Geoengineering: Time to Get Serious?

Imagine a fleet of 1,500 remote-controlled, wind-powered ships, sailing the world's oceans, spewing salt water into the air to whiten clouds, so they block more of the sun and cool an overheating planet.

Or think of trillions of tiny mirrors, sent into orbit, to reflect the sun's rays. Or artificial trees that suck a ton of carbon a day out of the atmosphere. Or iron filings, sprinkled on seas, to rapidly grow phytoplankton, which absorb CO2.

These emergency strategies for curbing global warming aren't crazy schemes. Well, maybe they are crazy schemes. But serious people say we should start taking them seriously, as a last-ditch option to deal with the threat of catastrophic climate disruptions.

The latest to do so is David G. Victor, a professor of law at Stanford who directs a program on energy and sustainable development at the university. With four academic colleagues -- Victor M. Granger, Jay Apt, John Steinbruner and Katherine Ricke -- Victor has written an essay in Foreign Affairs called "The Geoengineering Option" that calls for more scientific research and policy debate about geoengineering.

I ask him by phone why he became interested in geoengineering which, by his own account, is on fringe of climate science and politics.

"You can't help but look at the politics and the science of global warming today without becoming extremely pessimistic," Victor says.

"Barely a month goes by without a new report saying that warming is happening faster," he goes on. "It's a really worrisome picture."

But doesn't the debate that's beginning in Washington over climate-change regulation give him reason for hope?

"The Obama proposals are step in the right direction and they're better than what we were doing before which was, roughly, nothing," he replies. But as currently proposed, the cap-and-trade system to regulate greenhouse gases doesn't go far enough to reduce the use of fossil fuels and promote renewable energy. Gasoline prices, for example, would rise an estimated 15 cents a gallon under the plan, not enough to matter.

And so, the argument goes, when measured against current efforts to mitigate climate change -- which, in truth, require the top-to-bottom transformation of the global energy economy, despite a mostly-apathetic populace and over the objections of deeply entrenched industries -- geoengineering doesn't look so crazy.

It's not just Victor and his colleagues who say we should reconsider geoengineering.. Last fall, Scientific American published a long analysis of the science and politics of geoengineering, with a focus on pumping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, as volcanoes do. Popular Mechanics described "Five Big Plans to Stop Global Warming," which generated a lot of buzz on the web. Treehugger used the illustration below to consider the topic back in 2007.

Yet, as Victor and his colleagues point out in Foreign Affairs, there's a scarcity of scientific research into the topic:

Despite years of speculation and vague talk, peer-reviewed research on geoengineering is remarkably scarce. Nearly the entire community of geoengineering scientists could fit comfortably in a single university seminar room, and the entire scientific literature on the subject could be read during the course of a transatlantic flight. Geoengineering continues to be considered a fringe topic.

Partly that's because environmentalists have been loathe to talk about geoengineering, for fear that people will think there's a magic bullet out there that will enable them to avoid hard choices about the costs of moving away from fossil fuels and towards for renewable power.

It's also because we have come to understand the limits of science and engineering, thanks to such events as Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the space shuttle Challenger disaster. Tinkering with the earth's climate is no trivial matter. According to Victor and his co-authors, altering the earth's albedo -- that's a term to describe the extent to which an object reflects light from the sun -- would also affect

atmospheric circulation, rainfall and other aspects of the hydrologic cycle...Such changes could increase the risk of major droughts in some regions and have a major impact on agriculture and the supply of fresh water.

"This scares the hell out of people, and for good reason," Victor says.

The thing is, any nation fearing the impact of climate change could, in theory, begin engineering the planet without consulting the rest of us. Who's going to stop it? The UN? Even in the U.S., it's not clear who's responsible for geoengineering. NASA? The Pentagon? The National Science Foundation? Ira Flatow?

"It doesn't logically fit in any one place in government," Victor says.

Some companies think there are profits to be made from geoengineering. Last year, I wrote a column ("Dumping Iron") about Climos, a company that hopes to deploy ocean iron fertilization to generate revenues from carbon offsets.

What's needed, Victor tells me, is government-backed research carried out by academic scientists. "The science needs to be done in a way that is open and transparent and involves serious review and scrutiny," he says. At the same time, governments need to begin talking about how to manage and regulate geoengineering. As Victor and his co-authors put it:

"Politicians must take geoengineering seriously because it is cheap, easy and takes only one government with sufficient hubris or desperation to set it into motion."

 

 

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Comments

[JScott]

I certainly hope the will investigate the unintended consequences of some of the schemes. Seems like when humans do a little tinkering with the planet like this the results are usually disastrous.
One can only see what we do when we burn lotsa fossil fuels.

How bout researching ways to reduce human population growth that would do better than any of these schemes and unless it's done none of these schemes will work.

[tjfdownsouth]

Lets just push the planet a little farther away from the sun I seen it done in a movie once.

[dctackett]

It seems as though geoengineering is going to happen, we are just in the early phases... though our government, economic and educational systems must change to facilitate such enormous projects.

[HeevenSteven]

" What's needed, Victor tells me, is government-backed research carried out by academic scientists. "The science needs to be done in a way that is open and transparent and involves serious review and scrutiny," he says. "

That's exactly the process used to discover and study Anthropogenic Climate Change, but we still have 40% of our population not buying it due to the powerful, wealthy, political and economic interests obstructing it. Our population is stunningly ignorant about that very process, therefore pseudoscience and conspiracy theories dominate. ( See ZellaBees Chemtrails ).

[oakley9]

Zellabee's comment is not a theory. I have witnessed these aerosols being sprayed almost daily where Iive. I agree we need to disclose what is actually being used in the spraying and what the exact purpose is., but one has to wonder why the government totally denies such a project. It can only mean that whatever is being sprayed is not good for the masses.

[HeevenSteven]

You witnessed it?? WOW! Do you have mass spectrometer glasses?? Gas Chromatography binoculars?? That's amazing!

We can't even torture people halfway around the world without the pictures winding up all over the internet; how do you keep a mass aerial spraying campaign over the U.S. a secret??

Put away the x-files DVD's and get out into the real world.

[ZellaBee]

Chemtrails, (aerosols) as illustrated above in your picture, are already being sprayed in the earth's atmosphere in huge quantities all over the world, and are causing respiratory problems, disease, and who knows what else. Further pollution our air and water is not a solution. We need to solve the problem from the source, "the polluters". The earth like a wound can heal itself, if only we would allow it. We should never add fuel to the fire. The bee population is already suffering/­disappeari­ng and this will have enormous consequences on our food supply, if we don't address the real causes.
We also need disclosure on what chemicals and poisons are is being sprayed from these planes.

[valkyrie607]

Augh

The problems we face are systemic. Tools such as these will emphatically not help us solve our problems until we undertake systematic overhaul of our government and finances. It's that basic. Now, maybe we need to use these tools in the future. But in my opinion they'll be nothing more than bandaids until Westerners finally, fully accept that the solution to almost all of our environmental problems is simple and obvious: consume less stuff.

This solution, however, is a problem under the rubric of the financial system. Which is why I say we need a new financial system.