RE: Radical thinking

To John first and then a reply to Robert:

John wrote two points:

A. “Robert, you claim to be a realist but actually you are a defeatist. You think that we will inevitably fail to halt and reverse global warming, and we should tell our leaders so.”

PSA: It is not that we will inevitably fail, but that we HAVE ALREADY FAILED because we are the cause of our current situation. AND WE CONTINUE FAILING as a species (or global population) by making things worse while congratulating
ourselves on small and insufficient “successes”. And a leader who will say such thoughts will not be an elected leader very long.

B. [John wrote:] “That would be a self-fulfilling prophesy. It’s never too late to try: we owe it to our children and grandchildren.”

PSA: Agreed, it is never too late to try.   And our grandchildren will say that also as they try under horrible conditions (famine, water shortages, rising sea level, wars, economic collapse, etc.) while looking back at our current times
and pointing out how the generations alive today truly FAILED.   And their grandchildren (3 to 4 generations from ours) could be saying the same thing about them.   FAILED in the past will be the norm while those alive keep trying to survive.   SOME will
survive, but they will have lives unrecognizable unless compared with impoverished subsistence farmers of the 1800s or earlier lifestyles in harsh environments. Imagine no rock concerts, no professional sports, no easy transportation when and where you want
it, no industrially produced “essentials” on shelves in stores that no longer exist to cater to our every desire. Education will decline.

That brings me to Robert’s two good questions, but in reverse order:

2. “Or is it [the bleak future] so far into the future that we don’t care that we don’t have strategy for it?”

PSA: We do need to care, but we should note that humans know and personally care about 5 generations only, with themselves in the middle. Great grandchildren and great grandparents
are rather remote to our lives. And the great-greats are beyond our experience. I cannot realistically imagine the conditions of the surviving humans in the year 2150. They will be trying to not fail at their efforts for survival. Somehow we (collectively
all of society) need to care now about having the best strategy, but our collective society is so fragmented that it just keeps failing.

Robert’s other question:

1. “Is the future scenario I’m describing sufficiently implausible that we don’t need to bother having a strategy for it?”

PSA: We must work for a full solution, not for small ways to protect our loved ones in the highly unknown future. Money in the bank will not assure protection / survival. Moving poleward will not assure survival. Nor will building
bunkers with food supplies and defensive weapons be useful. We must focus on avoiding / preventing what is coming if we do not act..

Rephrasing the question: What could we do now to help those future generations who will face what is so likely to come because the planet is getting too hot to have sustainability of desired lifestyles? Short response: Be MUCH MORE
RADICAL. And blast apart the “moral hazard” roadblock /argument that is used to stifle alternative thinking. We need experimentation NOW for the various types of albedo enhancement. Not crazy mass deployment, but serious pilot efforts.

Paul

Doc / Dr TLUD / Paul S. Anderson, PhD

Email: psanders@ilstu.edu Skype: paultlud Mobile & WhatsApp: 309-531-4434

Website: https://woodgas.com see Resources page for 2023
“Roadmap for Climate Intervention with Biochar” and 2020 white paper, 2) RoCC kilns, and 3) TLUD stove technology.

From: healthy-planet-action-coalition@googlegroups.com <healthy-planet-action-coalition@googlegroups.com>
On Behalf Of John Nissen

Sent: Saturday, July 29, 2023 9:55 AM

To: Robert Chris <robertgchris@gmail.com>

Cc: healthy-planet-action-coalition@googlegroups.com; Planetary Restoration <planetary-restoration@googlegroups.com>; Shaun Fitzgerald <sdf10@cam.ac.uk>; Sir David King <dk@camkas.co.uk>; Ken Caldeira <kcaldeira@carnegie.stanford.edu>

Subject: Re: Radical thinking

This message originated from outside of the Illinois State University email system.

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Hi Robert,

As Guterres said, we face global boiling and it is terrifying. You neatly summarise the kind of terror we will face without determined cooling intervention.

It would be absolutely insane not to deploy cooling intervention now.

The emissions reduction strategy has not worked, is not working and will not work. The radical thinking required is to grasp the nettle of geoengineering. There is now absolutely no doubt that climate change has become dangerous [1].
There is no way that emissions reduction can cool the world, certainly not on any meaningful timescale. Cooling intervention is an absolute necessity if there is to be any prospect for a decent world for our children and grandchildren. We need to be loud
and clear about this. Shaun and Sir David have made a start in the public domain, albeit not picked up by the journalists [2] [3]. There needs to be a forthright debate.

The Arctic should be the place to start the cooling; partly because of the tipping points activated there and partly because, with mid to high latitude SAI, the Arctic is the quickest, safest, cheapest, easiest and least controversial place
to start the cooling – like a low hanging fruit. But most of all, cooling the Arctic would have a rapid effect on reducing extremes of heat and other weather.

Robert, you claim to be a realist but actually you are a defeatist. You think that we will inevitably fail to halt and reverse global warming, and we should tell our leaders so. That would be a self-fulfilling prophesy. It’s never too
late to try: we owe it to our children and grandchildren.

Cheers, John

[1] This “dangerous climate change” has always been the point at which to resort to geoengineering according to those who have been postponing geoengineering, such as Damon Matthews and Ken Caldiera, see their PNAS paper in 2007:

Geoengineering (the intentional modification of Earth’s climate) has been proposed as a means of reducing CO2 -induced climate warming while greenhouse gas emissions continue. Most proposals involve managing incoming solar radiation such
that future greenhouse gas forcing is counteracted by reduced solar forcing. In this study, we assess the transient climate response to geoengineering under a business-as-usual CO2 emissions scenario by using an intermediate-complexity global climate model
that includes an interactive carbon cycle. We find that the climate system responds quickly to artificially reduced insolation; hence, there may be little cost to delaying the deployment of geoengineering strategies
until such a time as ‘‘dangerous’’ climate change is imminent.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.0700419104

[2] Shaun Fitzgerald in the Briefing Room (BBC Radio 4) said that geoengineering was extremely controversial but needed to be considered, e.g. using MCB.

[3] Sir David King was also on BBC radio, mentioning the 4 Rs: which included Repair. However he did not explain the significance of this.

On Sat, Jul 29, 2023 at 5:09 AM ‘Sev Clarke’ via Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC) <healthy-planet-action-coalition@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Robert,

We seem already perched to begin a downwards spiral into autarchy, but that is not a reason to lessen our efforts to cool the world and so extinguish development of the spiral. As a combination of MCB efforts and my Buoyant Flakes concept
appears more achievable in the short term than other methods, particularly when vulnerable, small island states could individually or collectively decide to deploy them locally to increase their ocean albedo, cool their waters, save their corals, and improve
their fish stocks, one way we might bypass the IPCC’s wilful blindness and FF obstruction might be by persuading them to run transparent experiments, then cautiously gated deployments. Already some reputable R&D groups are planning to run periocosm experiments
to determine likely effects – though they seem to lack the “can-do” approach of trying several different flake and spray nozzle formulations and approaches at once.

Sev

On 29 Jul 2023, at 6:40 am, Robert Chris <robertgchris@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi folks

I feel the need to shake things up.

The entire climate change discourse everywhere, including in these groups, is focussed on the global response, albeit that this is then often sliced up into national contributions.
The objective of this global response, in the words of the UNFCCC Constitution is to ‘prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’, although when this was written in 1992, it was expected that that could be done by the ‘stabilization
of greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere’.

Since then, emissions have increased by ~70% per year and continue to grow year on year with no sign yet of peaking, greenhouse gas removal (GGR) has been added to the policy mix
to bolster efforts to stabilise atmospheric GHGs, although no significant GGR has yet been done and the amount now required suggests that it is implausible for it to be scaled quickly enough to have the climate impact necessary to avert the dangers from anthropogenic
interference in the climate system. Albedo enhancement (AE) offers real potential to deliver the UNFCCC objective but it is not on the international political agenda and has been routinely dismissed by IPCC and many influential NGOs. The paradigm shift required
for AE to emerge as a realistic policy option is not in sight and probably requires even more severe ravages from climate change before it becomes so, ravages that might happen until the situation is irretrievable.

Each day more bad climate change news confronts us. Whether it’s new climate records or new science showing that the climate is even more fragile than previously thought, there
is no escaping from a sense that we continue to be moving backwards, that climate change is advancing faster than we are. At what point do we ask ourselves, what if we can’t stop this, what do we do then? I’d like to ask that question now.

To keep this brief, I’ll make several convenient assumptions. The scenarios I’m considering are those where systemic collapses have begun seriously to disrupt human lives. I’ll
leave it to you fill in the blanks but broadly speaking, BAU has become impossible. Supply chains are broken. Large areas of previously inhabited land are uninhabitable. Crops failures are widespread. Starvation, migration, drought, pestilence and armed
conflict are rife. Global trade ceases to be able to sustain economic activity at anything like earlier levels. Developing nations are stricken by collapse of their already fragile internal socio-political systems. Developed countries are just beginning
to understand how little resilience they have when critical resources are denied them.

Are we not approaching the time when we have seriously to contemplate these scenarios? I think so. It is much easier to predict the vulnerability to collapse of a house of cards
but much more difficult to predict when it’ll collapse, and even more difficult to predict precisely how the cards will fall when it does. The way to minimise risk is in advance to build as much resilience into the system as possible. In scenarios where
the established geopolitical structures and global supply chains can no longer be relied upon, it will be necessary to look closer to home to fulfil people’s needs.

This is the world of autarky. Is it time for our governments to start preparing for autarky by building up internal systems that are as independent as possible of imported resources
and as robust as possible against attempts by others to steal our local resources? In many situations autarkies could be formed with friendly neighbouring states; the EU could be a paradigmatic example. These local agglomerations would have a wider range
of local resources making it easier to be self-sufficient.

The sooner we prepare for that brave new world, the less our fellow and future citizens will suffer.

This might not be the version of a healthy planet we were hoping for, but if it’s the best we can get, should we start giving it some thought? Pursuing this might also be a wake
up call for the laggards.

Regards

Robert

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