entitled geo engineering assessing the implications of large scale climate intervention i believe this hearing marks the first time that a congressional committee has undertaken a serious review of proposals for climate engineering that not surprising because this is a very complex controversial subject that has had little formal debate in the united states geoengineering carries with it a tremendous range of uncertainty ethical and political concerns and the potential for  catastrophic environmental side effects but we are faced with the stark reality that the climate is changing and they said of impacts outpace the world's political and economic ability to avoid them therefore we should accept the possibility that certain climate engineering proposals may merit consideration and as a starting point review research and development as appropriate at this time or whether it is best it is best  engineering or at its best year in engineering might only buy us some time but if we want to know the answers we have to begin to ask the tough questions today we began what i believe will be a long conversation in fact my intention is for this to serve as the introduction to the concept geo or other of climate engineering over the next eight months the committee will hold two or three more hearings to explore underlying science engineering and members of the commons committee visited us last spring the chairman phil willis opposed it we work together on issues of common interest geoengineering has decided early global implications and research should be considered in the context of transparency international process yesterday the commons committee voted to undertake a parallel effort to examine the domestic and international regulatory framework that may be applicable to geo engineering we will be in close contact with them sharing the findings from our own efforts when they complete their work in the spring the chairman of the committee will testify before us in a hearing on domestic and international governance issues but before we begin this discussion today i want to make something very clear up front my decision to hold this hearing should not in any way be misconstrued as an endorsement of any geo engineering activity and the timing has nothing to do with the pending negotiations in copenhagen i know we will run the risk  misleading headlines however this subject requires very careful examination and will likely only be considered as a potential stopgap tool in a much wider package of climate change mitigation and strategies will require years of international coordinated research for us to better understand our options to examine the impacts and to know if any activity warrants deployment in the meantime nothing should stop us from pursuing aggressive long term domestic and global strategies for achieving the productions and greenhouse gas emissions this issue is too important for us to keep our heads in the sand we must get ahead of geoengineering before it gets ahead of us or worse before we find our staff any climate emergency with inadequate information as to the full range of options as chairman of the committee of jurisdiction i feel responsibility began a public dialogue and developed a record of geoengineering and with that i look forward to it to a good  committee and their these are taking the issues and taking on issues that are really the forefront of cutting edge science and i appreciate your leadership as many of my colleagues will agree the debate about climate change is far from over i'm sure that you conducted and participated in that and came to the conclusion that it was a fact that there are still many many opinions as to the causes and effects and the potential solutions  demonstrates how much on certainty there is out there and how crucial it is for our nation to continue to search for answers geoengineering our climate engineering is in i guess intentional modification of their involvement to promote habitat out to promote and that this go to the definition and see that it's so broad that you could apply the term to almost any human changes that are made by humans and their surrounding environment from building dams to deforestation actions are more local or regional in scope the types of modifications will be discussed in this morning are global in nature and therefore no matter what our preconceptions are the implications of such technologies are far from reaching and are far reaching and stand at the hearing is to be the first of a series of hearings on this topic rather exploring the scientific basis understanding the concept of geo engineering and the ethical concerns and issues surrounding any future development and deployment scenarios could be extremely helpful in advancing the discussion on a movie have elephants flying elephants you know like hitchcock had the birds that were going to disturb the whole world and i don't know if i can get that underway or not but maybe work were here that get me in trouble if there are other members who wish to submit additional opening statements your statements will be added to the record at this point and now it's my pleasure to introduce our witnesses professor john sheppard is a professor of professional research fellow earth system science at the university of southampton and chair of the royal society geoengineering working group that produced a report geo engineering the climate science and governance uncertainty in the university of southampton is not located in new york dr can calera is a professor of environmental science in the department global ecology at the should know that we will have five minutes for your spoken testimony your written testimony will be included in the record for the hearing and when you have completed your spoken testimony we will begin the questions each member then we'll have five minutes to question the witnesses off chairman gordon ranking member hall members of the committee i thank you for giving me the opportunity today to speak with you about why it makes sense for us as american taxpayers to invest some of our hard earned dollars in exploring ways to cost effectively reduce environmental threats that are facing us i'm a climate scientist working at the carnegie institution department of global ecology i've been studying climate and ocean acidification for over twenty years and in and investigating geo engineering options for more than ten years climate change poses a real risk to america the surest way to reduce this risk is to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide we can build a twenty first century energy system on solar and nuclear power along with carbon capture and storage from coal oil and gas fired power plants i believe we can and will make this transformation to the clean energy system of the future however even if we decide to start building our twenty first century energy system today because of the long time lags involved we will still face threats from climate change the options we're discussing today can be divided into two categories with very different characteristics solar radiation management approaches and carbon dioxide removal approaches solar radiation management methods which you could also call sunlight reflection methods seek to reduce the amount of climate change by reflecting some of the sun's warming rays back to space we know this basically works because volcanoes have cooled the earth in this preliminary research suggests that we could rapidly and relatively cheaply put tiny particles high in the stratosphere and that this would cause the earth to cool quickly nobody thinks these approaches will perfectly offset effects of carbon dioxide for example these methods do not address the problem of ocean acidification however pull him in every climate model simulations indicate that these approaches could offset most climate change in most places most of the time while these approaches may be able to reduce overall risk they could and likely will introduce new environmental and political risks in contrast carbon dioxide remov approaches seek to reduce the amount of climate change and ocean acidification by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere essentially these options reverse carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere by pulling carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere there are two basic types of carbon dioxide removal methods one is to use growing farthest for other plan as to store carbon in organic form the other is to use chemical techniques we could build centralized carbon dioxide removal factories or perhaps spread out finally ground up minerals that would remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with the exception of proposals to fertilize the oceans carbon dioxide remov methods are unlikely to introduce new unprecedented risks so cost is likely to be the primary consideration governing deployment let me mention in closing that i do not think the term geo engineering is very useful  inform discussions the term has been used by so many people to refer to so many different and poorly defined grab bags of distantly related things that i do not believe the term can help us to think clearly about the decisions we need to make so to conclude we need multiple agency research programs in both sunlight reflection masses and carbon dioxide removal approaches to find cost effective ways to protect american taxpayers from unnecessary environmental risk because these two basic approaches these solar radiation management approaches and the carbon dioxide removal approaches differ in so many dimensions it seems unwise to link these research programs closely together solving our climate change problem is largely about cost effective risk management there are many different ways that risk might be diminished and the most important of these is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions however we also need to improve our resilience so that we can better adapt to the climate change that does occur we also need to understand whether there are ways that we can cost effectively remove carbon dioxide and perhaps other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere lastly we should try to understand whether thoughtful intentional interventions into the climate system might be able to undo some of the damage that we're doing with our car inadvertent intervention the problem is too serious to allow prejudice to take options off good morning mr chairman ranking member members of the committee ladies and gentlemen thank you very much for the invitation to come and testify to this morning it's a privilege to have that opportunity and my testimony will be largely based on the role society study that you mentioned mr chairman which was undertaken over the past year and which i chaired the report of this study was published in september and it's available on the reduce the confusion and misinformation which exists in some quarters about this rather controversial and novel issue in order to enable a well informed debate on the subject and so it's  a great pleasure to me to be here at the beginning of such a debate and i hope that our work will be useful the working group was composed of twelve members mainly scientists and engineers from the u k but also included a sociologist a opinions on the subject and all recognize that the primary goal is to make the transition to the low carbon economy that dr kalb era has already mentioned which we shall need to do eventually irrespective of climate change simply because fossil fuels are a finite resource so our terms of reference were to consider and so far it's possible to evaluate proposed schemes for geo engineering which we took to mean the deliberate large scale intervention in the climate system primarily in order to moderate global warming and the study was based primarily on a review of the literature but also by a call for submissions of evidence of which we received some seventy five since time is short i would like to move directly to summarize the key messages of our study and first among these is that geo engineering is not a magic bullet none of the methods that have been proposed to provide an easy or immediate solution to the problems of climate change there is a great deal of uncertainty about various aspects of virtually  schemes that are being discussed so at present this technology and whatever form it takes is not an alternative to emissions reductions which remain the safest and most predictable method of moderating climate change and in our view cutting global emissions of greenhouse gases must remain our highest priority however we all recognize that this is proving to be difficult and in the future given adequate research geoengineering may be useful to support the efforts to mitigate climate change by conventional means we concluded that geo engineering is very likely to be technical technically possible but there are major uncertainties a nd risks with all methods concerning not only their effectiveness but also their costs unintended environmental impacts and the social consequences and mechanisms needed to  manage them so in our view this is not a technology which is ready for deployment in the immediate future that is how technology may be useful at some point in the future if we find that we have need of it but it will not be available unless we undertake the necessary research not only on the technology but particularly also on the environmental and social impacts of such proposals and to do that we need to have widespread public debate and widespread public engagement and especially to develop an acceptable system of governance geoengineering by intention will affect everybody on the planet because it is an intentional moderation of the environment and consequently everybody has an interest in the outcome and we need to find a way to engage the opinions of a very diverse group of people on the planet in order that this can be done in an orderly and acceptable manner dr caldera has reviewed the major differences between some of the methods which i support entirely and i would say finally that too little is known about the technology is the stage to pick a winner what we need is research on a small portfolio of promising generally garden ranking member all the members of the committee thank you very much for the opportunity to appear here this morning i'm really laying resident fellow and  does not take organizational stances on the issues that it studies and the views that i'm going to express here this morning are entirely my own i want to begin by warmly commending the committee for convening this hearing and my statement fundamentally urges that treat this as a first step toward embarking upon a serious sustained and systematic exploration by the u s government of research and development into solar radiation management in particular one of the two approaches to climate engineering discussed by d earth reflects back into space in a recent study a panel of five highly acclaimed economists including three nobel laureates rated solar radiation management concepts to solar radiation management concepts as the first and third most productive kinds of investment that can be made in dealing with climate  change the panel that did those rankings was well aware of the large uncertainties that continue to surround solar radiation management and they were also aware of the fat that in the long run at least solar radiation management cannot replace the need for greenhouse gas emissions reductions but at the same time the panel was very much clearly very much aware of the vast damages from climate change in terms of two hundred to seven hundred billion dollars a year so those are we have potentially a good deal of upside with this technology the cost of an r and d effort into solar radiation management is like to be miniscule in comparison with the potential benefits s r m research is needed in part because for many nations reductions in greenhouse gas emissions cost more than the perceived value of the benefits of making those reductions the record of the last twenty years of climate talks demonstrates that the prospects for steep emissions reductions on a global scale are poor and they're likely to remain so for an extended period of time  without such emissions reductions and perhaps even with them some risk exists that quite harmful climate change might occur in s r m system might greatly reduce the potential to assess the prospects of s r m and more knowledgeable way and also perhaps to find ways of minimizing those risks in the future at this point the top priority should be added knowledge about s r m eventually the us may wish to address questions of international governance but at this point our first goal should be to learn more about climate about solar radiation management as a tool i guess the single most important caution that i would like to leave with the committee is that the governance arrangements for any research program including one on solar radiation management can either serve to nurture success or they can serve deciphered and i think it's awfully important as we go forward in considering how we want to manage research and development in desk r m that we keep in mind the need to balance the risks and the benefits of how we structure our r and d efforts thank you very much thank you mr lane also thank you for being an early supporter of our we hope that that some of the mr chairman mr hall members of the committee thank you for inviting me first i'd like to agree with ken caldeira that global warming is a serious problem and that mitigation reduction of emissions should primary response we also need to do adaptations and learn to live with some of the climate change which is going to happen no matter what using geoengineering only event of a planetary emergency and only for a temporary period of time years we did a climate model simulation of what would happen if we put in a corruption every four years the green line is the global warming temperatures that we've seen up until now the black line  eighty levels and who decides what if russia wants and can and i want to know that warmer in india wants a little bit cooler if we stopped after twenty years would have rapid warming as you can see we did it for twenty years and this rapid climate change will be much more dangerous than the gradual change we would get without doing anything so this is a couple of the reasons why i'm concerned about it but we certainly need more research now how do we get the aerosols i'm talking about the solar radiation management how do we get the aerosol into the stratosphere there's no way to do it today ideas of artillery or balloons or airplanes need a lot of research that would be easy and cheap but there's no demonstration of that it might not be that policy makers can make a decision about whether or not to implement it we don't have quantification of any of these i disagree with the economic analysis because they just ignored many of the risks and didn't even count want to do experimentation it would not possible to do just a small scale to put a little bit of particles into what happened we could do that but we couldn't measure their effect because there's a lot of weather variability a lot of particles there already we may just make the particles bigger and so it's problematic whether we could actually ever do an experiment in the stratosphere without actually doing geo engineering so i'd like to urge you to support a research program into the climatic response with climate models into the technology to see if it's possible to develop different systems so that we can make an informed decision in the future thank you dr robot and dr fleming you're recognized thank you mr chairman ranking member hall and members of the committee on science and technology i want to talk about history and one of my epigraph is facing unprecedented challenges which i think we are it's good to see historical precedence history matters and inform policy decisions are going to require interdisciplinary international and intergenerational perspectives so i applaud your international move and i'd like to make a case for intergenerational perspective as well informed by history i was so let's ask when humans first began became concerned about climate change and i immediately responded in the pleistocene that is our whole history comes out of  variations of climate and all of human history lies within the last interglacial area which is twelve thousand years ago we've experienced huge variations in climate up to twenty seven degrees fahrenheit and i'm sure the early humans had important tribal councils to talk about these things although they didn't have mitigation yet as an option european explorers and early american settlers were surprised that the new world was so much colder than the areas of the same latitude in europe for example washington d c is on lisbon portugal conus work to improve the climate by cutting the forest tilling the soil and draining the marshes benjamin franklin thought this was possible thomas jefferson thought it was actually happening he called for an index of the american climate which one wrecked one reason we have great weather records in this country to document the changes being caused by human intervention show a few pictures the quest to control nature including the sky his deeply rooted in the history of western science some climate engineers claim they are the first generation to propose the deliberate manipulation of the planetary environment but history says otherwise and the eighteen thirty is america's first national meteorologist james espy who work for the u s army surgeon general advanced a large scale engineering proposal to emulate quote artificial volcanoes he proposed lighting huge fires each week he preferred sunday evenings all along the appalachian mountains each each week he was going to make it rain and control and hence the nation's rainfall as the argue that the heated up droughts would trigger rain it would not only eliminate droughts but also temperature extremes and would render the air healthy by clearing out of me as most popular writer at the time pointed out that manufactured weather control would generate more problems than it solved and would satisfy no one hundred forty two this image of a technocrat pulling the levers of weather control appeared on the cover of collier's magazine in one nine hundred fifty four we were in a weather control race with the soviet union at the time and an air force general had just announced to the press that the nation that controls the weather will control the world the magazine article inside by president eisenhower's weather adviser harold orville provide detailed ways of conducting weather warfare a year later the noted princeton method titian johnny of anointment in an article called can we survive technology wrote that climate control to managing solar radiation was not necessarily a rational undertaking in his opinion climate control could alter the entire globe shatter the existing political order merged each nation's affairs with those of every other and lend itself to forms of warfare as yet on imagine he compared climate control to the threat of nuclear the proliferation here archimedes is acting as a geo engineer and technology as his lever but where is he standing and where will the earth roll if tipped geoengineering is not cheap since we don't know the side effects quoting ron print of mit how do you engineer system you don't understand well some argue that we can control the temperature of the globe ironically at a recent nasa meeting on the topic of managing solar and meeting coordinator apologized for not being able to control the temperature of the room think about it this is hurricane king one hundred forty seven one project cirrus intervened and ceded it they wanted to announce to the press that they could control hurricanes but basically they canceled the press conference when it came ashore and devastated savannah ga other diplomatic people have said that climate control is not a good idea harry wexler the head of research at the weather bureau said this in one thousand sixty two and just two years ago burt berlin the first year of the i p c c wrote the political implications of geo engineering are largely impossible to assess and it's not a viable solution because in most cases it's an illusion to sume that all possible changes can be foreseen climate change is simple we should do the right thing climate is complex it's very involves oceans and atmospheres i ce sheets and now monsoons so studying the human dimension is essential we need the interdisciplinary international and intergenerational emphasis thank you for your thank you dr claiming at this point we began the r first round of questions but first i would like to give a premise listening to this to the panel makes me think that for most people this is like coming in to the after the intermission  to mr hall's movie about the elephants and that we might want to give a little bit more premise and i would really advise anyone that has an interest in this issue to review the royal thank you the volcano emitted a large amount of sulfur dioxide amongst other things some of which made its way to the stratosphere and the result of this was the formation of a natural sulfate based aerosol that spread very rapidly around the world and lost it for a couple of years causing a full in temperature of approximately one degree fahrenheit for a couple of years so this gives us some confidence that aerosols in the stratosphere do have a cooling effect and that the quantities of material required to do this  that really nature has already given us some a lot of them on and this is not completely out of line i don't really understand them yet i'm going to give the panel some questions to take home with you and i would like to respond to but let's just start of the if we could today because if we're looking at a research program i'd like to get a little better idea what we should do it so let me put out some questions for the panel and get some reaction and again i would like for you to take it back and respond to it later but what would what would be the critical features of such a program would there be just one coordinated program in the u s which u s agencies would have to be involved from the start and which would need to play a later role what scale of investment would be necessary both initially and the long term and what kind of expertise would be required i'll later ask about the international implications but i'd like to get your thoughts on a research program here in united states we want to start i think based on what i said we'd have to have a lot more humanist involved a lot more social science component and i know that the national has done things but it's a national cademy of science and so i'd like to recommend that we go multi agency that include not only technical outfits in the discussion  not exclusively on solar radiation management because that is technology which requires you to maintain your activity for as long as the greenhouse gases stay in the past which is several centuries two thousand years and it's not clear that human society has the ability to sustain an activity on that time scale so i think it would be very dangerous to stop solar radiation management without having figured out your exit strategy and your exit strategy would almost certainly include one or cordero i would like to suggest that we should be thinking in terms of several research programs each multi agency in character but led by different agencies if we separate the solar radiation management proposals from the carbon dioxide removal proposals i think these solar radiation management proposals the research should perhaps be led by n s f possibly nasa on the carbon dioxide removal approaches again can be divided into two major classes some are essentially growing plants and burying the organic carbon made by plants we already have some research programs into growing new farce and similar techniques and those programs could perhaps be expanded to encompass a broader range of biologically based methods to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere the department of energy is already leading projects to remove carbon dioxide from gases coming out of power plants that those programs could be expanded to also consider removal of gases from the atmosphere and so i think there's a least three separate programs and some of them might involve expansion of existing programs on the carbon dioxide removal side but there's really no program at all in the solar radiation management side and i personally would like to see n s f probably all let me agree with dr sheppard that i think there ought to be research in both families both at air capture and solar radiation management however solar radiation management offers much larger economic payoffs potentially and a much greater ability to reverse the rapid highly destructive climate change should that occur therefore i guess i would reverse dr shepherd judgement of priorities and say that of the two approaches solar radiation management deserves more attention and as dr caldera has suggested it's not really receiving any support from the us government at this time i clearly the sort of problem that is going to require multiple agency inputs and it poses a very difficult organizational challenge for combining science and engineering i'm going everybody respond in writing later but m radiation generation from direct solar radiation by thirty percent and those technologies that were developing so it had it's a lesson of efficacy but also a problems i think research into solar radiation management needs to done in a coordinated way internationally with quantum models the national science foundation should probably take the lead in the u s along with know and there also needs to be a research program that into the technology can we actually get particles into the stratospher i always come out second on that one with when you're the chairman you've got to gavel i'll be serious with you because i appreciate you and i appreciate your background the many years of study and the gifts you made to this country and your very appearance here we can't get hardly anybody to talk about or who's going to pay it or how much china is going to continue to pollute store and and not pay a dollar and increase it on an increasing ratio so thank you for that i agree with you  then i don't disagree with you on anything if they just don't fully understand it but he's given me the right to write you and you'll be hearing from me thank you mr lane you said you advocate research and not deployment i guess that's what i'm trying to say and would you expand on your comment in your testimony that a state declining greenhouse gas emissions may well cost more than the perceived value of the about asteroids professor told us about volcanoes but we were studying asteroids and the danger in trying to get the international thrust on them got no help on that because we had a i think about a million five budget on that and that was a couple of brain brilliant people and their class workers and coworkers with them but we learned during that hearing something that none of the group knew including the chairman that was me that a asteroid just missed the earth by fifteen minutes and that sometime in nineteen eighty seven hundred eighty eight so i think this is worthwhile and this both from the chairman he's so good natured he's only shown not only that it's difficult to get agreement on greenhouse gas controls but that that that's happening for very clear reasons china and india both have very rapidly growing emissions and yet it's clear from the way their governments are dealing with the negotiations that they do not perceive greenhouse gas emissions reductions at least not steep wants is being in their national interest and both of those countries are too powerful to coerce and the costs of right to reduce emissions when they don't feel that it's in their national interest are likely to be prohibitively high i don't want to give the impression that i believe that we can go on emitting greenhouse gases it ever increasing rates i don't i think eventually controls are going to be essential but i really strongly believe that the conditions are not in place yet for a global agreement on significantly reducing and emissions and until those congestion conditions are in place there really isn't very much that the united states can do to change the global trajectory of omissions and mention everything with the fact that china think every six days are spewing not using clean coal and i think we'll fall back on coal one day we're going to have to but it has to be clean co but they're increasing again our sale and increasing ratio the damage to the earth without paying anything that goes for them they go for russia goes to india and goes from mexico and you could go on and on of those that want the benefits of the work that you probably all believe in but don't want to participate in the cost one of the others made mention of that let you have whatever i think i have maybe two seconds left but if you can do your best  support r and d rather than deployment dr roebuck is absolutely right we don't we don't have the technology yet to do deployment nor would it be prudent for me personally if i were going to put my bet on where to do  their own average body weight each day in the form of carbon dioxide so something like one hundred fifty pounds of c o two per person per day in the united states times three hundred million people right times three hundred sixty five days a year  the reason i ask the question is is we are doing geo engineering on a massive scale i mean if one hundred years ago somebody had said hey here's a bright idea we should promote a plan to put that much carbon into the air and dr called there i commend you for mentioning ocean acidification twenty five percent of which will go into the oceans make the oceans thirty percent more acidic within fifty years and then continuing on after that to make it so  cidic that it reaches levels not seen since the age of the dinosaurs and dissolve coral reefs shouldn't congress support that people would say you're crazy that geoengineering on that scale which is what we are doing now we're looking at ways to reverse that the second observation would be you know years ago there was a psychologist name lisbeth cooper ross who looked at what happens when people are dying and not everybody goes through or stages of dying which got a lot of play at the time but nevertheless early stages of dying went you know denial and then bargaining and the marketing tends to be is there going to be someone to come rescue me from this cancer or this other illness that i've got it strikes me that we're sort everybody's trying to say isn't there some way out there that we don't have to make changes in our behavior that we can continue to spew just as much c o two or use just as much energy and something somewhere is go or whatever people want to distribute in the air there are some positive things that we could do what would be the impact of simple things like changing the color of r or painting the rooftops my rooftop here in town is black it's a black rubber surface that gets hot as blazes up there month old we can make substantial differences in temperature and energy consumption that not on the scale we need it's not enough but the point is piece together the small stuff that doesn't require massive interventions what are some of the things we could do actually if we put solar panels on our roof that would be a much better way to respond because we would produce electricity from the sun and that would reduce the amount of c o two emissions from other sources and that would be much better than just paying the roos wired white it would cost a lot more money to start with but in the long run it would be the best investment it would be a business opportunity why doesn't every new house have solar panels built into the shingles rather than retrofitting it like i did on my house thanks to subsidies from the state of new jersey so there are lots of and there's lots of little things we can do and they all add up to a mitigation plan and we focus mostly today so far on atmosphere  solar radiation management what about in water i mean we're also geoengineering our water system where we're putting hundreds of millions of pounds of effluent and fertilizers it's from the water what are some positive positive changes that we can do to agricultural practices runoff practices it's after that could help improve the quality of our water not dumping clay and as a floppy land of of algae blooms but some positive things to reduce them from occurring to begin with do any of you have comments on that are we mostly atmospheric today and then you have the point i'm trying to make here that we are we are causing the problem through our own behavior and then we're somehow going to try to fix the earth instead of fixing ourselves if you had to summarize that which would you say exam my time's running out which would you say is easier to change our behavior or change the planet well you make it into a black and white choice and my answer would be both and the problem is that there is an awful lot that we could do in europe in the us and in china or and everywhere to reduce the impact that we are having but however hard we try that may not be enough so i think it's a mistake to make it black and white and say it's either or i think we need to do both and that my at some stage involve geoengineering that a hung on my wall for a while you can't do just one thing and that's the heart of the issue we're facing here today i think we have a lot of good ideas a lot of things we might want to try but you can't do just one thing and almost everything you do has side effects some may be good some may be bad frequently you don't know until you try to and that's what's going to be the major impediment here as as we proceed there's also a public attitudinal problem that well the best example i can give you in the one nine hundred seventy three gas shortages when we had the big long gas lines and you know as a physicist i was very interested in people's attitude toward energy and i thought we could do much better job of conserving energy the response of most people even in documentary say well we really don't have to worry about the scientists will come up with a solution this intrinsic that science can solve problems like that is not probably right that's nice they think that much of me but i don't think it's realistic i think we have to face these problems and all of their dimensions and the point was made about china and india and what their attitudes going to be as long as we continue the current economic behavior of this nation we have no leverage in which to try to solve the environmental problems how can we certainly chinese say if you do if you don't do this for us we're going to stop borrowing money from you but doesn't that's not an awful lot of leverage so i think you have to keep all these factors in mind i'm not in the least bit skeptical about geoengineering i think it's something we really have to investigate i am skeptical about saying this is the answer to a major problem until we get some data do some experiments find out what works what doesn't work and above all continue to recognize you can't do just one thing i remember very some areas of our nation found it just didn't work well because we have a lot of side effects we didn't anticipate so this is a bit more of a sermon than a question you're welcome any of you who can feel free to comment on this and how you think our nation and other nations can address this problem in a thoughtful reasonable meaningful way to try to come up with some solutions do you enjoy hearing that would work any comments or killed there i think you're correct in that we can't do just one thing and that i think everybody on the panel here believes that we need to eventually get to an energy system that the panel disagrees about maybe the scale and scope of what a research program should be i think it's it's indicative that the entire panel serves the need for a research program and i would just also like to take this to support something out robock said before when i was talking about the structure of research that on the solar radiation management side there's an environmental science component that n s f but there's another component about developing an engineering where that might better fit in agencies that allan mentioned thank you i just like to say that we can't hold geoengineering as a solution and allow that to reduce our push toward mitigation it's never going to be a complete solution we may need it in the event of an emergency but let's not stop mitigation and wait and see if geoengineering would work that's not the right strategy and the line i think would be very important for us to continue very strong way the approach of reducing o diversity here with the life expectancy of the male in china seventy three in the life expectancy of the male in india is sixty three which points out a great great disparity and what the needs of the various countries are and it makes it greatly difficult for a country like the us that represents only five percent of the world's population to come to conclusion our reach an agreement on how we should approach our sell ourselves to the rest of the world i guess we included germany france and england in that population group in denmark we may get up to six or seven percent of the world's population so it's a it's a good subject and it's certainly necessary and i appreciate each and every one of you being here and i appreciate th bring in the subject i think this is a start so thank you thank you dr griffin dr brought it down here right now will you will recognize him when he gets here so mr smith you're up to bat the rejection of recommendations that our science is peer reviewed and so it's been for this nebraskan interesting and how we might contribute and especially as it relates to industry in my district and if any of you could speak to the impact that your perceived impact of livestock industry i've heard various accusations and i'm no expert on the livestock industry but i do know that one of the concerns with respect to livestock and global warming is methane emissions from livestock and  know that people are working on various ways of removing methane from gases that might be in barns or pens where livestock are held and they might be potential for the kind of research to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere in general also to be applied to facilities such as livestock pens or barns thank you anyone else i'm involved with the university of kansas in a group that's doing th good disciplinary graduate education and certainly one of your neighbors but the group there is getting technical training in agricultural sciences as well as techniques to mitigate or perhaps reduce some of this but part of the groups also looking at behavioral issues and choices and ways of working together with the with the industries to to advance their purposes as well as other other goals and so the point i was making is that i think that the education we have often is in content and technique of science or techniques of engineering but that social dimension is very important and so looking at  looking at issues like global warming and and making personal commitments and personal decisions i think is very significant aspect of this program it's not a solution to the beef issue but smoking is bad for you which is called a lot of other things or whatever approach we might take i hope that we remember that we need to look at the big picture economically that  caldera we don't know how well these methods will work the solar radiation methods will work at affecting regional climates but there's at least some possibility that as a result of climate change weather conditions will change in america's heartland and that this will impact on the production of grain and you know i would be misleading you if i said that i thought we could reverse this but i think there's at least a potential that a research program with a relatively small investment could understand if american heartland does turn into a dustball is there a potential to change weather patterns to allow us to engage in agriculture once again and  even if there is a small probability that this will occur investment is small and so the expected benefit of this investment is very high on my part of the country that i  because of the chaotic nature of the weather so you can't attribute any drought or any flooding event to global warming the probability of different weather events changes over time but certainly that's just part of normal weather variability but  cows do put a burden on the climate system there's the methane emissions and there's all the energy used in the production of beef and so that is one of the mitigation strategies is for people to eat less beef and maybe there could be a way for florida and kennedy space center is in my district and so i'm really big on solar and sun as well as nasa and space exploration so my remarks will be focused for the for the most part on the solar radiation management my remarks and questions but i want to suggest to my friend mr hall while you might think this is science fiction i was talking with my daughter yesterday who was telling me my son who is in china was saying that they had a massive snowstorm induced by the  state of china or the nation of china do you not believe that happened i believe that the snowstorm happened but i don't think you can prove that the cause well maybe it is science fiction i don't know but it is interesting and i suspect if they could they would think all the comments mentioned today about the necessity for research and development and international cooperation in so doing are are valid and  h great consideration that it is not impossible and maybe not even improbable that someone somewhere will ultimately take advantage of the scientific opportunity i would like to see us move forward with research and development and i appreciate the comment of dr shepherd that you know be careful what you ask for because you're going to have to wind it down eventually and as you suggested with the volcanoes you need to know where you're going next nevertheless i think in this nation we have both the brains and the capability to move forward on new frontiers as this is mitigation obviously combined with  new opportunities for better ways to produce energy and also to protect the environment kind of seem like they go without saying in fact one of the reasons that i ran for office is exactly that i think we needed to be moving in a different direction in this country with regard to protection of the environment and conservation of energy and new energy methodology so i'm pleased to be here and pleased to be on this committee i wanted to just discuss for a moment with dr caldera you discussed in your comments the simulations and small scale experiments of solar  radiation management can you discuss with the simulations and the experiments and let's start with that today there have been a number of modeling  groups climate models to simulate the effects of deflecting more sunlight away from from the earth and i believe all of the simulations that use some reasonable amount of river delta had some of the lowest river flow on record and so there are negative consequences we need to be aware of and to study more deeply in terms of experiments so far no experiments have gone on but we could think of process based experiments you know if you did put some material into the stratosphere what kind of chemical reactions would occur particles stick together and so nasa climate model with nasa computers to do our simulations and certainly nasa should be heavily involved in the climate research and also puts up satellites and we need a capability of being able to measure and let me just note that there ever ample reason for us to question whether or not things that are being suggested today are really needed because there is a reason to question whether there is a global warming considering the fact that it's gotten it has not gotten warmer for the last nine years and the arctic polar cap is now refreezing for the last two  years but that argument isn't what today's hearing is about so i will just make sure that that's on the record and in people's mind when looking at some of these suggestions and ask about some of the specific suggestions i have heard that's not correct not correct there was one study that showed that without clouds from contrails that the darnall cycle of temperature went up to the day the temperature went up the nighttime temperature went down but that was later disproven it was shown that was just part of natural weather variability so that wasn't a very let me note that every time it doesn't fit into the global warming theory it becomes natural variability but when it does that and it becomes proof that there is global warming misreading you by suggesting that you too are part of the group that believes in global warming that would like to restrict air travel or try to find ways of eliminating frequent flyer miles we know you don't want to state now we're also not going to  fly in airplanes airplanes are one of the sources of emissions use bio diesel and it recycles the field then it wouldn't be part of the problem but indeed  if we we can to some emissions of c o two we don't have to these mobile transportation sources are very hard to retrofit airplanes with cars you can of course generate electricity with wind and solar but airplanes we have to keep flying and we can we can live with a little bit of c o two emission if we deal with other sources again let me know by the way good scientists what is the percentage of the atmosphere that c o two what percentage of the atmosphere point zero zero three nine percent ok most people when i asked that question mr chairman out in the hinterland people believe it's twenty five percent and instead of this minuscule that's point zero three that is three percent of one percent of the atmosphere and there are those who realize that and in the there have been many times when that c o two content was enormously greater was that right and during that time period there were lots of animals like dinosaurs and lots of things growing in the world seem to be doing pretty good c o two concentrations were high in the past and the biosphere florist and you know even if we disagree about what the threats are climate change and i think we do that you know i don't climate change is different than what was used ten years ago which was global warming and most of us realize that's because people now are trying to hedge their bets they can have these controls whatever way to temper no i don't think that's address it do you believe that any particular geoengineering option should be removed from consideration completely if so  why you know i think we have to think in terms of a portfolio and that there are some things that are clearly more promising that there are some things that can be scaled up on the solar radiation management side there are things that could be scaled up and deployed rapidly and i those two are really particles in the stratosphere and perhaps whitening clouds over the ocean and the carbon dioxide removal side there are a bunch of land based  options to increase the storage of carbon from photosynthesis that need to be explored and also industrialise capture of c o two from the air and also spreading minerals around on the earth my own view is that other options such as ocean fertilization for example are not going to play a significant role in solving a problem that's not to say i wouldn't put money into them i would just put them down in the list of buying portfolio of investments and nobody is sure if it would work so i wouldn't and i wouldn't suggest we invest money in that idea dr sheppard i would personally exclude from consideration the idea of covering desert given the hurricane i showed that came ashore i would also suggest we be very careful about redirecting storms dr kildare i think we need to be clear what kind of research considering that if we're talking about a climate model and somebody wants to say well what would happen if we change the respective a d of a desert in a climate model that's a small scale noninvasive kind of research that might be good to do but if somebody wants to and i would say there's nothing that we should do right now we need a lot more research theoretical research with climate models to see what the benefits but also the risks would be of different suggested strategies so far everybody's done a different climate model experiment it's hard to compare the results so i'm organizing international program where all the climate modeling groups in the world do exactly the same experiment so we can see do they really get drought in certain regions for certain experiments in a very same experiment we can compare it will have a much better confidence that our models are correct just like we do for global warming experiments we have to if we're looking at the climate system being so complex and we talked about some of the international agreements what kind of things do we need in place in terms of international agreements legal steps before we could really do a large scale testing initiative dr originally i guess i would pick up something that i said in my written statement which is that nations may differ in their interest in geo engineering at least in solar benefits of solar radiation management for the u s before it embarks on any kind of international agreement or international protocol we need to gentleman from the frozen wasteland of nebraska at this time i didn't realize that was a thank you dr robot following up on your suggestion of mitigating the consumption of beef would one narrow way of looking at it there is more that causes more global warming from that narrow way of looking at it yes yes there's a lot of other considerations just talking about the impact on global warming you would advocate mitigating consumption beef as a means of accomplishing your objectives yes and how would you suggest going about that and in the interest of time i do want to leave him some time how would you suggest going about that  education i mean people you can't i don't i don't mean it's your job to decide what to tax and what not to tax obviously if you want to people to behave differently you give them incentives and disincentives for behavior but that's just one of the ways that the climate system responds to methane the response to carbon dioxide and the current way of producing a lot of those gases that's just what to do about it what the entire portfolio of mitigation should be then you give a record i don't want and i have stated before the change you know quote unquote lifestyles or whatever is not going to be too little too late i want to thank you for having this hearing the fact is after seeing what kind of proposal that supposedly was going to address climate change that came out of the political structure here i've come to a conclusion that we need to talk about mitigation of the crisis because we're not going to avoid it there's not the political will to do what it takes is not the political willing to make it legal in the united states to do what it takes to avoid climate change and so because i believe strongly that we've got to produce have the ability to produce energy that doesn't admit greenhouse gases so when shut down all those facilities that do and there's not the political will to do with that what we did with the interstate freeway system where the government went out and cited did the planning did the things so we can shut down the coal producing and the emissions and all that other stuff we're not willing to do that we're just willing to talk about how terrible this is going to be treating the crisis and trying to mitigate the adverse impact and i  appreciate that approach the question is there was a comment how we now a limited global dimming as a consideration in this issue but solar array to get radiation mitigation is global dimming on a global scale people are talking about putting a cloud in the stratosphere not down near here where we are we bring my concern is this is somebody that worked on air pollution i would assume eliminating coal use today earth would probably heat up by about another degree fahrenheit from removing the sulfur if we put just a few percent of that sulphur in the stratosphere we get the same cooling effect o global average without imitating something like ninety five or more percent with a low level pollution and so we need to think about what if china were to say for each power plant that we put sul want to take a quick to to assure mr smith that he can go home and tell us constituents at the base police will not be knocking on their door and recognise mr lu to conclude our questions mr chairman i appreciate that and that someone that enjoys or lambchop sometimes it's raised on the family farm that i live on well and home to a wonderful hunting in new mexico as well that i don't buy my colleagues to come down to new mexico to see for themselves i appreciate the emphasis with mitigation and what we're talking about here i would say that as we look to see what we have to do as a nation and what i hope that we're truly looking at here is not telling people they don't have to fly to visit their family or that they don't have to eat beef or that they don't have to do whatever it is that is being said today but that we're telling people we can be smarter about the way that we do things that we're saying well we're talking about human behavior i do not see how encouraging people to be more efficient with their home energy use or with vehicle use or being smarter about things like that  that doesn't have a positive impact on all that we're looking at again being smarter about the way we do things being able to embrace ingenuity and challenge our scientists our engineers our researchers to continue to do great things you know  when i was young i remember watching cartoons about science fiction and this whole notion that people could one day be in space building a space station not only walking on the moon but staying up there for months upon end to do research and lo and behold yesterday there were three astronauts that came to visit us here on capitol hill who came back from making improvements where there's more and more people that are living in space staying there for months upon end where in the global community we're doing some of these things that were once considered science fiction we're being smarter about the way we do things and we're doing them better and so as we look to see what is happening around the earth i know that there are many who truly believe that there still isn't a problem that this isn't something that we have to do something about and i would hope that we could get some submitted into the record from those of you that are willing to to speak to them to tell us what it is that we can share with them as well to talk about this problem that i believe that is facing us as a nation and facing us as a global community as we talk about the science and what indeed that we can employ to be more aware of what is actually occurring with the warming of the oceans or weather patterns can you talk about the importance of how we're able to include computer modeling capabilities of research laboratories of our national laboratories of our colleges and our universities around the united states that have supercomputing capabilities and have the ability to now use new data to be able to feed you the information that you need so we can indeed solve some of these problems dr kildare and my colleagues did some of the first computer model simulations of these solar radiation management methods at a department of energy national lab lawrence livermore lab and they kind of computing facilities at places like los alamos and the other labs in the system are really valuable and we're a great place to be able to do this work you know that also is as an academic a strong supporter of our academic research institutions and the computing facilities at those institutions and i think that there is potential through investing in this research area to revitalize our science education and the computing facilities that support that education not get there and right for the rest of panel we're down to less yes we would also welcome any comments to follow up mr littlejohn or anything else you have been an excellent panel this has been a a i think an important hearing the start of a longer term discussion and i think that we can say with consensus and so i will say now that the record will remain open for two weeks for additional statements from members and for answers to any follow up questions the committee might ask witnesses witnesses or excuse in the hearing is john thank you