Happy 81st, Prof. Gwynne Dyer
Today, April 17th, we can wish Professor Gwynne Dyer best wishes on his 81st birthday. A fun-fact on his name- If you start typing his name into Google, by the time you finish typing the third letter, he is at the top of suggested searches. But I have to trash his full-page opinion piece of boosterism for geoengineering in the past weekend’s Globe and Mail, because that’s what I do! The article is titled: “We are ignoring potentially valuable climate-change technologies,” Globe and Mail, 13 April 2024, p. O2, by Gwynne Dyer.
Gwynne Dyer has written books; writing books puts authors into the realm of demi-gods, while I haven’t, so people pay attention to what he says and ignore us plebes.
In his article he states (regarding the recent rapid elevation of global temperatures): “Climate scientist’s predictions are normally very accurate, and nobody knows why they are so far out this time.” Well, if the author would do more reading, less blathering and shilling for geoengineering, there is a good answer. Dr. James Hansen recently posted the answer, and not for the first time. His article “Global Warming Acceleration: Hope vs Hopium,” answers this query completely - the cause is the recent removal of sulfur from marine fuels which caused a big drop in aerosols. Aerosols are a big deal - in his paper “Global warming in the pipeline,” Dr. Hansen shows that if the present climate forcing of 4.6 W/m2 continues, the Earth system response would be 10°C eventual warming, but that is presently being ameliorated by negative forcing from aerosols. His “Faustian bargain” is that if we clean up air pollution, we risk overheating. Gwynne Dyer also quotes Dr. Gavin Schmidt, the new director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies as saying “If the anomaly does not stabilize by August, then the world will be in uncharted territory.”
Thus Dr. Schmidt is also wrong on this issue and I have sent him the appropriate information (but guess who is always ignored). Gwynne Dyer is all-in on geoengineering, wishing humanity to yet again look to a techno-fix to solve Earth-systems problems. Such adventures would be a great leap into unintended consequences, or worse, into intended consequences we are unable to control. Gwynne Dyer supports injection of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, same as volcanoes do, while we nixed the previous system of sulfur in marine fuels which puts the sulfur dioxide in at sea-level which also brightens the clouds. You could see from satellite images, the “contrails” above the shipping lanes, adding to the cloud cover, and mostly importantly, in the northern hemisphere waters, between the land masses which contain the stinkiest parts of humanity’s industrial-sized anti-life cityscape. Guess what also happens when there is stratospheric SO2? Crops don’t do so well. Gwynne Dyer also brushes off some damage to the ozone over Antarctica, but guess what - that could start over northern latitudes as well! Stock up on sunscreen, anyone? For an explanation of the effects of SO2 on ozone, see this article.
The simple immediate solution to this extra bout of global warming is to reinstate the 3.5% sulfur content of marine fuels. Secondly, we must face the facts that trying to cool the planet so that we can carry on in our “Normal” extravagant over-consumption of energy sources, is just ridiculous. We MUST cut emissions, and the simplest way to take that first step is ground all flights, permanently. Blowing CO2 into the atmosphere, whether from fossil or “bio-“ fuels, above the level where rain can bring it back down, caused by air travel, simply must stop. Now! “We” have gone so far in this massive burning of fossil fuels that a call for negative emissions comes into play, which requires even more energy input! See why it’s called a “climate emergency”? And you want to simply carry on?
Now here’s the rub: here, on this page, you see the comments from two high-level experts, Dyer and Schmidt, who for whatever reason, ignore or dismiss the excellent research work of Hansen et al., apparently to lean in to geoengineering as the only solution, by making geoengineering sound unavoidable, then dismissing consequences and dismissing critics.
I was really trying not to include this in this post, but it must be said, and I’m not putting it as an ad hominem insult. All three of the professors mentioned here seem to reflect familiar trends in male-brain thinking. A fully-detailed and apparently logical thought process ends up with an unsatisfactory result. I haven’t figured out where the small glitch (or many small ones) sits in the logic stream, but it is there, and these little errors are why we have wars, nuclear weapons, etc. As per my two previous posts on assaults on the commons and on geoengineering, this type of proposed “planetary management” action on a grand scale affects our collective commons and needs prior, informed consent. I don’t see the consequences as benign. Say you start injecting SO2 into the upper atmosphere, when will this come down as acid rain? How are you going to maintain this activity for 10,000 years? What if the next year there is a big volcano and resulting excessive cooling? And remember, we are at all times perhaps only two hours away from nuclear winter since we have made zero progress on international governance.
Yes, Dr. Hansen is also leaning in to geoengineering, calling it SRM (solar radiation management) and states the need to reduce and reverse Earth’s energy imbalance, to avoid many meters of sea-level rise. But sea-level rise comes from melting of glaciers (Antarctica, Greenland, etc.) and that process has started in the 1940s and once started, is almost a conserved energy and can’t be stopped short of massive refrigeration plants of an unimaginable scale. So yes, your coastal cities will go under water whether or not you try geoengineering stunts. We ran this fossil-fuel-burning experiment far too long, using energy slaves to build this glorified version of the past. Yet some fools say we yet have room in the “carbon budget.” Wrong, we blew that away at about 350 ppm or less, if you would allow atmospheric room for natural fires, etc.
Prof. Dyer also states, “… the emissions cuts the world agreed to enact haven’t happened. The politics is much harder to do than the scientists imagined.” And what is “politics”? Quoting John Dewey from 1905: “Politics is the shadow cast upon society by big business.” And Big Business is in total denial and wants Normal to go on forever to protect their income stream (and power). Dr. Hansen (in the Pipeline paper) calls for “a political party that takes no money from special interests…” - read John Dewey’s quote and try to imagine politics sans money.
And seriously, just cooling the planet so “we” can gleefully carry on with our mass extractivism of this planet? In the book _Sea Sick - The Global Ocean in Crisis_, by Alanna Mitchell, 2009, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, there is this quote, on page 137, referring to the work of Boris Worm (a German researcher):
"Worm takes the synoptic view. It took humans roughly 50,000 years to deplete the planet's large land animals, 5000 years to exhaust most of the planet's coastal environments, 500 years to fish out the continental shelf, 50 years to impoverish the open ocean and about 5 years to run through the creatures of the deep ocean.
`We don't realise how absolutely exceptional this time is. We are reaching the carrying capacity of the planet's natural resources,' he says, adding `We are at the stage of losing the ability of things to come back on their own.' He pauses, then says carefully, looking me straight in the eyes, `That would represent a threshold.'"
But if only we could just cool the planet for a while, we could just carry on, right? NO! This entire industrial-type civilization was a terrible mistake and it MUST be wound down which means not one more act of technological “progress,” for a start. Read my previous post again, “Take a ride on the Hopium Express”