Anti-Dystopian Future History

The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson

The standard model for climate change fiction is a narrative of calamity piling up, or of living among calamity. The fact that our system for living, one we support time and time again through our democracy, embeds us as part of the problem (some, admittedly, much more than others) seems to make divergence from a path to this calamity difficult to imagine.

But mapping out how this divergence could occur - scientifically, technologically, socioeconomically, ethically, and even spiritually - is Robinson's aim here. The central, eponymous concept is the creation, under the Paris Agreement, of a Ministry for the Future, a UN body focused on representing future generations and non-human residents of Earth. In Robinson's telling, this Ministry uses its limited budget in a precisely targeted way, finding the physical and - especially - the financial fulcrums where small changes can exact large gains.

But that's the philosophical backdrop. The novel itself opens with, appropriately for the subgenre, a calamitous near-future heatwave in continental India that, over a few days, kills tens of millions of people. This event unsettles the global order, with India's Hindu nationalist political class toppled, and solar radiation management (SRM) geoengineering unilaterally undertaken by the nation. It also motivates its characters, providing a clear view of the peril for the Ministry's head, Mary Murphy, and fuelling the rage of Frank May, an aid worker survivor of the heatwave. Their paths become entangled as the novel progresses over several decades, but much of the novel is a tapestry woven from parallel stories. These are told both by other inhabitants of the imperiled world and, fancifully, from the perspective of inanimate objects like a photon, a carbon atom and the Market.

While the overarching focus is climate change, as the novel progresses this broadens to encompass two key facets of this: refugees and biodiversity. Many of the strands, and especially those of Frank, deal with the trials, traumas and then resolutions of people forced to migrate directly by climate change, or indirectly because of its downstream societal impacts. In Robinson’s 21st century, after decades of strife, the world ultimately adopts a system explicitly modelled on the Nansen Passport scheme from the early 20th century. In parallel, he creates a Half-Earth movement that slowly but steadily drives societies to cede half of the Earth’s land area to nature, consolidating existing communities in cities, and allowing wildlife to recover in the wake of their retreat.

Wearing my Earth scientist hat, it’s refreshing, if ever so slightly uncomfortable, to read a climate change novel in which science doesn't play the dominant role in its resolution. It’s clearly important in framing the problem, and in monitoring its resolution, but the most successful drivers come from the economic and societal changes that the Ministry (and other bodies) engineer. Markets are tamed and repurposed via a carbon currency, financial transparency is hard-wired via a blockchain that destroys secrecy and corruption, and social media is democratised to put its power back into the hands of its users. And, as readers of his Mars trilogy of novels will attest, Robinson puts a lot of imaginative effort into how exactly these socioeconomic forces might be realised - arguably a little too much effort in some particularly dry segments.

An aspect I found intriguing, and liable to cause Robinson some trouble, is the novel's attitude to geoengineering. As mentioned already, SRM geoengineering plays an early and successful role in the novel, although it's clearly labelled as a temporary, placeholder fix in the narrative. But the novel also runs with icesheet management geoengineering, essentially pumping out the meltwater that lubricates icesheet collapse, and touches briefly on a novel (to me) mode of "staining" the waters of the Arctic Ocean to decrease its warming. These are all presented as successful needs-must approaches - a view of the potential role of geoengineering that I share myself, but a likely contentious one for environmentally-inclined fellow-travellers. For many, the moral hazard argument against geoengineering (sometimes even against just contemplating it) is simply unsurpassable. On a not-dissimilar note, Robinson doesn't shy away from issues of population, particularly where demographic transition in his imagined future brings benefits. Again, liable to upset some in the environmental movement who - with some justification - are ideologically opposed to contemplating this facet of Earth's problems.

Notwithstanding all of the foregoing positives, the novel isn't without its weaknesses. Principally in the character of Frank, whose role in the narrative is just too muddy - particularly so given he's introduced in such a pivotal way, and then precipitates a fateful run-in with Mary. But his arc quickly runs out of steam, and he becomes an ill-defined foil to Mary's more prominent narrative. More generally, the episodic nature of the novel - which has many "ecological sci-fi" precedents, including Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar and Brin's Earth - has a habit here of introducing then dropping threads that were just getting interesting. For instance, the whole "black ops" wing of the Ministry tantalisingly appears and then disappointingly evaporates, lost, seemingly, in a crush of competing threads. Plus, as already noted, Robinson's excitable fleshing out of some of his socioeconomic solutions can be tinder-dry at times.

But the ambition and scale of the novel absolves it of all of these problems. It’s easily the most realistic “climate positive” novel I’ve read. It may sound stupid out of context, but it’s quite the thing to read of atmospheric CO2 not just peaking but actually dropping, and dropping fast (5 ppm per year) by the end of the novel. I had to stop when I read that, as continual CO2 rise is just a simple, lifelong fact. But it’s not exactly a happy-clappy utopian novel, where the penny suddenly drops for everyone and we all start behaving sensibly. Instead, it's much more of an anti-dystopian tale, in which the planetary handbrake turn that’s executed is actually the result of the slow accumulation of multiple credible steps. So this feeds into a sense of realism and, for me at least, a more genuine positivity about the future.

I should conclude by noting that I finished reading it in the same week as I watched the darkly satirical Don’t Look Up. While that’s an excellent howl of a movie, one that doesn’t offer anything by way of a solution (or really intend to), this is much closer to the real deal. But the contrast between them was enjoyable to savour. I’ll be recommending it to my Earth science colleagues, but I think it’d be an enjoyable and informative read for anyone. If - characteristically for Robinson - a long one.

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Stray observations:

• I thought it was only me who was imagining something like the Half-Earth movement. Obviously not. It’s not a concept that I’ve seen written down before, but it seemed like a pretty good idea to me - and clearly to Robinson too. Of course, long-term I’d like to see a Whole-Earth movement in which we abandon the Earth to do interesting things elsewhere, leaving our cradle free for successor species … 
• Much like the Mars trilogy, Robinson has a nice section near the end where a major character takes a trip that allows the world that he’s built-up to shine. Here, more so than in the Mars triology, this feels necessary - like it shows what our efforts could achieve if we do the right thing, both by the Earth and by those living in it who are less fortunate than ourselves. In a literature dominated by abundant dystopias, giving a vision of how things could be different hit the spot for me. Ditto, as already mentioned, the novel’s late turnaround point when atmospheric pCO2 starts decreasing. 
• Another intriguing suggestion of Robinson’s is that advances in computing, AI and automation (none of which seem unreasonable) favour a kind of “Red Plenty” economics. Essentially, the market is (I think) streamlined and out-guessed by computing systems to the point that its purported efficiencies are unnecessary. It’s the portion of the novel where it feels closest to utopian thinking, but there’s still at least a veneer of realism. 
• It’s kind-of funny to contrast how David Brin’s corresponding stab at the future, Earth, treats the Swiss compared to here. For Robinson, they’re kind-of a beacon of sanity - albeit one with flaws - whereas Brin just made them the bad guys, what with their secret banking and mountains of gold. (Admittedly, he does claim that he did it for the surprise value.) 
• As an oceanographer, I can’t let the novel’s passing reference to the ocean that I’ve reproduced below go unmentioned. While it’s negative about the prospects for us doing anything to help the ocean, I can’t say that I disagree. Absorbing so much heat and CO2, it’s been extensively perturbed, and on a scale that we’d struggle to redress. So I’d agree with Robinson that probably the best we can do is stop making things worse, and allow it to just recover on its own.

• I mentioned the strange position of Frank in the novel before, but the late and completely unnecessary introduction of a potential romantic partner for Mary is another strange misstep. It’s brief, and just a small part of the “Earth is healing” segment near the end, but it’s pretty glaringly incongruous in a novel that’s otherwise quite disinterested in its characters’ emotional lives.

Framing

This week is Challenger 2010 week at NOC, so I've been in local-organising-committee mode doing all sorts of little jobs for BAG-who-shall-be-obeyed. It's been fun, but pretty hectic. I can't imagine how much of a stressathon it's been for BAG - it's enough of a trial getting the little things sorted out without having the whole conference on your back.

One of the highlights that I've found time to see was a lecture last night from Mike Hulme, a climate scientist from UEA. Not someone I knew a lot about going into his plenary seminar, but someone whose name I was familiar with. Anyway, he gave an interesting talk based around one of the key messages of a book he published a couple of years back, Why We Disagree About Climate Change.

The main narrative of his seminar focused around how different people frame climate change, and how this framing colours how they interpret and respond to evidence or discussion concerning it. Framing is one of those things I'm faintly aware of but never give any thought to, preferring instead to stick to more tangible topics. So it was nice to have someone else do the heavy lifting and present a summary of what the major frames that people use in the context of climate change. Little came as a surprise, but it was good to see a rather over-familiar subject viewed askew from a social sciences perspective.

I suspect that some people might have thought the seminar was a bit too artsy or airy-fairy sociological for an ostensibly scientific subject but, in a way, that kind of view was really the meat of the seminar. That is, the way people frame a subject dictates how they perceive, among other things, other frames, and that those viewing things from a high-minded scientific frame (I mean, who does this???) need to realise that what's compelling to us isn't convincing to others. One of the upshots of which is, Hulme argued, scientists need to tailor their messages in different ways when dealing with different communities.

In principle, this sounds almost totally obvious, but Hulme meant more than simply altering our language, or shifting the emphasis of our presentation onto aspects more easily understandable. He meant that we should imagine climate change through the frames of others, and determine what sorts of things are likely to be interesting or persuasive. And, also, what sorts of things just won't work with a particular audience. In the context of so-called climate scepticism, this might mean avoiding any attempt to persuade that climate change has an anthropogenic component, and focusing instead on subjects that one might get agreement on, for instance climate adaptation.

In questions afterwards, Hulme made this re-framing sound almost a little sinister, suggesting that it should be used as a tactic to gain entrance and credibility within (so-called) skeptical communities. I know he didn't mean it like that at all, but his phrasing might have excited the more conspiratorial fringes. Anyway, overall it was a well-paced introduction to his book and to the role that the social sciences might play in making progress in minimising climate change. Certainly, it's been clear for a long time that the sciences, for all of their direct and detailed knowledge, have very little to offer society when it comes to getting action on climate change. We already know more than enough to tackle the first-order part of climate change, but our civilisation seems reluctant to act on even this information - more nuanced detail isn't going to change this. Approaches that try to engage with people at philosophical, ethical, moral and spiritual (yikes) levels seem much more likely to succeed.

Changing the subject slightly, another interesting "spiritual" revelation came out of a debate on geoengineering between an advocate and a scientist from Greenpeace. Normally I find myself in the sceptical camp when it comes to geoengineering, but the empty platitudes and scare-mongering from Greenpeace pushed me decidedly towards it. Time and time again the Greenpeace spokesman just played up the uncertainly and dismissed geoengineering out of hand. He was firmly of the opinion that we should do nothing that could be deleterious to the world, and just plain refused to answer the question "what should we do in the face of a sudden, unexpected climate calamity?" (or, rather, words came out of his mouth, but they did not engage with the question). Greenpeace have almost a theological devotion to environmental issues that sees everything in black-and-white, and which won't even countenance research that might give us a Plan B at a minuscule cost to the Earth. It's a holier-than-thou mindset that is so far from persuading anyone that it's not even funny. As the great ecologist Garrett Hardin said many years ago, "With friends like these the environment needs no enemies".

Anyway, the conference has one more day to run and, despite the science, I'm quite looking forwards seeing the back of it tomorrow. I think I'll stick to attending conferences in the future. Even small-scale organising like that I've been involved in doesn't seem to suit me!

Geoengineering feedback

Quite a while back I submitted a response to a Channel 4 query concerning geoengineering, and I copied this here. Needless to say, and much as I predicted, I never heard a thing back about it. Anyway, through a rather circuitous route, I've found that Channel 4 did prepare an article on the topic, and they did use what I sent them (although only a small fraction of it). Still, I can't complain since I got three short paragraphs to myself, and I was one of only six scientists they quoted. Clearly my campaign to become a media-whore continues. The full article can be found here.

In other news, another survey that I completed for our funding agency has spawned a public, sorry, stakeholder engagement programme to gauge wider views on geoengineering. It's open for anyone to complete, and the more people who do, the better. It can be found here.

Front Page Pipes

Courtesy of hard work on the part of my old boss, another paper on ocean pipes has now been published, and its made our institute's front page. My contribution this time extended largely to comments and some discussion, rather than simulation and number-crunching.

I've alluded to this paper before, largely because its results are much more interesting than those that I found. In part, this stems from the use of a more detailed physical model that includes a simplified atmosphere which allows feedbacks that my ocean-only simulation just had to gloss over. The model (UVic for those who care) is also lower resolution than OCCAM, so longer simulations were possible.

Anyway, what happened? In the ocean, the pipes were still largely inefficient at sequestering carbon, although here they were allowed to cleverly alter their lengths here to maximise their use of so-called preformed nutrients (i.e. those that come with no associated carbon). Interestingly, the pipes did slightly counter the slowdown of the THC caused by global warming in the simulation (although in doing so they also brought up more CO₂-rich seawater).

However, the real action was on the land. Here, cooler temperatures, driven by the cooling effect of the ocean pipes, led to a drop in the respiration of the land biota (TRIFFID for those who care). In fact, the changes on land were responsible for about 80% of the total sequestration of carbon in the simulation. Not what the proposers of ocean pipes had in mind, and not something that'd be easily verified in the real world to gain carbon credits.

Another interesting result was that switching off the ocean pipes leads to a (slightly) warmer Earth than would happen in the no-pipes control Earth. So, if the pipes are running but start to have some unforeseen negative effect, turning them off comes with an additional climate change penalty. Essentially, you'd have been better off not using them at all. Again, not what the proposers of ocean pipes had in mind.

While there are still some questions that the ocean pipes throw up, this seems another knock to them. Still, the geoengineers are rarely put off by such hurdles ...

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P.S. The press release associated with this paper has been cut-and-pasted into (at least) three external blogs (here, here and here). This seems a pretty armchair approach to adding content to your web presence. Perhaps Strange News could bump up its posting-rate this way ...

Geoengineering survey

The UK's major funding agency for environmental topics is slowly getting around to tackling geoengineering. Though they're not committing any funds to its study just yet (unlike their physical sciences counterpart), they are initiating a public consultation. How touchy-feely / useful this will be is up for grabs. Prior to running this, they've sent a note around academia to gather the community's opinion (and to spare themselves some work by fielding for questions to ask the public!). As I seem unable to resist putting my oar in, I've obviously replied ...

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I am responding to the request for comments on NERC's public dialogue on geoengineering.

With respect to the particular questions raised in the request, I would respond as follows.

1. What are your hopes and concerns about the potential use of geoengineering technology?

In an ideal world, I would hope that it proves unnecessary to resort to geoengineering technologies in the future. All of the schemes proposed to date either have negative (or uncertain) secondary effects, are prohibitively expensive, or (further) disrupt natural ecosystems. As such, I would hope that their use is restricted unless serious climate change occurs unexpectedly rapidly.

Furthermore, I am concerned with our lack of understanding of the full effects of such purposeful climate modification. For instance, methods to reflect incident solar radiation may deleteriously alter cloud and rainfall patterns, or introduce acidic pollutants to the atmosphere. Similarly, methods that remove CO2 from the atmosphere through oceanic modification will (at least temporarily) accelerate ocean acidification and may expand ocean anoxia (with further consequences for the production of greenhouse gases). In the case of technologies that enhance natural biological sinks for CO2, changes in biodiversity are also liable to occur.

I am additionally somewhat concerned that the availability of geoengineering technology may serve to diminish efforts to decarbonise technological societies, the so-called "moral hazard". Since measures to address CO2 emissions are liable to lead to increased costs in the short- to medium-term (and the benefits are liable to be economically unquantifiable "externalities"), geoengineering schemes that promise to resolve climate change at a fraction of the cost will appear strongly attractive to governments.

All that said, I hope that government and other bodies are able to fund research into geoengineering so that, should disastrous climate change appear unavoidable, such technologies are available for use and considerably better understood. Given that some geoengineering research can run alongside existing research, it need not be especially expensive to investigate. But having a more complete understanding of possible climate interventions is crucial if they are to serve as a plausible "Plan B".

I would also hope that governments and other legislative bodies would assist to ensure that researchers are permitted to undertake small-scale trials of potential geoengineering technologies. In early 2009 an open ocean trial of iron fertilisation was heavily disrupted by legal activity, despite its activities being almost insignificant compared to the natural background of ocean processes. If geoengineering is to be evaluated properly (even for use as a "Plan B") it is important that efforts are not derailed by disproportionate or misguided appeals in the courts.

2. What questions should we ask people about the future of geoengineering research? What issues and options should be considered?

Both the question subjects and wording should be carefully considered (and/or studied in of themselves) to avoid polarising members of the public who are not familiar with climate issues in detail. For instance, the two following statements are liable to elicit different responses despite asking the same question.

• Should geoengineering technologies (which purposefully alter the climate) be (a) investigated, and (b) potentially deployed?
  
• Given that technological societies have already inadvertently altered climate, should geoengineering technologies (which purposefully alter the climate) be (a) investigated, and (b) potentially deployed?

That said, I would suggest the following as possible questions to ask people during public dialogue.

• Given that technological societies have already inadvertently altered climate, should geoengineering technologies (which purposefully alter the climate) be (a) investigated, and (b) potentially deployed?
  
• If geoengineering technologies are deployed, how should they be controlled? For instance, by companies or special interest organisations, by national governments, or by transnational organisations such as the United Nations.
  
• Under what circumstances should geoengineering technologies be deployed? For instance, to return climate to its pre-industrial / modern state, or only when severe climate change is occurring.
  
• When evaluating the safety of a geoengineering technology, how much weight should be given to negative impacts on natural ecosystems? For instance, consider a situation where a technology cools climate but significantly damages wildlife.
  
• Should small-scale trials of geoengineering be permitted or banned?
  
• Should geoengineering technologies complement or supplant efforts to decarbonise technological societies or the development of adaptations to climate change?
  
• How should geoengineering research be funded? For instance, by normal government routes, or by private organisations that are either responsible for CO2 emissions or can profit from geoengineering.
  
• Is any additional oversight, that is beyond government and regulatory authority, required for geoengineering? For instance, should lay individuals be formally involved.
  
• Should the UK engage with geoengineering if the principle benefits of it are received elsewhere? For instance, some geoengineering schemes are liable to have the greatest benefit for high latitude (polar) areas.
  
• Should the UK engage with geoengineering if negative consequences are caused elsewhere? For instance, some geoengineering schemes may cool the Earth, but impact negatively on weather patterns (e.g. the monsoon) in areas outside the UK.

Since geoengineering is tantamount to the alteration of the Earth at the largest scale to suit human needs and interests, I would additionally suggest that any questioning of public attitudes is accompanied by questions that aim to establish how people value and evaluate the worth of the Earth. For instance, whether participants consider that the Earth, its ecosystems or its charismatic megafauna have cultural (or other) worth. I certainly think it would be useful to know *why* people hold particular views (or which views overlap) alongside the views themselves.

Finally, given geoengineering's necessary connection to climate change, it seems crucial to me that some assessment is made of participants' views of climate change science as well. People whose views do not accord with the scientific consensus are liable to respond differently to those who accept current evidence and thinking. If one does not trust observational data or modelling simulations for climate change, it seems unlikely that these will be viewed positively for assessing geoengineering.

For reference, I am a coauthor of a review of ocean geoengineering (Lampitt et al., 2008; [1]), and was lead author on a study of the use of ocean pipes for geoengineering (Yool et al., 2009; [2]).

[1] Lampitt, R.S., (10 other authors) and Yool, A. (2008). Ocean fertilisation: a potential means of geo-engineering? Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. A 366, 3919-3945, doi: 10.1098/rsta.2008.0139
[2] Yool, A., Shepherd, J.G., Bryden, H.L. and Oschlies, A. (2009). Low efficiency of nutrient translocation for enhancing oceanic uptake of carbon dioxide. J. Geophys. Res. 114, doi: 10.1029/2008JC004792

Greatest promise?

We got a circular around work last week asking for individual scientists to contact Channel 4 news to respond to a particular climate change question. Anyway, here's what I (ignorantly) sent them ...

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"Which idea, policy or technology do you think holds the greatest promise or could deliver the greatest benefit for addressing climate change?"

In the immediate future (~10 years), I believe that the greatest promise is offered by technologies related to carbon capture and storage (CCS). In principle, these will allow technological societies to retrofit existing infrastructure while continuing to use fossil fuel resources without exacerbating either climate change or ocean acidification. In an ideal world, these problems would be tackled by energy conservation and by expansion of renewable and nuclear fission energy provision, but these options are either limited in extent or are (irrationally) unpopular.

In the further future (~30 years), I believe that the greatest promise is offered by technologies related to nuclear fusion. There are a number of options being investigated on this front (of which the best-known is ITER under construction in France), but I expect that one or more will be successful and will allow us to meet longer-term energy requirements without the production of CO2. Assuming there are no further innovations in transportation technology, I would also expect nuclear fusion to provide a means for generating carbon-free hydrogen for use in land and (possibly) air travel.

Should climate change prove more rapid and deleterious than we currently believe it will be, I believe that some geoengineering technology may be helpful in temporarily offsetting climate change to allow us time to adjust our activities. Specifically, I believe that the deployment of stratospheric aerosol technology may allow us to decrease excessive global temperatures. However, since this particular technology does nothing to address the root cause of climate change, it categorically should not be viewed as anything other than a temporary "fix". Furthermore, as indicated by the recent Royal Society report, all geoengineering technologies have significant negative aspects (e.g. deleterious side-effects, prohibitive cost), and none should be viewed as preferable options.

My answers above have focused on purely technological angles to climate change, to which I would add a couple of policy / presentational points. Firstly, given that climate change measures are costly (at least in the short term), it should be recognised that there are strong financial incentives to avoid pursuing them, and policy relying on the better natures of individuals and governments is unhelpful. Mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon must be the route forwards. Secondly, and this is more a presentational point, it cannot be stressed enough that, on climate justice grounds, emissions targets should always be expressed in per capita terms and should acknowledge not just present-day emissions but those historical emissions of technological societies that have gotten them to their present state. All too often public discussion is needlessly clouded by focusing on emissions on a country-by-country basis, which ignores (all too conveniently it usually transpires) relative size. Further, technological societies are overwhelming responsible for our current situation, but this fact is often overlooked, creating great injustice when the emissions of less developed societies are scrutinised.

Finally, a point that is only rarely heard in current environmental discussions is that climate change is not the only ecological cliff-edge to which modern societies are heading. The growth of human societies (both in terms of numbers of individuals and resource consumption) is creating ever greater strain on the ecosystem services on which these same societies unknowingly rely. Coupled to this is the related loss of biodiversity, which has both practical and moral angles to it. Solving climate change, which seems a forlorn hope at the best of times, does very little for other such invisible hurdles.

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Needless to say, as with other such requests for input, I've heard diddly-squat back. If I hear anything about this news item, I'll post it up.

Blogosphere fame

How exciting - our pipes paper has been picked up by the online technology blog/journal Ars Technica under the (admittedly obvious) banner of "Latest carbon sequestration idea could be another pipe dream". And they've done a good job of it as well, possibly on account of not having spoken to me about it. Anyway, needless to say, I'm really chuffed.

Pipes published

Finally, after two inexplicably long review-revision-resubmission cycles, our paper on the efficacy (or not) of ocean pipes is finally formally published. I say "inexplicably" because neither review cycle turned up much in the way of major problems with the paper. Reading between the lines, I suspect that difficulties getting reviewers, and getting them to submit reviews on time, has been the main source for our frustrations.

Anyway, what does the paper say? Essentially it explores what the consequences would be if you "plumbed-in" the whole of the ocean (well, wherever it's > 1000 m in depth) with pipes that transfer seawater from its interior to the surface (cf. the figure to the left). The idea behind such pipes is that they would channel high concentrations of deep nutrients to surface waters, where they can fuel the growth of phytoplankton, increase the uptake of CO₂, and thus potentially decrease climate change.

In our work we did quite short simulations of the recent past (1995-2004) in which we explored what happened to primary production, export production and the air-sea flux of CO₂ when pipes of three lengths (200, 500 and 1000 m) were switched on, relative to a control simulation for the same period.

What we found was that the pipes did the business in terms of primary and export production, with significant increases in both (although we did assume that the pipes were moving a comparable amount of water to that naturally translocated by ocean circulation). However, we also found that, by contrast, the air-sea flux of CO₂ was only marginally increased by the pipes. In part, this was because we just ran the pipes everywhere without any consideration as to whether they would bring up more DIC than they'd be able to sequester, and the consequences of this can be seen in the figure below. The big blue areas in the lower row are places where, because of the deep carbon:nutrient ratios, the pipes channel more CO₂ to the surface than can be drawn down by the transported nutrients.


However, even factoring out areas where the ocean was turned from a sink of CO₂ into a source, we found that for every 100 moles of extra carbon fixed by phytoplankton, there'd be only 2-3 moles extra drawn from the atmosphere. And then, by doing a big back-of-the-envelope calculation, we estimated, based on our results, that to increase the ocean's uptake of CO₂ by 50%, we'd need to deploy around 800 million pipes in the oligotrophic tropical ocean. Of course, there are a lot of caveats in our paper that cover what's wrong with our model, our simulation and our assumptions, but we tend to think that our sums are about right to first order (but then we would!).

In the paper, we completely avoided tackling what the "side effects" of the pipes could be (although one of my co-authors finds some really interesting ones in a separate study), just so we could focus on the basic: "do the pipes work?". Taking a somewhat ethical stance, one thing that they would do would be to replace the oligotrophic "desert" communities of the subtropical gyres into the more mesotrophic communities typical of upwelling areas. As a biologist, I don't like the idea of decreasing biodiversity just so that we can avoid the unwanted consequences of our actions, but at the same time I think it's good to know how efficient this sort of geoengineering scheme is just in case we do need a drastic solution to climate change down the line. Though hopefully we'll see sense before then ...

A "leading climate scientist" speaks

Further to the ocean geoengineering review that I was involved with last year, just before Christmas all of the authors of that paper were invited to take part in a survey and to comment on the topic of geoengineering by The Independent. I didn't hear a peep back from the newspaper, but they published an article on the results of the survey ...

• Climate scientists: it's time for 'Plan B'

From the numbers, it sounds like I was in the majority: that I thought a "Plan B" was necessary; and that I was less optimistic about the Earth's climate coping with anthropogenic change. As per usual, the survey's questions were to be answered YES/NO when a more nuanced response would have been better. Still, nuance isn't usually very helpful when communicating science, so perhaps it's best to be forced one way or the other.

Aside from the main article, The Independent also published a selection of the comments it got back from "leading climate scientists", and somehow I made the grade. Although I was inexplicably attributed to a different research institute on a different continent ...

• What can we do to save our planet?

Ocean iron fertilisation

We had a seminar today from XXXXX XXXXX, the XXXXX of XXXXX, a private organisation interested in technology for removing CO₂ from the atmosphere, primarily via ocean iron fertilisation (at least for now).

The seminar was a bit long-winded, and apart from being very "research positive" (i.e. more research would be nice), I wasn't entirely clear on what XXXXX was all about. Most of the aspects of the presentation that I found interesting were focused on non-OIF issues, such as the London Convention and the acceleration of CO₂ emissions (which, apparently, are increasing faster than previously estimated). So, while the background and legal aspects were covered pretty well, the OIF bits were given slightly short shrift. Then again, I think the speaker was assuming we were all au fait with those. Fair enough really given that NOCS people (myself included) recently produced a review of the technical aspects of ocean geoengineering.

Overall, I'm still rather hesitant about getting behind geoengineering. It's pretty much not what we should be doing, but at the same time I'm well aware that it'd be a conscious and (hopefully) rational change to a biosphere that has already been heavily impacted by (largely) unconscious changes. And there are a lot of technologies and strategies other than geoengineering that I'd really prefer that we tried first (even expanding nuclear fission!). Mostly those focused on decreasing emissions in the first place - surely the obvious strategy? One of XXXXX's main messages was that these possibly weren't sufficient, but I'm less sure about that.

Though the ocean is, in some respects, less impacted than the terrestrial biosphere, and could probably take the hit, I'm just reluctant to bring another part of the biosphere under our control. We've not got a good record on noticing or preserving ecosystem services, and it can't be a good idea to start messing with those that the ocean provides.

A.N. Other Nature "publication"

A second post today to note the publication of a letter (in the conventional sense) in the science weekly, Nature. The letter (well, "correspondence") deals with James Lovelock's recent suggestion that "ocean pipes" should be used to funnel nutrients from deep water up to the surface where phytoplankton (finally - plankton make it into the blog!) can consume them and, in doing so, draw anthropogenic CO₂ from the atmosphere. It sounds great, until one remembers that it's not just nutrients that come up the pipe.

Anyway, by a rather modest amount of text editing and discussion, I managed to wangle myself onto the author list (JGS, DIR and me), making this my second appearance in Nature this year (bizarrely, my previous appearance spawned two further mini-appearances including an [electronically] published photograph). I might even appear a proper scientist to the untrained eye. Though "correspondence" really doesn't count for much.

Aside from this letter, I'm doing some more work in the background with OCCAM to explore Lovelock's scheme, but it looks a total no-hoper (though slightly less of a no-hoper since I found an error in the underlying assumptions of earlier simulations that I'd done). This work may yet turn into something publishable that'll hopefully put paid to this sort of misguided scheme. Of course, none of this has stopped someone in the US from trying to crank money out of these ocean pipes. Still, their hearts are probably in the right place (with their wallets not far behind).