While you and your wife might disagree as to the optimal setting of the thermostat, my guess is that you'd both **really** rather have a thermostat to argue about than have no influence over temperature at all. I suspect that arguments over exact temperature setting are a higher-quality problem than having no ability to intervene.
Moreover, the costs to increase albedo are likely to be huge and the benefits disbursed and difficult to measure. My intuition is that the problem will be getting nations to chip in, rather than suppressing nations that step up with too much enthusiasm.
Start with the thermostat at your wife's higher setting, and if you can live with it, gradually see if she can cope with a lower setting, a tenth of a degree at a time. If you are bold, you could even note that she should have a tradeoff between paying higher energy bills for her comfort and spending on her other interests.
No, the costs are not huge. Wake Smith estimated about $18 billion yr−1 per degree Celsius of warming avoided (in 2020 USD). This is a small fraction of the wasted subsidies now provided to decarbonisation, supposedly to mitigate climate change but really to support vested interests. See The cost of stratospheric aerosol injection through 2100 by Wake Smith https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aba7e7
which points out that while many damn geoengineeering , few object to mitigating local warming by brightening roofs,walls and roads, and raises the question of how policy paradigms might shift if , like politics, all geoengineering were local?
Many regional water problems are as amenable to solution by local albedo management as the urban heat island effect, because water is easily brightened by air: parts per million of it can double the solar reflectivity of reservoirs & canals to cool thier contents and cut evaporative loss .
Hi Russell. Several of us have been discussing nanobubbles, and would welcome your thoughts on this. Please email me at robert at rtulip.net if you would like to follow up.
The fact that you recognize there ARE strong arguments against your preferred policy and seriously grapple with them is such a rare thing to see, even on Substack, and really helps your credibility on the subject.
I do however politely disagree on the theoretical optimal practical solution. Mind you, I'm not advocating for this, but simply as the outcome of a much abbreviated analysis of competing courses of action I find a different possibility more likely, particularly in light of the recent 'unexplained' drone sightings in the US: covert ops geoengineering.
It even "sounds" like a wild tinfoil-hat crazy person conspiracy theory, I know, but that's actually an asset. The best way to avoid a public fight over the thermostat is to just not publicly admit it exists or you used it. Do it in the most plausibly deniable / anonymous way. Nobody else can openly contest your thermostat setting without running into the same public opposition problem you just cited, none of them would have the tech right away anyway and the impetus for developing it should drop right along with the temperature, and even those who do know that "somebody" is doing it have nowhere to send their complaints (for those who would even dare complain publicly rather than try to make quiet deals for favorable settings). Sure, the whole world would notice that "something" is going on, but they all know how messy this could get if they make an open issue about it, so I suspect that most would honestly be happy to let someone else just... handle it... Take all the risks for them without asking anything in return but them looking the other way.
The UN has no credibility for almost anything right now, so they won’t help.
There just needs to be an experiment run with small enough amounts that a signal is just barely detectable. Either someone just does an experiment Dr. Evil style or we wait for the end times to try it. I don’t really see any cases in between though.
Excellent comment. However, there are international organisations within the UN family that could become credible partners, including in the World Bank Group and the WMO. To 'wait for the end times' brings a rather provocative religious tinge to the debate about the climate apocalypse. The four biblical horsemen, death, famine, war and plague, are already stalking the planet.
Excellent post Quico. Cooling Governance should be the key priority for climate discussion. Several international bodies could possibly provide models and advice for an International Albedo Organisation. The International Finance Corporation, World Bank and IMF bring the history of the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 to multilateral cooperation on economic development. The World Meteorological Organisation enables cooperation on weather science. The International Astronomical Union brings astronomers together to collaborate on priorities. The elimination of emission reduction from US cooperation on climate with the election of Donald Trump as president makes cooperation on cooling an urgent priority as a substitute for decarbonisation, including on how this can be made acceptable to Chris Wright, Trump's Energy Secretary, who accepts the reality but not the urgency of anthropogenic climate change. Industries who stand to benefit commercially from cooling, notably insurance, agriculture, shipping and energy, should lobby Wright to support cooling governance. A strategy should start with cooling technologies that are local and acceptable. For example, beginning with production of dimethyl sulphide as a biogenic aerosol from seaweed, developing technology for marine cloud brightening and ocean nanobubbles, and enabling homeopathic levels of SAI to test for impacts, would all prepare for the effective rapid global deployment that will certainly be needed to maintain security as we start to tumble over the climate precipice into the hothouse. As well, the system of carbon credits has to shift to cooling credits, determined by cooling ROI, with an agreed system to assess and measure cooling effects of interventions. The International Standards Organisation did preliminary work on a standard for radiative forcing that is relevant. I believe the massive benefits of cooling for agriculture, weather management and biodiversity protection will make the thermostat problem you describe less of a worry, especially with the ability of AI to help optimise location, timing and volume of deployments. There may even be the potential to build an ice canal across the north pole, which would assuage Russian concerns and massively benefit trade between Atlantic and Pacific economies. An International Albedo Union should be pitched as a strategy to support peace and prosperity, and a way to prevent the scarenarios of conflict promoted by opponents.
My thought is to question how much resistance there would be given everyone has stated net zero goals that have much higher costs. It could be a fraught mess yet still easily outperform short time horizon emissions targets - which seem likely to be an ineffective fraught mess with a healthy side of suppression of developing countries growth
Shifting gears to marine cloud brightening, would you know if it would be a simple fix for any kind of Greenland tipping point? Recently someone argued that it wouldn't affect Greenland's interior so the tipping point remains
MCB is not a simple fix, but it needs to be understood on a global scale to consider Greenland impacts. Operation of MCB in the tropics, and in the identified zones of high density of suitable low clouds off the western coasts of continents, would cool the ocean currents flowing into the Arctic as a primary way to cool Greenland in the event SAI is delayed. Note the problem with Greenland includes that melting reduces the current elevation of its ice cap, now up to 3.2 km. As the top level falls it melts faster. Refreezing the whole Arctic region by cooling inflowing ocean currents may prove the best way to reverse Greenland melt.
A very convincing argument (I didn’t ask to be terrified in such a way before coffee this morning.) I would say though that some of those “unknown unknowns” might suggest a world-terminating event and bear consideration. Perhaps I am behind and we’re much more certain about the science for such a project, but the weather is a famously unpredictable problem. I can hardly be blamed for being skeptical of certainty here.
These scarenarios are nonsense. Global cooperation on cooling will struggle to slow temperature rise, let alone bring excessive cooling. Stabilising the jet stream will even out the current extremes. Extensive field experience will demonstrate capacity to ensure deployment volumes are far below the scale needed to generate such risks of excessive cooling. Kim Stanley Robinson speculated on this in his novel 2312, and it formed the plot for the schlock movie Ice Piercer, enabling it to be used as a schlock excuse to defend the vested interests in decarbonisation alone as a climate strategy.
While you and your wife might disagree as to the optimal setting of the thermostat, my guess is that you'd both **really** rather have a thermostat to argue about than have no influence over temperature at all. I suspect that arguments over exact temperature setting are a higher-quality problem than having no ability to intervene.
Moreover, the costs to increase albedo are likely to be huge and the benefits disbursed and difficult to measure. My intuition is that the problem will be getting nations to chip in, rather than suppressing nations that step up with too much enthusiasm.
Start with the thermostat at your wife's higher setting, and if you can live with it, gradually see if she can cope with a lower setting, a tenth of a degree at a time. If you are bold, you could even note that she should have a tradeoff between paying higher energy bills for her comfort and spending on her other interests.
No, the costs are not huge. Wake Smith estimated about $18 billion yr−1 per degree Celsius of warming avoided (in 2020 USD). This is a small fraction of the wasted subsidies now provided to decarbonisation, supposedly to mitigate climate change but really to support vested interests. See The cost of stratospheric aerosol injection through 2100 by Wake Smith https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aba7e7
The question you raise is discussed in a 2011 article in _ Climatic Change _ linked at:
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4737323/Seitz_BrightWater.pdf;sequence=1
which points out that while many damn geoengineeering , few object to mitigating local warming by brightening roofs,walls and roads, and raises the question of how policy paradigms might shift if , like politics, all geoengineering were local?
Many regional water problems are as amenable to solution by local albedo management as the urban heat island effect, because water is easily brightened by air: parts per million of it can double the solar reflectivity of reservoirs & canals to cool thier contents and cut evaporative loss .
Hi Russell. Several of us have been discussing nanobubbles, and would welcome your thoughts on this. Please email me at robert at rtulip.net if you would like to follow up.
The fact that you recognize there ARE strong arguments against your preferred policy and seriously grapple with them is such a rare thing to see, even on Substack, and really helps your credibility on the subject.
I do however politely disagree on the theoretical optimal practical solution. Mind you, I'm not advocating for this, but simply as the outcome of a much abbreviated analysis of competing courses of action I find a different possibility more likely, particularly in light of the recent 'unexplained' drone sightings in the US: covert ops geoengineering.
It even "sounds" like a wild tinfoil-hat crazy person conspiracy theory, I know, but that's actually an asset. The best way to avoid a public fight over the thermostat is to just not publicly admit it exists or you used it. Do it in the most plausibly deniable / anonymous way. Nobody else can openly contest your thermostat setting without running into the same public opposition problem you just cited, none of them would have the tech right away anyway and the impetus for developing it should drop right along with the temperature, and even those who do know that "somebody" is doing it have nowhere to send their complaints (for those who would even dare complain publicly rather than try to make quiet deals for favorable settings). Sure, the whole world would notice that "something" is going on, but they all know how messy this could get if they make an open issue about it, so I suspect that most would honestly be happy to let someone else just... handle it... Take all the risks for them without asking anything in return but them looking the other way.
The UN has no credibility for almost anything right now, so they won’t help.
There just needs to be an experiment run with small enough amounts that a signal is just barely detectable. Either someone just does an experiment Dr. Evil style or we wait for the end times to try it. I don’t really see any cases in between though.
Excellent comment. However, there are international organisations within the UN family that could become credible partners, including in the World Bank Group and the WMO. To 'wait for the end times' brings a rather provocative religious tinge to the debate about the climate apocalypse. The four biblical horsemen, death, famine, war and plague, are already stalking the planet.
I think a big difference here is that there is an obvious Schelling point : keep the thermostat to the average of the last 50 years.
Excellent post Quico. Cooling Governance should be the key priority for climate discussion. Several international bodies could possibly provide models and advice for an International Albedo Organisation. The International Finance Corporation, World Bank and IMF bring the history of the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 to multilateral cooperation on economic development. The World Meteorological Organisation enables cooperation on weather science. The International Astronomical Union brings astronomers together to collaborate on priorities. The elimination of emission reduction from US cooperation on climate with the election of Donald Trump as president makes cooperation on cooling an urgent priority as a substitute for decarbonisation, including on how this can be made acceptable to Chris Wright, Trump's Energy Secretary, who accepts the reality but not the urgency of anthropogenic climate change. Industries who stand to benefit commercially from cooling, notably insurance, agriculture, shipping and energy, should lobby Wright to support cooling governance. A strategy should start with cooling technologies that are local and acceptable. For example, beginning with production of dimethyl sulphide as a biogenic aerosol from seaweed, developing technology for marine cloud brightening and ocean nanobubbles, and enabling homeopathic levels of SAI to test for impacts, would all prepare for the effective rapid global deployment that will certainly be needed to maintain security as we start to tumble over the climate precipice into the hothouse. As well, the system of carbon credits has to shift to cooling credits, determined by cooling ROI, with an agreed system to assess and measure cooling effects of interventions. The International Standards Organisation did preliminary work on a standard for radiative forcing that is relevant. I believe the massive benefits of cooling for agriculture, weather management and biodiversity protection will make the thermostat problem you describe less of a worry, especially with the ability of AI to help optimise location, timing and volume of deployments. There may even be the potential to build an ice canal across the north pole, which would assuage Russian concerns and massively benefit trade between Atlantic and Pacific economies. An International Albedo Union should be pitched as a strategy to support peace and prosperity, and a way to prevent the scarenarios of conflict promoted by opponents.
My thought is to question how much resistance there would be given everyone has stated net zero goals that have much higher costs. It could be a fraught mess yet still easily outperform short time horizon emissions targets - which seem likely to be an ineffective fraught mess with a healthy side of suppression of developing countries growth
Shifting gears to marine cloud brightening, would you know if it would be a simple fix for any kind of Greenland tipping point? Recently someone argued that it wouldn't affect Greenland's interior so the tipping point remains
MCB is not a simple fix, but it needs to be understood on a global scale to consider Greenland impacts. Operation of MCB in the tropics, and in the identified zones of high density of suitable low clouds off the western coasts of continents, would cool the ocean currents flowing into the Arctic as a primary way to cool Greenland in the event SAI is delayed. Note the problem with Greenland includes that melting reduces the current elevation of its ice cap, now up to 3.2 km. As the top level falls it melts faster. Refreezing the whole Arctic region by cooling inflowing ocean currents may prove the best way to reverse Greenland melt.
Forgive us if the rest of the world isn’t terribly interested in following you over this catastrophic cliff…
A very convincing argument (I didn’t ask to be terrified in such a way before coffee this morning.) I would say though that some of those “unknown unknowns” might suggest a world-terminating event and bear consideration. Perhaps I am behind and we’re much more certain about the science for such a project, but the weather is a famously unpredictable problem. I can hardly be blamed for being skeptical of certainty here.
Interesting but tread lightly least you creat the year with no summer
Year Without a Summer - Wikipedia https://search.app/j53eMHF5yu5DUokHA
Or start another Little Age
Little Ice Age - Wikipedia https://search.app/mipyc618K553vgDf6
These scarenarios are nonsense. Global cooperation on cooling will struggle to slow temperature rise, let alone bring excessive cooling. Stabilising the jet stream will even out the current extremes. Extensive field experience will demonstrate capacity to ensure deployment volumes are far below the scale needed to generate such risks of excessive cooling. Kim Stanley Robinson speculated on this in his novel 2312, and it formed the plot for the schlock movie Ice Piercer, enabling it to be used as a schlock excuse to defend the vested interests in decarbonisation alone as a climate strategy.