. Hence the term “carbon markets.”
But here’s the rub: Waxman-Markey does not propose a pure cap-and-trade scheme. It’s actually cap and trade and offset. Offsets, put simply, would let polluters pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than they would be permitted under the “cap” part of the program. Companies would earn that right by investing in projects in the United States or in other countries that reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere.
…Inevitably, the offsets trend prompted a backlash: questions about methodology and merit, comparisons to sin indulgences, nicknames like “rip-offsets” (thanks, Joe Romm!), and parodies like Cheat Neutral. In August 2008 the Government Accountability Office lent a stamp of authenticity to these concerns by issuing a report that outlined the challenges associated with the voluntary market for offsets. And on August 3, the Congressional Budget Office issued a report (PDF) that, while concluding offsets under the Waxman-Markey bill would likely reduce compliance costs and cut carbon emissions, conceded that a lot depends on the design of the program and how offsets are certified.
If regulated companies are allowed to buy offsets as an alternative to reducing their own emissions or buying extra allowances under the cap, and if those offsets aren’t actually reducing pollution, then we would be merely running a “shell game,” not tackling climate change, said Daphne Wysham, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, an independent think tank based in Washington, D.C…
(10 August 2009)
