Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

Solar radiation management (SRM) –  aka ‘hard’ geo-engineering — is, literally, a smoke and mirrors solution to the dangers posed by unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases,.

As science advisor John Holdren resasserted in 2009 of strategies such as space mirrors or aerosol injection, “The ‘geo-engineering’ approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects.“

And, of course, those ’solutions’ do nothing to stop the consequences of ocean acidification, which recent studies suggest will be devastating all by itself (see Geological Society: Acidifying oceans spell marine biological meltdown “by end of century”).

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Climate ’sceptic’ Bjørn Lomborg now believes global warming is one of world’s greatest threats

One of the world’s most prominent climate change sceptics has called for a $100bn fund to fight the effects of global warning, after rethinking his views on the severity of the threat.

That’s the UK Telegraph’s headline.

Bjørn Lomborg: the dissenting climate change voice who changed his tune

With his new book, Danish scientist Bjørn Lomborg has become an unlikely advocate for huge investment in fighting global warming….

That’s from the Guardian’s headline.

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Science magazine reporter Eli Kintisch, sent me a blog post based on the research he did on Calera company for his new book, “Hack the Planet.

So startup Calera, who seeks to turn CO2 exhaust into limestone for “carbon negative” cement, has struck a $15 million deal with coal giant Peabody. And Monday you reported on various issues facing the technology.

I thought I’d offer more:  Harvard geochemist Dan Schrag says its CEO is “pulling numbers out of his a##.” And other independent experts have their doubts as to various aspects.

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Sometimes blog posts have immediate impacts.  On Thursday, March 18, I wrote a piece on the Climate Response Fund that reflected concerns raised to me by many leading climate experts:  “Exclusive:  Chief sponsor of landmark climate manipulation conference maintains close financial ties to controversial geo-engineering company.”

CRF’s Board responded with a statement on Friday, specifically addressing these concerns:

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[UPDATE:  Sometimes blog posts have pretty immediate impacts -- see here.]

I am not comfortable with the the idea that a meeting set up to create guidelines governing geoengineering field tests might be used to help raise funds for geoengineering field tests, without the informed consent of meeting participants. I am also concerned with possible conflicts of interest related to the profit motive.

That’s from an e-mail that climatologist and geo-engineering expert Ken Caldeira sent me this week.

I had heard last week that Caldeira was not going to the star-studded “Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies” — the “Woodstock” of geo-engineering.  I asked him why.  I reprint his full email below, along with concerns raised to me by geo-engineering expert David Keith.

Frankly, I think all of the conference attendees (and they include some of the biggest names in climate, full list here) need to ask themselves whether they are helping to legitimize — and thereby ultimately helping to raise funds for — a nonprofit that will not unequivocally forswear funding geo-engineering experiments, a nonprofit that is closely tied to the financing efforts of a for-profit company that has already started pursuing dubious geo-engineering schemes.

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Climate Progress is beginning a multipart series on what has been called the “Woodstock” of geo-engineering.   This historic but controversial event will take place March 22 – 26 in Asilomar, CA. Details can be found here on the website of the conference “developer,” Dr. Margaret Leinen of the Climate Response Fund.

I have been interviewing leading experts on geo-engineering about this conference, including journalist Jeff Goodell, author of the forthcoming book, How to Cool the Planet.

This conference proclaims its lofty goal “to develop norms and guidelines for controlled experimentation on climate engineering or intervention techniques.”  That’s one reason why, as Goodell put it to me, it “needs to be purer than pure.”  It appears to fail that test in a number of respects, as we will see.

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The following is a guest post by Hillary Berkowitz of 4th Row Films about “Owning the Weather,” which is being screened in Copenhagen, tomorrow, Sunday the 13th.

The desire to modify the weather has been around forever; but with the threat of catastrophic climate change, water wars, and intensifying hurricanes, a new breed of weather control has emerged.

OWNING THE WEATHER tells the story of weather modification in the United States, from Charles Hatfield’s infamous rainmaking days to modern plans to engineer the climate.

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The Superfreaks come up with their biggest aerosol smoke screen yet  to obscure their book’s countless mistakes, as Brad Johnson reports in this Wonk Room repost.  Note also how Dubner, in playing the victim card, trivializes the very serious issue of religious persecution.

In the latest of many fawning interviews promoting SuperFreakonomics, author Stephen J. Dubner claimed the critics of his “global cooling” chapter have issued a “fatwa for entertaining alternate theories.” On Public Radio International’s morning program, “The Takeaway,” Dubner told hosts John Hockenberry and Celeste Headlee that he was right to call global warming a “religion.” In fact, he considers the criticism the book has received from economists, climate scientists, and energy experts to be “essentially a fatwa“:

In terms of the biggest result, I’d say is: We argued that the movement to stop global warming has the feel of a religion. I think if anything we should strengthen that sentence, because what’s been issued here is essentially a fatwa for entertaining alternate theories.

Listen here:

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The authors of SuperFreakonomics simultaneously insist they accept the science — “Like those who are criticizing us, we believe that rising global temperatures are a man-made phenomenon” — while at the same time labeling global warming a “religion” (see here).  And we’ve seen one award-winning journalist explain “Freakonomics Guys Flunk Science of Climate Change.”  But now, as this stunning Charlie Rose video shows, we have the clearest demonstration that both Levitt and Dubner don’t accept and don’t understand the science.  This is a Wonk Room repost.

Appearing on PBS’s influential Charlie Rose Show last week, SuperFreakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner expanded upon their destructively uninformed portrayal of climate science, even throwing into question man’s influence on global warming. When Rose asked him about the controversial “global cooling” chapter, Levitt fatuously claimed that “what we actually said is not even very controversial.” Levitt said that SuperFreakonomics is “not denying that the Earth has gotten warmer.” After Rose interjected, “And it’s man created,” Levitt said, “It’s harder to know whether it’s man created”:

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On Monday, The New Yorker published Elizabeth Kolbert’s lengthy review of SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.  In her 2400-word review, titled “Hosed:  Is there a quick fix for the climate?” she writes:

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modelling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years.  Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is a climatologist who, like Levitt, teaches at the University of Chicago. In a particularly scathing critique, he composed an open letter to Levitt, which he posted on the blog RealClimate.

On Friday, coauthor Stephen Dubner replied in a post titled, “With Geoengineering Outlawed, Will Only Outlaws Have Geoengineering?“  Notwithstanding the title, the piece is clearly meant to be serious.  Here is what they have to say about Kolbert’s review:
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The outrage over — and debunkings of — the error-riddled book Superfreakonomics continue, even as coauthors Levitt and Dubner slowly concede their mistakes.

Perhaps the most scathing takedown to date comes from Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, the Louis Block Professor in the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, on RealClimate, in an “An open letter to Steve Levitt.”  Pierrehumbert accuses his U of C colleague of “academic malpractice in your book.”

So far, Dubner has apologized to me for one false accusation in his Sunday, October 18 post attacking my accurate debunking of his book (see here).  Now he has finally conceded on his blog that one of the many key errors I pointed out in his book — that climatologist Ken Caldeira did not believe or ever say that “carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight” (see here).  He still has not retracted the countless other mistakes I and others have pointed out.  Indeed, Berkeley economist Brad DeLong urged both authors to “abjectly apologize” for the whole chapter.

And Dubner has not retracted the claim that is still being parroted by the deniers and delayers around the web that I did a “smear” on the book.  It is clear for all to see now that there never was a smear. Everything I wrote in my original debunking was accurate – see Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’: New book pushes global cooling myths, sheer illogic, and patent nonsense — and the primary climatologist it relies on, Ken Caldeira, says “it is an inaccurate portrayal of me” and “misleading” in “many” places.

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Yale Environment 360: I want to start with this little dust-up over SuperFreakonomics. In the book, you are quoted as saying, when it comes to global warming, “Carbon dioxide is not the right villain.” Is that accurate?

Ken Caldeira: That is not accurate. I don’t believe I said anything remotely like that because I believe that we should be outlawing the production of devices that emit carbon dioxide, and I don’t think we can solve this carbon climate problem unless we drastically reduce our carbon dioxide emissions very soon.

e360: They also write that you are convinced that human activity is responsible for “some” global warming. What does that mean?

Caldeira: I don’t think we can say with certainty whether we’re responsible for 90 percent of it or we might be responsible for 110 percent of it. But the vast majority of global warming, I believe, is due to human release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

e360: Another thing that plays in to the same kind of sensibility is the idea [which the book quotes Caldeira saying] that the “doubling of CO2 traps less than 2 percent of the outgoing radiation emitted by the Earth.” When that’s phrased like that, it makes it sound like it’s not really much of a problem.

Caldeira: You should think of the whole global warming problem as a 1 percent problem, at least for doubling of CO2. In absolute temperature Kelvin — scientists like to use the Kelvin scale — the current Earth temperature is around 288 degrees Kelvin, and a 3-degree warming on top of that is basically a one-percent additional warming. And so this whole issue of climate change, when viewed from an Earth-system perspective, is a story about 1 percents and 2 percents. Two percent might sound like a small number, but that’s the difference between a much hotter world, and the kind of world we’re accustomed to….

e360: Overall, do you feel like your work has been accurately and fairly represented in this book?

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Un-friggin-believable.

Nathan Myhrvold, who Levitt and Dubner call the “polymath’s polymath” — who is one of the primary “experts” the authors rely on to make the case for their central geoengineering-only approach to global warming — has just publicly repudiated that approach. Apparently he never read the chapter — or didn’t understand it if he did.  And apparently in their rush to print this “rebuttal” to my debunkings, the Superfreaks didn’t bother to read it closely, since he just wrote this jaw-dropper on their blog:

Geoengineering is proposed only as a last resort to try to reduce or cope with the even greater harms of global warming!

… The point of the chapter in SuperFreakonomics is that geoengineering might be good insurance in case we don’t get global warming under control.

You can’t make this stuff up.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists posted here about Myhrvold’s amazing defense repudiation of Superfreakonomics:

That is exactly the opposite of what the book argues and represents a complete repudiation of the chapter from one of the main sources on which Levitt and Dubner relied.

Or go to the Bloomberg interview of Dubner and Caldeira that backs up my reporting on error-riddled Superfreakonomics for an independent view of what the book is about — and what the authors think the book is about:

Caldeira, who is researching the idea [of aerosol geoengineering], argues that it can succeed only if we first reduce emissions. Otherwise, he says, geoengineering can’t begin to cope with the collateral damage, such as acidic oceans killing off shellfish.

Levitt and Dubner ignore his view and champion his work as a permanent substitute for emissions cuts. When I told Dubner that Caldeira doesn’t believe geoengineering can work without cutting emissions, he was baffled. “I don’t understand how that could be,” he said. In other words, the Freakonomics guys just flunked climate science.

Are you baffled also?  The two leading experts (well, one expert and one F.A.K.E.R.) that Dubner and Leavitt relied on for their geoengineering-only solution don’t believe in it!  Well, Caldeira doesn’t believe in it.  As we’ll see, it’s impossible to figure out what Myhrvold believes.

Myhrvold is not a ”polymath’s polymath.”  He repudiates the Superfreaks, so he’s a contrarian’s contrarian.

Why exactly does Myhrvold think the Superfreaks were so desperate to push the (incorrect) statement about Caldeira that his “research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain”?  Since the Superfreaks made me take the PDF of the book down, go to the NPR interview of Levitt (transcript here):

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UPDATE: For an even bigger shocker, read Myhrvold’s “rebuttal,” which actually endorses my main critique (!):  Nathan Myhrvold jumps the shark — and jumps ship on Levitt and Dubner (on their blog!) asserting: “Geoengineering is proposed only as a last resort to try to reduce or cope with the even greater harms of global warming! … The point of the chapter in SuperFreakonomics is that geoengineering might be good insurance in case we don’t get global warming under control.” Did he even read the book?

This post will shock you.

The sheer illogic and “patent nonsense” of the new book Superfreakonomics discussed in Part 1 is just the tip of the iceberg.  What’s most worrisome is 1) who exactly has been peddling much of the nonsense and illogic to the authors — Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft — and 2) who else may have been persuaded by his bullshit.  The Myrhvold connection deserves special focus because it may help explain three puzzling things:

• Why does Bill Gates’ Foundation mostly ignore global warming?  (see here)
• Why is Warren Buffett so wrong — and outspoken — about cap and trade? (see here)
• Why did Gates and Buffett visit the Athabasca tar sands — the biggest global warming crime ever — to satisfy “their own curiosity” but also “with investment in mind”? (see here).

According to the Superfreaks, Gates and Buffett went to the visit the tar sands (and other energy producers) with Myrhvold, giving him plenty of time to spread his misinformation to them.  Moreover, the idea Myrhvold came away is simply stunning.

And yes, one always needs the caveat, “according to Levitt and Dubner,” because their reporting skills are so dreadful — they shoehorn everything they hear into whatever contrarian view they had decided to adopt.  You shouldn’t take anything they say at face value.  As we’ve seen, the primary climatologist the book relies on, Ken Caldeira, says “it is an inaccurate portrayal of me” and is “misleading” in “many” places.  But I have reason to believe Myrhvold was given a draft to comment on — and if so, he was a willing participant in the defamation of his own reputation and that of his company “Intellectual Ventures.”  Apparently, he really does push this piece of staggering illogic:

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In the face of seemingly accelerating climate change, some have proposed tackling the problem with geoengineering: intentionally altering the planet’s physical or biological systems to counteract global warming. One such strategy — fertilizing the oceans with iron to stimulate phytoplankton blooms, absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and export carbon to the deep sea — should be abandoned.

So begins a recent Nature opinion piece, “Ocean fertilization: Time to move on” (subs. req’d, excerpted below) by four researchers and oceanographers.

The more you know about geo-engineering, the less sense it makes (see Science: “Optimism about a geoengineered ‘easy way out’ should be tempered by examination of currently observed climate changes”).  The most “plausible” approach, massive aerosol injection, has potentially catastrophic impacts of its own and can’t possibly substitute for the most aggressive mitigation — see Caldeira calls the vision of Lomborg’s Climate Consensus “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story.” And for the deniers, geo-engineering is mostly just a ploy — see British coal industry flack pushes geo-engineering “ploy” to give politicians “viable reason to do nothing” about global warming.

Geo-engineering is a “smoke and mirrors solution,” though most people understand that the “mirrors” strategy is prohibitively expensive and impractical.  One of the few remaining non-aerosol strategies still taken seriously by some is ocean fertilization.  This Nature piece explains why it should be abandoned:

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If you don’t do aggressive greenhouse mitigation starting now, you pretty much take geo-engineering off the table as a very limited (but still dubious) add-on strategy.

The only upside I can see to all of the media coverage Bjorn Lomborg is getting for his do-nothing climate “consensus” is this one sentence by NYT reporter John Broder:

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