GEOENGINEERING TO THE RESCUE?

It’s Time to Cool the Planet; Cutting greenhouse gases is no longer enough to deal with global warming, says Jamais Cascio. He argues that we also have to do something more direct—and risky.
Jaimais Cascio, June 15, 2009 (Wall Street Journal)

SUMMARY
Futurist and Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Senior Fellow Jamais Cascio made an interesting case for a reconsideration of geoengineering. It isn’t a solution to global climate change, it’s a bridging strategy. It buys time.

First, what is geoengineering? It is the manipulation of the environment or, in essence, messing with the way the world works to alter the climate. It’s what civilization has been inadvertently doing for the last 2 centuries, but with intention.

Cascio wisely acknowleged the most important potential danger of geoengineering, unintended consequences. He also listed foreseeable complications but said the study of geoengineering is urgent for one crucial reason: The people and institutions whose responsibility it has been to confront and respond to global climate change have so far utterly failed. Geoengineering could buy them some time.

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There are, according Cascio, two forms of geoengineering: (1) Temperature management and (2) Carbon management. Blocking the amount of sun hitting the earth is temperature management. Current efforts to reduce greenhouse gases (GhGs) being added to the atmosphere is a slow-acting kind of carbon management. The geoengineering method of carbon management is to subtract carbon dioxide (CO2).

Most students of geoengineering seem to think there are temperature management methods that have minimal costs and consequences and worthwhile impacts.

There are benefits and risks associated with geoengineering. Costs, environmental disruptions, political impacts and – worst of all – the aforementioned unintended and unforeseen consequences. And if a geoengineering method should be found to have significant enough long-term consequences to require its withdrawal, climate change would likely rush back with a vengeance. First, there would be more impacts than when the geoengineering was introduced and then climate change would proceed to unfold as if there never had been any interruption.

Therefore, the introduction of geoengineering is not a substitution for GhG reductions but must be accompanied by them. So here is the question: Why not just make the GhG cuts? Or to put a different way: Is it too late to just attack GhGs? Are the risks of geoengineering now unavoidably necessary?

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Cascio believes that is true: Not doing both (geoengineering and GhG reduction) would be dangerous.

His prescription is much like a doctor’s prescription: (1) pain relief-, muscle relaxation- and anti-inflammatory medications (geoengineering) as well as (2) rehabilitative physical therapy (GhG reductions in the form of New Energy and Energy Efficiency).

To minimize the possibility of the medication’s having side effects, it is urgent, according to Cascio, to begin funding research into and development of geoengineering methods.

Geoengineering would, he suggested, be most effective if deployed around the poles. Lowering temperatures there could slow the melting of the polar ice caps and temporarily postpone a massive release of methane frozen in arctic tundra that otherwise is expected to have a disasterous quickening effect on climate change.

There’s one small flaw in the plan: It calls for geoengineering to be developed in a timely and prudent way - by the same people and institutions who have failed to respond in a timely and prudent way to global climate change.

Mark Twain said the definition of a fool is somebody who redoubles his efforts in the wrong direction.

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COMMENTARY
Even its advocates admit geoengineering is not a solution to global climate change. The only solution is the transition to an emissions-free way of life. Geoengineering is, they admit, extremely risky and will almost certainly have problematic unforeseen and unintended consequences.

The best argument in favor of undertaking the costs and risks of geoengineering is that it will buy time. It will delay the “tipping point” at which the poles melt and a massive release of methane trapped beneath arctic tundra is released, accelerating all the changes leading to disaster.

The theory is that geoengineering will buy the time needed for societies and economies to change. It could have exactly the opposite effect. It could provide yet another excuse for denial and recalcitrance.

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Temperature management is said to be the more likely geoengineering choice because it would produce faster results. Carbon management presents the same conundrum as GhG-created climate change and GhG-reduction: Demonstrable results could take decades.

Some forms of temperature management are impractical. Vast arrays of mirrors in the desert would do too much harm to the desert. It would be impossible to launch enough mirrors into space – it would require the launch of a square mile of mirrors hourly – to have an impact.

What is deemed practical is the injection of tons of solid sulfur dioxide particles into the stratosphere, where they would become sulfates that would reflect sunlight before it reached the earth. Another possibility is pumping seawater into the lower atmosphere to create a heavier cloud cover.

The use of sulfates in the upper atmosphere is modeled on the effects of huge volcanic eruptions. Their smoke, it has been shown, lowers the earth’s temperature. Sulfates could be carrried to the upper atmosphere by high-altitude balloons, jet aircraft and/or artillery barrages. The sulfates would eventually cycle out of the atmosphere but 2-to-10 megatons could be replenished annually.

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At a few billion dollars a year, the sulfate project would be relatively cheap compared to the costs of a GhG reduction regime. Because it mimics the effects of volcanic eruptions, some impacts – for better and worse – can be predicted: (1) Damage to the ozone resulting in more skin cancers and harms to plants and animals, (2) Scattering of sunlight and diminshed solar energy potential (compromising the most viable large-scale New Energy solution there is), and (3) disruption of monsoonal rain and other weather cycles, resulting in exactly the kinds of population impacts as climate change.

Creating more clouds would have fewer side effects and could even be used to target some climate change-associated drought but also has some negatives. (1) Because it is aimed at the lower atmosphere, it wouldn’t be as effective without a lot more of it, increasing the expense and the side effects. (2) Upping the volume of the cloud cover changes would produce the same disruptions, perhaps worse disruptions, in weather patterns and the same accentuation of climate change population impacts.

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Then there are the diplomats, the lawyers, the soldiers and the terrorists. The use of geoengineering would raise a lot of questions. Like who decides when and where and how much to use it? What’s the right temperature? What’s the right technology? Who gets the benefits? Who pays the price? Who decides when to turn it off?

For a world diplomatic community currently struggling over the details of a successor agreement to the Kyoto treaty, that’s a lot to settle.

Yet it doesn’t even begin to get at the questions of liability. Who gets blamed if things go wrong in one place but not another? Who gets sued? Those questions ought to keep the lawyers busy while the diplomats bicker.

The military will want to have a say in anything that can have a global impact, but which country's military? Could this be a NATO operation like Kosovo? Or like Afghanistan? How about a coalition of the willing? For a world that has been impotent at instituting a nuclear pact, this will be pretty heady stuff.

Finally, there are the terrorists. But let’s not even go there. Just give the geoengineering plans to Kim Jong Il and buy some ocean front property in Saskatchewan.

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QUOTES
- Cascio: “Many of us who have been watching this subject closely have gone from being skeptics to advocates. Very reluctant advocates, to be sure, but advocates nonetheless.
What has changed? Quite simply, as the effects of global warming have worsened, policy makers have failed to meet the challenge. As a result, if we want to avoid an unprecedented global catastrophe, we may have no other choice but to reduce the impact of global warning, alongside focusing on the factors that are causing it in the first place.”
- Cascio: “…[W]hy would I consider myself an advocate of geoengineering, no matter how reluctant? Because I believe the alternative would be worse…The global institutions we rely on to deal with a problem like climate change seem unable to look past short-term roadblocks and regional interests. At the same time, climate scientists are shouting louder than ever about the speed and intensity of environmental changes coming from global warming…[A]lthough we know what to do to stop global warming, we’re running out of time to do it and show no interest in moving faster. So here’s where geoengineering steps in: It gives us time to act…”

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- Cascio: “Still, we can’t forget: Geoengineering is not a solution for global warming. It would simply hold temperatures down temporarily, doing nothing about the causes of climate change, let alone ocean acidification and other symptoms of a carbon overdose. We can’t let ourselves slip back into business-as-usual complacency, because we’d simply be setting ourselves up for a far greater disaster down the road…Our overall goal must remain the reduction and then elimination of greenhouse-gas emissions as swiftly as humanly possible. This will require feats of political will and courage around the world. What geoengineering offers us is the time to make it happen.”