Rogue geoengineering and scrivener's error

A shadowy businessman from my state named Russ George has apparently dumped boatloads of iron into the Pacific off the Canadian coastline in an alleged carbon sequestration project.  I first thought he had hooked up with the Haida, a Canadian First Nations indigenous group, in order to get some political backing, but the link shows it may have been more involved:

The dump took place from a fishing boat in an eddy 200 nautical miles west of the islands of Haida Gwaii, one of the world's most celebrated, diverse ecosystems, where George convinced the local council of an indigenous village to establish the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation to channel more than $1m of its own funds into the project. 

The president of the Haida nation, Guujaaw, said the village was told the dump would environmentally benefit the ocean, which is crucial to their livelihood and culture.  

"The village people voted to support what they were told was a 'salmon enhancement project' and would not have agreed if they had been told of any potential negative effects or that it was in breach of an international convention," Guujaaw said.

One imagines they could have done better things with a million dollars than financing Mr. Ross.  He is of a certain infamy from his Planktos company's effort to do the same thing five years ago and sell carbon offsets certified AFAICT on the basis of their own say-so.

So now they seem to have legal trouble with international agreements that tried to regulate efforts such as those by George.  However, wherever you can find a dubious legal interpretation that could harm the environment, it seems one can find a connection to the recent Rabett favorite, David "Heartstrings" Schnare:

• The London Convention / London Protocol: You may fertilize if the intent is to grow fish but not if the intent is to dispose of carbon in the ocean. Hence, focus on “restoration”.

At the same link, Ken Caldeira writes:

It would be useful if any legal minds in the group would assess exactly the relevant language that Russ George has supposedly violated. 

I recall that in negotiations under the London Convention / London Protocol, there was concern not to impact fish farms which of course supply copious nutrients to surrounding waters. 

If my recollection was correct, somebody proposed an exception for mariculture. I piped up and said that all ocean fertilization could be considered mariculture and that the CO2 storage could be regarded as a co-benefit, achieved knowingly but not intentionally (just as when we drive a car we knowingly heat the planet although that is not our intent). 

My recollection was that in response to this comment, the word 'conventional' was added to the language, so that it now reads: 

"Ocean fertilization does not include conventional aquaculture, or mariculture, .. ". Resolution LC-LP.1(2008) - IMO 

Incidentally, it seems that they have a misplaced comma, as I believe the word 'conventional' was meant to apply to both 'aquaculture'' and 'mariculture', but with the placement of the comma, I read this as 'conventional aquaculture' or 'mariculture'. I am not enough of a lawyer to know whether the intended meaning or the literal meaning is the one likely to prevail under some sort of adjudication process.

The misplaced comma is what lawyers call scrivener's error, a great way to mess up legal documents and run up legal bills.  To broadly over-generalize, under US domestic law courts will correct scrivener's error when it leads to absurd results.  It strikes me as absurd to limit the regulatory exception to conventional aquaculture while expanding it to all mariculture.  The legal issue here isn't domestic law though, but international law as interpreted by domestic authorities, probably Canada in this case.  Hardly my field, but Article 79 of the UN Treaty on the Law of Treaties says if signatories agree there was a clerical error, you just go and fix it.  I think that's where we would stand now on the clerical error, but there are other reasons for thinking George is in legal trouble (comments of Jim Thomas) regardless of the misplaced comma.

Goodbye blue sky

The recent study showing that geoengineering via aerosols would make our planet's sky whitish, like what's seen in urban environments, is making the rounds.  It'll be interesting to see if we get some sky color denialism as a push back.  I also haven't seen whether urban skies would be even more altered as a result.

I expect this new study could have political repercussions.  The "don't worry about your SUV, we'll just partially blot out the sun and turn the sky a different color" crowd might find it a hard sell.  Especially when this change is from a human perspective, forever.  It will take centuries of pumping pollution in the atmosphere to balance the effect while the majority of extra CO2 is slowly eliminated.

Despite all this, I think we can't rule out the possibility that things will get so bad that we'll have to consider it.

UPDATE:  by comment request:

My last, somewhat contrarian, Superfreaks post

I've got one more post about contrarianism in general, but I'll wrap up on Superfreakonomics.

My contrarian points:

1. They're not picking on the left. Many bloggers speculate that contrarians like picking on the left but not on the right. I don't know about other contrarian authors, but Levitt and Dubner's first book talked a lot about how legalizing abortion reduced crime. Even the current book sympathizes with legalizing prostitution, something that's mostly libertarian/glibertarian, but still probably supported more by the left.

2. Geoengineering with sulfate aerosols is cheap. I've seen a number of assertions that they've left out costs of the stratospheric shield and exaggerated the costs of mitigation. It doesn't matter. As long as you simply examine the cost to cool a certain amount globally, without regard to distribution of heat reduction, or any other side effect, then the shield has to be cheaper than 80-95% greenhouse gas reductions.

3. A limited stratospheric shield for the Arctic might be worth the risks. I believe RealClimate wrote about this idea in a very tentative but not-completely-dismissive tone, but I can't find the link. (Superfreakonomics also mentions it, but they seem not extremely interested.) The Arctic is experiencing so much warming and the atmosphere is somewhat isolated there, so it might be possible, maybe, to counteract the enhanced warming there without the repercussions elsewhere, if the aerosol particles actually stay in that region. It couldn't be done for a few decades until the ozone-depleting chemicals are gone from the stratosphere, but it shouldn't be done anytime soon anyway - this is an act of desperation. (UPDATE: John Mashey points to high-albedo, artificial rafts as a potentially useful "band-aid" approach for the loss of polar ice, and possibly ice elsewhere.)

4. Somewhat less contrarian: geoengineering on a global scale needs to be researched and kept in mind as a last resort for the worst-case scenarios. If 50 years from now we find ourselves on a trajectory to a Lovelock-type scenario involving deaths of billions, or even a somewhat less-bad outcome, then smogging up the earth's stratosphere and hoping for the best might be worth rolling the dice. I think this position isn't all that unusual, even if Al Gore might disagree with it. By contrast, people like James Annan and William Connolley probably shouldn't be interested in geoengineering because they don't think the worst-case scenarios are plausible.

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Okay, so much for being generous to Superfreakonomics. I'll just add two points that haven't been discussed too much. First, the authors have occasionally defended the stratospheric shield approach as a complement and not a substitute for carbon mitigation. But if that's the case, why do they keep talking about how much cheaper it is? And the failure as far as I can tell to admit in the book that we need to drastically cut emissions means they're trying to have it both ways - show a radical solution to those not paying close attention, and then running it backwards when caught.

Second, they seem to think it would be easy to determine that that shield isn't worth its side effects and turn it off if appropriate. I'm not so sure. If a powerful country or number of countries reached the point where they felt it was in their interest to smog the stratosphere, I expect they'd be very resistant to arguments that an ongoing drought in Africa means they should cut it out and drastically reduce carbon emissions instead. Just as we see massive foot-dragging today to the idea that we're causing warming, I expect a lot of self-interested denial would occur as to whether it's necessary to gut the shield.

One other point that has been mentioned but is still worth highlighting is this excellent Michael Tobis piece on removing carbon versus interfering with sunlight - two radically different approaches.

Unrelated bonus blogging: soldier fly composting. I get flies in my worm bin anyway, so this might be the solution.

UPDATE: forgot to mention that a critical comment I submitted to the Freakonomics blog was never published. Maybe it just fell through the Internet cracks.

Unilateral geoengineering against the global interest

A RealClimate piece on geoengineering through pumping massive amounts of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere doesn't make it seem very attractive. While it can control temperature, it does nothing to stop ocean acidification, and I assume we end up with the Mother of All Acid Rain-damaged ecosystems on land (pretty sure that's the case but I've not seen verification). Massive pollution would have to be continued as long as humans kept adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and for many decades afterwards, or temperatures would quickly rebound to the highs they would otherwise have achieved. Finally there's the issue RealClimate addresses, that significant decreases in precipitation could result from this plan.

Two points I would add to this depressing picture: first, as bad as it sounds, it's not as bad as what the Lovelock-types project. While I don't think 11C warming will happen, if it did head that way, we'd choose the sulfur-geoengineering future instead.

Second, all climate scenarios, including this geoengineering scenario, have winners and losers. Right now this looks like a bad deal for everyone, but we can't predict with certainty how specific countries will be affected. Twenty years from now, some medium-sized or larger nation may figure out that its precipitation pattern won't do too badly, and so for that specific nation, geoengineering will be the best option, and then it will simply go ahead and do it.

I came up with this little problem myself, but it turns out of course that a lot of others have thought of it too. Solution's not clear other than a treaty forbidding geoengineering without international consent (along with coordinated punishment against a transgressor). I expect that would tie conservatives into knots - they'd hate a treaty, but don't want to give China a free hand.

Kleiman digs further down a hole; I blast straight through Godwin's Law

The normally-excellent Mark Kleiman wrote a not-excellent post about geoengineering to combat global warming a while back. Kleiman felt it had promise and was being ignored. RealClimate did a much better discussion about the unproven and highly speculative geoengineering field earlier, noting this "ignored" subject was in the New York Times.

Kleiman then had to dismiss an attempt to ally him to a non-existent, "centrist" position between denialists and global-warming believers. While doing so, he says "there's been roughly no money to do the studies." He needs to back up that statement with some facts, or he's just digging the hole further down. There have in fact been studies of geoengineering, and there was even an experiment with seeding the ocean with iron to study (in part) whether micro-organisms can absorb carbon dioxide efficiently. The fact that these studies are being done suggests there's some level of funding for it.

These concepts are getting a moderate level of interest and moderate level of resource commitment, and that's what they deserve at this point. Should these studies look promising, then it's time to scale up the resources.

Where I want to blast through with my Godwin's Law violation is regarding the belief in modern magic - Technology! - as the easy solution to all problems. That's what Hitler thought. From the Wikipedia article on the V-2 rocket:

Dornberger had always wanted a mobile launch platform for the missiles, but Hitler pressed for the construction of massive underground blockhouses from which to launch them. According to his plans, V-2s should have arrived from a number of factories in a continuous stream on several redundant rail lines, and launching should have been almost continual.
....
Despite being one of the most advanced weapons in WWII, the V-2 was militarily ineffective. Its guidance systems were too primitive to hit specific targets, and its costs were approximately equivalent to four-engined bombers, which were more accurate (though only in a relative sense— see discussion in strategic bomber), had longer ranges, carried many more warheads, and were reusable. Moreover, it diverted resources from other, more effective programmes.

The desire for magical solutions is persistent in history, but it's not particularly helpful.

P.S. One more thing - Kleiman wrote in his second post:

If you really think that the Gulf Stream might stop running ten years from now, as Gore suggests in his movie (as I understand it, such a catastrophe isn't likely, but can't be ruled out)...

From the text facing page 150 of the book version of An Inconvenient Truth:

At Woods Hole Research Center, Dr. Ruth Curry is especially concerned about the rapid melting of ice in Greenland, which is adjacent to the area in which the [thermohaline] pump operates.

Recently, she observed: "The possibility of such extreme events precludes ruling out that disruption of the North Atlantic Conveyor in the 21st century could occuras a result of greenhouse warming."

Depending on the probability level one assigns to "precluding" catastrophe, Curry might represent an outlier, but there's no hint of anything happening in ten years.