Perhaps a month ago Paul Athanasiou of EcoEquity, a radical climate group, made the very smart point to me that geoengineering is a viable possibility only if coupled with intensive, actual reductions in global carbon emissions as a sort of emergency intervention. Otherwise climate engineering proposals remain extremely dangerous because emissions continue unabated while temperatures are kept artificially low. If the geoengineering intervention is curtailed, temperatures would skyrocket precipitously like a dam bursting.
But the issue of climate engineering seems to be coming to a head. John Tierney wrote today, here in the NY Times, about an upsurge in interest in geoengineering or climate engineering proposals. These include things like installing sunscreens in space to block radiation over the Arctic, making the oceans or clouds more reflective using aerosols or reflective particles, directly removing CO2 from the atmosphere, or even launching a small artificial planet into space that would orbit at a constant rate between the Earth and Sun, blocking a percentage of radiation. Tierney mentions some important risks, for instance the potential effects of aerosols on rainfall.
One thing that’s fascinating is the tendency toward grandiose thinking among scientists whose inclinations run toward large-scale experimentation with global systems. An issue that comes up again and again is who – or what political body – could reasonably authorize such an intervention into what is patently (but not legally) a human domain of the highest political order, the climatic stability of Earth’s biosphere. Does this require UN authorization? Could the UN prevent some ambitious entrepreneur from trying to intervene to save the world?
But this is the attractiveness of geoengineering proposals for most proponents, namely that they don’t require much talking, negotiation or coordination. “[H]ow much hope is there of permanently enforcing tough restrictions in the United States, much less in poor countries like India and China?” Tierney asks. “If even a few nations demur or cheat, the whole system can break down.” This is conversely apparent in how proponents talk about the physical side of things. He quotes Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution of Science discussing the need for and difficulty with short term climate experiments: “With short testing periods, you would need to hit the [climate] system with a hammer.”
Can you guys be a little more delicate with my atmosphere please?
Tierney writes that “climate engineering does not require unanimous agreement or steadfast enforcement throughout the world. Instead of relying on politicians’ promises, we might find it simpler to deal directly with Mother Earth’s hot air.” This puts us squarely in the domain of the science studies insight that things have politics – why talk to Indians or the Chinese when you can negotiate directly with Mother Earth? The issue is not what Andrew Barry calls ‘antipolitics’ but rather the politics per se of technology. Geoengineering is held up as an alternative to multilateral negotiations or even to world government, if you like.
Pay attention, too, to the language of promise, hope, agreement and cheeting that runs through the geoengineering discourse. Mike Fortun helps us think about such things in discussing the ethics of promising in biotech, in which technological promises help secure investment futures. Here the operation is opposite and symmetrical: cheating is a threat because ultimately promises are insubstantial. Tierney marks himself as a ‘realist’ sharing symmetrical epistemological underpinnings with the ‘idealists’ he imagines will just talk about the weather instead of acting.
By setting up the debate as one between the ease of a realist proposal and the implausibility of the idealists’ approach, Tierney outright ignores the real, fine-grained intimate work that many, many people will need to engage in to make climate mitigation happen. That work will indeed require a lot of talking, and talking with people with expectations that will be hard to meet or manage.
Most importantly, Tierney completely neglects by far the biggest risk of geoengineering: cooling the atmosphere without reducing CO2 concentrations requires a permanent commitment to continue deployment of the technology indefinitely into the future. He alludes to but elides this fact when he writes that the “effects [of loading the statosphere with aerosols] would wane as the particles fell back to Earth.” In the meantime people and governments will have forgotten about the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. They will have forgotten the need to actually reduce emissions because so long as geoengineerging is in force the climate will remain cool even while CO2 concentrations skyrocket.
What happens when no one wants to keep paying the $10-30 billion (annual?) Teirney estimates is the cost of such a proposal? Temperatures meanwhile will have been kept artificially low – to cease the engineering intervention global temperatures would spike catastrophically. The one exception Tierney mentions is the possibility of active, direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which pretty much everyone agrees would be a good thing.
Geoengineering may not require global agreement to implement, but if one considers who could make such a promise the only plausible answer is a global political institution with a mandate and wherewithal to vitally protect the well being of humanity indefinitely into the future.
Accounting for Atmosphere 
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December 23, 2010 at 20:02
mel
It is also very important for people to know that geoenginnering by throwing aerosol (aluminium and berium) into our skies is detrimental to our environment. It cause plant life to die and has many health effects on humans such as alzeihmers and cancer.
Is this a cover up method to eventually cause all plant life to die so we working class people will have to buy geo seeds that can grow in a soil based of large amounts of aluminum and berium
August 17, 2012 at 03:22
Tnioli
While pretty much everyone agree that removal of CO2 from the athmosphere is a good thing, virtually noone is braev enough to mention that despite some pilot projects being able to do it a bit, large-scale (Gt+) carbon dioxide capture and safe storage is impossible to implement in practice, despite our significant efforts to do so. Could it be that only few people bothered to read in-debth papers about this? I don’t know. Anyways, CO2 is hard to break into C and O2. Green plants’ photosynthesis is a process we still can’t replicate artificially – even in lab, lest in industrial scale, – despite decades of intensive, massive research. Even if scientists would find a way to do it, it’s still very energy-hungry process – green plants get the energy to do it from the Sun, and amounts of energy green plants consume to make photosynthesis worldwide – is a huge figure, far beyond our reach. This means the most we can hope for – is to capture CO2, and store it as CO2 for millenia. But it’s very prohibitively expensive/difficult to keep in liquid/solid state in large-scale amounts (Gt+) reliably. Thus, leakage is unavoidable. Thus, talking about “removing CO2 from the athmosphere” are nothing short of a child’s dream – we can talk about it all day long, but it won’t happen in reality. double guaranteed, since there is yet another “killer” problem: pilot projects of industrial-scale CO2 capture and storage – do not capture CO2 out of the athmosphere, – they merely use outputs of coal/gas power plants. To get CO2 out of general athmosphere is prohibitively expensive task in terms of energy required to do it on large scale (Gt+), and most of our energy is from fossil fuels. As such, in very best case – if those pilot projects will some day result in technologies allowing to capture gas/coal power plants’ CO2 output, and so prevent further increases of CO2 amounts in Earth’s athmosphere, – it still won’t allow us to actually _reduce_ already existing CO2 levels anyways.
Last but definitely the biggest thing, though, is that whole CO2 talk is secondary. Today, CO2 is not the largest threat to our climate. Methane is. East siberian arctic shelf and about a dozen other large areas of Arctic already started to emit exponentially increasing amounts of methane. First major outbursts were observed and documented in 2010 – mile-wide scale columns of air with methane concentrations several times higher than “normal” ~1800ppb. Today, i mean literally today, we know that arctic ice cover is at record low for this day of the year, and massively so. With ~40 days of arctic melt season still ahead, and definite trend to far exceed 2007’s record low minimum september ice extent, and with ice volume (both PIOMASS and satellite) data also at record-low trends and values, it is clear that further massive warming will occur this season in Arctic. Ice, due to its reflective abilities, is a protector of sea-bottom sediments, ones which hold thousands of gigatons (in total) of methane in them. No ice = sun’s rays go down and warm up shallow shelf’s sea floor (<50 meters debths) = more and more methane is released. 50+ Gt of methane is ready to be released "at any time" as soon as temperatures rise a few degrees (Shakova et al, etc). And 50Gt of methane will already produce more greenhouse effect than all CO2 emitted by humans through all the industrial history up to date. Sure, methane's half-life in the athmosphere is only a few years – 8 to 9 or so, – but that's more than enough: the place where this huge additional greenhouse effect – and warming, – will be strongest – is arctic itself. Which will surely trigger further, accelerating methane releases. You get the picture…
CO2? Sigh. Surely important. Surely we need to stop emitting it, and the sooner, the better. However, without finding a way to prevent "methane gun" catastrophe, – all the efforts about CO2 are simply useless. And that methane gun is not only loaded, – the trigger has already been pulled, the round has already been hit, the ignition of gunpowder has already started, and the bullet is starting to move inside that methane gun's barrel as we speak here. So to say. This is real emergency. Huge one. And yet, most people still talk about CO2. It's like talking about how to treat one's flu with a person who's also termially ill with huge and deadly cancer, you know?