Exploring Geoengineering: A Climate Crisis Intervention?
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It’s becoming clear that we won’t cut carbon emissions soon enough to prevent catastrophic climate change. But there may be ways to cool the planet more quickly and buy us a little more time to shift away from fossil fuels. They’re known collectively as geoengineering, and though it was once a scientific taboo, a growing number of researchers are running computer simulations and proposing small-scale outdoor experiments…
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But what is geoengineering exactly? Traditionally, geoengineering has encompassed two very different things: sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky so the atmosphere will trap less heat and reflect more sunlight away from the planet, so less heat is absorbed in the first place. The first of these, known as “carbon removal” or “negative emissions technologies,” is something that scholars now largely agree we’ll need to do in order to avoid dangerous levels of warming. Most no longer call it “geoengineering” – to avoid associating it with the second, more contentious branch, known as solar geoengineering. This is a blanket term that includes ideas like setting up sun shields in space or dispersing microscopic particles in the air in various ways to make coastal clouds more reflective, dissipate heat-trapping cirrus clouds, or scatter sunlight in the stratosphere.
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The word geoengineering suggests a planetary-scale technology. But some researchers have looked at the possibility of conducting it in localized ways as well, exploring various methods that might protect coral reefs, coastal redwoods, and ice sheets… The best-known form of solar geoengineering involves spraying particles into the stratosphere, sometimes known as “stratospheric injection” or “stratospheric aerosol scattering.” That’s in part because nature has already demonstrated it’s possible… Most famously, the massive eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the summer of 1991 spewed some 20 million tons of sulphur dioxide into the sky. By reflecting sunlight back into space, the particles in the stratosphere helped push global temperatures down about 0.5 °C over the next two years.
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…So could geoengineering be the solution to climate change, relieving us of the hassle of cutting back on fossil fuels? No… Even if it works, it’s at best a temporary stay of execution. It does little to address other climate dangers, notably including ocean acidification, or the considerable environmental damage from extracting and burning finite fossil fuels. And greater levels of geoengineering may increase other disruptions in the climate system, so we can’t just keep doing more and more of it to offset ever rising emissions.
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Critics argue that openly talking about the possibility of a technological “solution” to climate change will ease pressure to address the root cause of the problem: rising greenhouse-gas emissions. And some believe that moving forward with outdoor experiments is a slippery slope. It could create incentives to conduct ever bigger experiments, until we’re effectively doing geoengineering without having collectively determined to. Some argue it’s playing God to tinker with a system as complex as the climate. Or that it’s simply foolish to counteract one pollutant with another, or to try to fix a technocratic failure with a technocratic solution. A final concern, and an indisputable one is that modelling and experiments will only tell us so much. We can’t really know how well geoengineering will work and what the consequences will be until we actually try it – and at that point, we’re all stuck with the results.
