From today's /New York Times/:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/business/economy/geoengineering-climate-change.html
To Curb Global Warming, Science Fiction May Become Fact, by Eduardo Porter
Remember “Snowpiercer”?
In the delirious sci-fi thriller by the Korean director Bong Joon-ho, an
attempt to engineer the climate and stop global
warming goes horribly wrong. The planet freezes. Only the passengers on
a train endlessly circumnavigating the globe survive.
Those in first class eat sushi and quaff wine. People in steerage eat
cockroach protein bars.
Scientists must start looking into this. Seriously.
News about the climate has become alarming over the last few months. In
December, startled scientists revealed that
temperatures in some parts of the Arctic had spiked more than 35 degrees
Fahrenheit above their historical averages. In
March, others reported that sea ice in the Arctic had dropped to its
lowest level on record. A warming ocean has already killed
large chunks of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
Let’s get real. The odds that these processes could be slowed, let alone
stopped, by deploying more solar panels and wind
turbines seemed unrealistic even before President Trump’s election. It
is even less likely now that Mr. Trump has gone to work
undermining President Barack Obama’s strategy to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions.
That is where engineering the climate comes in. Last month, scholars
from the physical and social sciences who are
interested in climate change gathered in Washington to discuss
approaches like cooling the planet by shooting aerosols into
the stratosphere or whitening clouds to reflect sunlight back into
space, which may prove indispensable to prevent the
disastrous consequences of warming.
Aerosols could be loaded into military jets, to be sprayed into the
atmosphere at high altitude. Clouds at sea could be made
more reflective by spraying them with a fine saline mist, drawn from the
ocean.
The world’s immediate priority may be to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
to meet and hopefully exceed the promises
made at the climate summit meeting in Paris in December 2015. But as
Janos Pasztor, who heads the Carnegie Climate
Geoengineering Governance Initiative, told me, “The reality is that we
may need more tools even if we achieve these goals.”
The carbon dioxide that humanity has pumped into the atmosphere is
already producing faster, deeper changes to the
world’s climate and ecosystems than were expected not long ago. Barring
some technology that could pull it out at a reasonable
cost — a long shot for the foreseeable future, according to many
scientists — it will stay there for a long time, warming the
atmosphere further for decades to come.
The world is not cutting emissions fast enough to prevent global
temperatures from spiking into dangerous territory,
slashing crop yields and decimating food production in many parts of the
world, as well as flooding coastal cities while
parching large swaths of the globe, killing perhaps millions of mostly
poor people from heat stress alone.
Solving the climate imperative will require cutting greenhouse gas
emissions down to zero, ideally in this century, and
probably sucking some out. But solar geoengineering could prove a
critical complement to mitigation, giving humanity time to
develop the political will and the technologies to achieve the needed
decarbonization.
With Mr. Trump pushing the United States, the world’s second-largest
emitter after China, away from its mitigation
commitments, geoengineering looks even more compelling.
“If the United States starts going backwards or not going forward fast
enough in terms of emissions reductions, then more
and more people will start talking about these options,” said Mr.
Pasztor, a former United Nations assistant secretary general
on climate change.
While many of the scholars gathered in Washington expressed misgivings
about deploying geoengineering technologies,
there was a near-universal consensus on the need to invest more in
research — not only into the power to cool the atmosphere
but also into the potential side effects on the atmosphere’s chemistry
and on weather patterns in different world regions.
While it is known that solar radiation management can cool the
atmosphere, fears that field research would look too much
like deployment have so far limited research pretty much to computer
modeling of its effects and small-scale experiments in
the lab.
Critically, the academics noted, the research agenda must include an
open, international debate about the governance
structures necessary to deploy a technology that, at a stroke, would
affect every society and natural system in the world. In
other words, geoengineering needs to be addressed not as science
fiction, but as a potential part of the future just a few decades
down the road.
“Today it is still a taboo, but it is a taboo that is crumbling,” said
David Keith, a noted Harvard physicist who was an
organizer of the conclave.
Arguments against geoengineering are in some ways akin to those made
against genetically modified organisms and
so-called Frankenfood. It amounts to messing with nature. But there are
more practical causes for concern about the
deployment of such a radical technology. How would it affect the ozone
in the stratosphere? How would it change patterns of
precipitation?
Moreover, how could the world agree on the deployment of a technology
that will have different impacts on different
countries? How could the world balance the global benefit of a cooling
atmosphere against a huge disruption of the monsoon
on the Indian subcontinent? Who would make the call? Would the United
States agree to this kind of thing if it brought
drought to the Midwest? Would Russia let it happen if it froze over its
northern ports?
Geoengineering would be cheap enough that even a middle-income country
could deploy it unilaterally. Some scientists
have estimated that solar radiation management could cool the earth
quickly for as little as $5 billion per year or so. What if
the Trump administration decided to focus American efforts to combat
climate change on geoengineering alone?
That wouldn’t work, in the end. If greenhouse gases were not removed
from the atmosphere, the world would heat up in a
snap as soon as the aerosol injections were turned off. Still, the
temptation to combat climate change on the cheap while
continuing to exploit fossil fuels could be hard to resist for a
president who promised to revive coal and has shown little
interest in global diplomacy.
As Scott Barrett, an environmental economist from Columbia University
who was at the meeting in Washington, noted,
“The biggest challenge posed by geoengineering is unlikely to be
technical, but rather involve the way we govern the use of this
unprecedented technology.”
These ethical considerations should be taken into account in any
research program into managing the rays of the sun.
Perhaps researchers should refrain from taking money from an American
administration that denies climate science, to avoid
delegitimizing the technology in the eyes of the rest of the world.
People should keep in mind the warning by Alan Robock, a Rutgers
University climatologist, who argued that the worst
case from the deployment of geoengineering technologies might be nuclear
war.
But it would be a mistake to halt research into this new technological
tool. Geoengineering might ultimately prove to be a
bad idea for a variety of reasons. But only further research can tell us
that.
The best way to think of the options ahead is as offering a balance of
risks. On one plate sit whatever pitfalls
geoengineering might bring. They might be preferable to the prospect of
radical climate change. Thinking in terms of delirious
sci-fi fantasies, the trade-off won’t necessarily be between cockroach
protein bars and some happy future of cheap, renewable
energy. It is more likely to pit cockroach treats against some
dystopian, broiling world.
A version of this article appears in print on April 5, 2017, on Page B1
of the New York edition with the headline: Planet-Cooling Technology May
Be Earth’s Only Hope.
--
Alan
Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor
Editor, Reviews of Geophysics
Department of Environmental Sciences Phone: +1-848-932-5751
Rutgers University Fax: +1-732-932-8644
14 College Farm Road E-mail: [email protected]
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551 USA http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock
☮ http://twitter.com/AlanRobock
Watch my 18 min TEDx talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsrEk1oZ-54
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