http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-earth-masters-playing-god/
Book Review: Earth Masters: Playing God with the Climate by Clive Hamilton Author: Maggie Ball Published: Feb 24, 2013 at 3:56 Despite all the best efforts of those that have taken a political stance as “climate deniers,” it has been generally recognized by scientific communities around the world that the climate system is warming due to greenhouse gases produced through human activities.We are rapidly entering the Anthropocene era: a new geological epoch that takes its cue from the activities of humans. This has created a major, species-threatening problem that requires the kind of urgent governmental response that doesn’t appear to be happening on anything like the scale necessary.Into what looks to be a hopeless collective failure to act, comes a series of proposed solutions presented under the banner of climate or geoengineering. At first glance, geoengineering solutions seem to be an easy way out of the environmental crisis, and the range of possible solutions have been attracting significant funding from oil companies like ExxonMobile, billionaires like Richard Branson and Bill Gates, and governmental research organisations like Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.However, our understanding of the total impact of these technologies is embryonic, and there is no way to safely test most of them without full scale deployment.Clive Hamilton is a member of the Board of the Climate Change Authority of the Australian Government, as well as Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, and the Vice-Chancellor's Chair in Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University, and he's well placed to explore both the potential technological and ethical issues inherent in the geoengineering technologies presented in Earth Masters. Hamilton provides a clearly presented picture of the context into which geoengineering has arrived, the technology itself, and the ethical issues that our rapid move towards acceptance has created. Earth Masters covers the processes involved in the two most well-known and “viable” geoengineering techniques: those that aim at removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and depositing it elsewhere, and solar radiation management, a technique designed to cool the planet by reflecting radiation into space. Although many of the processes that fall under these headings are complex, both in terms of the processes involved and in terms of the potential impacts and how we can trace them, Hamilton’s descriptions are clear and easy to follow for the non-scientist.For the carbon removal methods, Hamilton describes ocean iron fertilisation and liming as well as land-based storage in trees, crops, agricultural wastes, soil, and algae. My one gripe about the book is that there is very little information on mineral carbonation, a relatively safe and promising process that is dismissed later in the book, grouped with other carbon capture and storage processes as having presented a “false promise”. "Soft" geoengineering options are not necessarily either/or solutions like ocean fertilisation or solar management techniques, but they are important tools that might be able to be used along with abatement techniques and even though they don't quite fit the thesis of Earth Masters, it would have been useful, I think, to see these options presented in less stark terms. Continued on the next page -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
