1/5 How to improve models used for solar geoengineering?
New @AGU_Eos paper by the steering committee of the Geoengineering Modeling Consortium (GMRC) What's GMRC? We are a science community consortia anchored at NCAR
3/5 PiG in the GCM? An example, of one of model improvements I happen to be working on. Aerosols or aerosol precursors would most plausibly be released into the stratosphere by aircraft. Observations show that stratospheric plumes are coherent for >10 days.
4/5 Models now assume all material is instantly mixed into the model grid-cell missing the plume processing that will determine particle size distribution keith.seas.harvard.edu/files/tkg/file…
5/5 This artificial mixing problem can be addressed by using a Plume-in-Grid model (PiG). E.g. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10….
My student Hongwei Sun is working to build a PiG into GEOS-chem. Ultimately models for stratospheric solar geo might use a PiG in a GCM.
2/13 This is not personal. Ray, you are an amazing scholar & human. In the early '90s helped me on meridional energy transport. We have enjoyed dinners talking about shared love of the northern wilds. I am jealous of your musical ability, and wish to count you a friend.
3/13 But, Ray, do you truly think our experiment is as bad as if we were helping a crazed dictator get nuclear weapons?
Nuclear weapons threaten to burn us alive without warning. They are machines of death:
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?
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.