Our ancestors imagined the gods as beings who controlled the forces of nature. Zeus hurled the thunderbolts. Aeolus ruled the winds. Even Yahweh launched his career as a volcano god. They used their powers to keep human beings in line, and didn't hesitate to wipe us out when we didn't behave.
No wonder we have always dreamed of turning the tables. Ever since Prometheus stole fire from the gods, harnessing the forces of nature has been a human obsession.
Is geoengineering the chance to finally fulfill our destiny?
At a recent breakfast hosted by the Environmental Defense Fund, EDF Chief Scientist Steve Hamburg's amiable bearing and reassuringly calm voice tended to moderate the effect of what sounded like the plot lines for a sci-fi flick. As a certain gleam in his eye began to betray his enthusiasm, Dr. Hamburg shared various schemes concocted by scientists who believe that we can engineer the climate to reverse global warming. For example, we could pour iron particles into the ocean in the hopes of growing plankton that sucks up carbon. Or we could put gigantic reflectors in the sky to bounce the sun's rays away from Earth. A plan to blast sulfur particles into the clouds to turn down the global thermostat won several nods of approval.
The presentation swept me back to the early 80s, the heady days of daytime soap General Hospital's "Ice Princess" storyline, when would-be world dominator Mikkos Cassadine uses weather control technology to blackmail global leaders into accepting his new world order. Thankfully, the mesmerizing Luke Spencer foiled the plot. But the show tapped into a potent collective fear that we could be undone by an enemy bent on ecoterrorism. In the days of the Cold War, rumors circulated of a Russian weather machine that could conjure catastrophic storms.
The Cold War is over, but the use of climate technology for nefarious purposes has resurfaced in the effort to save the planet from ourselves.
Geoengineering schemes are highly seductive. Somewhere inside, we know how badly we have effed up the climate. We know this, but we don't fancy cutting into our lifestyles in order to save our beloved blue marble. Dr. Hamburg described geoengineering plans as an innocuous-sounding "bridge" to help us slow climate change that was accelerating beyond our means to cope. That didn't prevent a number of nasty what ifs from swirling through my mind.
What if something went wrong?
What if whoever turned down the temp decided to stop?
What if murderous minds turned to climate warfare?
What kinds of laws, treaties, or global systems have a prayer at monitoring these activities?
What if human beings have lost their minds?
Geoengineering technologies appeal most of all to our hubris. We are capitalists, damnit. Surely we can innovate and technologize our way out of this mess. Reigning in the rapacity of our consumption and managing the magnitude of our reproduction do not speak to our desire to master the universe. Putting giant mirrors into space does.
Unfortunately, as is the case for nuclear technology, there is no room for error. A tiny screw-up could destroy Life as We Know It. When asked about that little concern, Dr. Hamburg replied good-naturedly. "These are important questions. We're just at the beginning stages. We don't pretend to know the answers yet."
Gee, that's comforting. I have a sinking feeling that geoengineering will follow what I call Murphy's Law of Unintended Consequences: Whatever can go wrong, will, and it's probably something you didn't think of. Beyond the obvious potential for deliberate misuse, we have no way of knowing what delicate ecological systems could be sent out of balance by our well-intended tinkering.
But savvy business speculators aren't worried about all that. They are sensing a bonanza. And politicians delight in schemes that protect them from telling constituents anything they don't want to hear, like, 'take the bus.'
The desire to minimize the damage to Earth that our human activities have caused troubles our hearts. We don't know whether we should mitigate that damage, adapt to the change, or just wring our hands and wait for Doomsday. But geoengineering may unleash a Pandora's box of potential problems even scarier that what it's supposed to solve. I suspect that we underestimate the complexity of nature and overestimate our ability to predict the consequences of our actions.
Which is partly what got us into this mess in the first place.
Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.
Here is what Climate Code Red says:
--Human emissions have so far produced a global average temperature increase of 0.8 degree C.
--There is another 0.6 degree C. to come due to "thermal inertia", or lags in the system, taking the total long-term global warming induced by human emissions so far to 1.4 degree C.
--If human total emissions continue as they are to 2030 (and don't increase 60% as projected) this would likely add more than 0.4 degrees C. to the system in the next two decades, taking the long-term effect by 2030 to at least 1.7 degrees C. (A 0.3 degree C. increase is predicted for the period 2004-2014 alone by Smith, Cusack et al, 2007).
--Then add the 0.3 degree C. albedo flip effect from the now imminent loss of the Arctic sea ice, and the rise in the system by 2030 is at least 2 degree. C, assuming very optimistically that emissions don't increase at all above their present annual rate! When we consider the potential permafrost releases and the effect of carbon sinks losing capacity, we are on the road to a hellish future, not for what we will do, but WHAT WE HAVE ALREADY DONE.
This is basically the strategy employed by Joel Satalin at Polyface Farm. He divides his pasture into one-acre blocks using portable electric fencing to move the cattle onto fresh blocks of pasture every evening. The laying hens follow the cattle by three days in portable hen houses to feed on the dung beetle larvae growing in the cow patties and lay down more droppings. Then the grazed and fertilized block is allowed to regrow to the optimal state before the cycle repeats.
Management-intensive grazing is extremely efficient at sequestering carbon in soil organic matter. One can imagine that by using solar-powered robots to move the electric fencing and hen houses around the pasture, this scheme can be implemented on a very large scale across the Great Plains with minimal human labor to collect the eggs, spent hens, and market-weight cattle.
The land can be left in permanent pasture under this management scheme, or we could use the Argentine pasture-crop rotation, where the land is in semi-permanent pasture for 5-10 years and then plowed for annual crops for 5-10 years before returning to pasture.
This isn't just a fantastic way to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, it's also a very smart way to conduct sustainable agriculture, and it's a proven technique.
The "totality constraint" shows how ludicrous the increased photosynthesis idea is, even if it were to be implemented ACTIVELY, not just passively.
"stabilizing the atmospheric CO2 concentration would require gathering up the equivalent of 1 to 2 times the world’s existing above ground vegetation and putting it down abandoned oil wells or deep in the ocean. While CO2 fertilization could help to increase above ground vegetation a bit, storing more than a few tens of percent of the existing carbon would be quite surprising, and this is likely to be more like a few percent of global carbon emissions projected for the 21st century."
www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/11/co_2-fertilization/
Estimates from another study suggest that global reforestation could only sequester maybe 6 to 12 years worth of CO2 emissions over the 30 year period required to grow an ultra-fast growth forest. So, fast growing euphorbia might uptake 20-40% of emitted CO2 over their 30 years growth period, at best. Then what? Where's there further additional land, not taken from agriculture or cities?
www.springerlink.com/content/n3v122106252535q/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforestation#cite_note-4
In short, enhanced photosynthesis is NOT REMOTELY DOABLE as a global warming mitigator.
And of course, this is not going to happen. Because what's really happening instead is exactly the opposite: extremely rapid anthropogenic deforestation.
www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/01/forests.conservation
"Global deforestation sharply accelerated around 1852.[75][76] It has been estimated that about half of the Earth's mature tropical forests—between 7.5 million and 8 million km2 (2.9 million to 3 million sq mi) of the original 15 million to 16 million km2 (5.8 million to 6.2 million sq mi) that until 1947 covered the planet[77]—have now been cleared.[78][79] Some scientists have predicted that unless significant measures (such as seeking out and protecting old growth forests that have not been disturbed) are taken on a worldwide basis, by 2030 there will only be ten percent remaining,[75][78] with another ten percent in a degraded condition.[75] 80% will have been lost, and with them hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable species.[75]"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation#cite_ref-Wilson_74-1
Lynne Farramore is absolutely right to be skeptical. The unintended consequences of any such effort are more likely to backfire than accomplish their intended purpose. Such proposals are likely to increase, however, since they offer a (false) hope of a "technological fix" for climate change deniers to latch onto. Deep down the deniers who aren't scientific illiterates know they need a "Plan B" for when their denial no longer works (they plan to be rich from whatever denial scam they're running by then and off to Scandinavia or Saskatchewan).
The last thing they and their less intelligent useful dupes are willing to do is reduce their energy waste, so they'll continue the fantasy that there is nothing to be concerned about any way they can. Global warming denial takes a lot of hubris, and geoengineering as a fix fits right into such mentalities.