Wildcat geoengineering

Sun setting behind clouds. The sky is deep orange.
Photo: NASA. Public domain.

Back in 2010, before I started working professionally in a climate-adjacent field, I went to a talk about geoengineering. I came away with a lot to think about. I wrote in my journal at the time, referring to the idea of using sulphur dioxide in the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight,

“Beyond the obvious risks of unintended consequences with trying something like this on a global scale – and such risks are large – there’s a question in my mind of what nation, or group of nations, could possibly claim to have the moral or legal authority to actually do it.”

Since then there has been a lot of serious discussion of geoengineering of various sorts, including this, and I’m not here to pronounce on whether or not it’s a good idea – those far more expert than me have well publicised views. But… at the time I wrote the above, I had assumed that it would be a nation, or a group of nations… now it appears to be a bunch of techbros doing it on their own initiative.

That’s hugely problematic, for a lot of reasons, most of which are explained in the linked article. But there’s something they haven’t picked up on in the article, which relates to the way it’s funded. The company who is doing this is saying “Each gram of SO2 we release will counteract the effect of n kg of CO2 this year.” And on the back of this, they are selling carbon credits for those n kg of CO2. That’s their “business model” for what some would say is simply pollution.

But carbon offsets are normally a one-off payment. I release a kg of CO2, and I buy an offset for it. The SO2 release is something that will need to happen every year!* So something doesn’t line up…

For those who haven’t seen it, this problem of treating the symptom (heat), and not the cause (greenhouse gas), was wonderfully satirised by Futurama back in 2002:

*(maybe not every year. That’s aribtrary. But the dwell time of SO2 in the atmopshere is less than that of CO2, so it’ll need renewing)

Posted by simon, 0 comments

SmartSTEMs, and excellent questions

Last week I took part in a day run by SmartSTEMs at one of the local schools. About two hundred primary and middle school aged kids spent the day hearing from myself and lots of other sciencey people about what we do, and doing activities that we provided. I had them playing a computer game about managing a power grid, in small groups, and then thinking about the functions of different power sources.

Three tweenage boys gathered around a laptop, playing a game that involves some graphs. A teacher watches from behind.

Some of the kids were really engaged and interested. Some weren’t, which is perhaps inevitable. The organisers had a nice system set up to encourage questions: if you asked a sensible, non-silly, question, you got a raffle ticket. At the end of the day there was a raffle draw for an iPad. There were a couple of very happy winners, but it also worked well as encouragement for the students not only to ask questions, but to ask some with a bit of thought behind them. A few did this in class or in other exposed spaces, but most waited and found me at lunchtime. Either way it takes a lot of courage… it’s an approach that I might think about using myself.

One girl came up to me after one of my workshops and very timidly asked me, “Before you started your job, how did you know that you could do it?”. It was perhaps the best question that I had all day, and I suspect represents not just her worries but those of many of her peers. I gave a fairly straightforward answer about how I had got feedback about my teaching, and I’d done some research before so I knew that I enjoyed that aspect, and so forth, and none of that was wrong – but it wasn’t the answer that she really deserved.

When I thought about it some more, later, I realised that what I should have said is,
“I didn’t. We can do things to try to find out if a job is right for us, but we can never be sure; at some point the only way to find out whether we can a do job — and whether we want to do that job — is to try it and see. And if it turns out to be the wrong thing for you, that’s not the end of the world, because you can change and do something different.”

Posted by simon in Professional updates, Reflective

“Profits” cartoon

This “comic” (the word hardly fits) from Rosemary Mosco hit me hard. I don’t have anything to say about it that isn’t said better by the strip itself. Except, perhaps, that if you want more context, this recent US congressional report might be a good place to start.

Original at https://rosemarymosco.com/comics/climate/strong-performance. The rest of her “climate” series is well worth reading too. Most of them are funnier than this.

Posted by simon in The wider world

Examining

Today has been the fourth viva that I’ve been a part of, including my own. It was the first as the external examiner, which feels like a bit of a milestone. This involved travelling from Orkney down to England, spending half the day in the exam, then a few more hours with the internal examiner having lunch and doing paperwork…. it’s been nice. It’s always rewarding to examine a good student, but more than that, it’s been delightful to spend a day thinking and talking about science rather than answering emails.

It’s quite a time-consuming activity: 1.5-2 days to read the thesis carefully and think on it. And a minimum of a 3-day trip to do the exam (one day here, one day travelling each way). And that isn’t something that workload models allow for, so one can’t do too many. But the occasional one is not only essential for the system, it’s also good for the soul 🙂

Posted by simon in Professional updates, Reflective

Feeling useful

This week brought a professional milestone of sorts: it’s the first time that I’ve been called up and asked to share my expertise to feed into policy. I’ve been approached once before by a company who were interested in some research I’d done, which was also nice, but this was the first time for “We’re revising x, and we’re reaching out to people who have published on the topic to have conversations…”

It felt good. It helped me feel that what I do can make a difference; that it’s worthwhile, on the research side as well as the teaching. Maybe it will lead to future things – there is talk of a possible working group – but if it doesn’t, that’s OK too. It’s given a positive glow to the last couple of days.

Posted by simon in Professional updates, Reflective