Folks, The following is an extract of minutes from a DOE meeting, known as the LERDWG meeting, held on Nov 8, 2006, held at the Joint DOE Lab. Offices, Suite 900 Aerospace Center Bldg., 901 D Street SW, Washington, DC 20024.

These minutes were prepared, I believe, by Bill Fulkerson. Enjoy, Ken -------------------------. A perfect introduction to Ken Caldeira's talk that he called 'Geoengineering the Arctic Climate. Ken is with the Carnegie Institution Department of Global Ecology, and his paper had collaborators Lowell Wood of Hoover Institution and Mike McCracken of the Climate Institute. Mike McCracken attended the meeting. All three were formerly of LLNL.

Ken asked the question: would it be possible to geoengineer the Arctic to avoid catastrophic loss of biodiversity, Greenland Ice, etc.? He showed that if one believes the models he used that this is indeed possible by putting particulates in the stratosphere. It doesn't really matter where one injects the particles because they tend to migrate to the poles. By reducing the solar radiance by 0.37% Arctic sea ice is preserved assuming a doubling of CO 2 concentrations to 560 ppm(v) compared to preindustrial levels. Temperature is reduced to preindustrial levels in the Arctic but precipitation rises as for the case of doubling of CO 2 without geoengineering.

There is one other impact that is not reduced and that is ocean acidification. The tendency to dissolve carbonate materials is greater in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet. Other concerns that Ken mentioned about such geoengineering are that it might negatively impact the stratospheric chemistry, and although Paul Crutzen believes this is not an issue, his conclusion should be independently tested. Second, the perception of geoengineering as an inexpensive technological fix could divert attention from the controlling GHG emissions. Finally, Ken wonders if there may be some unanticipated negative environmental impacts. Is research on geoengineering technology important, and if so, should it be undertaken by DOE? These are two questions that Bill Fulkerson tried to answer.

The Car Inefficiency Levy by Oliver Tickell. The Secret History Of The World Jonathan Black Pdf. Suggested by Mike McCracken of the Climate Institute in Washington DC, is that car manufacturers should. Jun 08, 2009 Mike MacCracken attended my George C. Marshall Institute seminar titled ”Considering the Human Influence on Climate” on May 14 2009. First I want to. Speakers: Mike McCracken (Climate Institute) - Motivations for considering geoengineering (including 'climate emergencies'), overview of key physical processes and.

Jun 07, 2009 Mike MacCracken attended my George C. Marshall Institute seminar titled ”Considering the Human Influence on Climate” on May 14 2009. First I want to.

He answered in the affirmative to both. Fulkerson made this presentation in the place of Ehsan Khan who was scheduled to talk about a potential geoengineering R&D plan, but his paper was not cleared by the Office of Science. Hopefully it can be cleared in time for Ehsan to present his paper on February 7, the next LERDWG meeting. Fulkerson argued that offset technologies are a sort of insurance policy that is cashed in only if mitigation of emissions of GHG cannot be accomplished adequately to meet the UNFCCC objective of preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. He then made a crude estimate of the cost of offset based on Paul Crutzen's recent paper in Climate Change 2006 that suggested that 5 Tg of sulfur could offset a carbon doubling and that the cost per Tg injected in the Stratosphere was $25B. Fulkerson assumed 5Tg injections every other year for 100 years giving $6.25T and if this cost is discounted at 5% the number is 2.5T. Ehsan Khan believes this number is on the high end of the range of costs of offset.

This can be compared to the range of costs for mitigating GHG emissions so that two degrees are not exceeded calculated by Jae Edmonds and Steve Smith in their paper Technologies of Two Degrees published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the Exeter Conference. For a range of advanced technologies the cost discounted at 5% may be as low as $2-3T over 105 years, but it may be as high ad $18T using existing technologies. Hence the conclusion that offset is on the lower end of GHG mitigation costs. An injection of particles in the stratosphere is reversible in two to three years as demonstrated by the eruption of Mt.