[geo] Adam Corner – On geoengineering
http://www.aeonmagazine.com/nature-and-cosmos/adam-corner-geoengineering-climate-change/ Blue sky thinking Geoengineers are would-be deities who dream of mastering the heavens. But are humans the ones who are out of control? by Adam Corner - a research associate in psychology at Cardiff University. His latest book is Promoting Sustainable Behaviour: A Practical Guide to What Works (2012). At a small conference in Germany last May, I found myself chuckling at the inability of the meeting organisers to control the room’s electronic blinds. It’s always fun when automated technology gets the better of its human masters, but this particular malfunction had a surreal pertinence. Here was a room full of geoengineering experts, debating technologies to control the climate, all the while failing to keep the early summer sun’s rays away from their PowerPoint presentations. As the blinds clicked and whirred in the background, opening and closing at will, I asked myself: are we really ready to take control of the global thermostat?Geoengineering, the idea of using large-scale technologies to manipulate the Earth’s temperature in response to climate change, sounds like the premise of a science fiction novel. Nevertheless, it is migrating to the infinitely more unsettling realm of science policy. The notion of a direct intervention in the climate system — by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or reflecting a small amount of sunlight back out into space — is slowly gaining currency as a ‘Plan B’. The political subtext for all this is the desperation that now permeates behind-the-scenes discourse about climate change. Despite decades of rhetoric about saving the planet, and determined but mostly ineffectual campaigns from civil society, global emissions of carbon dioxide continue to rise.Officially, climate policy is all about energy efficiency, renewables and nuclear power. Officially, the target of keeping global temperatures within two degrees of the pre-industrial revolution average is still in our sights. But the voices whispering that we might have left it too late are no longer automatically dismissed as heretical. Wouldn’t it be better, they ask, to have at least considered some other options — in case things get really bad?This is the context in which various scary, implausible or simply bizarre proposals are being put on the table. They range from the relatively mundane (the planting of forests on a grand scale), to the crazy but conceivable (a carbon dioxide removal industry, to capture our emissions and bury them underground), to the barely believable (injecting millions of tiny reflective particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight). In fact, the group of technologies awkwardly yoked together under the label ‘geoengineering’ have very little in common beyond their stated purpose: to keep the dangerous effects of climate change at bay.Monkeying around with the Earth’s systems at a planetary scale obviously presents a number of unknown — and perhaps unknowable — dangers. How might other ecosystems be affected if we start injecting reflective particles into space? What would happen if the carbon dioxide we stored underground were to escape? What if the cure of engineering the climate is worse than the disease? But I think that it is too soon to get worked up about the risks posed by any individual technology. The vast majority of geoengineering ideas will never get off the drawing board. Right now, we should be asking more fundamental questions.Here is a project that elevates engineers and their political masters to the status of benevolent deitiesGeoengineering differs from other approaches to tackling climate change not in the technologies it seeks to deploy but in the assumptions it makes about how we relate to the natural world. Its essence is the idea that it is feasible to control the Earth’s climate. It is a philosophy, then — a philosophy that characterises the problem of climate change as something ‘solvable’ by engineering, rather than a social phenomenon emerging from politics and culture.Thinking about it in this way — as a set of assumptions about how to tackle climate change rather than a set of technologies — makes it easier to see why the ethical issues embedded in the concept are trickier than any scientific disputes about the side effects of this or that piece of machinery. Here is a project that elevates engineers and their political masters to the status of benevolent deities; a project that requires us to manage a suite of world-shaping technologies over the long haul. Do we have either the desire or the capacity to do that? As the late American climate scientist Stephen Schneider wrote in 2008: ‘Just imagine if we needed to do all this in 1900 and then the rest of 20th-century history unfolded as it actually did!’ In other words, world history is volatile enough even without the question of how to manage the global climate.Let’s think about how disputes might play
Re: [geo] Adam Corner – On geoengineering
Thanks, Andrew. As for the title's question ..are humans the ones who are out of control? the answer is obviously yes otherwise we wouldn't be having a discussion about increasing CO2 and it's global consequences and needed remedies. It is the ongoing failure of social, political, and cultural systems to deal with this problem that should force everyone to consider other possible solutions including evil technology. At the end of the day social, political, and cultural systems will make the ultimate decisions as to how to proceed. Given what is at stake it would be best for those systems and the planet to fully, carefully, and quickly evaluate all options rather than prematurely and ill-advisedly jettisoning possible solutions including those involving engineering. As for engineers as deities, this apparently speaks to a perceived lack of social control over technology. Fine, let's make sure society is the ultimate deity and decider. Still, whoever is going to play God here is going to need to know to the best they can all of the options and consequences before (quickly) proceeding. So let's cut the demonization of the potential contributors here, and get on with determining what viable social, political, and technical solutions we may have (if any). -Greg From: Andrew Lockley andrew.lock...@gmail.com To: geoengineering geoengineering@googlegroups.com Sent: Fri, April 5, 2013 1:14:28 AM Subject: [geo] Adam Corner – On geoengineering http://www.aeonmagazine.com/nature-and-cosmos/adam-corner-geoengineering-climate-change/ Blue sky thinking Geoengineers are would-be deities who dream of mastering the heavens. But are humans the ones who are out of control? by Adam Corner - a research associate in psychology at Cardiff University. His latest book is Promoting Sustainable Behaviour: A Practical Guide to What Works (2012). At a small conference in Germany last May, I found myself chuckling at the inability of the meeting organisers to control the room’s electronic blinds. It’s always fun when automated technology gets the better of its human masters, but this particular malfunction had a surreal pertinence. Here was a room full of geoengineering experts, debating technologies to control the climate, all the while failing to keep the early summer sun’s rays away from their PowerPoint presentations. As the blinds clicked and whirred in the background, opening and closing at will, I asked myself: are we really ready to take control of the global thermostat?Geoengineering, the idea of using large-scale technologies to manipulate the Earth’s temperature in response to climate change, sounds like the premise of a science fiction novel. Nevertheless, it is migrating to the infinitely more unsettling realm of science policy. The notion of a direct intervention in the climate system — by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or reflecting a small amount of sunlight back out into space — is slowly gaining currency as a ‘Plan B’. The political subtext for all this is the desperation that now permeates behind-the-scenes discourse about climate change. Despite decades of rhetoric about saving the planet, and determined but mostly ineffectual campaigns from civil society, global emissions of carbon dioxide continue to rise.Officially, climate policy is all about energy efficiency, renewables and nuclear power. Officially, the target of keeping global temperatures within two degrees of the pre-industrial revolution average is still in our sights. But the voices whispering that we might have left it too late are no longer automatically dismissed as heretical. Wouldn’t it be better, they ask, to have at least considered some other options — in case things get really bad?This is the context in which various scary, implausible or simply bizarre proposals are being put on the table. They range from the relatively mundane (the planting of forests on a grand scale), to the crazy but conceivable (a carbon dioxide removal industry, to capture our emissions and bury them underground), to the barely believable (injecting millions of tiny reflective particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight). In fact, the group of technologies awkwardly yoked together under the label ‘geoengineering’ have very little in common beyond their stated purpose: to keep the dangerous effects of climate change at bay.Monkeying around with the Earth’s systems at a planetary scale obviously presents a number of unknown — and perhaps unknowable — dangers. How might other ecosystems be affected if we start injecting reflective particles into space? What would happen if the carbon dioxide we stored underground were to escape? What if the cure of engineering the climate is worse than the disease? But I think that it is too soon to get worked up about the risks posed by any individual technology. The vast majority of geoengineering ideas will never
