David Keith and David Travis

[Wayne Hall]

Correspondence with David Keith and David Travis

(David Travis is one of the scientists interviewed in the David Sington’s BBC Documentary Global Dimming
www.buildings.gr/greek/perivallon/planitikiskiasi.htm)

1.

Dear Dr. Keith,

Several days ago we saw the video of your lecture entitled "A surprising idea for solving climate change"
( www.ted.com/talks/view/id/192 )

We have made reference to this lecture in a discussion that our website is currently conducting with leading members of the Green parties in Greece and other European countries on the subject of climate change.

You can see the discussion here: www.enouranois.gr/english/epistolesenglish/indexrisogelos.htm As you can see, the Greek Ecogreen leader Nikos Chrysogelos is expressing an attitude of deep scepticism in relation to geoengineering.

His stance, as you will see, is subjected to criticism from the internationally distinguished scientist and ecological activist Rosalie Bertell.

Chrysogelos' stance is defended in a qualified manner by another leading Greek Ecogreen Philip Dragoumis, and I, in turn, make some comments on Philip's arguments.

You can see at end the quite specific question I am asking YOU: "What kind of grass-roots action and discourse do you want to see, particularly if you really are reluctant to embark on - or have embarked reluctantly on - global aerosol spraying programmes……..: the politics of denial as articulated by Nikos Chrysogelos, along with innumerable other ecologists and Greens, and by official spokespersons everywhere??. Or the Enouranois politics of analysis and exposure??"

If you read through the debate I think you will see that we have presented the background to our question as cogently as could be expected. What is your answer to this question? Whose side are you on, the side of Enouranois, or the side of the Ecogreens? We would like to publish your answer as a continuation of the discussion to which we have linked you.

2.

Wayne,

Sorry but I am not interested in getting involved in the “chemtrails” debate. I don’t think it has any substance.

Yours,
David


3.

Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2007 5:29 AM
To: Travis, David J
Subject: Seeking your opinion

Hello David,,

It's a while since we had any communication. I was wondering if you would like to help out with a little interpretation. I recently sent an e-mail to David Keith, the geoengineering specialist at the University of Calgary. I hope you don't kind reading through the correspondence.

Do you have any notion as to what might be prompting him to say that I am trying to involve him in a discussion over "chemtrails" rather than over geoengineering?

What would your own feelings be if asked to take sides between the positions of Enouranois and those of Nikos Chrysogelos as they emerge from this discussion? You have written in the past that you disapprove of the "geoengineering" approach to solving climate change problems..

What the positions of Enouranois amount to is willingness to investigate all factors, including the political and considerations informing the moves of the different players.

Regards,

Wayne Hall

4.

From: "Travis, David J"
Wayne Hall
Friday, November 30, 2007 6:01:19 PM
Subject: RE: Seeking your opinion

Hi Wayne,

I hope the weather is warmer there than it is here! I've read through your e-mail correspondence below as well as portions of the discussion included in the link provided. He, like I, probably read the first paragraph and connected the dots that the origin of this conversation is probably somehow a result of certain individuals concerned about chemtrails. This is simply a topic that none of us want to get into because it's a no-win conversation. I know for myself I've wasted many, many hours trying to explain to certain people why contrails can have funny shapes and patterns in the sky and criss-cross eachother, etc. only to get nowhere with the conversation.

Regarding my stance on geoengineering...it hasn't changed and if anything, I feel even stronger about opposing it now than I ever have. To me this is a band-aid approach and gives us a false sense of security that we can keep doing what we're doing to the environment and we'll always be able to come up with new technology at some point to "fix" it. Yet we've never really successfully geoengineered the atmosphere and we don't have a good handle on what sort of side effects or positive/negative feedbacks could be created by these efforts. I cringe every time I hear geoengineering mentioned and now I'm noticing that it's becoming more commonly spoken about as a viable option among the conservative politicians of the world that still feel like man has the power to overcome nature whenever he wants.

We're expecting a major snow and ice storm in the upper Midwest U.S. this weekend. Let's see how much power man has to overcome nature then.

Best regards,

David
***********************************************
Dr. David Travis
Associate Dean, College of Letters and Sciences
White, Rm. 105
Professor, Department of Geography and Geology
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
Whitewater, WI 53190
Website: facstaff.uww.edu/travisd
*********************************************

5.

Hi David, thanks for the comments, which are not however getting to the nitty-gritty in my opinion. What I was hoping for was something that would take us closer to what appears to be the reality of why chemtrails are a topic "that none of us want to get into", namely because a way has not been found of legalizing them and if it were admitted that they exist this would open the way to lawsuits, including lawsuits by climate change "sceptics" serving malicious political agendas. The argument I was putting forward was that the bind that geoengineers have been pushed into is one of the mechanisms by means of which "sceptics" and the lobbies that support them retain the upper hand politically.

I did everything I could to avoid leading the discussion into the familiar and "contrail vs chemtrail" debate and I am not pleased that you too, with no prompting from me, took us back there. .

Anyway, thank you for keeping communication channels open. I am sure that if you wanted to you could make some interesting comments that would start to move us out of the dreary and repetitive old exchanges we are so familiar with. I am always open to, and interested in hearing comments of that kind from people involved in all these matters from closer to where the decisions are being made.

Best wishes,

Wayne

4.

Dear Dr Keith,

I fully sympathise with your unwillingness to get involved in the tedious "chemtrails vs contrails" discussion. It was not my purpose in writing to you to have such a discussion with you, and this was the reason for my making my caustic remarks about your not being able to read, for which I now apologize.

I sent a copy of your reply to me to Dr. David Travis. You can see it below. As you will appreciate, the proposed discussion is not about chemtrails, but about geoengineering, the subject of your public lectures. As well as addressing the remarks I actually made in my initial correspondence, would you mind making some comment on what Dr. Travis has to say about geoengineering. You always say in your public lectures and writings that controversial geoengineering programmes should not be proceeded with without public discussion and without first securing the support of the public.

How would you defend geoengineering from Dr. Travis's criticisms?

W. Hall

5.


I don’t think I have much to add. I agree that geoengineering “a band-aid approach and gives us a false sense of security that we can keep doing what we're doing to the environment and we'll always be able to come up with new technology at some point to "fix" it.” I also think that the risk of rapid climate change may now be large enough that we should take the idea seriously, doing some real work to see how well it might work and what the downsides may be. I don’t see that these ideas are contradictory.

Yours,
David (Keith)

6.

Hi Wayne,

I’m probably not qualified for such a debate…certainly not in the realm of what David Keith can offer. My feelings about geoengineering are mostly personal and ethical and I would rather not debate whether a certain effort may or may not work. It’s not a winnable debate since don’t have enough hard data to prove either side. Plus, I’m swamped right now and wouldn’t have time for such a debate anyway. Maybe during the holidays I’ll have a bit more time.

David (Travis)

7.

From Wayne Hall:

To: David (Travis),

We tried to arrange a debate last year between Paul Crutzen, George Monbiot and Rosalind Peterson The Hellenic American Union agreed to host it on condition that all the speakers agreed to participate but in the end only Rosalind Peterson did. Given experiences like this it becomes more difficult to believe that some of the proposed geoengineering programmes will not be implemented, or are not already being implemented, without full prior public consultation.

There are a number of parallel discussions going on: the climate change discussion, the geoengineering discussion, the aircraft emissions discussion which appear to be at cross purposes and never encountering each other. Surely the public has a right to monitor these discussions at its own initiative for purposes of arriving at a coherent and synoptic understanding of what is being done and what is being proposed.

If I am involved in organizing and compering any such public debate I can guarantee that it will not become bogged down in sterile chemtrails-vs-contrails discourse or in recriminations and that it will not demand confessions that could lead to political or legal problems.

David, If you do not feel adequately equipped to debate David Keith alone on his own subject, perhaps you could suggest who might like to join you in such a debate? As for the time, there is no huge urgency and the debate could be arranged for a time when all are able to participate.

Regards,

Wayne

[Wayne Hall]

Floating an idea: what about our trying to arrange a video conference including David Keith and as many as possible of the scientists who appeared in the BBC Global Dimming documentary?

halva.proboards46.com/index.cgi?board=Board1&action=display&thread=1115700967

[Wayne Hall]

Introductory note:

David Keith, author of “Geoengineering Encyclopedia of Global Change” (2002) is one of the most visible figures in the contemporary geoengineering club. The following public lecture, delivered in New York in September 2007, and containing an appeal for “musicians scientists, philosophers, writers” to interest themselves in Keith’s particular subject: geoengineering, can be interpreted – and I believe most definitely SHOULD be interpreted – as an expression of Keith’s desire for a change of political masters: in effect an appeal to reverse the process set in motion at the outset of the Cold War when in the aftermath of the furore over the loyalties of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller moved his political allegiance from Democrat to Republican.

The most cursory glance at Edward Teller’s short piece from 1998 “Sunscreen for Planet Earth” highlights the dilemmas that Teller - through his simultaneous advocacy of anthropogenic climate change “skepticism” and the geoengineering approach to “solution” of a problem of whose existence he proclaims himself skeptical - prepared for all subsequent geoengineers. Such deliberate generation of cognitive dissonance could perhaps be justified in terms of the “divide and rule” logic of war, (hot or cold). It has many precedents in Teller’s previous history as architect of the hydrogen bomb and of the Star Wars “anti-missile shield”. But in a post-Cold War world threatened with ecological ruin, (largely in consequence of the mentalities and activities of the very same laboratories and scientists), it has most certainly reached its “sell-by” date. David Keith’s lecture can, and my opinion should be interpreted as coded acknowledgement of that reality.

Most conspicuous at the beginning of Keith’s lecture is the disdain of the “skeptic” for the clichés and monotony of the popular climate change debate. This stance of Keith should not be mistaken for actual “skepticism”. Keith, like the Marty Hoffert he mentions in his talk, rejects the “market fundamentalism” of authentic climate change “skeptics”.

Although there is overwhelming circumstantial evidence that geoengineering programmes of the type Keith advocates are not just proposals but have already been under implementation for years (how else, for example, can one interpret Keith’s observations on the problems of sulphate-based geoengineering. Is he really just talking about volcanoes?) the only thing that Keith really has in common with “skeptics” is his evasiveness on this particular subject. This is a reflection of the Teller inheritance, the past that David Keith seems to want to get away from.

It is by no means necessary to become an apologist for geoengineering to support Keith’s statement that “you don’t make good policy by hiding things in a drawer”.

All of the implications of Keith’s lecture, though he does not say so in so many words, is that the “skeptics” have no place in the climate change debate. How, after all, is his recommendation for maximum progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to be achieved in the face of the demagogic politics, and the popular influence, of the various Inhofes and Lomborgs?

Keith’s appeal for transparency, for getting the geoengineering debate “out of the drawer” could moreover provide one of the prerequisites for serious opposition to military applications of weather and climate modification: reintroduction of the distinction between civilian and military applications of science.

Neither Keith’s own lack of total frankness nor his evident support for nuclear power should discourage acceptance of what appears to be an appeal to be allowed to serve a new master. Are today’s climate change, anti-nuclear, anti-militarist and “altermondialiste”movements capable of becoming that new master? If we are not, we had better start trying to do something about that.
W.H.
www.enouranois.gr

[Wayne Hall]

A Surprising Idea for “Solving” Climate Change

From the“TED” (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in New York City, September 2007.
www.ted.com/talks/view/id/192

David Keith: You’ve all seen lots of articles on climate change and here’s yet another New York Times article just like every other darned one you’ve seen. It says all the same stuff as all the other ones you’ve seen. It even has the same kind of headline as all the other ones you’ve seen. What’s unusual about this one, maybe, is that it’s from 1953. And the reason I’m saying this is that you may have the idea this problem is relatively recent, that people have just sort of figured out about it and now with Kyoto and the Governator and people beginning to actually do something, we may be on the road to solution. The fact is uh-uh. We’ve known about this problem for fifty years, depending on how you count it, and we have talked about it endlessly over the last decade or so and we’ve accomplished close to zip.

This is the growth rate of CO2 in the atmosphere. You’ve seen this in various forms but maybe you haven’t seen this one. What this shows is that the rate of growth of our emissions is accelerating, and accelerating even faster than what we thought was the worst case just a few years back. So that red line there was something that a lot of skeptics said the environmentalists only put in the projections to make the projections look as bad as possible, that emissions would never grow as fast as that red line, but in fact they’re growing faster. Here’s some data from actually just ten days ago, which shows this year’s minimum of the Arctic sea ice, and it’s the lowest by far, and the rate at which the Arctic sea ice is going away is a lot quicker than models, so despite all sorts of experts like me flying around the planet and burning jet fuel and politicians signing treaties, in fact you could argue the net effect of all this has been negative because it has just consumed a lot of jet fuel. In terms of what we really need to do to put the brakes on this very high inertial thing, our big economy, we’ve really hardly started. Really we’re doing this, basically, really not very much. I don’t want to depress you too much. The problem is absolutely soluble, and even soluble in a way that’s reasonably cheap. Cheap meaning sort of the cost of the military, not the cost of medical care. Cheap meaning a few percent of GDP. No, this is really important to have this sense of scale. So the problem is soluble and the way we should go about solving it is, say …. dealing with electricity production, which costs us something like 43 or so percent - and rising - of CO2 emissions, and we could do that by perfectly sensible things like conservation and wind power, nuclear power and coalless CO2 capture, which are all things that are ready for giant-scale deployment, and work, and all we lack is the action to actually spend the money to put those into place. Instead we spend our time talking. But nevertheless, that is not what I am going to talk to you about tonight. What I'm going to talk to you about tonight is stuff that we might do if we did nothing, and it's this stuff in the middle here, which is what you do if you don't stop the emissions quickly enough, and you need to deal, somehow break the link between human actions that change climate and the climate change itself. And that’s particularly important because of course while we can adapt to climate change, and it’s important to be honest here, there will be some benefits to climate change. Oh yes, I think it’s bad. I spend my whole life working to stop it. But one of the reasons it’s politically hard is there are winners and losers, not all losers. But of course the natural world: polar bears - l spend time skiing across the sea ice for weeks at a time in the high Arctic - they will completely lose and there’s no adaption. (sic)

So this problem is absolutely soluble. This geoengineering idea in its simplest form is basically the following. You can put particles, say sulphuric acid particles, sulphates, into the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, where they reflect away sunlight and cool the planet and I know for certain that that will work - not that there aren't side effects, but I know for certain it will work - and the reason is it’s been done. And it was done not by us, not by me, but by nature. Here’s Mount Pinatubo in the early 90s, that put a whole bunch of sulphur in the stratosphere with a sort of atomic-bomb like cloud and the result of that was pretty dramatic. After that, and some previous volcanoes, we had you see a quite dramatic cooling of the atmosphere. So this lower bar is the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, and it heats up after these volcanoes but you’ll notice that in the upper bar, which is the lower atmosphere on the surface, it cools down because we’ve shielded the atmosphere a little bit. There's no big mystery about it. There's lots of mystery in the details and there are some bad side effects, like it partially destroys the ozone layer, and I’ll get to that in a minute, but it clearly cools down, and one other thing. It’s fast. Really important to say. So much of the other things that we ought to do, like slowing emissions, are intrinsically slow, because it takes time to build all the hardware we need to reduce emissions and not only that. When you cut emissions you don’t cut concentrations because concentrations, the amount of CO2 in the air, is the sum of emissions over time, so you can’t step on the brakes very quickly. But if you do this, it’s quick. And there are times you might like to do something quick Another thing you might wonder about is does it work? Can you shade some sunlight and effectively compensate for the added CO2 and produce a climate sort of back to what it was originally. And the answer seems to be yes. So here’s the graphs you’ve seen lots of times before. That's what the world looks like under one particular climate model's view, with twice the amount of CO2 in the air. The lower graph is with twice the mount of CO2 and 1.8 percent less sunlight, and you're back to the original climate. And this graph from Ken Caldeira, it's important to say, came because Ken at a meeting that - I believe Marty Hoffert was also at - in the mid-90s, Ken and I stood up in the back of the meeting and said geoengineering won't work and to the person who was promoting it said the atmosphere is much more complicated and a bunch of physical reasons why it wouldn’t do a very good compensation. Ken went and ran his models and found that it did.

This topic is also old. That report that landed on President Johnson’s desk when I was two years old in 1965, that report, in fact, which had all of modern climate science, the only thing they talked about doing was geoengineering. It didn’t even talk about cutting emissions, which is an incredible shift in our thinking about this problem. I'm not saying we shouldn't cut emissions. We should. But it made exactly this point. So in a sense there is not much new. The one new thing is this essay. So I should say, I guess that since the time of that original President Johnston report and the various reports of the US National Academy - 1977, 1982, 1990 - people always talked about this idea. Not as something foolproof but as something to think about. But when climate became politically a hot topic, if I make the pun in the last fifteen years, this became so un-PC we couldn't talk about it. It just sank below the surface. We weren't allowed to speak about it. But in the last year Paul Crutzen published this essay saying roughly what’s all been said before: that maybe given our very slow rate of progress in solving this problem and the uncertain impacts, we should think about things like this. He said roughly what's been said before. The big deal was he happened to have won the Nobel Prize for ozone chemistry, so people took him seriously when he said we should think about this, even though there will be some ozone impacts, and in fact he had some ideas to make them go away. There was all sorts of press coverage all over the world, going right down to ‘Dr, Strangelove saves the Earth’ from the Economist. And that got me thinking. I’ve worked on this topic on and off but not so much technically and I was actually lying in bed thinking one night and I thought about this child's toy, which is hence the title of my talk, and I wondered if you could use the same physics that makes that thing spin around in the child's radiometer to levitate particles into the upper atmosphere and make them stay there. One of the problems with sulphates is that they fall out quickly.

[Wayne Hall]

The other problem is that they are right in the ozone layer and I prefer them above the ozone layer. And it turns out…. I woke up the next morning and started to calculate this and it was very hard to calculate from first principles - I was stumped - but then I found out that there were all sorts of papers already published that address this topic because it happens already in the natural atmosphere. So it seems there are already fine particles that are levitated up into what we call the mesosphere about 100 kilometres up that already have this effect. I'll tell you very quickly how the effect works. There are a lot of fun complexities I would love to spend the whole evening on, but I won’t. But let's say we have sunlight hitting some particle and it's unevenly heated so the side facing the sun is warmer, the side away cooler. Gas molecules that bounce off the warm side bounce away with some extra velocity because it’s warm, and so you see a net force away from the sun. That’s called a photoforetic force. There are a bunch of other versions of it that I and some collaborators have thought about how to exploit, and of course we may be wrong - this hasn't all been been peer reviewed, we're in the middle of thinking about it - but so far it seems good., But it looks like we could achieve long atmospheric lifetimes, much longer than before, because they’re levitated. We could move things out of the stratosphere into the mesosphere, in principle solving the ozone problem - I'm sure there will be other problems that arise - and finally we could make the particles migrate over the poles, so we could arrange the climate engineering so it really focused on the poles, which would have minimal bad impacts in the middle of the planet where we live and do the maximum job on what we might need to do, which is cooling the poles in case of planetary emergency if you like. This is a new idea that has crept up that may be essentially a cleverer idea than putting sulphates in. Whether this idea is right or some other idea is right, I think that it is almost certain that we will eventually think of cleverer things to do than just putting sulphur in, that if engineers and scientists really it turn their mind to this, it's amazing how we can affect the planet The one thing about this is that it gives us extraordinary leverage. This improved science of engineering will, whether we like it or not, give us more and more leverage to affect the planet, to control the planet to give us weather and climate control. Not because we plan it, not because we want it. Just because science delivers it to us bit by bit with better knowledge of the way the system works and better engineering tools to effect it.

Now suppose that space aliens arrived on - maybe they're going to land at the UN headquarters down the road here - maybe they’ll pick a smarter spot - but suppose they arrive and they give you a box and the box has two knobs: one knob is the knob for controlling global temperature, maybe another knob is the knob for controlling CO2 concentrations. You might imagine that we would fight wars over that box because we have no way to agree about where to set the knobs. We have no global governance and different people will have different places they want it set. Now I don't think that's going to happen. It’s not very likely. But we’re building that box, the scientists and engineers of the world are building it piece by piece in their labs, even when they’re doing it for other reasons. Even when they 're thinking they're just working on protecting the environment - they have no interest in crazy ideas like engineering the whole planet. They develop science that makes it easier and easier to do. And so I guess my view on this is not that I want to do it - I do not - but that we should move this out of the shadows and talk about it seriously, because sooner or later we’ll be confronted with decisions about this and it's better if we think hard about it even if we want to think hard about reasons why we should never do it.

I'll give you two different ways to think about this problem that are the beginning of my thinking about how to think about it. But what we need is not just a few oddballs like me thinking about this. We need a broader debate, a debate that involves…. musicians scientists, philosophers, writers, who get engaged with this question about climate engineering and think seriously about what its implications are. So here’s one way to think about it, which is that we do just do this instead of cutting emissions because it's cheaper. I guess the thing I haven't said about this is that it is absurdly cheap. It's conceivable that say using the sulphates method or this method I've come with, you could create an ice age at a cost of .001 percent of GDP. It's very cheap. We have a lot of leverage. It's not a good idea. But it's just important. I'll tell you how big the lever is. The lever is that big. That calculation is very much in dispute. You might argue about the sanity of it. But the leverage is real. So because of this we could deal with the problem simply by stopping reducing emissions and just as concentrations go up we could increase the amount of geoengineering. I don’t think anybody takes that seriously because under this scenario we walk further and further away from the current climate. We have all sorts of other problems like ocean acidification that come from CO2 in the atmosphere anyway. Nobody but one or two very odd folks really suggest this. But here's a case that's harder to reject. Let’s say that we don't do geoengineering. We do what we ought to do, which is get serious about cutting emissions. But we don’t really know how quickly we have to cut them. There's a lot of uncertainty about exactly how much climate change is too much. So let's say that we work hard and we actually don't just tap the brakes but we step hard on the brakes and really reduce emissions and eventually reduce concentrations and maybe some day, like 2075, October 23, we finally reach that glorious day where concentrations have peaked and are rolling down the other side. We have global celebrations and we've actually started to, you know, we’ve seen the worst of it. But maybe on that day we also find that the Greenland ice sheet is really melting unacceptably fast, fast enough to put metres of sea level on the oceans in the next hundred years and remove some of the biggest cities from the map. An absolutely possible scenario. We might decide at that point that even though geoengineering was uncertain and morally unhappy, that it’s a lot better than not geoengineering. And that's a very different way to look at the problem. It's using this as risk control, not instead of action. It's saying that you do some geoenginering for a little while to take the worst of the heat off, not use it as a substitute for action But there is a problem with that view and the problem is the following: Knowledge that geoengineering is possible makes the climate impacts look less fearsome. And that makes a weaker commitment to cutting emissions today. This is what economists call a moral hazard. And that's one of the fundamental reasons that this problem is so hard to talk about and in general I think it is the underlying reason that it has been politically unacceptable to talk about this. But you don’t make good policy by hiding things in a drawer.

I'll leave you with three questions and then one final quote. Should we do serious research on this topic? Should we have a national research programme that looks at this? Not just at how you would do it better but also what all the risks and downsides of it are? Right now you have a few enthusiasts talking about it. Some on a positive side. Some on a negative side. But that's a dangerous state to be in. Because there's very little depth of knowledge on this topic. A very small amount of money would get us some. Many of us, maybe now me, think we should do that, but I have a lot of reservations. My reservations are principally about the moral hazard problem And I don't really know how we can best avoid the moral hazard. I think there is a serious problem. As you talk about this, people begin to think that they do not need to work so hard to cut emissions. Another thing is maybe we need a treaty, a treaty that decides who gets to do this. Right now we may think of a big rich country like the US doing this. But it might well be that in fact if China wakes up in 2030 and realizes that the climate impacts are just unacceptable, they would not be very interested in our moral conversations about how to do this. They may just decide but they would really rather have a geoengineering world than a non-geoengineering world. And we'll have no international mechanism to figure out who makes the decisions.

So here is one last thought, which was said much much better 25 years ago in the US National Academy Report than I can say today. I think it really summarizes where we are here. That the CO2 problem, the climate problem, that we've heard about, is driving lots of things - innovations and innovative technologies - that will reduce emissions. But also, I think inevitably, it will drive us towards thinking about climate and weather control, whether we like it or not, and it’s time to begin thinking about it, even if the reason we're thinking about it is to construct arguments for why we shouldn’t do it. Thank you very much.