Hack the planet? Geoengineering research, ethics, governance explored
by Hannah Hickey
Hacking the Earth’s climate to counteract global warming – a subject that elicits strong reactions from both sides – is the topic of a December special issue of the journal Climatic Change. A dozen research papers include the most detailed description yet of the proposed Oxford Principles to govern geoengineering research, as well as surveys on the technical hurdles, ethics and regulatory issues related to deliberately manipulating the planet’s climate.
- “Geoengineering research and its limitations,” a December special issue of the journal Climatic Change
- Edited by three UW faculty from atmospheric sciences and philosophy
University of Washington researchers led the three-year project to gather leading thinkers and publish a snapshot of a field that they say is rapidly gaining credibility in the scientific community.
“In the past five years or so, geoengineering has moved from the realm of quackery to being the subject of scientific research,” said co-editor Rob Wood, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences. “We wanted to contribute to a serious intellectual discourse.”
Creating clouds over the ocean that would reflect back sunlight is the subject of a chapter by Wood, whose research is on the interaction among air pollution, clouds and climate. He and co-author Tom Ackerman, a UW atmospheric sciences professor, look at what it would take to test the idea with a field experiment.
A conceptualized image of a wind-powered, remotely controlled ship that could seed clouds over the ocean to deflect sunlight.
“I don’t want to prove it right, I just want to know if it’s feasible,” Wood said. “If you look at the projections for how much the Earth’s air temperature is supposed to warm over the next century, it is frightening. We should at least know the options. Is geoengineering feasible if there were to be what people call a ‘climate emergency’?”
Also explored in the journal issue is the idea of injecting reflective particles into the stratosphere, subject of a 2006 paper in Climatic Change by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen and central to Seattle entrepreneur Nathan Myhrvold’s proposed StratoShield. Yet another idea is iron fertilization of ocean microbes, though Wood said preliminary tests suggest this is not as successful at drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as its proponents had originally thought.
How to govern geoengineering is a topic of hot debate. In one paper, U.K. authors flesh out the so-called Oxford Principles, which suggest how geoengineering could be regulated as a global public good. The five principles described in the paper concern the research, publication, assessment and deployment of geoengineering techniques.
Many of the authors spoke at the UW during a 2011 seminar series, and more attended a 2012 workshop where they developed their paper ideas.
While discussions were civil, Wood said, the contributors didn’t all agree. A UW philosopher questions whether geoengineering can even be described in the Oxford Principles as a global public good.
“Just spraying sulfates into the stratosphere is not the kind of thing that necessarily benefits everyone, so in that sense it seems a mistake to call it a global public good,” said co-editor Stephen Gardiner, a UW philosophy professor who has written a book on ethics and climate change. There are decisions about how to conduct sulfate spraying, he writes, and potential tradeoffs between short-term benefits and long-term risks.
Gardiner also questions whether something should be done in people’s benefit but without their permission, and if accepting geoengineering as a necessary evil ignores other science or policy options.
He’s not the only social scientist to be looking at climate issues.
“A lot of people, from across the academy, are getting interested in the Anthropocene – the idea that we may have entered a new geological era where human influence is a dominant feature, and what that means for various issues,” Gardiner said.
The collection aims to prompt a serious academic discussion the editors say has so far been lacking.
“It’s an interdisciplinary discussion with an emphasis on the research angle – whether and how we should be researching geoengineering,” said co-editor Lauren Hartzell-Nichols, a UW lecturer in philosophy. “We hope it helps people think about this issue in a more interdisciplinary and integrated way.”
The seminars and workshop that led to the issue’s creation were supported by the UW College of the Environment.
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For more information, contact Wood at 206-543-1203 or robwood@atmos.washington.edu and Gardiner at 206-221-6459 or smgard@uw.edu.
Philip Mulholland says:
December 17, 2013 at 3:59 pm
Geoengineering? Here is an example of how Mother Nature does it:-
The Chesapeake Bay impact crater
=====================
Very interesting what even Wikipedia has to say about the climate of Chesapeake Bay BEFORE the time of the SUV:
The Chesapeake Bay impact crater[1] was formed by a bolide that impacted the eastern shore of North America about 35 million years ago, in the late Eocene epoch…During the warm, late Eocene, sea levels were high, and the Tidewater region of Virginia lay in the coastal shallows. The shore of eastern North America, about where Richmond, Virginia, is today, was covered with dense tropical rainforest
Question: What caused the climate to change such that there are not tropical rainforest in Richmond Virginia today? Did the caveman do it?
Has anyone stopped to think about how little effect a wind driven, cloud spraying boat would have as compared to millions of acres under irrigation?
We already have a cloud spraying machine operating on the oceans. It is called the sun, wind and the waves and it makes the boat in the picture look like a sad toy.
Wood said. “If you look at the projections for how much the Earth’s air temperature is supposed to warm over the next century, it is frightening.”
========
stop reading the scary bedtime fairy tales.
Geoengineering is ripe ground for the Law of Unintended Consequences. Nobody knows enough about the biosphere to reasonably claim that any given geoengineering project will never have any disastrous consequences.
As far as ‘governance’ is concerned, geoengineering will be first and foremost governed by the laws of economics. When the benefactrors (those who are providing the gold and making the rules) are besieged by ‘constituents’ who have a more immediate need (such as medical research for a now strain of flu), projects with no immediate tangible benefits to the people who support the benefactors will move to the back of the line.
This is exactly what happened to Kyoto Protocol Compliance.
If only we could come up with a threat to the world that doesn’t exist – say something half believable and far off – and prop ourselves up as indispensable with no one able to disprove that we are saving the world … we could be kings.
I have mixed feelings about trying to do geoengineering, however:
1. If they had snow making machines in the arctic, they could kill two birds with one stone. And, if you need to stop, flipping the switch to off is immediate (although the polar ice created will remain).
2. Follow the money – which multinational engineering firm would get the contract? Are they pushing the research now?
3. The idea of Oxford Principles scares me – will definitions chance to include fossil fuel burning as an example of geoengineering?
4. Why should taxpayers foot the bill for an unnecessary “good?”
The biggest problem with epic geo-engineering solutions of this calibre is that they address a problem that only exists in a “virtual” environment. As long as the solutions themselves remain in the same virtual reality, I see no problem.
…Chemtrails…
[Please do not discuss chemtrails here, per site Policy. — mod.]
[Please do not discuss chemtrails here, per site Policy. — mod.]
The question is improperly framed.
I say with confidence that Earth is going to get colder.
Sooner or later Earth is going to get a lot colder.
So what type of geo-engineering can be applied to counter-act the next ICE AGE?
I am fairly sure that pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere is NOT going to work. It has done nothing so far.
So what tools could we use to stave off the next ICE AGE?
I am serious folks – global warming IS NOT THE PROBLEM!
THE 60 YEAR PERIOD OF CLIMATOLOGY
Climate has a 60 year period
http://tinyurl.com/9zqmllk
(h/t Girma)
Climatology also has a 60 year period.
Because the climatology period is delayed
it goes the wrong way.
That fact saved our civilization repeatedly.
And periodically, of course.
During the 1910-1940 0.8C warming, there were two world wars and people couldn’t care less about climate.
Toward the end of the 1940-1970 0.2C cooling, climatologists sounded the alarm:
we are all going to freeze.
http://tinyurl.com/bw55e5r
Pouring soot over the arctic
(an environmental disaster if there is one)
seemed the only way out.
Fortunately, by the time it was getting close to reality in 1975, we were in the next half period of warming.
Toward the end of the 1970-2000 .8C warming, climatologists sounded the alarm:
we are all going to boil.
Pouring acidic CO2 in caves
(an environmental disaster if there is one)
seemed the only way out.
Fortunately, by the time it was getting close to reality in 2010, we were in the next half period of cooling.
We are in the middle of the 1998 – 2030 0.2 C cooling.
In a few years climatologists will sound the alarm:
we are all going to freeze.
Unless by 2040 we do SOMETHING
*
See how lucky we all are.
If the half period was 40 rather than 30 years
the restless among us would have time to act and
we would all be unwilling lab rats.
There are though equally unproductive and much more fun ways of spending those few trillions which we don’t have.
As the only true wealth is natural resources, which includes energy sources (as well as mineral resources); unless rail cars roll loaded with material or pipelines are busy moving liquids, your society is going to slowly ‘dissolve’ (literally: sent piece by piece/pound by pound to the scrap yards with a final destination ‘offshore’) from within … Keynesian spending would seem to be the ‘procedure’ or economic methodology to accomplish this. This can’t end well for any modern, technological society. (Witness the former economic/production powerhouse cities like Camden NJ or Detroit MI. NY seems to have survived only on account of being/having been the financial center of the US.)
.
” if you look at the projections……..,, it’s frightening”
Don’t these dumb bastards have a class to teach or something ? If they are not teaching (probably a good thing) , maybe they don’t need to be a drain on the university payroll.
Maybe they could get a job retraining the folks who lost their jobs when the incandescent lamp factory was forced to close, although writing science fiction is a risky career choice.
Mark And Two Cats said all that needs to be said on this topic…..
As awful as the movie was, I immediately thought of “Highlander 2” where the lead cured the hole in the ozone layer by putting a shield around the Earth, with the consequence that it was thrown into constant darkness and 99degree temps everywhere. Muck with Mother Nature and she’ll bite you in the butt….
ferdberple @ur momisugly December 18, 2013 at 6:10 am
Here is something else of interest for you. Tektites are a natural glass and are generally believed to consist of terrestrial material. They originate from the spray of molten rock, caused by an impact, that was ejected from the surface of the Earth out into the vacuum of space. Tektites are found in strewn fields that can be linked to a particular impact event.
See also Paul V. Heinrich (2009) Reevaluation of Tektites Reported from
Rapides Parish, Louisiana
Louisiana Geological Survey News Insights, Summer 2009 • Vol. 19, No. 1, pages 10-14. as an interesting example of how to do real science.
This proposal reminds me of the 1950’s schemes to dig a new Panama Canal using atomic bombs.
What could possibly go wrong?
Easy-shmeasy. Just relocate Antarctica. Somewhere in the Pacific should work. Oh, and get rid of Panama while you’re at it.
People need to realize,aerosol geoengineering is BASED upon mimic of the stratospheric mist acid rain droplets super volcanoes get to stratosphere,,,they spread around entirely encompassing earth with the winds + rotation…that volcanic mirror STAYS up in stratosphere years,,,nowhere else does it stay up..goengineering in lower atmosphere with planes + chemtrails next to strato engineering mimic would be like trying to empty ocean with a spoon…Super volcanoes cause this “VOLCANIC MIRROR” phenomena naturally because they inject the STRATOSPHERE.+ they cause ice age every time..if it worked in lower atmospheres with regular volcanoes OR CHEMTRAILS which it doesnt…we would be in a never ending ice age 4ever…ONLY idea I can think of 4 chemtrails is so while they ARE geoengineering strato sulfates you will be busy following the chemtrails + not check the stratosphere…which would be simple enough …its working well to panic people chemtrails is,,,much like the Orson Wells war of world radio broadcast..IF YOU fully understood the volcanic mirror droplets aerosols stratospheric phenomena*acid rain technically, highly solar reflective, surrounds earth heat is reflected away, no heat comes thrugh temps drop* A stratospheric mimic of that phenomena would not even be noticed like in 1991 when pinatubo did it in tiny form, no chemtrails etc not even a blink….but if you did it just a little much more than pinatubo things would happen,,,like Cairo freezing+Australia in its summer…..hmmmmm…IF theres a volcanic mirror up there right now in strato but everyone chases chemtrails, when it eventually clears there will be no proof,,,,you only need about 2 years of distraction…..peace…..juith woolworth donahue
PSS the pyramid of egypt was created mirrored, IF you restore the mirror casing*note my avatar* you SEE that super volcanic mirror science in pictogram….i believe its geoengineering instruction to mimic super volcanic mirror to cool earth…+ no matter where u r or what language you speak, if restored it looks like a super volcanic mirror in middle of desert from the time of Moses from anywhere on earth! see my fb….oh + id quit chasing those chemtrails + start checking the stratosphere FAST… OR PRIVATE FACTIONS WILL CONTROL YOUR PLANET 4EVER