The climate challenge has turned into politics and scientific consensus has been blown away. This way nothing much will happen. The present DOHA climate meeting will produce nothing – or maybe a trifle, a prolongation.
Global warming is a hypothesis about the future of the Earth’s climate. The IPCC has postulated that in a 100 years time the temperature of the Earth is likely to or will probably rise by about one degree Celsius. There is a kind of consensus now that the average temperature rise since measurements started about 100 years ago is about three quarters of a degree Celsius.
The temperature discussion has gyrated wildly into claims that this increase already has happened and that the nearterm increase will be 5-10 degrees centigrade. No documentation of this is offered.
The concept of a global average temperature is doubtful as the geographical, seasonal, purely local and incident related variations are great over time, or year by year.
At present there is about 400-440 ppm of CO2 in the air around us, and it is estimated that the amount produced by humans is about 15-25 ppm or about 5%. The correlation between CO2 and temperature is not precisely known.
The biggest emitters counted by CO2 emissions per head are now the industrialized nations led by the US, but the biggest polluter is probably China. The general situation is that emissions continue to increase.
The situation is best described as lacking a decision of resolution.
The temperature measurements are done by several organisations like IPCC, NASA, NOOVA, UK Met Office. A new contender is The Berkeley Earth Project. They are intent on making a scientific data picture of the Earth that can be part of a consensus. It appears previous data are not precise, have systematic biases, the number and placing of measurement points are not well set. Sooner or later the right temperature situation will emerge?
Then geo-engineering comes up, may as an indication of the impatience of some people. Technologists say they can solve the CO2 conundrum by engineering the Earth in various ways. A businessman named mr. George has fed the algae in the sea so that they can eat CO2 and by doing this he has caused a stir. The morals, ethics, governance principles, effectiveness, consequences are not clear.
It is also clear that known geo-engineering is already taking place all over the world. Remember also claims that spraying of the air already is done in secret projects via planes flying in many parts of the world, but this has never been substantiated.
Geo-engineering projects often take the form of one or more of these:
- administering precipitation changes
- air capture
- solar radiation management
- ocean mangement
- structures, landscaping
- water management
- radiation issues
The confusion in this area is now massive. Geo-engineering is a rogues business at the moment as the international agreements are simply not there. The Earth is a common resource for the people of the world and we need some sort of common resource management if this shall be good for us. The law, the science, the ethics, the politics, the technology are not in the least clear and wee should keep off until these matters have been looked into. Elin Ostrom has said much sensible about common resource pool management, she even got a Nobel prize for it.
The realism concerning effectiveness seems absent. Managing resources like the Earth’s water and air is a massive undertaking requiring huge machinery, the scale of which has never been seen before. The consequences of mistakes can be devastating and catastrophic.
And what if the scientific basis for it all is lacking – there is no need to take away CO2?
Whatever happens we must see to it that the scientific basis is there. The first thing to do must always be to reduce emissions if they are too high to be sustainable. Geo-engineering can never be more than a supplement to reductions.
For the time being forget geo-engineering.
Global warming is possibly not the main issue as there are many more emissions and issues to handle. The real issue might be deep ecology, or the sustainability of the cosmic system, environmentalism in a much wider sense than global warming.
Making the Earth thrive is what the issue is..
inertial@lumber.mary” rel=”nofollow”>.…
good info!…