Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumClimate Hacking Is Barking Mad
By Raymond T. Pierrehumbert
Some years ago, in the question-and-answer session after a lecture at the American Geophysical Union, I described certain geoengineering proposals as “barking mad.” The remark went rather viral in the geoengineering community. The climate-hacking proposals I was referring to were schemes that attempt to cancel out some of the effects of human-caused global warming by squirting various substances into the atmosphere that would reflect more sunlight back to space. Schemes that were lovingly called “solar radiation management” by geoengineering boosters. Earlier I had referred to the perilous state such schemes would put our Earth into as being analogous to the fate of poor Damocles, cowering under a sword precariously suspended by a single thread.
This week, the National Research Council (NRC) is releasing a report on climate engineering that deals with exactly those proposals I found most terrifying. The report even recommends the creation of a research program addressing these proposals. I am a co-author of this report. Does this mean I’ve had a change of heart?
No.
The nearly two years’ worth of reading and animated discussions that went into this study have convinced me more than ever that the idea of “fixing” the climate by hacking the Earth’s reflection of sunlight is wildly, utterly, howlingly barking mad. In fact, though the report is couched in language more nuanced than what I myself would prefer, there is really nothing in it that is inconsistent with my earlier appraisals.
Much more in the article.
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phantom power
(25,966 posts)I don't understand the attitude that considering some kind of climate hacking to compensate for our previous hacking is crazy.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Especially when the Earth System is far larger and more intricate than any of these hubristic bozos seem to realize? Why not just crash civ? That would also address the problem, nicht wahr?
phantom power
(25,966 posts)I, for one, would be totally uninterested in risking unintended consequences if somebody suggested cropdusting the upper atmosphere with SO2, say, next week.
But things haven't gotten bad. Yet. I predict people will suddenly rediscover a tolerance for risk of unintended consequences in a generation or two, when shit starts to get real.
Everybody loves imperfect analogies, so I will tell a story. Back when my wife was about 30, she had to have some tumors removed from her spinal cord. The surgeon, on purpose, only debulked the the tumors instead of attempting total resection. Our logic went like this: total resection required messing with the nerve bundle in the cord, which involved about russian roulette odds of substantial function loss, up to and including total paralysis. There was some reason to hope that better treatment options would eventually be available if they grew back. This decision worked out well for about ten years.
A decade later, they grew back, even bigger. This time, she went for total resection. Same russian roulette odds of function loss. But the consequences of doing nothing were guaranteed total function loss, as the tumors grew and crushed the spinal cord. The cost of just debulking was near-guarantee of having to do surgery yet again in another 10 years. Then she'd be 50, not 30. Age starts to take its toll.
She lost some function. She'll live with some kinds of nerve pain the rest of her life. But she's not paralyzed, and the tumors are gone.
So right now, it's like we're in our 30s, and the risk/reward tradeoff looks one way, and climate hacking sounds nutty. But soon enough, we'll be in our 40s, staring at our 50s. And the payoff matrix is going to look very different.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)
OKIsItJustMe
(19,938 posts)Certainly, you agree that, “Business as Usual,” has proven to have “unintended consequences.”
Would “doing nothing” would have no “unintended consequences?” (What exactly would “doing nothing” be?)
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)In this case, not doing any deliberate geohacking. And now that we know that burning fossil fuels amounts to inadvertent geohacking, not doing any more of that either. Stop burning fossil fuels entirely. Now.
That's what "doing nothing" would look like in this case. We won't do nothing, of course. Too bad for us. too bad for the rest of the biosphere.
Que sera, sera.
OKIsItJustMe
(19,938 posts)Would planting forests qualify as “Geohacking?”
What if the trees were hybrids, bred to sequester as much carbon as possible?
What if they were genetically engineered/modified?
To my way of thinking, any effort to intentionally affect the climate (presumably for the “better”) qualifies as “Climate Engineering.” (AKA “geoengineering.”)
progressoid
(49,992 posts)Since we don't want to make any real effort to reduce it now, we may not have a choice but to take drastic measures in the not to near future.
Nihil
(13,508 posts)> Since we don't want to make any real effort to reduce it now, we may not
> have a choice but to take drastic measures in the not so near future.
That way, the people who have made vast profits from trashing the planet
(and who are knowingly doing so every day) will continue to make profits from
their mindless greed then switch to making profits from the knee-jerk reaction
(of planet hacking) that their behaviour has promoted.
The best thing for life on this planet would be the sudden (and soon) arrival
of a 15km asteroid.
hatrack
(59,590 posts)The politicians will talk and talk and talk until water laps at their nostrils.
Activists and environmentalists will nibble around the edges - it's all they can really do, given the scale of the problem, but it's certainly better than nothing.
Business will occasionally pick up a little green paintbrush, but in the mean time will continue in the spirit of Lee Iacocca's mentor - "Make money - screw everything else".
And for the rest of the world, continuous distraction, operating on two levels - for Haves like us, the Dangling Shiny-Shiny held just out of reach forever and ever; for the Have-nots like everybody else, the glowing promise that more growth n' jobz n' stuff will make things better - someday.
Collectively, we will continue to flog the dinosaur we're riding deeper until the desert until gangrenous, flayed chunks of its flesh fall off and the great beast founders in the sand. At that point, we'll stumble out of our saddles and whine about our predicament.
