Drones for good?

Louise Redvers in IRIN: Most commonly associated with spying and military missions, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – or drones – for humanitarian purposes is the subject of both hype and caution. Sceptics are wary of the ethical and practical implications, worried about human rights and security aspects and unconvinced by their capabilities and relevance.

But experts argue they could play an important role in disaster relief as well as having other useful civilian applications. A two-day event hosted in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) this weekend presented some potentially positive uses for UAVs in civilian and humanitarian settings offering big money prizes to the best ideas.

“Drones don’t have a great reputation,” admitted Patrick Meier, the director of social innovation at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), and a leading advocate for UAVs in the humanitarian sector, who helped judge the Dubai competition.

“Don’t forget in the past we used to associate satellites with the Cold War and the military, but that has now changed, thanks to the democratization of imagery. Hopefully as the public see more examples of drones doing good, of stopping animal poaching, of saving lives in search-and-rescue efforts or delivering medicines to remote parts of Africa, then perceptions will change,” said Meier, also the co-founder of the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN), a membership platform for digital disaster response. ...

A NASA Pathfinder drone

Will geoengineering make people give up cutting their carbon footprint?

Adam Corner in the Guardian (UK): If you thought there was a machine that could magically remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and bury it underground, would you be less likely to worry about reducing your own carbon footprint?

The question is not entirely hypothetical. Geoengineering is the catch-all term for a suite of technologies that could one day be used to alter the Earth’s climate and combat global warming. Most of them are unlikely to ever see the light of day: they are considered too risky, too unpredictable, or too reckless to be taken seriously by the scientific community.

...As geoengineering has gradually moved on to the policy agenda, debates about the ethics of meddling with the global thermostat have become more prominent. Central among these is whether geoengineering might undermine fragile public and political support for the more pressing business of reducing carbon emissions.

This is what is known by economists and philosophers as a ‘moral hazard’ argument: the phenomenon whereby people who feel insured against a particular risk are more likely to exhibit risky behaviour. Will the prospect of geoengineering make people feel ‘insured’ against the risks of climate change, and indulge in ‘riskier’ environmental behaviour themselves?

In a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society on Monday, my colleague Nick Pidgeon and I attempted to answer that question. Using a nationally representative online survey, we provided 610 people with a ‘factsheet’ about geoengineering, and then asked them a series of questions. One striking finding was that some people seem more susceptible to the ‘trap’ of the moral hazard than others.

People who were wealthier, and who identified with self-focused values such as power and status, were more likely to agree with the statement “Knowing geoengineering is a possibility makes me feel less inclined to make changes in my own behaviour to tackle climate change.”...

A smoggy sky in Taiwan, shot by Carrie Kellenberger, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license

Preventing climate change and adapting to it are not morally equivalent

I usually don't link to Grist, because I assume my audience is already reading it. But recently David Roberts had a significant piece that everyone should read: Climate hawks are familiar with the framing of climate policy credited to White House science advisor John Holdren, to wit: We will respond to climate change with some mix of mitigation, adaptation, and suffering; all that remains to be determined is the mix.

It’s a powerful bit of language. It makes clear that not acting is itself a choice — a choice in favor of suffering. But in another way, Holdren’s formulation obscures an important difference between mitigation (reducing greenhouse gas emissions to prevent climate effects) and adaptation (changing infrastructure and institutions to cope with climate effects). It makes them sound fungible, as though a unit of either can be traded in for an equivalent unit of suffering. That’s misleading. They are very different, not only on a practical level but morally.

Carbon is global, adaptation is local... [M]itigation is fundamentally altruistic, other-focused.

...Adaptation is nearly the opposite. It is action taken to protect oneself, one’s own city, tribe, or nation, from the effects of unchecked climate change. An adapta
tion dollar does not benefit all of humanity like a mitigation dollar does. It benefits only those proximate to the spender. A New Yorker who spends a dollar on mitigation is disproportionately preventing suffering among future Bangladeshis. A New Yorker who spends a dollar on a sea wall is preventing suffering only among present and future New Yorkers. The benefits of adaptation, as an iterative process that will continue as long as the climate keeps changing, are both spatially and temporally local....

A smoking chimney, shot by Sampsonchen, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license 

We need an apartheid-style boycott to save the planet

Some inspiration from Desmond Tutu in the Guardian (UK): Twenty-five years ago people could be excused for not knowing much, or doing much, about climate change. Today we have no excuse. No more can it be dismissed as science fiction; we are already feeling the effects.

...Who can stop it? Well, we can, you and I. And it is not just that we can stop it, we have a responsibility to do so. It is a responsibility that begins with God commanding the first human inhabitants of the garden of Eden "to till it and keep it". To keep it; not to abuse it, not to destroy it.

...People of conscience need to break their ties with corporations financing the injustice of climate change. We can, for instance, boycott events, sports teams and media programming sponsored by fossil-fuel energy companies. We can demand that the advertisements of energy companies carry health warnings. We can encourage more of our universities and municipalities and cultural institutions to cut their ties to the fossil-fuel industry. We can organise car-free days and build broader societal awareness. We can ask our religious communities to speak out.

We can actively encourage energy companies to spend more of their resources on the development of sustainable energy products, and we can reward those companies that do so by using their products. We can press our governments to invest in ren
ewable energy and stop subsidising fossil fuels. Where possible, we can install our own solar panels and water heaters.

...It makes no sense to invest in companies that undermine our future. To serve as custodians of creation is not an empty title; it requires that we act, and with all the urgency this dire situation demands.

Desmond Tutu in 2007, shot by Elke Wetzig (Elya), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Scientists unmask the climate uncertainty monster

A press release from the University of Bristol

: Increasing uncertainty in the climate system compels a greater urgency for climate change mitigation, according to new research from the University of Bristol. Scientific uncertainty has been described as a 'monster' that prevents understanding and delays mitigative action in response to climate change.  New research by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol, and international colleagues, shows that uncertainty should make us more rather than less concerned about climate change.

In two companion papers, published today in Climatic Change, the researchers investigated the mathematics of uncertainty in the climate system and showed that increased scientific uncertainty necessitates even greater action to mitigate climate change.

The scientists used an ordinal approach – a range of mathematical methods that address the question: 'What would the consequences be if uncertainty is even greater than we think it is?'

They show that as uncertainty in the temperature increase expected with a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels rises, so do the economic damages of increased climate change.  Greater uncertainty also increases the likelihood of exceeding 'safe' temperature limits and the probability of failing to reach mitigation targets.  The authors highlight this with the case of future sea level, as larger uncertainty in sea level rise requires greater precautionary action to manage flood risk.

Professor Lewandowsky, Chair in Cognitive Psychology and member of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol, said: "We can understand the implications of uncertainty, and in the case of the climate system, it is very clear that greater uncertainty will make things even worse. This means that we can never say that there is too much uncertainty for us to act.  If you appeal to uncertainty to make a policy decision the legitimate conclusion is to increase the urgency of mitigation."

Co-author, Dr James Risbey of Australia’s CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, said: "Some point to uncertainty as a way to minimize the climate change problem, when in fact it means that the problem is more likely to be worse than expected in the absence of that uncertainty.  This result is robust to a range of assumptions and shows that uncertainty does not excuse inaction."...

The Allegory of Immortality, Giulio Romano

Hack the planet? Geoengineering research, ethics, governance explored

Hannah Hickey at UW Today: Hacking the Earth’s climate to counteract global warming – a subject that elicits strong reactions from both sides – is the topic of a December special issue of the journal Climatic Change. A dozen research papers include the most detailed description yet of the proposed Oxford Principles to govern geoengineering research, as well as surveys on the technical hurdles, ethics and regulatory issues related to deliberately manipulating the planet’s climate.

University of Washington researchers led the three-year project to gather leading thinkers and publish a snapshot of a field that they say is rapidly gaining credibility in the scientific community. “In the past five years or so, geoengineering has moved from the realm of quackery to being the subject of scientific research,” said co-editor Rob Wood, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences. “We wanted to contribute to a serious intellectual discourse.”

Creating clouds over the ocean that would reflect back sunlight is the subject of a chapter by Wood, whose research is on the interaction among air pollution, clouds and climate. He and co-author Tom Ackerman, a UW atmospheric sciences professor, look at what it would take to test the idea with a field experiment.

 “I don’t want to prove it right, I just want to know if it’s feasible,” Wood said. “If you look at the projections for how much the Earth’s air temperature is supposed to warm over the next century, it is frightening. We should at least know the options. Is geoengineering feasible if there were to be what people call a ‘climate emergency’?”....

Image by Beckyq6937, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Indigenous leaders abandon faith in UN to find climate solution

Douglas Fischer in the Daily Climate: Tribal elders from the United States, Greenland and Mexico spoke of the need for individual action rather than government edicts, and of the difficulty – and urgency – of replacing economic questions with moral ones.

As United Nations delegates gather in Warsaw in the 19th annual effort to craft a global climate treaty, indigenous leaders from across North America met half a world away and offered a prophecy: The solution to climate change will never come via the UN talks.

They spoke of grandfathers and grandmothers, of battles with alcoholism and disenfranchisement, of a world that's changing around them and a need to do something for their grandchildren. Most of all, though, they talked of a need for a new direction in an increasingly unsustainable world.

Organized by the Bozeman, Mont.- based American Indian Institute, the gathering drew about 65 people from across North America. Here amid the hills and mesas that painter Georgia O'Keeffe made famous, these elders presented a different palette with which to look at environmental woes. They placed little faith in the weighty United Nations process that opened Monday and will draw thousands of people to Warsaw over the next two weeks to try to find a way to stem emissions of greenhouse gases.

"I have nothing to say to them," said Angaangaq, an Inuk known here as Uncle and who since 1975 has been "runner" for his elders in Greenland, spreading their words worldwide. "Not one of those United Nations people responsible has ever changed."

...The dismissal of the UN was all the more striking given that it came from those who, in the 1970s, spearheaded the quest to have the world body recognize indigenous rights.  Forty years later, they have moved on. ...

Shot of the mesa at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico by Brian Thomas, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Experts push ethical case for climate adaptation policies

David Dickson in SciDev.net: The strong ethical case for governments and individuals to help communities adapt to the threats of climate change — on top of purely practical or political factors — is emphasised in a report by the top UN committee responsible for monitoring science ethics.

Climate adaptation policies need to acknowledge and express ethical principles already enshrined in international agreements, according to the report approved yesterday (29 May) by the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST) at a meeting in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Such principles include the need to avoid causing unnecessary harm, to treat all individuals fairly and to provide equitable access to a decent standard of living, says the commission, which operates under the auspices of UNESCO (the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

The principles also include the need to recognise the right to access and benefit from scientific information, which could strengthen poorer developing countries' demands for access to climate data obtained by richer nations using complex or expensive monitoring equipment.

"The report sets out what anyone who is involved in policymaking on climate change adaptation should be responsible for," said Rainier Ibana, chair of the philosophy department of the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, as well as of the COMEST working group on environmental ethics, which produced the report....

A fountain in the center of Quito, shot by David Adam Kess, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

UNESCO urged to explore guidelines on 'nano-ethics'

David Dickson in SciDev.net: The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has been urged to set up an expert group to seek a consensus of both developed and developing countries on how to tackle the ethical aspects of nanotechnology.

The proposal was made by speakers at a workshop in Bratislava, Slovakia, last week (27–29 May) organised by the Slovakian National Commission for UNESCO and the World Commission on the Ethics of Science and Technology (COMEST).

"All countries in the world will become involved in nanotechnology over the next ten or 20 years, and it is important to establish collaboration between North and South in developing an ethical roadmap on how the issues raised by this technology should be handled," said Ali Beitollahi, director of international relations for the Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council (INIC).

The Bratislava meeting heard that the potential applications of nanotechnology — particularly in water treatment but also in fields such as health, agriculture and energy — could transform prospects for developing countries in ways similar to the wide-scale adoption of mobile phones.

"Nanoscience and nanotechnology are giving us new ways of thinking about development, and can play an important role in helping developing countries move towards sustainability," said COMEST member Abdoulaye Sene, an environmental sociologist at Senegal's Cheikh Anta Diop University....

A nano-whatsis, shot by Aydin4ik, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Experts push ethical case for climate adaptation policies

David Dickson in SciDev.net: The strong ethical case for governments and individuals to help communities adapt to the threats of climate change — on top of purely practical or political factors — is emphasised in a report by the top UN committee responsible for monitoring science ethics.

Climate adaptation policies need to acknowledge and express ethical principles already enshrined in international agreements, according to the report approved yesterday (29 May) by the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST) at a meeting in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Such principles include the need to avoid causing unnecessary harm, to treat all individuals fairly and to provide equitable access to a decent standard of living, says the commission, which operates under the auspices of UNESCO (the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

The principles also include the need to recognise the right to access and benefit from scientific information, which could strengthen poorer developing countries' demands for access to climate data obtained by richer nations using complex or expensive monitoring equipment.

"The report sets out what anyone who is involved in policymaking on climate change adaptation should be responsible for," said Rainier Iban[ez], chair of the philosophy department of the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, as well as of the COMEST working group on environmental ethics, which produced the report....

A photo of Edward Onslow Ford's statue of Justice, part of a monument to the Maharajah of Mysore

Weighing costs and benefits--a Carbon Based original

In deciding whether to undertake large projects, most managers and policymakers begin with a cost-benefit analysis, or CBA.  The advantage of CBA is its comparative simplicity. The choice with the largest net gains is the one we should select. This method shows a way forward using straightforward assumptions.

Unfortunately, when the first step in an important assessment is a CBA, policymakers have already closed off major alternatives, usually the ones that involve non-economic values.  And in a changing climate, a naive use of CBA creates a strong bias against, for example, cutting greenhouse gas emissions. 

Most economic theory struggles to explicitly addressing environmental goods and ills, which are not so readily translated into costs.  In fact, global warming is a market failure, perhaps the most significant market failure of all.

Most CBA users assume that the environment will remain stable over the life of the endeavor.  Yet climate change jeopardizes that stability. When farm productivity dropped because of environmental degradation during the Dust Bowl, recovery took decades.  A growing frequency of coastal property being inundated and disrupted by storm surges can dramatically alter the environmental picture --and therefore the economic outlook. But economists rarely call attention to these issues.

Environmental goods and ecosystem services are not readily quantified, and thus easy to take for granted in a business-dominated world. Insurance is one business mechanism that quantifies natural disaster costs to some degree, but the point of view is pretty limited and stylized. It's a distorted lens for getting the whole picture of climate change.

Risk is a blind spot for CBA, too. Even a mainstream economist such as Martin Weitzman notes that low probability but high impact scenarios tend to disappear from conventional CBA.  The destruction from Hurricane Sandy is a recent instance. Everyone knew that a hurricane hitting New Jersey and New York had a serious potential for tremendous losses. But long decades between storms lulled everyone, economists included, into postponing decisive action.  This is true even though the Bloomberg administration has actually done more than nearly any other American city. Sandy has shown how inadequate this effort was.

A more fundamental drawback is philosophical.  Cost-benefit analysis embodies norms that persistently steer us toward short-term ventures, consumption, and individualist standards -- the prevailing ideology of our era. The utilitarian bias of economists lead to scant regard to matters of morality, rights and justice. Personal relationships count for little, as does art, and even nature itself except where some natural feature has an obvious dollar equivalent.

In utilitarian style, CBA reduces values to mere preferences, which have to compete with a long list of stakeholder desires.  This group wants to preserve thriving wetlands, but other people want to buy houses that are "close to the land," and the alternatives compete in a CBA. If preserving ecosystem services imposes severe costs in the short term, then standard-issue property development will rule the day. It's left to environmentalists to object that, say, losing wetlands or species will result in overwhelming damage to property in a few years, or decades.

This raises another hitch for cost benefit analysis. CBA pays little attention to how the costs and benefits are distributed through time. By favoring the present generation, it allows those of us alive now to pass our knottiest difficulties on to our children and grandchildren. As I noted in an earlier post about the discount rate, economic theory struggles with how to coherently weigh the standing of later generations. Some economists openly declare that the present goods outweigh future utility -- which is why the future assigned a lower worth, using a discount rate. This may work well enough for financial investments, but it starts falling apart when ethics are involved.  And in climate change, ethics should be at the heart of the matter.

Dispensing with CBA altogether isn't possible, and it would be irresponsible to neglect the balance of costs and benefits of competing climate mitigation efforts. But when it comes to climate change, we have to be aware of the tool's limitations.

Discount rates and market failures: some original content

In grappling with climate change, we face a number of demanding decisions to make about land use, economic growth, and even basic justice. We must invest wisely, and our choices will have a dramatic impact on future generations. The stakes couldn't be higher.

In making these choices, policymakers assess the costs and benefits of a given measure over the life of a project, which in climate terms can be several generations, or even centuries. Because of the time frame, policymakers must gauge the present value of these costs and benefits. In other words, they use what's known as a social discount rate.  This measure looks like an interest rate, or the hurdle rates that corporations rely on when deciding to make business investments.

Many economists are drawn to the view that the social discount rate should track average market rates of return. A proper investment has a discount rate of five or six percent or more.   So the economically minded look for a six percent return on any climate change investments. 

A shaky assumption lies hidden in this point of view.  First of all, it means that the well-being of later generations matters less than economic growth right now.  The justification for this is the faith that later generations will benefit of years of economic development, to which investments like ours will make a strong contribution.

The social discount rate you choose is not a trivial decision. It can dramatically change the assessment of a given project, whether it's restoring wetlands or building flood barriers.

At five or six percent, a centuries-long issue like climate change is not worth much investment at all.  Positive discount rates have a magical effect on the costs of climate change -- they are minimized over short time periods, and they all but disappear over a century or two. Economic growth will take care of the problem.  Besides, an investor could make more money by buying a company and stripping its assets rather than investing in climate-friendly projects. 

Economists who study climate change disagree sharply about the social discount rate to use, with William Nordhaus arguing for a 5.5 percent rate, and Nicholas Stern insisting that a rate larger than 1.4 percent is, in fact, immoral. Stern even suggests that for ethical reasons, we should use a zero discount rate.

I side with Stern. When economists discuss the issue, the ethical dimensions are a major blind spot.   Climate change is also an ethical issue, not merely an economic one. The ethical reason for a zero discount rate -- otherwise we are reducing the standing and value of future generations.  In a moral discussion, all the participants should be on an equal or at least comparable footing.  Generations to come have a very strong stake in what we do today and ethically they must be taken into account.

Even more significant, climate change results from a broad, systemic market failure.  Without strong regulatory intervention, markets have no incentive of addressing externalities like pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and the like.  We have little reason to believe that markets alone are going to solve the problems that unfettered markets have created.

Most economists are all too eager to minimize or eliminate the ethical dimensions to any discussion of climate change.  In doing so, they rely a psychological blind spot called hyperbolic discounting, which results when we dramatically overvalue present rewards over future rewards. It leads to short-term thinking run amok and unwillingness to plan for the long term.  Future generations get no say at all and have no standing when hyperbolic discounting is in force.

Since economists are inveterate hyperbolic discounters and often heedless of market failures, we should weigh their advice without much enthusiam.

Brooklyn Bridge with Freedom Tower and 8 Spruce Street in the background, New York, United States. A great shot by Kadellar, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Ethics for an ‘ecological civilisation'

Suvendrini Kakuchi in IPS: Leading Japanese ecologists are pushing for the concept of environmental "ethics" to influence the upcoming Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, an approach they contend will foster accountability towards sustainable development.

"(Environmental) ethics is based on the concept of making people accountable for the preservation of natural resources and biodiversity. By highlighting this aspect, we aim to combat the priority on economic growth that has hijacked previous Earth Summits," said Ryoichi Yamamoto, development expert and professor emeritus at Tokyo University.

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the first United Nations summit on sustainable development, this year’s conference, dubbed Rio+20, will negotiate on a transition to a green economy in an effort to preserve the planet’s air, land, water and biodiversity.

But activists worry this crucial debate on the planet’s future will once again – as has been the case since sustainable development was launched as a global issue in 1992 – focus too heavily on anti-pollution technologies and the exploitation of natural resources in service of economic growth.  Such an approach, green activists say, has not adequately provided for protection of the planet’s scarce natural resources and delicate ecosystems.

...He told IPS that excellent scientific research, evaluating ecosystems’ vulnerability to economic growth, has provided ample knowledge to influence policy decisions.  "But what is missing is sustainable development based on the perspective of an ecological civilisation, a civilisation that could exist in harmony with natural systems," he said.  The call for an ethical approach to finding solutions in Rio has gained momentum in Japan after the massive natural disaster that hit the northeastern coasts of the country in March 2011. ...

Sento Imperial Palace, Kyoto, Japan - pond view through trees. Shot by Daderot, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

'Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change' envisions the good life in a harsher world

PhysOrg: Think like a planet - and reorganize society to reflect it, says Case Western Reserve University's environmental ethicist Jeremy Bendik-Keymer. That's a new way of thinking about reversing the tide of climate change.

"Don't obsess over your individual actions: counting carbon emissions, changing light bulbs or even developing new technologies for personal use. The only international cure-all for climate change is societal, born of civic protest against the injustice we are visiting on future children," Bendik-Keymer says.

That's also the message from Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future's editors Bendik-Keymer and Allen Thompson from Oregon State University.

..."The standard definition of adaptation is about coping to protect our business as usual model of development. We take that a step further and think adaptation requires ethics –a new frame for development. We should change our form of life to assume responsibility keyed to a planetary scale," said Bendik-Keymer, the Elmer G. Beimer-Hubert H. Schneider Professor in Ethics at Case Western Reserve.

The volume, aimed at both theorists and practitioners working on the emerging international architecture of climate regulation and climate philosophy, starts at the global level.

Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change (MIT Press) is a call for reorganizing both our conception of good character and our understanding of institutions to allow humans to flourish in the climate we have substantially affected for the next thousands of years....

Nasa scientist: climate change is a moral issue on a par with slavery

Severin Carrell in the Guardian (UK): Averting the worst consequences of human-induced climate change is a "great moral issue" on a par with slavery, according to the leading Nasa climate scientist Prof Jim Hansen. He argues that storing up expensive and destructive consequences for society in future is an "injustice of one generation to others".

Hansen, who will next Tuesday be awarded the prestigious Edinburgh Medal for his contribution to science, will also in his acceptance speech call for a worldwide tax on all carbon emissions.

In his lecture, Hansen will argue that the challenge facing future generations from climate change is so urgent that a flat-rate global tax is needed to force immediate cuts in fossil fuel use. Ahead of receiving the award – which has previously been given to Sir David Attenborough, the ecologist James Lovelock, and the economist Amartya Sen – Hansen told the Guardian that the latest climate models had shown the planet was on the brink of an emergency. He said humanity faces repeated natural disasters from extreme weather events which would affect large areas of the planet.

"The situation we're creating for young people and future generations is that we're handing them a climate system which is potentially out of their control," he said. "We're in an emergency: you can see what's on the horizon over the next few decades with the effects it will have on ecosystems, sea level and species extinction."...

The medallion of the British Anti-Slavery Society, from 1795

Bill Gates backs climate scientists lobbying for large-scale geoengineering

John Vidal in the Guardian (UK) describes what can happen when lots of money with a compromised agenda targets climate policy: A small group of leading climate scientists, financially supported by billionaires including Bill Gates, are lobbying governments and international bodies to back experiments into manipulating the climate on a global scale to avoid catastrophic climate change.

...Geoengineering is opposed by many environmentalists, who say the technology could undermine efforts to reduce emissions, and by developing countries who fear it could be used as a weapon or by rich countries to their advantage. In 2010, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity declared a moratorium on experiments in the sea and space, except for small-scale scientific studies.

Concern is now growing that the small but influential group of scientists, and their backers, may have a disproportionate effect on major decisions about geoengineering research and policy. "We will need to protect ourselves from vested interests [and] be sure that choices are not influenced by parties who might make significant amounts of money through a choice to modify climate, especially using proprietary intellectual property," said Jane Long, director at large for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, in a paper delivered to a recent geoengineering conference on ethics.

"The stakes are very high and scientists are not the best people to deal with the social, ethical or political issues that geoengineering raises," said Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace. "The idea that a self-selected group should have so much influence is bizarre."...

Caricature of a mad scientist drawn by J.J., Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

Once, men abused slaves. Now we abuse fossil fuels

Jean Francois Mouhot further elaborates on a brilliant point he made in 2010, this time in the Guardian (UK): ...The history of slavery and its abolition shows how blurred the frontier between what is considered good and evil can be, and how quickly it can shift. We have a mental image of slave-owners as cruel, sadistic, inhuman brutes, and forget too easily the ordinariness of slave ownership throughout the world. To many, slavery seemed normal and indispensable. In the US, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Lifestyles and healthy incomes were predicated upon it, just as we today depend on oil. Similarly, many slave-owners lived with the impression that they were decent people.

... Why is all of this relevant for climate change policy? Our contemporary economies have become extremely dependent on fossil fuels, just as slave societies were dependent on their slaves – indeed far more than the latter ever were. As one scholar remarked: "That US Congressmen tend to rationalise fossil fuel use despite climate risks to future generations just as southern congressmen rationalised slavery despite ideals of equality is perhaps unsurprising."

It should thus come as no surprise that there is so much resistance to climate science. Our societies, like slave-owning societies, have a vested interest in ignoring the scientific consensus. Pointing out the similarities between slavery and the use of fossil fuels can help us engage with the issue in a new way, and convince us to act, as no one envisages comfortably being compared with a slave-owner.

Furthermore, because of the striking similarities between the use of slaves and of fossil fuels, policymakers can find inspiration from the campaigns to abolish slavery and use them to tackle global warming. For example, the history of the abolition of slavery, in the UK at least, suggests that an incremental approach and the development of compromises worked better at moving the cause forward than hardline stances.

The evidence also implies that slavery came to be challenged and finally abolished when people became aware of an alternative. This alternative – steam power – was of course a great moral improvement until we came to know the consequences of fossil fuel consumption. This, in turn, suggests that we will restrain our use of fossil fuels if we can favour a new energy transition and find clean sources of energy – and that we should concentrate our efforts on developing "green" technologies at the same time as reducing our consumption of fossil fuels....

If we do not change, the human family will pay heavily for the consequences of our reckless activity. Moreover, future generations will look back at us and wonder how our civilisation could have been so backward and have lived in such appalling moral blindness. Will the next generation have any awareness that industrialised societies had mitigating circumstances? Probably not. They are more likely to curse us for the irreparable damage we have done to the planet. Surely, they will say, we were a barbarian people....

An image of the Congress of the Confederacy in the US, 1861

Geoengineering not a climate cure

UPI: Geoengineering to combat global warming by injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere can't fully offset human-caused climate change, U.S. scientists say. Researchers at the University of Washington say that suggested method would likely achieve only part of the desired effect and could carry serious, if unintended, consequences.

Tiny sulfate and sea salt particles, called aerosols, are naturally present in the lower atmosphere and reflect energy from the sun into space. Some researchers have suggested injecting sulfate particles directly into the stratosphere to enhance the effect.

However, a UW modeling study shows sulfate particles in the stratosphere will not necessarily offset all the effects of future increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Significant changes would still occur because even increased aerosol levels cannot balance changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation brought on by higher levels of atmospheric CO2, researchers said....

An 1860 painting by Carl Spitzweg, "The Alchemist"

Future generations risk 'enslavement' without a vote now

Damian Carrington's Environment Blog at the Guardian (UK): It's a new year, so let's start with a new idea: a democratic body to safeguard the basic needs and fundamental interests of future people.

That is the proposal of Rupert Read, a philosopher at the University of East Anglia, in a report called Guardians of the Future for the think tank Green House. The core idea is both radical and straightforward: a council of "Guardians of Future Generations", chosen like a jury from the general public, would sit above the existing law-making bodies and have two core powers. A power to veto legislation that threatened the basic needs and interests of future people and the power to force a review, following suitable public petition, of any existing legislation that threatens the interests of future people.

After the UN climate change summit in Durban in December I wrote, our current glacial progress in tackling global warming is piling costs and hardship onto our descendents in a way that will make the current global debt crisis seem minor by comparison. The changes to our economic, food, energy and water systems needed to adapt to changing climate get more expensive the longer we leave them. So ideas about how to represent the interests of people yet to exist are welcome.

I asked Read why he took on the issue. "It came from the worry that it is clear that the current institutions of government are not working and are not future proof," he said. "It also came from a philosophical direction: seeking for a way take the future seriously and in a democratic way."

"The proposal being made here is that we give future people en masse the nearest possible equivalent to the vote," he says. The need for democratic representation of unborn people led Read to the idea of a "super-jury". "Random selection would emphasise that we all share this responsibility for future people, and that none of us and all of us are ideally placed to do this vital job," he writes in the report....

A misty valley in Swift's Creek, Victoria, Australia, shot by Fir0002, flagstaffotos.com.au, Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 only

Testing geoengineering

Natasha T. Metzler in Environmental Research Web: Solar radiation management is a class of theoretical concepts for manipulating the climate in order to reduce the risks of global warming caused by greenhouse gasses. But its potential effectiveness and risks are uncertain, and it is unclear whether tests could help narrow these uncertainties. A team composed of Caltech's Doug MacMynowski, Carnegie's Ken Caldeira and Ho-Jeong Shin, and Harvard's David Keith used modeling to determine the type of testing that might be effective in the future. Their work has been published online by Energy and Environmental Science.

..."While it is clearly premature to consider testing solar radiation management at a scale large enough to measure the climate response, it is not premature to understand what we can learn from such tests," said Doug MacMynowski of the California Institute of Technology, who led the research. "But we did not address other important questions such as the necessary testing technology and the social and political implications of such tests."

Using models the team was able to demonstrate that smaller-scale tests of solar radiation management could help inform decisions about larger scale deployments. Short-term tests would be particularly effective at understanding the effects of geoengineering on fast-acting climate dynamics. ...

Redwood sunlight, shot by someone in the National Park Service