I’m not doing syllogisms here. The heuristic might not dominate the effects but it seems like a valid heuristic.
In which larger projects has the assumption “climate models are bad, so geoengineering may overperform” been at play? I’m not familiar with any historical geoengineering projects, I’m not aware there’s been any, unless you count all of the accidental cloud seeding that occurred as a result of sulphur in cargo boat emissions, which seemed more like an unexpected success.
To my knowledge, none. This is because to my knowledge there has never been such a project.
I claim that there is no reason to expect geoengineering to be different than any other field in project outcomes. I claim further there are strong causal reasons to expect them to be the same. Large projects behave similarly regardless of whether we are talking civil infrastructure, oil & gas, energy, mining, aerospace, entertainment or defense. There is no trait of geoengineering which can differentiate it from this pattern.
This is because the problems are not driven by the field from which the project originates, but by the irreducible complexity that comes with size. Absent a specific commitment to dealing with irreducible complexity problems, we should expect budget and timeline estimates to be badly wrong.
Note this doesn’t make geoengineering a bad field or their projects worse than other projects; the thing I am pointing to is that we need separate expertise to make it work the way we need. We cannot afford to spend multiple projects worth of budget on only one project, and we really cannot afford to be surprised by a 10 year delay.
Large projects behave similarly regardless of whether we are talking civil infrastructure, oil & gas, energy, mining, aerospace...
The industrial aspect of MCB seems to be “numerous, autonomous boats spraying water”. Building a lot of adequately-reliable boats doesn’t sound like your typical megaproject, but more of an assembly-line job, something like liberty ships. Adequately developing the process of managing large numbers of drone ships might be a pre-requisite, and doubtless has other military and civil applications.
(Of course, whether MCB affects the climate as hoped is another question altogether).
As it happens, coordinating a large assembly-line project is fairly standard megaproject material. Ships, aircraft, and semiconductors are good examples.
The hitch is your example assumes a WWII-grade of funding and coordination. Do you think that can be achieved quickly enough, cheaply enough, and reliably enough to be ignored when proposing such a project?
I think a very significant (probably even dominant) fraction of this geoengineering project would not be the industrial aspect but the organisational and political aspects. Building some ships sounds very doable (although I don’t know to what extend “spraying water” and “autonomous” are assembly-line projects, do we already have industries that make ships like this?) , coordinating around letting them sail around and alter the atmosphere less so.
Maybe I could be clearer. I’m proposing that we will need to do less of it than we thought, that we will get halfway when we were supposed to be all the way, but then maybe tests will reveal that this is enough. Geoengineering is a megaproject where, yes we may underestimate the amount of time it will take to get them to the stage of completion we thought we needed, but we may also overestimate how far we needed to get.
As Greylag mentions, producing the boats will be a continuous process, it will be possible to stop halfway if that turns out to be sufficient, although I suppose most of the cost will be at the beginning so I’m not sure how significant that is here.
I think that is plausible, and I think the factors you mention are definitely a virtue of the MCB approach. A further one is that even if we were to produce too few, the ones we did produce would still result in marginal gains. I also agree that most of the cost will be at the beginning; even more so if it is done correctly.
But I point out the error in estimating how many boats will be needed is completely independent of the error in estimating the timeline and costs for setting up production; we aren’t at liberty to assume they will even approximately balance out. I think it is reasonable to infer that the longer the delay until operations start, the more boats will be needed to achieve the goal. This means the risk is lopsided primarily on the side of costs increasing; there’s no particular likelihood of things being much cheaper or faster than expected, like we expected production to start in five years and it mysteriously happened in three.
These are all solvable problems, mind; the core of my criticism is that there are specific issues that arise from the bigness of challenges alone, and that we need to account for them deliberately. This is not done in baseline cost or time estimates, and rarely done even among people who are experienced in tackling big challenges, so we aren’t at liberty to assume that we can hand it off to experienced practitioners and they will handle it.
I’m not doing syllogisms here. The heuristic might not dominate the effects but it seems like a valid heuristic.
In which larger projects has the assumption “climate models are bad, so geoengineering may overperform” been at play? I’m not familiar with any historical geoengineering projects, I’m not aware there’s been any, unless you count all of the accidental cloud seeding that occurred as a result of sulphur in cargo boat emissions, which seemed more like an unexpected success.
To my knowledge, none. This is because to my knowledge there has never been such a project.
I claim that there is no reason to expect geoengineering to be different than any other field in project outcomes. I claim further there are strong causal reasons to expect them to be the same. Large projects behave similarly regardless of whether we are talking civil infrastructure, oil & gas, energy, mining, aerospace, entertainment or defense. There is no trait of geoengineering which can differentiate it from this pattern.
This is because the problems are not driven by the field from which the project originates, but by the irreducible complexity that comes with size. Absent a specific commitment to dealing with irreducible complexity problems, we should expect budget and timeline estimates to be badly wrong.
Note this doesn’t make geoengineering a bad field or their projects worse than other projects; the thing I am pointing to is that we need separate expertise to make it work the way we need. We cannot afford to spend multiple projects worth of budget on only one project, and we really cannot afford to be surprised by a 10 year delay.
The industrial aspect of MCB seems to be “numerous, autonomous boats spraying water”. Building a lot of adequately-reliable boats doesn’t sound like your typical megaproject, but more of an assembly-line job, something like liberty ships. Adequately developing the process of managing large numbers of drone ships might be a pre-requisite, and doubtless has other military and civil applications.
(Of course, whether MCB affects the climate as hoped is another question altogether).
As it happens, coordinating a large assembly-line project is fairly standard megaproject material. Ships, aircraft, and semiconductors are good examples.
The hitch is your example assumes a WWII-grade of funding and coordination. Do you think that can be achieved quickly enough, cheaply enough, and reliably enough to be ignored when proposing such a project?
I think a very significant (probably even dominant) fraction of this geoengineering project would not be the industrial aspect but the organisational and political aspects. Building some ships sounds very doable (although I don’t know to what extend “spraying water” and “autonomous” are assembly-line projects, do we already have industries that make ships like this?) , coordinating around letting them sail around and alter the atmosphere less so.
Maybe I could be clearer. I’m proposing that we will need to do less of it than we thought, that we will get halfway when we were supposed to be all the way, but then maybe tests will reveal that this is enough. Geoengineering is a megaproject where, yes we may underestimate the amount of time it will take to get them to the stage of completion we thought we needed, but we may also overestimate how far we needed to get.
As Greylag mentions, producing the boats will be a continuous process, it will be possible to stop halfway if that turns out to be sufficient, although I suppose most of the cost will be at the beginning so I’m not sure how significant that is here.
I think that is plausible, and I think the factors you mention are definitely a virtue of the MCB approach. A further one is that even if we were to produce too few, the ones we did produce would still result in marginal gains. I also agree that most of the cost will be at the beginning; even more so if it is done correctly.
But I point out the error in estimating how many boats will be needed is completely independent of the error in estimating the timeline and costs for setting up production; we aren’t at liberty to assume they will even approximately balance out. I think it is reasonable to infer that the longer the delay until operations start, the more boats will be needed to achieve the goal. This means the risk is lopsided primarily on the side of costs increasing; there’s no particular likelihood of things being much cheaper or faster than expected, like we expected production to start in five years and it mysteriously happened in three.
These are all solvable problems, mind; the core of my criticism is that there are specific issues that arise from the bigness of challenges alone, and that we need to account for them deliberately. This is not done in baseline cost or time estimates, and rarely done even among people who are experienced in tackling big challenges, so we aren’t at liberty to assume that we can hand it off to experienced practitioners and they will handle it.