A climate change hypothetical

Great Debates
1

The hypothetical bit:-
For the purpose of this thread we’re twenty years in the future, global warming is real and its effects are being felt strongly.
Some way has been found to stop, even reverse GW by a method other than reducing human CO2 output (seeding the oceans with iron, covering the deserts with tin-foil or whatever)
Reducing CO2 output will not reverse GW in a reasonable timescale (because a “tipping point” has been reached, or it wasn’t human generated CO2 responsible, or just because it takes a long time for levels to fall naturally)

So:-
Could there be international agreement to do it? (given that agreements to stop wars or free up trade etc etc seem to be beyond humanity’s grasp)
Who would be in charge?
Who would pay? (I’m assuming whatever the method is, it’s horribly expensive)

Most importantly, could there be agreement on what a desirable climate actually is?
I can imagine that some countries would welcome a bit of climate change if it meant previously unproductive areas (like Siberia, say) had become profitable. They would presumably argue any control of the climate should just the slow the change, or at most hold it at the point it had reached when the control program started.
Others, like African or Middle-Eastern countries might want the thermostat turned down as much as possible. They would want to reverse all of GW’s effects. Going right back to pre-industrial levels.

One problem I can see with any organisation trying to control the climate is that they would inevitably get blamed for every weather related catastrophe that occurred. No longer would people talk about a “natural disaster” or an “act of God” – floods, hurricanes and droughts will either be seen as being directly caused by those crazy weather-control folks, or at least as not having been prevented by those heartless ivory-tower bastards

If international agreement proved elusive – or if an international body wanted to set climate rules seen as contrary to American interests (while using a lot of US money to fund the program) - what are the chances of the US trying to go it alone?
And how much shit would that stir up?

China and the US are already competing for resources including oil; it’s a competition that can only become increasingly bitter as China’s economy grows.
Could they compete for control of the climate? (Either through lobbying an international body – or more extreme – setting up rival climate control programs)

2

I’d say, yeah. We do sometimes seem to manage to implement international agreements to prohibit things that pretty much everybody agrees are bad and can be stopped without crippling economies, such as ozone-destroying CFCs and massive environmental DDT use.

It would be agreed upon and administered like other international treaties, I would guess.

What do you mean, “horribly expensive”? How expensive, say, as a percentage of global GDP? We need some figures on the cost before we can figure out who will pay.

That, I think, would be the easiest part of an admittedly not-easy process. In theory and very approximately, since increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere warm the globe, decreasing greenhouse gases will cool the globe. An international scientific committee like the IPCC would basically just set target levels for desired concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases: concentrations that would be in line with a range that’s comfortably typical of the levels that prevailed for most of our current interglacial period.

Then we’d set the mechanism to work, reduce the atmospheric concentrations to the target levels, and see how the climate settled down into its new “old” state (with significant time lag, natch). If it was felt that the global climate still needed tweaking for livability, we’d go back to our scientific advisors and see what they recommended.

3

The attitude of major players like the U.S. and China is already bordering on suicidal, by the time they bother to do anything (i.e. cities being underwater) it will probably be too late. It may already be too late.

4

But the OP’s hypothetical scenario is that 20 years from now it won’t be too late (although conditions will be serious), and we’ll have an effective method to reverse the process. Irrespective of the realistic likelihood of those assumptions, if we do assume those assumptions as the OP asks us to, will we be able to solve the problem?

5

Apollo program / Manhattan project expensive

(all the ideas I’ve heard being put forward seem to be that kind of “Big Science on steroids” thing - though they all seem to be woefully short of actually being much use when the real numbers get run)

6

Well shoot, that’s pocket change if considered as the entire cost of a major global environmental program. The Apollo program’s costs from soup to nuts are typically estimated at a total of $135 billion in 2005 dollars. The US alone spent that kind of money just on the first couple years of the Iraq War.

The Manhattan Project was even thriftier, coming in at maybe $23 billion in today’s dollars. The nations of the world acting together could cover this kind of cost basically with what they find in the couch cushions. $23–135 billion to solve the global warming problem? Best bargain ever.

Or are you hypothesizing that the costs for each nation would be on this scale? That makes drawing up a budget significantly more challenging.

7

I’m hypothesizing something that the top, oh, four economies in the world could afford to do alone - everyone else would have to cooperate whether they want to or not
But it’s not just pure money - you need scientists, resources, the political will (just as the USSR could compete in the Space Race while not being in great economic shape I’m thinking only China and the US would realistically think about trying it alone - maybe Putin would make Russia bankrupt trying, who knows? )

When have politicians ever simply gone to scientific advisors asked “what should we do here” and acted on it?

Usually the advisors will say something like “if you want to prevent the uBooBoo bird being hunted to extinction you will need to reduce the catch to less than 10% of current levels”
Lobbying by uBooBoo hunters follows
The politicians strike a compromise of 35%
The plaintive cry of the uBooBoo is heard no more
And whose “Liveability” do we consider? Alaskans? Sub-Saharan Africans?

8

Well, IIRC, the scientists pretty much got their way on the Montreal Protocol agreement which eliminated ozone-destroying CFC use. I’m sure it ended up more red-tapey and protracted than the scientific advisors might have liked, but it did produce the essential effect that the scientists were aiming at.

I’m not sure they’re in competition. The point about trying to lower atmospheric greenhouse gas levels and thus global temperatures is simply that the approximate climate equilibrium of the past 10K years or so is what human societies everywhere, from the Arctic Circle to the tropics and beyond, have more or less adapted to.

We wouldn’t be trying to design a “perfect climate” for any lucky winner among competing population groups. We would just be trying to approximately restore our pre-existing global carbon cycle equilibrium to minimize or reduce hugely expensive and destabilizing disruptions in the large-scale climate patterns that humans in all regions have come to consider “normal”.

If we can achieve that (and of course, it’s an extremely iffy proposition), then we would be restoring the traditional “liveability” of climate patterns for Alaskans and sub-Saharan Africans alike, along with everyone else.

9

Kimstu, I think you’re missing the point of the OP. Capt B. Phart explicitly said that his hypothetical scenerio postulated a way of regulating average global temperature that had nothing to do with CO2 at all. In other words, what if we simply had a magic thermostat that would set the global mean temperature to whatever X degrees we wanted? There’s a huge difference in mindset between “not interfering with the climate” and “artificially regulating the climate”, and the OP postulates the latter.

In a sense, the premise of the OP would be dissatisfactory to many factions who oppose global warming. The people who are disgusted with our consumerist lifestyle wouldn’t like it, because it would let us “get away with” our current consumerism culture. The “hands off nature” crowd would hate it because it would mean humanity interfering more, not less, with the environment. And finally it would mean that there would be a real struggle over control of the global climate. If you think that disputes over setting the office thermostat get ugly, it would be nothing next to the premise of the OP.

10

No, he didn’t. The OP made it clear that his hypothetical solution only ruled out reducing human CO2 output. In other words, we would somehow be able to regulate our global temperature without cutting our greenhouse-gas emissions (and hence not worrying about our fossil-fuel use, etc.).

But the OP did not postulate that the hypothetical solution would have “nothing to do with CO2 at all”. In fact, his example of seeding the oceans with iron, which has been proposed as a method of increasing the oceans’ capacity to absorb CO2, makes it quite clear that the hypothetical “magic bullet” might well involve some kind of mechanism to eliminate excess CO2 from the atmosphere.

As you note, any kind of warming-reversal mechanism that didn’t involve reducing human fossil-fuel use and CO2 output would be disappointing to some people. And you’re right that lots of people might have their own reasons for wishing to turn the “global thermostat” to a setting different from what prevailed for most of our current interglacial. However, there’s nothing in the OP that rules out atmospheric CO2 removal (as opposed to reduction of CO2 emissions) as a mechanism for regulating global temperature.

11

Suppose this happens-
-the Russian tundras become forests, as the trees colonize the once-barren grasslands (all those trees are busy turning CO2 into O2)
-the Mediterranean Sea warms up-and N. Africa becomes a verdant farmland (as it was in ancient times-the granary of the ancient world)
-Central Europe becomes sub-tropical climate: OKK, no more glaciers (bad0, but farmers now can grow oranges and lemons, instead of apples
-new England has a climate like present-day Virginia (no more maple syrup, but no more snowstorms in February)
-increased plankton growth in the N. pacific leads to record fish catches(good)
-the Kennedy Compound (Hyannis, MA0 is now under 12 ft. of water (good)
have any climatologists found GOOD effects from AGW?

12

That would be very nice. Unfortunately, with increased global temperatures and greater extremes of precipitation, the semi-arid and arid grasslands in that region are expected to get drier and less productive, rather than becoming forested:

Um, you’re suggesting that the reason N. Africa isn’t verdant farmland now is because it isn’t warm enough? And global warming is what it needs to become more fertile?

Not AFAICT, sorry. Again, what’s currently predicted is greater aridity and less fertility for much of Africa as a result of climate change.

Yes, the central European region is predicted to grow more like the present-day Mediterranean. That’s okay, but it’s not clear to me why it’s necessarily a better deal for them than their current climate, especially considering the costs of the transition period and the associated predicted increase in climate variability (e.g., more droughts, more floods, more heatwaves, and very hot summers one year followed by very cold summers the next, making consistent agricultural outputs more difficult to achieve).

We could live with that. Again, though, the transition period could be pretty painful, as agricultural and tourism products (e.g., the fall foliage shows in the Berkshire Mountains) that the region has depended on in the past are sacrificed in favor of new ones.

That’s nice too. Bear in mind, though, that increased ocean temperatures can stress fish populations, leading to expected severe declines in some Pacific fish catches over the next century (pdf).

Yuk yuk yuk. :slight_smile:

Sure; some of them as you noted, some of them in other areas. The problem isn’t that there aren’t any upsides to a slightly warmer world. The problem is that overall, even in the long run the downsides are predicted to outweigh the upsides, and in the meantime, coping with severe and rapid environmental change is almost always costly.

It’s not that we wouldn’t have any reasons to love our post-warming world, it’s just that it’s likely to cost us lots of money and pain to make the transition.

And of course, there’s the question of where does it stop. Even if a certain amount of global warming turns out to have some compensating advantages, that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to keep warming indefinitely. As far as we can figure from the science at present, we will need to stop our lavish carbonizing of the atmosphere at some point, so we might as well try to start in time to minimize the severity of the impacts.

But we’re getting rather off-topic here, aren’t we? The thread is supposed to be about how we would implement a hypothetical mechanism to reverse global warming, not about whether or not we should think global warming has upsides.

13

For an accounting, good and bad, of the various predicted effects of climate change go to the IPCC website and click on the Summary for Policymakers to the Working Group II (or just click here [PDF file]).

14

:confused: History is full of such agreements.

15

But they’re mostly pretty crappy - sometimes totally counter-productive (like, IIRC, the mutual defence treaties that led to the carnage of WWI)
Hence we still have wars, whaling and overfishing, trade tariffs/restrictions and monstrosities like the Common Agricultural Policy

Kimstu mentions the CFC treaty - but frankly I can’t think of a more trivially easy agreement to get (replace one chemical with another that is nearly the same but a little bit more expensive, carry on as before) no one country faced any real downside from it (though some companies obviously did, hence the CFC smuggling problem)

Look how the oil issue screws up attempts to get international agreement over Darfur.
If China found that a slightly warmer or slightly cooler climate would lead to fewer of the disastrous floods that presently regularly kill so many - wouldn’t they be just as likely to be obstructive over attempts to set a level based on some arbitrary interglacial period average

Kimstu is right, I’m not ruling out ***artificial *** CO2 reduction as a mechanism.
It’s the crossing of the Rubicon (if that’s the term) of deliberately taking charge of the climate of the whole world by artificial means - and how we can set what is the “ideal” climate that interests me
I guess with artificial CO2 reduction it at least eliminates the measuring problem (if a desirable level of CO2 could be agreed on - say the level just before the industrial revolution – it shouldn’t be too hard to know when it’s been achieved
With shielding methods – artificially blocking or reflecting the sun’s energy – I can imagine a whole other can o’ worms over what exactly is going on – given the complexity of the weather system and its natural yearly variations (throw in sunspots and a volcanic eruption or two to make it really hard to see how much effect the mechanism itself is having at any one time)

In twenty years time people will have been living with GW (if it is for real) for more than twenty years (my BiL is already growing crops he reckons wouldn’t have been viable ten years ago - presumably he’ll have to abandon others if the change continues).
People will have adapted as best they can - changes in agriculture, mass migrations, ports relocated etc
Stopping GW at the point it has reached in twenty years is one thing - I can see pretty much everyone getting behind not wanting further warming
But reversing GW?
It means the new ports drying up, changes in agriculture again, and the migrants finding themselves back on the move - in other words, after 20 yrs of instability you deliberately plan another 10-20 yrs of instability - it may well be worth it - but now all the bad things that happen are your fault and politicians generally don’t like that kind of responsibly

16

Oh, it didn’t seem that trivially easy at the time. The initial research on the destructive capabilities of CFC’s in the 1970’s “unleashed a firestorm of controversy” because the substances in question seemed so essential to so many applications in modern technology. The substitution of other substances for CFCs and their ilk required not just a trivial “replacement” but what the linked article describes as “a virtual technological revolution in global industry”. There was strong resistance to CFC-limiting treaties in CFC producer nations, and the original 1987 protocol was signed by only 24 countries. It took about twenty years to get the whole matter threshed out to the point of convincingly successful accomplishment.

Well, I dunno. For one thing, remember that there’s a pretty long time lag predicted between increase in greenhouse gases and the consequent impacts on climate. Altering the global climate through incrementally changing the composition of the atmosphere really is like turning an ocean liner: it takes quite a while before the full effects of any action are felt.

By the same token, even if we did decide to reverse global warming by dialing atmospheric CO2 back down to pre-industrial levels, there’s nothing that says we’d have to do that as quickly as possible. We could agree to decrease atmospheric CO2 concentrations much more slowly than we increased them, so that we’d (in theory) return to the pre-industrial carbon equilibrium but take a couple hundred years or more to get there.

Sure, there would be bound to be endless argument and negotiation over exactly when and how much to twiddle the global thermostat. But I think it wouldn’t be impossible to get at least approximate global agreement on what the global climate should be like.

17

That’s sort of my point - it took decades of wrangling to get an agreement on an issue orders of magnitude less complex than climate change - and whose solution turned out to be technologically trivial compared to anything that’s going to make an impact on Global warming - and there are still people breaking the agreement for a buck
I do think the “slowly does it” approach is most likely - if only because it costs less (financially and politically) to do less
Also it’s likely that any practical techno fix is likely to have nasty side effects of some kind

But it does mean centuries of changing sea levels, farming practises and weather patterns - slowly it’s true, but it’s not going to be a nice smooth linear change if all the climatic feedback mechanisms (positive and negative) that are predicted to kick in during GW have to be gone through again in reverse.
It also means maintaining an agreement for centuries between countries, some of which will actively have their economies damaged by global cooling