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.
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Continue reading the main story
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.
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