Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Geoengineering jiu-jitsu and India

RealClimate has an interesting post on how the Copenhagen Cherrypicked Consensus ignores science that has inconvenient economic effects on their infatuation with geoengineering.

Leaving the cherrypickers behind us, I think discussing geoengineering might be a useful wakeup call to policy-makers in India, because the resulting drought effects from spewing sulfates into the atmosphere seems especially likely to hit India hard. If India doesn't want to do anything to stop emissions, then they can think about the consequences. Either with warming-induced loss of a snowpack or with sulfate induced droughts, India isn't getting water. Maybe they ought to consider emission reductions as an alternative, however unfair it might be with Republicans here in the US demanding that Indians produce one-tenth the emissions that they do per person.

Tangentially related is something else that might be useful for India and the black carbon problem beloved by bunnies, and that is home-cooking pyrolysis stoves that get rid of black carbon and leave soil-improving biochar as the result. This is no silver bullet - people have invented countless ways to improve upon traditional cooking fires that haven't been accepted. Biochar is basically charcoal, too, so you have to get people to bury it instead of cooking with it as well. Still, this is worth a shot (and even if they burn it, that's carbon neutral, while burying biochar is carbon-negative).

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