A Governors’ Climate Repair Initiative · in major scientific reports about our climate problem....

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A Governors’ Climate Repair Initiative

WILLIAM H. CALVIN1

Executive Summary (for governors, optional for the magazine article) • The best indicator of climate change is no longer a fractional-degree change in global

warming. Now we have at least four major shifts in extreme weather requiring faster

action than can be achieved through more effective emissions reduction.

• Severe windstorm damage (enough for a billion dollars’ damage) now occurs seven times as often as before 2003; since 2010, severe inland floods now occur four times as often.

Hurricanes have not similarly surged but stalled hurricanes made their appearance.

Hurricane Harvey caused $240-billion in damage when it stuck around Houston for five

days rather than five hours.

• Finally, each of the 2003 and 2010 mega heat waves killed a hundred times more people than a 20th-century heat wave.

• All four surges appear to be enabled by long southerly loops of the polar jet stream, a consequence of Arctic warming since 1993.

• Climate action now must shift from prevention to repair. We should clean up the excess carbon dioxide (CO2) by 2040, but we also need to move quickly to address the loopiness

of the jet stream by shading the Arctic until global cooling kicks in.

• Both projects may need four years of design and field trials before deployment. Congress is likely to be slow, but a Governors’ Climate Repair Initiative could now orchestrate

those design-and-prototype years, largely funded by the many west-coast billionaires who

are already familiar with doing big technology projects quickly. The initiative could also

build support in Congress, with constituents approvingly pointing to specific designs fresh

from the experts.

Re-thinking climate In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” Climate’s future has

already arrived, and it is much easier to understand than global warming. The impacts of climate

change have become so bad that the story can now be told without computer-model warnings of

future temperature.

That at least solves one of the three shortcomings I see in how we scientists have been warning

our leaders about climate dangers. First, we have persisted in presenting the problem as a

computer forecast that generates a little number such as +1.5°C global average surface

temperature. People often assume it to characterize the entire climate problem. The number

comes from averaging temperature over day and night, north and south, land and ocean, and all

four seasons. Your mileage may vary.

1 William H. Calvin, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine in Seattle and president of CO2Foundation.org. He is the author of sixteen books, translated into seventeen languages. Particularly relevant is Global Fever (University of Chicago Press). He wrote The Atlantic ’s 1998 cover story on climate instability, “The Great Climate Flip-Flop.” He has received the national Phi Beta Kappa award for science as literature.

http://co2foundation.org/

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/01/the-great-climate-flip-flop/308313/


Most people live on land, which since 1984 has warmed 2.5 times as fast as the ocean, yet ocean

counts for 70 percent of the average. Most people compare that 1.5° rise to the occasional hotter

summer or to a mild fever. They opine, “What’s the big deal? Just wait and it will go away.” Fifty

years of trying to warn using small numbers is enough; it is time to try some other indicators of

trouble ahead.

Second, prevention and treatment often demand different approaches, but that is not yet reflected

in major scientific reports about our climate problem. Civic organizations supporting climate

action usually echo them. Most sayi, in effect, “Emissions caused the problem, reducing them

ought to fix it.” However true for smog in the 1970s, CO2 is not cleaned up by nature as fast as air

pollution is (a thousand years vs. two weeks).

Today, the continuing emphasis on “use less” is like treating a painful tooth solely with reduced

candy consumption. While emissions reduction was the obvious strategy for CO2 fifty years ago,

it is a preventive measure (like reducing smoking), not a fix once a disease (like lung cancer)

develops. Things have changed, but our strategy has not.

Think Again Indeed, climate scientists rarely discuss remedies at all, having been firmly told, since the

establishment of the UN’s IPCC in 1990, that the scientists’ job is to report the facts; it is the job

of government to figure out what to do about it. That was what the UK’s Prime Minister Margaret

Thatcher had in mind when she helped establish the IPCC, being quite annoyed at the time with

Carl Sagan for going public in 1984 with scientists’ concern about nuclear winter. (And we all

know how leaving climate fixes to government has turned out: taboo talk arising from fossil fuel

lobbying.) Climate scientists, nonetheless, have repeatedly snuck into their big IPCC reports the

observation that fewer emissions would be a good thing.

The third shortcoming is simply from insufficient training: Medical-school professors teach future

doctors how to think about an emergency. West Point instructors do something similar for future

army generals using war games atop the battle history lessons. But little of a similar skill set for

emergencies is evident when climate scientists occasionally discuss what to do about climate

change.

Dealing with an emergency is not part of the education of climate scientists, nor that of other

Ph.D. basic scientists and engineers. For example, the emergency-medicine admonition “Think

fast, and then think again!” reminds the physician to regularly ask if something new is now going

on, not just whatever the earlier diagnosis identified. A secondary problem such as internal

bleeding may develop, an urgent matter demanding a different intervention to prevent shock and

shutdown.

Here I will argue that the surges in four types of extreme weather, starting about ten years ago,

are urgent secondary problems and that the appropriate fixes are now decreasing Arctic sunshine

and quickly removing the 45% excess of CO2 from the air.

A paradigm shift featuring climate repair Moving the U.S. Congress to act could take years—years we no longer have. So, to ensure a fast

response, consider what we might do to get started without them. Just as California’s initiatives

provided 20th-century leadership on national-level air pollution efforts, both early and often, so a

Governors’ Initiative on Climate Repair could provide badly-needed 21st-century leadership.


Our current paradigm focuses on +1.5°C coming up by 2030; on the action side, it calls for more

emissions reduction (authoritative statements often do not mention anything else—a puzzle).

I propose a paradigm shift that is not about changing how we do climate science, only about how

we focus the attention of others: stick to the extreme weather surges for which we have such a

threatening track record. For the action side, we need to focus on dimming the Arctic sunshine

and removing enough CO2 before 2040 to back out of the danger zone.

That gets climate scientists out of the forecast business—a good thing, as they do not yet

understand extreme weather trends well enough to forecast future decades. While an increase in

extreme weather had long been emphasized, I don’t think that anyone talked about a sudden surge

until they began to happen ten years ago—featuring four different types of extreme weather.

Computer models then simply were not detailed enough to handle such nonlinear features of

climate dynamics as the loopiness of the jet stream.

Despite the attempted rebranding to ‘climate change’ in recent decades, the threat is still

expressed as ‘global warming’ for most purposes, as in that recent emphasis on limiting it to

+1.5°C. Given fifty years of failure to sufficiently educate leaders about the meaning of such small

numbers, we should not continue to focus on the global average temperature change. The surges

in extreme weather ten years ago provide an alternative focus that is easier to understand, more

immediate, and more difficult to deny. A ten-year track record is easier to credit than any forecast

we could make.

We have been hammered hard by at least four types of extreme weather and, in some future year,

they are likely to gang up on us. A flood, followed ten days later by a week-long heat wave, would

be especially deadly because of the soggy ground, the humidity setting up heat stroke.

Four Surges in Extreme Weather (plus triple wildfire costs) The extreme weather surges date back to

at least 2003 when a mega heat wave in

Europe killed 70,000 people in a week,

about a hundred times more than did

any 20th-century heat wave. Any hopes

that it was a chance-in-a-million oddity,

unlikely to ever be seen again, were

dashed seven years later when a second

mega occurred, killing 56,000 Russians.

That second mega also ruined a third of

the Russian grain crop, causing the price

of bread to soar worldwide. That

triggered 12,000 food-riot deaths and

synchronized the ‘Arab Spring’ revolts in early 2011. That scenario may repeat in a future mega

elsewhere. Recall the Pharaoh’s seven-year stockpile, likely Joseph’s idea: Grain storage helps

avoid such a sudden shock and is cheap insurance for leaders concerned with staying in power.

The Pharaoh sold some of the stockpile to his less provident neighbors, likely at a considerable

profit.


From 1980 to 2002, the U.S. averaged

one billion-dollar-plus windstorm each

year. The rate then jumped to triple. In

2011, hail did a lot of damage and it was

a terrible year for tornadoes; there were

a total of nine billion-dollar windstorms.

Their rate has remained high: on

average, seven times as many as before

2003. Clearly, climate change arrived in

a big way.

In 2010, the rate of billion-dollar-plus

inland floods quadrupled and has

remained high. This does not include

the wind-driven hurricane flooding. A decade’s perspective now tells us that there is no more

pretending that “It was just a couple of bad years.” This was the third surge to stick. Based on

mathematical probabilities, the chance of a one-two punch of severe windstorm followed by a

severe flood the same month has now gone up at least 28-fold, probably more.

The annual number of hurricanes may not have surged, but stalled hurricanes made an

appearance in 2012 with Hurricane Sandy off New Jersey. Once on land, a hurricane usually

forges ahead at a ground speed of 11 mph (18 km/h); in about five hours, it has come and gone. In

2017, Hurricane Harvey hung out near Houston for five days, doing $240 billion in damage—four

times more than Sandy, and the most damage ever. More such stalled hurricanes are on offer, so

long as the jet stream remains so loopy. Now even the lesser hurricanes will cause major damage,

should they stall.

Much of this extreme weather is driven by the slowing of the jet stream, largely a consequence of

high Arctic warming since 1993. Once the reflective Arctic sea ice melts in the summer, the 24-

hour summer sunlight can better warm the dark Arctic Ocean, widening the zone of open ocean

even more and allowing yet more heat to be absorbed—and this repeats, an excellent example of

what engineers call amplifying feedback.

This vicious cycle is called Arctic Amplification; to break it, we would need to cool the Arctic

enough so that the winter sea ice survives the summer sunshine, just as it used to do. That’s the

best bet for taking the extreme loopiness out of the jet stream and backing the mid-latitudes out

of the known sources of extreme weather surges.

Reporting on the sinking ship Talking about the extreme weather onslaught can be done without stirring up heavily-promoted

misconceptions about global warming, ones that persuade voters that “uncertainty” warrants

waiting. We need not dwell on the IPCC reports, even though they are important

accomplishments. A focus on the extreme weather surges, already experienced, doesn’t require

our audience to first appreciate what computer models say about the future. Despite a quarter-

century of trying to educate the public about climate models, too many people just don’t get it.

But it’s not just our computer models: consider the public’s zero emissions reasoning. Most people

still think that the 45% excess of CO2 will go away soon after we stop emitting CO2 from tailpipes

and smokestacks, that it will disappear as quickly as the usual air pollution. They may have no


idea that two-thirds of the fossil CO2 emitted this year will still be in the air at mid-century and

that one-fifth will remain a thousand years from now.

Better to say that it is now like being on a sinking ship that might suddenly lurch over onto its

side, any time now. It needs patching and pumping—never mind explaining the details of that

iceberg, which caused the trouble after dinner. Fast action is needed before our food supply is cut

in half for a few years by a one-two punch from the extreme weather we created, triggering a

population crash. Time spent promoting climate repairs is more likely to produce results than

time spent on emissions reduction, with its long lag before significant results.

Emissions reduction is not enough “Use less” (emissions reduction) has not

succeeded in slowing the rise of CO2. It’s

not merely that emissions reduction is too

slow to relieve overheating: it is

insufficient at any speed. Even if rich

countries switch completely to clean

energy and electric vehicles tomorrow,

developing countries will use their local

fossil fuels to power increasingly essential

air-conditioning—so, the CO2

accumulation will continue to rise.

Though our reduction efforts have

improved lives in many ways and sped the needed transition to a more sustainable economic

model, the CO2 is not leveling off nor going down; indeed, the annual increase is now bigger than

ever because emissions rose 49% between the 1990s and 2007-2016.

Going after the facilitators of fossil fuels is unlikely to be effective: elections and carbon taxes are

a slow track, and we now need a fast track. “Time is of the essence,” as lawyers like to write into

contracts.

The time has come to quickly remove excess CO2 from the air and the ocean surface. This is the

only definitive treatment. Shading the Arctic is what one does to keep the patient alive until the

definitive treatment takes hold.

Big, Quick, and Surefire There are dozens of climate repair proposals out there. Like the various paths to emissions

reduction, “every little bit counts” is all they claim; few of them are big guns, few can produce

sizeable results in ten years.

Given our new situation, we can set aside proposals that do not meet most of these criteria:

1. The fix needs to be big (there is space available that it can use; it cannot require lots of

clean electricity).

2. And quick in all aspects (if it cannot be scaled up to full production in ten years, it goes

on the back burner).

3. The fix needs to be surefire: not only sure to work but it has to be secure, so it can’t be

lost to extreme weather, fire, or terrorists. That usually means it has to be widely

distributed on the planet, with no single failure point that an attack could destroyii.


4. And of course, the fix needs to minimize side effects—in environmental impacts and

impacts on vulnerable human communities—compared to other alternatives and

compared to not acting.

So far, most proposals are not only too small but they have not taken into consideration the

quicker deployment required by the rise in extreme weather since 2003.

Like other aspects of proposed climate engineering, Solar Radiation Management is not the

domain of climate scientists per se (though they make excellent critics of the proposals) but that

of inventors and engineering professors with a different mindset.

The best-known type of technofix is Solar Radiation Management. Solar Radiation Management

proposes to mimic the white haze seen up in the stratosphere for several years after a major

volcanic eruption. That haze reflects some sunlight back into space, cooling things below. Cooling

the whole earth that way has its problems, but a little cap over the Arctic may be useful for backing

off on extreme weather.

Technofix A: The Arctic Halo Why should we care about cooling the Arctic first? That’s because its southern border is not really

the Arctic Circle at 66.6°N but rather where surface air converges from both north and south. At

the meeting place, the air then rises up and up, just as it does near the equator, losing its water

content as rain. The polar jet stream sits

just on top of that curtain of rising air,

up at about 30,000 feet where the dry,

cloudless stratosphere begins.

The jet stream’s wandering route has

become more exaggerated. The path can

form long southerly loops that dip down

as far as Mexico, then head back up to

Canada a few hundred miles (500 km)

farther east. When the jet stream slowed

down, thanks to Arctic warming since

1993, it appears to form more long

loops, setting up the extreme weather

surges that began in 2003.

When the jet stream starts wandering so far south, it lets cold Arctic surface air follow it, causing

some abnormal cold spells, allowing some people to ignore all else and suggest there is no global

warming after all. But global average warming can cause brief, regional cooling episodes. This is

another good reason to stop talking about global average surface temperature.

While Solar Radiation Management (SRM) has major flaws if attempting to cool the entire planet,

high Arctic SRM may prove useful for creating a reflective halo or cap that would decrease the

summer sunlight that now melts the winter sea ice. Restoring the original surface reflectivity

above ~75°N with an Arctic halo should reduce the extreme weather in the mid-latitudes (30°N

to 60°N) of North America and Eurasia. According to the computer models, it will also cool ~60°N

(Anchorage, Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, St. Petersburg) and somewhat less, the ~50°N latitudes

(Seattle, London, Prague).


It is easy to imagine how we might create a shiny halo around

the top of the world. The big tanker planes that refuel

military aircraft in-flight could be stocked instead with halo-

stuff. It would slowly drift down over several years into the

high clouds and then be washed out of the air in several more

weeks.

Planes would fly north from the US’s Thule Air Base in

northwest Greenland (77°N), laying down a fine spray as

they go toward the North Pole. The round trip from Thule is

only 1,900 miles (3,000 km), allowing several trips a day for

each stratotanker. The Russians could do the same from

Siberia.

Back and forth along that path can achieve a wide coverage,

as the polar vortex winds will spread that aerosol “contrail” around in a circle. North Pole

roundtrips out of Thule are a mere 1,900 miles, allowing a plane to make two trips a day; during

the summer, resupply by sea is easy at Thule with freighters anchoring behind a long jetty just

west of the runway; the Air Force’s only tugboat is kept there to aid with docking. Satellites will

show where a touch-up job needs to be scheduled.

The ad hoc ‘halo committee’ would adjust the application rate to bring end-of-summer sea ice

back up to its 1999 extent, so that it reflects as much Arctic sunlight as before. I’d observe that,

time being short, countries will now need to leave climate fixes to the experts, cleaning up later

with a more formal Halo Commission. Building standards are no longer a matter of detailed legal

specifications; most jurisdictions have now deferred to the standards organizations run by

professionals that re-evaluate every three years. Long ago, the U.S. Congress recognized its

inability to deal with some technical matters in a timely fashion: it ceded much authority to

technical experts at the independent agencies, insulating the experts from White House and

Congressional pressure in some ways: economists on the Federal Reserve Board keep the nation’s

economy from overheating and the EPA is allowed to regulate some types of pollution.

Governors’ Initiative for an Arctic Halo An Arctic Halo could make quick progress: indeed, going full-scale may only require repurposing

some military refueling planes and settling on which aerosol to use. To back off from the mid-

latitude extreme weather depends on how many years are required to seal over the summer Arctic

Ocean again. One can imagine an East Coast Governors’ Initiative for an Arctic Halo focusing on

getting started more quickly than Congress can. The Arctic peoples and the polar bears would

become the first to have their climate problems addressed.

But note that Arctic SRM is only a stop-gap measure and only for 2 percent of the earth’s surface;

it does little for cooling the planet. In my view, SRM use is mostly about minimizing mid-latitude

extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere—not at all the usual notion. SRM does nothing for

reversing ocean acidification, the other big effect of excess CO2, which threatens the entire ocean

food chain.

Only recapturing the excess CO2 serves to cool globally and reverse ocean acidification. We now

must do both halo and removal, and at the same time.


Technofix B: Removing the excess CO2 For the last 25 years, inventors and engineering professors have been busy thinking about Carbon

Dioxide Removal projects (CDRs, sometimes called NETs, for Negative Emissions Technologies).

Functionally, think cleanup or drawdown. More than a dozen CDR proposals have been recently

compared, at least on paper.

However, this solution space is not yet widely known, even to those who are alert to environmental

issues (indeed, many tend to dismiss all forms of climate engineering, not understanding that

time has run out). When someone says we need international treaties before embarking on climate

engineering, the appropriate query is “Do you really think, given the extreme weather surges of

the last 15 years, we have enough time left for that 10-year delay?” That delay now has big human

costs associated with it.

Even experienced people often think we must check all the boxes before starting, something one

cannot always do when time is of the essence. Just ask any emergency medicine doc or army

general. We must, however, be as careful as possible. The sooner we start, the more opportunities

we will have to weigh and minimize side effects.

A sample timeframe Those four surges in extreme weather suggest we should forget all end-of-the-century frames of

reference from global warming extrapolations. Given the extreme weather surges, the window of

opportunity for backing out of climate’s danger zone is now brief. Here is how I imagine a twenty-

year CO2 removal effort would progress:

• A few years to generate public will on a national scale in the USA; by starting

immediately, a Governors’ Climate Repair Initiative could bypass those years. In China,

the technocrats in government would likely not wait for public understanding of the

threat.

• Four years for research and simultaneous prototyping, field trials, etc. (the time frame for a Governors’ Initiative). That sounds short, but recall how fast things were made to

happen during World War Two.

• Manufacture and deployment would ramp up over the following five years. This sort of

rapid buildup is traditionally assigned to the military; DARPA might be appropriate to

lead a Pentagon effort and would certainly wish to be consulted during the design phase.

• Cleanup complete (or at least good enough) in the next twenty years, though CO2

removal will still be needed afterward, to counter continuing emissions from less

developed countries.

Only after one-fourth of the CDR array is built and working—say, 2027—would we be taking out

as much CO2 each year as continuing emissions were adding. Only after that does the CO2

accumulation start to drop. Cooling finally begins. Redoubling emissions reduction efforts might

buy us a year’s advance to 2026 but, by themselves, reducing emissions will no longer fix our

extreme weather problem, even though good for the environment in other ways (getting rid of

tailpipes will make traffic jams less irritating).

SRM does not have such a lag-time problem as the CDRs, but SRM only applies (in my view) to

the Arctic, not to global cooling. Much can happen during that lag, such as a major climate lurch

that rearranges the winds and invalidates all calculations.


How big? How fast? For scale, the aim must be to remove enough excess CO2 by 2040 to back out of the danger zone

for hidden tipping points and simultaneous hits from the four extreme weather types that have

already surged. I’d guess that it requires removing at least 150 gigatonnes of CO2 each year to

finish by 2040.

A Governors’ Initiative could bypass the initial years of consensus-building in Congress, to

immediately begin four years of design and field tests, getting the effort up to speed before the

federal involvement finally arrives, allowing manufacture and deployment to begin in earnest.

Those years are reminiscent of the 1942-1945 Manhattan Project that gathered physics, math,

chemistry, and engineering professors of varied nationalities at Los Alamos—that canonical

example of a hurry-up design project that ended up with two very different prototypes, both of

which worked.

Two current CDR proposals that seem big enough for the present situation are 1) quickly doubling

our forests, and 2) plankton farms that sink both the new living plankton and the even greater

amounts of dissolved organic carbon to the deep ocean for a thousand years. Both proposals are

currently viewed as flawed, but a working group of experts should be able to design something

better in several years, such as wind/wave-powered systems that mimic, on a large scale, natural

ocean upwelling and downwelling.

How to double forests Storing the excess CO2 in trees is easier to understand than plankton farms. It mostly involves

cutting and replanting the second-growth northern forests of pulp trees that supply paper mills.

The forest-sinking method provides a quick illustration of the many aspects that designers must

consider in creating a better solution.

One does not sell the timber; the logs are instead sunk to an anoxic ocean floor where they will

take a very long time to rot and release CO2. Fit an empty logging truck with a U-shaped cradle of

chain-link fencing; bundle up the usual load of trees; tow the bundle out to sea where a barge full

of bundled-up concrete rubble awaits, then attach enough to sink the timber bundle so it can take

up residence on an anoxic bottom. Otherwise, one needs some use of the wood (neither firewood

nor paper, which mostly burns or rots in five years) where the wood is protected from decay for

centuries, as in varnished furniture, treated pilings and docks, and the twisted-layers-of-veneer

‘plywood’ now used to construct the taller wooden buildings.

Besides using fast-growing species such as hybrid poplars, add fire protection to the replanted

forest: brush clearance as in German forests, computer-controlled sprinklers, and wide fuel-free

gaps (like those under power lines) to limit a fire to only one parcel.

Forest harvest-and-sink would use the second-growth pulpwood trees in the vast Canadian and

Siberian forests. Instead of using them for making paper, we would sink the trees in weighted

bundles to oxygen-poor basins on the ocean floor. That takes out of circulation the CO2 that would

ordinarily be produced in the next ten years via used paper burning or rotting in trash dumps.

There is little to design and build; any country desiring to cancel out their continuing emissions

could do this today, simply by competing with the paper mills for buying up pulpwood forests,

then diverting the logging trucks from mills to waiting tugboats.


Fast-growing trees such as hybrid poplars are replanted, taking more CO2 out of the air, then the

harvest-and-sink is repeated in a quarter-century. To clean up enough CO2 for a cooldown, we

would need half of the world’s forests for two generations, while protecting those growing trees

from fires and beetles.

Currently, we are not skilled at either job. Even if we were, the forests would remain vulnerable

to droughts, drying summer heat, and our new extreme weather. The sunk trees would not be very

secure, either, as sea-going timber thieves could haul them up and sell them in a paper-hungry

world. This CO2 removal method is not sure-fire.

Burying biochar would be more secure but biochar production is still full of manufacturing

problems; the manure and crop residues used as input clog the pipes. Until bound by starch into

pellets or briquettes, the biochar product must be kept from the air’s supply of oxygen or

spontaneous combustion will result. Biochar production could easily consume more power than

it would produce.

There are, fortunately, better ways to do the CO2-sinking job—but even they require a few years

of design and prototyping in order to work around whatever their vulnerabilities and side effects

turn out to be.

Half of the photosynthesis that removes CO2 from the planet’s air is done in ocean surface waters

by microscopic plants called phytoplankton, and there is much more ocean surface than land

surface available for scrubbing projects. It takes less than a day for one plankton to become two

plankton, and four the following day; no land plant can increase its numbers so quickly. In a few

days, a plankton “bloom” can turn blue waters green.

Sinking enough plankton Plankton farms are not the turn-of-the-century iron fertil-

ization proposals that sink only 23 percent of what the new

photosynthesis captures. For a twenty-year cleanup job,

this would be insufficient, even if fertilizing the entire ocean

surface, 70 percent of the planet. Furthermore, even if the

supply of iron is replenished, the bloom will stop as soon as

some other nutrient runs out—in blue waters, that is very

soon. If fertilization is not to be a one-time deal, a more

efficient and sustainable version must be developed.

The plankton farmers’ first step is to start in green water,

sinking the local plankton along with the fine suspended

feces and cell debris that cannot settle fast enough to escape

bacteria turning them into CO2. The ocean surface has 240

times more dissolved organic carbon (DOC) than the carbon in the live plankton, whose

photosynthesis took the CO2 out of the air; in a month, bacteria convert DOC into CO2 via their

respiration—and so this reconstructed CO2 soon goes back into the air.

The down pump sends the entire “carbon soup” of surface waters into the cold depths (98 percent

of ocean volume), a fifty-fold dilution in water that will take a thousand years to circulate back up

to the surface. As an ecological disturbance, it is likely to be minor: even when sinking all of the

excess CO2 in the air and surface ocean, it would only add 1.3 percent to what is already down


there. Deep ocean is already the biggest carbon sink in the world and we know its track record,

making it a better bet than novel projects.

So, one needs a down pump and pipe. There are

several ingenious proposals for pumping down;

they look to be less expensive than windmills

and easier to maintain because they have no

moving parts. For the Salter Sink, the pipe has

a funnel up top, collecting water from waves

that crest over its meter-high floating rim; as

the funnel’s top starts to fill, the extra pressure

forces water out at the deep end of the pipe.

Pipe lengths need not be longer than 150 meters

if this is done at the edge of the Continental

Shelf, as offshore currents from undertow will

push the pipe’s output over the cliff. An

advantage over blue ocean sites is that the

Continental Shelf down pumps will take in

some of the plankton and dissolved debris

produced closer to shore without fertilization.

Managing a bloom Next, one uses an up-pump to mimic the way that steady winds create a plankton bloom via

upwelling: by adding natural fertilizer pumped up from just below the wind-mixed layer, known

as the thermocline. That is where the heavier cell debris accumulates and decomposes, becoming

natural fertilizer for whatever grows up top, nearer the sunlight. On the Continental Shelf, the

thermocline may be only 50 meters deep, allowing a shorter pipe for the up-pump than needed

for the down-pump. Edge-of-the-shelf up pumps will also take in natural fertilizer produced in

non-project waters nearer shore.

So far as I am aware, this push-pull pumping is the only CDR proposal that currently appears to

meet the Big-Quick-Surefire criteria. We even get a head start on evaluating its side effects

because push-pull pumps neatly mimic the natural wind-driven upwelling and downwelling ocean

currents that oceanographers and fisheries experts have been studying for many decades.

Given a 20-year project and about 2,000

gigatonnes of CO2 to remove, the needed

area of ocean appears to be somewhere

between the area of the Great Lakes and

the area of the Caribbean Sea. Because

plankton do best in cooler waters, the

project area would likely be spread out on

the Continental Shelf edge going north

from New Jersey up through

Newfoundland waters, then from Iceland

south to Morocco. Green waters where

the big fishing fleets hang out provides a

good guide to plankton productivity that we can enhance.


This idealized push-pull ocean pump serves to provide a concrete example, easy to remember if

not ideal, that defines the response ballpark by being big, quick, secure, powered by clean sources,

and inexpensive enough so that a country can implement it on its own continental shelf without a

decade of conferences about the international waters. Indeed, their fishermen will demand it,

once they hear of all the extra fish supported on the project leakage.

At the present, there are some drawbacks to being overly specific in public, ones that I hope this

push-pull model system can avoid. Many climate scientists will privately acknowledge that we

need some sort of carbon dioxide removal, while hesitating to endorse any specific proposal that

still needs a lot of design work. We need a Governors’ Initiative, not to evaluate existing proposals

like my push-pull pumping model, but to spend a few years creating better ways of doing the job

that are also as big, quick, and surefire. The public would understand that something was being

done without being drawn prematurely in to the pros and cons, as it has with stratospheric

aerosols, now made into a taboo topic in some environmental circles.

The Governors’ Design Initiatives could also serve to facilitate the international effort needed

when the better designs are divided up for implementation. Once up and running, the design

phase would attract in relevant scientists and engineers from around the world, some of whom

would end up as those “halo commissioners” later. Once designed, the forest projects might be

best undertaken by Canada, Russia, and China; plankton projects by East Asia, US, Canada, and

the EU; and the Arctic halo involving Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia.

Hopeless? No. The initiative is not expensive for the first few years but getting, say, $400 million from state

legislatures could take too long. There is an alternative: The US has a number of tech billionaires

who already think in terms of quick technology solutions that take no more than four years to

design and complete. Collectively, the billionaires should be up to contributing $100m each year,

if governors are doing the asking. But we need to get those governors out in front and soon,

because political leadership must be seen to be effective.

Think Governors’ Design Initiative for Repairing Climate. A big public project may soon be

essential for morale—and to preserve our democracy against emerging feelings among the young

that Congress and government agencies have failed the public interest.

And in closing: the biggest future threat is not about surviving the bad weather when it arrives.

“Think again.” Think about the situation three months after a one-two punch, when the harvest

falls short.

The adults-only section: The biggest threat is severely disrupted agriculture from the heat

waves, floods, and windstorms. When other countries get hit at the same time, importing food

doesn’t work. Suddenly there are food riots. Famine leads to raiding neighbors and then

resource wars, refugees on the move, genocides, and epidemics when people drink from ponds

and lakes that were contaminated by prior refugee visits.

Such multi-impact societal collapses happened in ancient agricultural times, and often enough

for the combination to borrow a name: apocalypse. I have just mentioned all four horsemen

and their underlying mechanisms. (Genocide is frequently a taboo word, as it is today in

Poland and Turkey, and that oddly-named rider Death appears to serve as a euphemism for

genocides.


The result of falling dominos would be a human population crash, with the next generation

responding only to authoritarian rule and missing out on education—yet having to dig

themselves out of a deep hole over many centuries into the future.

Our best chance of avoiding this fate, it now appears, is to repair climate very quickly.

Our situation is not hopeless, as some commentators are beginning to suggest—ones who have

been led to believe that emissions reduction is the only game in town. Our new situation is risky—

but properly focused actions that shadow the high Arctic and remove CO2 can greatly improve our

chances.

Text is about 5000 words; illustrations are optional. Copyright ©2019 by William H. Calvin.

[email protected]

Climate Reading List Here are some links—in addition to the 2018 IPCC and the similar National Academies (US), Europeans, and Royal Society (UK)

reports that mention removing CO2. Hardcopy readers, go to “CO2Foundation.org?p=1257” for live links.

RM Amon, et al (2003) Dissolved organic carbon distribution and origin in the Nordic Seas: Exchanges with the Arctic Ocean and

the North Atlantic. J Geophys Res 14: 1-17.

David Archer, Victor Brovkin (2008), The millennial atmospheric lifetime of anthropogenic CO2. Climatic Change 90:283–297 DOI

10.1007/s10584-008-9413-1

Beal, C. M., Archibald, I., Huntley, M. E., Greene, C. H., & Johnson, Z. I. (2018), Integrating Algae with Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage (ABECCS) Increases Sustainability, Earth’s Future, 6, doi.org/10.1002/2017EF000704.

William H. Calvin (1998). The great climate flip-flop. The Atlantic 281(1):47-64 theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/01/the-great-climate-flip-flop/308313/

William H. Calvin (2008). Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change. London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press. faculty.washington.edu/wcalvin/bk14

William H. Calvin (2013, with updates). Emergency 20-year drawdown of excess CO₂ via push-pull ocean pumps. MIT ClimateCoLab Proposal for Geoengineering (Finalist). CO2Foundation.org?p=1063.

William H. Calvin (2019). A Governors’ Climate Repair Initiative. Both an executive memo to west-coast governors and a magazine-length article. Limited access at CO2Foundation.org

Richard Conniff (2019). Scrubbing carbon from the sky. Scientific American, January issue. News article based on Nemet, Fuss, Minx et al in Environ. Res. Lett. 13 (2018abc). Richard Conniff (2019). Scrubbing carbon from the sky. Scientific American, January issue. News article based on Nemet, Fuss, Minx et al in Environ. Res. Lett. 13 (2018abc).

R. Dryden, M.G. Morgan, A. Bostrom, W. Bruine de Bruin (2018). Public perceptions of how long air pollution and carbon dioxide remain in the atmosphere. Risk Anal. 38(3):525-534. doi.org/10.1111/risa.12856.

Jennifer A. Francis (2018). Why Are Arctic Linkages to Extreme Weather Still up in the Air? BAMS, doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-17-

0006.1.

Jennifer A. Francis & N. Skific (2015). Evidence linking rapid Arctic warming to mid-latitude weather patterns. Philosophical Transactions. Series A, Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, 373(2045), 20140170. doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2014.0170

Jennifer A. Francis, Steven J. Vavrus (2012). Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes. Geophys. Res. Lett., 39, L06801, doi.org/10.1029/2012GL051000.

Dennis A. Hansell, Craig A. Carlson, Daniel J. Repeta, and Reiner Schlitzer (2009). Dissolved organic matter in the ocean. Oceanography 22(4):202-211. doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2009.109

Philip Kithil (accessed 2019). Ocean surface carbon relocation (OSCAR). At atmocean.com/carbonsink/.

Marco Lagi, Karla Z. Bertrand and Yaneer Bar-Yam (2011). The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East. Tech. Rep., New England Complex Systems Institute, necsi.edu/research/social/food_crises.pdf

William K. M. Lau, Kyu-Myong Kim (2012). The 2010 Pakistan Flood and Russian Heat Wave: Teleconnection of Hydrometeorological Extremes. Journal of Hydrometeorology 13:392-403, doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-11-016.1

https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/special-reports/srccs/srccs_wholereport.pdf

https://www.nap.edu/read/25259/chapter/1#xii

https://easac.eu/fileadmin/PDF_s/reports_statements/Negative_Carbon/EASAC_Report_on_Negative_Emission_Technologies.pdf

https://royalsociety.org/~/media/policy/projects/greenhouse-gas-removal/royal-society-greenhouse-gas-removal-report-2018.pdf

https://co2foundation.org/?p=1257

http://www.agu.org/journals/jc/jc0307/2002JC001594/2002JC001594.pdf

http://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-008-9413-1

https://doi.org/10.1002/2017EF000704



http://faculty.washington.edu/wcalvin/bk14

https://co2foundation.org/?p=1063

https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-17-0006.1

https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-17-0006.1

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2014.0170

https://doi.org/10.1029/2012GL051000

https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2009.109

https://atmocean.com/carbonsink/

http://necsi.edu/research/social/food_crises.pdf

https://doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-11-016.1


Michael E. Mann et al. (2017). Influence of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Planetary Wave Resonance and Extreme Weather Events. Scientific Reports 7, 45242

Michael E. Mann et al. (2018). Projected Changes in Persistent Extreme Summer Weather Events: The Role of QuasiResonant Amplification. Science Advances 4, eaat3272.

Michael E. Mann (March 2019). The weather amplifier. Scientific American, pp.43-50.G. F. Nemet, M. W. Callaghan, F. Creutzig, S. Fuss, J. Hartmann, J. Hilaire, W. F. Lamb, J. C. Minx, S. Rogers, P. Smith (2018). Negative emissions—Part 3: Innovation and upscaling. Environ. Res. Lett. 13, 063003, doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/aabff4.

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (2016). U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/time-series.

A Oschlies, et al (2010) Climate engineering by artificial ocean upwelling: Channelling the sorcerer’s apprentice. Geophys Res

Lett37, L04701.

Corinne Le Quéré, et al (2018). Global Carbon Budget 2017. Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 10, 405–448, doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-405-2018

J.-M. Robine, et al. (2008). Death toll exceeded 70,000 in Europe during the summer of 2003. C. R. Biologies 331, doi.org/10.1016/j.crvi.2007.12.001

Wake Smith and Gernot Wagner (2018). Stratospheric aerosol injection tactics and costs in the first 15 years of deployment Environ. Res. Lett. 13 124001, http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae98d/pdf

Will Steffen, et al (2018). Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 201810141; doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1810141115

Stuart Strand and Gregory Benford (2009). Ocean sequestration of crop residue carbon: recycling fossil fuel carbon back to deep

sediments. Environ Sci & Tech 43:1000-1007. doi.org/10.1021/es801555

Keith Trenberth, J. Fasullo (2012). Climate extremes and climate change: The Russian heat wave and other climate extremes of 2010. J. Geophys. Res. 117, D17103. doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0441-5

A White, et al (2010) An open ocean trial of controlled upwelling using wave pump technology. J Atmos Ocean Tech 27:385-396.

A Yool, et al (2009) Low efficiency of nutrient translocation for enhancing oceanic uptake of carbon dioxide, J Geophys Res.

114:C08009.

i “Emissions caused the problem, reducing them ought to fix it.” Too many people shorten “annual emissions” to just “emissions,” creating a fallacy. “Emissions (meaning accumulations) caused the problem, reducing emissions (meaning the annual addition) ought to fix it.” That’s like confusing miles driven with miles per hour.

ii This is not a trivial consideration: recall Aum Shinrikyo, a large doomsday cult worshipping Shiva, successful in both Japan and Russia. It attracted a considerable number of graduates from Japan's elite universities and its leaders recruited technical types, hoping to start an apocalypse using nerve gas attacks in the Tokyo subway in 1995. They reasoned that the US would be blamed for it, triggering World War Three and Armageddon; humanity would end, except for the elite few who had joined Aum in time. The cult did not disappear after the trials but merely changed its name in 2000 to Aleph, disavowing its former leaders, who were among the 15 eventually hanged by Japan in 2018. In 2016, 21 years after the subway nerve gas attack, the Russian government banned Aum Shinrikyo, declaring it a terrorist organization.

http://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aabff4

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/time-series



https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-405-2018

https://doi-org.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/10.1016/j.crvi.2007.12.001

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae98d/pdf

http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1810141115

http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/es8015556

http://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0441-5



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