Thread #1 debunking solar geoengineering's BS mountain
Search geoengineering & drought, you get's ~0.5 million google hits and 1,696 news articles in Nexis starting with a 1991 Newsweek article.
Must be some facts underneath?
2/7 The '91 Newsweek article reported that US National Academy has endorsed research on solar geoengineering. It mentioned drought as a climate risk and geoengineering as an uncertain and potentially risky way to ameliorate such risks. Other '90s articles have a similar take.
3/7 Yet, most recent articles with "drought & geoengineering" describe drought as a risk of geoengineering rather than climate risk that geoengineering might ameliorate.
This shift must be the result of new science. Right?
Wrong.
4/7 The only peer-reviewed study to directly examine geoengineering’s impact on drought (Katie Dagon, 2017) found that it generally reduced long duration (>10 day) drought frequency. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…
5/7 Dagon's paper concludes "Using an ensemble approach, we show that in almost every region, heat waves and consecutive dry days decrease in frequency in a world with solar geoengineering relative to a doubled CO2 climate."
Did you see a lot of press about that?
6/7 Did Dagon's findings make @guardian revisit their 2014 article headlined "Geoengineering could bring severe drought to the tropics, research shows"?
Nope.
And, no, the underlying research did *not* show that.
7/7 Now for reading this far you get a much better debunking of a very different Bullshit Mountain.
Enjoy!
4.5/7 Ooops! I am an idiot. I forgot the new paper!
Romaric Odoulami et al found that in their modelled scenario, SRM could reduce the likelihood of a Day Zero drought in Cape Town by up to 90% compared to a warming scenario:
1/3 Cheap intermittent solar power can make carbon-neutral hydrocarbons: high-energy fuels that are easy to store and use. My 12 min talk at Royal Society #CodexTalks describes a low-risk fast path to industrial-scale solar-fuels
2/3 Background: Carbon-Neutral Hydrocarbons keith.seas.harvard.edu/publications/c…. Recent work on renewable hydrogen nature.com/articles/s4156…. H2 will win in some markets, but it has many disadvantages as a fuel. The big $$$ is getting to H2, once there, why not go to hydrocarbons with DAC?
3/3 I am *so* proud of @CarbonEngineering, but..
This is NOT about one company. It’s about an energy pathway that could grow to >10% of global primary energy before mid-century, allowing intermittent solar energy to energize heavy transport and other hard-to-decarbonize sectors.