Geo-engineering: Getting It Right Is a Huge Challenge; Getting It Wrong Is Lethal
Here’s an article that points out why geo-engineering, i.e., attempts to control the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere by injecting chemicals into it, is a challenge fraught with problems.
Tell me about it. If there were unintended consequences associated with filling our air with greenhouse gases, isn’t it at least conceivable that there will be more unintended consequences from manipulating with it further? And the science is only part of it; what about the politics? Humankind in its current form has nowhere near a sufficient level of sanity to be deliberately messing with the global thermostat.
Perhaps the simplest and best answer all around is the most obvious: let’s make a concerted effort on a planetary scale to migrate to renewable energy, while employing efficiency solutions and making sincere commitments to conservation.
Craig,
I just wanted to point out: The article is somewhat misleading with the definitions of certain terms… and you have inadvertantly repeated their sloppy word usage.
Geo-engineering applies to any cockamamy scheme to control planetary climate. The “Pinatubo Option”, or “increasing aerosol albedo”, or “jet trails”… or whatever else you want to call it… is a specific type of proposed geo-engineering. The article discusses the Pinatubo Option as if geo-engineering at large is narrowly defined as the Pinatubo Option in particular… and you seem to have used wording that suggests the same.
Note – I believe all forms of geo-engineering are highly speculative, and most of them are just flat-out stupid. I consider the Pinatubo Option to be among the flat-out stupid options… Studies suggest that it would take ~10 million tons of finely ground SO2 launched into the upper atmosphere, and then an additional 2-5 million tons/year to be launched every year thereafter to replace what falls out due to gravity.
The first obvious problem with this plan is the sustained cost would be worse than the accommodation cost of just dealing with the warming. The second – and to my mind more important problem with this plan is the amount of acid rain that would be generated… We’d destroy the ozone layer and we’d have accellerated infrastructure and property damage due to increased sulfuric acid content in the rain.
This “fix” for global warming would require more accommodation than global warming itself.
The fact that a researcher noted it would shift rainfall patterns may indeed make it less enticing, but it was never even remotely enticing to begin with.
It’s funny you mention this: I was aware that I was providing an incorrectly narrow definition, and I thought about changing it, but I forgot about it before publishing it. Thanks for the note, and all the great insight here.
Craig,
Geo-engineering was a significant interest of mine in the late 90’s/early 2000’s (I was young… you’ll have to pardon my naivety)… Supposedly we could dump finely ground rust into the ocean and foster algae and plankton growth in regions where there was currently little life, and thus help balance more CO2 emissions. It seemed like a win-win… more ocean life, more CO2 abatement.
The ship was funded and sent, and I was excited to read the results… and they dumped rust into the ocean… and the rust sank… and nothing happened.
🙂
After that, I did as much research as I could with the internet, looking for other ideas but applying more critical thinking and asking more questions when I encountered them. I have yet to encounter a geo-engineering idea that doesn’t amount to wide-eyed foolishness… but I know a little about the options that are commonly tossed around.
That’s interesting. I’m a relative late-bloomer, in terms of environmentalism.
Re: geo-engineering, I hope you’ll let us know if you came across something that looks promising, and relatively safe in terms of unintended consequences. I know there are conferences on the subject; I suppose I should attend a couple of them.
Craig,
I wouldn’t recommend wasting your time with geo-engineering conferences. They can’t seem to get themselves out of sci-fi mode.
Of the geo-engineering ideas that might help – the first, and most obvious, is aforestation of Africa. (when thinking geo-engineering, no-one can think small). Clearly there’s no negatives to the idea… other than the cost of setting up nuclear power plants to power endless deslalination and pumping plants and employing a billion poor people to plant and tend millions of square miles of trees which will not be cut down and hence not return any money.. But if we could find a philanthropist with a few trillion dollars to blow, it actually would help – not harm.
The next least absurd idea would be cloud brightening around the arctic and more specifically around Greenland – using super-powered water streams (again relying on nuclear power plants powering desalination plants and pumps) spraying into one another, so that the colliding water turns into a high velocity ultra-fine mist which has sufficient inertia to raise itself into a a low-lying cloud,,, If you assume a few thousand such cloud-producing water jets, all centered around the arctic during the summer, then you have some plausible means of slowing or even reversing ice loss in the arctic and the Greenland Ice Shelf.
The remaining ideas get progressively more absurd, until you have people considering jettisoning space-junk between the sun and the Earth to permanently reduce the insolation of the outer atmosphere… It gets pretty crazy.