A bipartisan panel of scientists, former government officials, and energy experts is urging the U.S. government to explore the potential benefits, costs, and risks of geoengineering schemes to slow global warming.

In a new report, the 18-member panel convened by the Washington, D.C.-based Bipartisan Policy Center concedes that the use of technology to slow or reverse global warming — such as scattering light-reflecting aerosols into the atmosphere or seeding the oceans with iron to trigger CO2-absorbing algae blooms — is “no substitute” for cutting carbon dioxide emissions. But with the failure of the U.S. and the international community to take meaningful measures to reduce CO2 emissions, the panel recommends that the U.S. government should begin researching and testing alternatives in case the Earth’s climate system reaches a “tipping point” and immediate remedial action is required.

“The federal government is the only entity that has the incentive, responsibility, and capacity to run a broad, systematic, and effective program,” the report says. “It can also play an important role in effectively establishing international research norms.”

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

photo: NASA

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A British company has developed a new computer game that allows players to save the planet from the effects of global warming — at least in a simulated setting.

“Fate of the World,” produced by the gaming company Red Redemption, places players at the head of a global environmental organization — a “UN with teeth” — charged with saving the world over the next 200 years in the face of rising temperatures, diminishing resources, disappearing ecosystems, and growing population.

Using actual climate models and data from scientists at the University of Oxford, players can confront these challenges through a variety of policies — including cap-and-trade, promotion of renewable energy, and geoengineering schemes. “In many ways, it’s just a very complex puzzle,” Matt Giles Griffiths, one of the designers, said. “The first few times you try it, you’ll get absolutely creamed.”

While the makers of the game say they are pushing no particular agenda, some green groups say a surge in popularity of games focused on sustainability is helpful in raising awareness.

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In an upcoming book, high-profile global warming skeptic Bjorn Lomborg acknowledges that rising temperatures are “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and calls for investing $100 billion annually to deal with climate change. Lomborg, who has attacked environmentalists and the media for exaggerating the threat of global warming, said that while he has never denied the existence of man-made warming, he has come to believe that it is a serious challenge that must be met by a large-scale investment.

His new book, Smart Solutions to Climate Change — co-written with other economists — recommends levying a tax on carbon emissions and using the proceeds to finance research and development into renewable sources of energy; developing geoengineering ideas to cool the planet, such as “cloud whitening” to reflect the sun’s energy back into space; planting more trees; and reducing soot and methane emissions, which contribute to global warming.

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The Asilomar conference on geoengineering had been touted as a potentially historic event. What emerged, however, were some unexpected lessons about the possibilities and pitfalls of manipulating the Earth’s climate to offset global warming.

In the beginning, I had my doubts. The Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies, held last week at the Asilomar conference grounds near Monterey, Calif., was touted as an “unprecedented” gathering of 175 scientists, environmental groups, philosophers, and public policy wonks to discuss the governance of geoengineering — that is, large-scale, intentional manipulation of the Earth’s climate to offset rising temperatures.

The meeting was obviously set up to channel the spirit of the first Asilomar conference in 1975, during which biologists drew up voluntary guidelines to help reassure the public that genetically modified organisms would not be released into the world. Asilomar 1.0 is remembered as a landmark event in the evolution of scientific ethics and a turning point in the public acceptance of biotechnology.

Asilomar 2.0 seemed to pale in comparison. For one thing, geoengineering may be a scary idea, but the dangers were nowhere near as immediate as the unintentional release of genetically modified organisms. As David Keith, head of the Energy and Environmental Systems Group at the University of Calgary and one of the pioneers of geoengineering research, put it, “There is no threat of genetically altered clouds replicating virally in the atmosphere.” For another, no one seemed exactly sure what the goal of Asilomar 2.0 was, other than to convince the rest of the world that geoengineers are not mad scientists bent on destroying whatever is left of the Earth’s “natural” climate system. A few days before the conference began, questions were raised about whether the conference was in fact a quiet way for the organizer of the conference, The Climate Response Fund, to raise money to fund geoengineering experiments (a last-minute statement from the CRF’s board put an end to that controversy).

The first few days of the conference were chaotic and disorganized, occupied with the familiar discussions about how the term “geoengineering” lumps together two very different ideas about how to cool the planet — technologies that reduce the amount of sunlight that hits the planet, as well as technologies that reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. From a governance point of view, nobody is worried about technologies that suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. It’s the technologies that reduce the amount of sunlight that hits the planet — such as brightening clouds and injecting sulfur particles in the stratosphere — that freak people out, mostly because they can be deployed quickly and cheaply, and they have an immediate effect.

None of this was news to anyone who had spent any time thinking about geoengineering. And for a while, it seemed like Asilomar 2.0 was going to devolve into five days of infighting over the wisdom of attempting to rebrand geoengineering as “climate restoration.” But then a strange thing happened. Amidst the chaos, new ideas – and some lessons — emerged.

Lesson one: Geoengineering is a tabula rasa in the public mind. Like most of the attendees, I was well aware of the fact that geoengineering is an unfamiliar idea to many people. But I had not seen any actual data on this. Nor had I really grasped the implications of it.

One of the most enlightening presentations of the week was from Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change, who presented the results of a long-running study on the public perception of global warming. In his most recent survey, he had thrown in a few questions about geoengineering. When asked, “How much, if anything, have you heard about geoengineering as a possible response to climate change,” 74 percent of respondents said “nothing.” The 26 percent that had heard about geoengineering turned out to be wildly misinformed — more than half thought it referred to geothermal energy. Only 3 percent of the people who had heard about geoengineering were correctly informed about it. “The public basically knows nothing about this,” Leiserowitz told the attendees. “That is both a great challenge, and a great opportunity.”

Lesson two: Nobody has any clear idea how to resolve the inequalities inherent in geoengineering. One of the most quoted remarks at the conference came from Pablo Suarez, the associate director of programs with the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre, who asked during one plenary session, “Who eats the risk?” In Suarez’s view, geoengineering is all about shifting the risk of global warming from rich nations — i.e., those who can afford the technologies to manipulate the climate — to poor nations. Suarez admitted that one way to resolve this might be for rich nations to pay poor nations for the damage caused by, say, shifting precipitation patterns. But that conjured up visions of Bangladeshi farmers suing Chinese geoengineers for ruining their rice crop — a legalistic can of worms that nobody was willing to openly explore.

There was much discussion about the role the UN Security Council might play in governing the eventual deployment of geoengineering technologies, as well whether a new protocol should be developed to govern geoengineering under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. A few people even brought up a new idea: How about a World Geoengineering Council? The concept conjured up visions of black helicopters and Dr. Evil, and was quickly dropped — even though, in private, some policy experts admitted that was the direction we might be headed.

In public, everyone agreed that climate is something that happens to everyone and, therefore, everyone should have a say in any decisions that are made to deliberately change it. But the simple truth is nobody has any very good ideas about how you accomplish that, especially among people in the developing world, where the impact, presumably, would be greatest. Leiserowitz put it best: “What does informed consent mean in a world where more than two billion people are unaware that climate change is a problem?”

Lesson three: The biggest question on the horizon is, “Should field experiments be banned?” Virtually everyone at the conference agreed that further research into geoengineering is a good idea. “We need to figure out what works and what doesn’t,” David Keith argued. Not surprisingly, conflict arose when the discussion moved on to whether or not it was time to run some field experiments in the real world. Everyone agreed that small-scale “process” experiments, such as testing devices to spray aerosols in the stratosphere, should be allowed, since there is no expectation that such experiments would have any impact on the climate. But what about modest field experiments, such as attempting to spray particles over one region of the Arctic, or brighten clouds over one part of the ocean? Alan Robock, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University who has long pointed out the risks of geoengineering field experiments, predictably argued against it: “You can’t wall off the Arctic from the rest of the world.”

But how do you define the difference between “sub-scale” experiments, likely to have little if any impact, with “large” experiments, which could indeed have an impact? This is a perennial problem among prospective geoengineers. Keith argued for the importance of field experiments as a way of testing our knowledge — as well as the accuracy of climate models. “We only found out about the hole in the ozone because we went out and did some experiments,” he argued. “If we would have relied entirely on models, we might never have found it.” In the view of others, it was also a question of urgency: “We don’t want to do modeling for the next 20 years while the Arctic melts,” one scientist told me.

The question of field testing also played into the larger governance issue. David Victor, a law professor at the University of California, San Diego, argued that you can’t set up a workable governance structure until you know which technologies might be deployed and what the risks are. “And to find that out, you might have to do some experiments,” he said.

Lesson four: It’s all about the money. Is anyone going to get rich geoengineering the planet? Nobody likes to ask that question explicitly, but it’s unavoidable. After all, if geoengineering ever gets taken seriously, it’s going to be the mother of all engineering projects. Who should be in charge — and what role should private investment play? Should entrepreneurs be able to profit off technology designed to cool the planet?

It was generally agreed that for CO2-sucking technologies, private investment was not a problem. Sunlight-reduction technologies, however, are another issue. if some company (or entrepreneur) is able to develop a new way of injecting particles into the stratosphere that becomes indispensible to the survival of the human race, well, that gives that company or person a lot of leverage. “I’m not interested in selling my soul to some company who is going to control how much sunlight hits the planet,” said Phil Rasch, a climate modeler at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state. (As one audience member quipped, “Gives new meaning to company town.”) Granger Morgan, the head of the department of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, argued that the creation of a profit motive would inevitably lead to a geoengineering lobby: “Lobbying is the last thing we need on this.”

Does that mean government funding, in the U.S. initially through the National Science Foundation or an agency like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is the answer? Many attendees pointed out that government funding has its own troubles, not least of which is that the bureaucracy and regulatory hurdles will slow down research and deployment. As for the U.S. Department of Defense — forget about it. To this group, such involvement prompts nightmares of a new military-industrial-geoengineering complex. One novel solution: demand that all technology used for sunlight reduction technologies remain in the public domain. “The issue is not private investment,” argued Keith. “It’s is open intellectual property.” Open-source climate engineering, anyone?

Lesson five: Trust is everything. The media loves to play up the angle of hubristic geoengineers hell-bent on messing with a system they don’t understand, but there was very little bold or reckless talk at Asilomar. The entire mood of the meeting was somber and hyper-alert to the dangers that lay ahead. “The whole game,” David Victor pointed out, “is about establishing credibility.” In other words, if the public comes to see geoengineering as, as one attendee put it, “a crazy idea cooked up by rich Anglo Saxons to dominate the climate,” then they will all be rightfully tarred and feathered.

In the end, I didn’t leave Asilomar feeling like I’d attended a historic event. But I did feel like I may have witnessed the birth of something new — call it the conscience of a geoengineer.

Article by Jeff Goodell appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

photo: NASA Visible Earth

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When the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog embraces nuclear power, genetically engineered crops, and geoengineering schemes to cool the planet, you know things have changed in the environmental movement. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Stewart Brand explains how the passage of four decades — and the advent of global warming — have shifted his thinking about what it means to be green.

Stewart Brand helped shape the environmental consciousness of the 1960s and ‘70s with his Whole Earth Catalog, which became a bible of the counterculture and the back-to-the-land movement. An eclectic compendium of information and “tools” for innovative, environmentally friendly living, the Whole Earth Catalog reflected Brand’s ecological and technological interests, foreshadowing the rise of the San Francisco Bay Area’s computer and green cultures.

In the 1970s, Brand — a Stanford-trained biologist — started CoEvolutionary Quarterly to continue his exploration of environmental issues and the rise of new technologies like the personal computer and genetic engineering. In between writing books on computing and space colonies, Brand served as an advisor to California Gov. Jerry Brown. In the early 1980s, Brand co-founded The WELL — the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link — an early electronic community in the pre-Internet days with Larry Brilliant, the epidemiologist who later become the first director of Google’s philanthropic arm.

In recent years, Brand, 71, has begun to rethink his earlier opposition to nuclear power and has embraced genetic engineering, geoengineering of the earth’s climate system, and other issues that were anathema to the traditional environmental movement. This evolution of his thinking has led to his new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

In it, Brand calls for the rapid deployment of a new generation of nuclear power plants to combat global warming, arguing that technological advances have made nuclear energy safer and any potential danger from nuclear waste pales compared to the damage inflicted by burning coal.

“The air pollution from coal burning is estimated to cause 30,000 deaths a year from lung disease in the United States, and 350,000 a year in China,” writes Brand. “A 1-gigawatt coal plant burns three million tons of fuel a year and produces seven million tons of CO2, all of which immediately goes into everyone’s atmosphere, where no one can control it, and no one knows what it’s really up to.”

Likewise, he says, environmentalists are misguided in their long-standing opposition to the genetic engineering of crops to increase yields and reduce pesticide use. In a move sure to rankle the local-food movement, Brand says organic farmers should also embrace GE crops.

Brand argues that humans have been reshaping the natural environment for millennia and thus should start exploring planet-wide technological fixes to the pending catastrophe of climate change, everything from injecting sulfates into the atmosphere to constructing a gigantic space shield to block solar radiation. And if the Whole Earth Catalog catered to the anti-urbanists of the 1960s, Brand now finds ecological salvation in the world’s mega-cities and their sprawling slums as “concentrators of efficiency and innovation.”

Brand lives on a converted tugboat in Sausalito, Calif., with his wife Ryan Phelan, founder of DNA Direct, a genetic testing service. Environmental journalist Todd Woody met Brand in his book-lined office — located nearby in a beached fishing boat on the Sausalito waterfront — and conducted the following interview for Yale Environment 360.

Yale Environment 360: Who did you write this book for?

Stewart Brand: For two versions of environmentalists — the ones who already know their environmentalism and the ones who are finding out their environmentalism because of climate change.

An assertion I make in the first chapter is that in light of climate change everybody’s an environmentalist. And in light of climate change people who already know they’re environmentalists are facing a changed situation. And I’m trying to help adjust the course in light of the situation and the technologies that are emerging.

e360: Is the environmental movement ideologically stuck in the 1970s?

Brand: It’s moved on in some areas. The environmental movement used to hate cities and is now halfway toward loving cities. The Sierra Club has been very active in supporting compactness in cities. Environmentalists don’t call themselves ecologists any more, and that’s good.

e360: Why is that good?

Brand: It’s good because most weren’t, and most people who said they were part of the ecology movement wouldn’t know one trophic level from another, or what a trophic level is, or what a food web is, or why a niche is a niche, or much less why horizontal transgenic gene transfer is normal rather than unnatural. So not being called ecologists is fine.

e360: Do you see a generational dividing line on nuclear power?

Brand: I’m somewhat speculating that there is a generation gap there. I think it’s probably much stronger with genetic engineering. There is no iGEM [the undergraduate International Genetically Engineered Machine synthetic biology competition] for grownups as far as I know. I take that as pretty much a good sign because geneticists and microbiologists are going to just own so much of this century.

e360: For anyone who’s younger than 35, nuclear power has not been an issue because there have been no new nuclear power plants built in this country for decades.

Brand: Well, that’s my surmise. What one would want to look at is some young anti-nuclear person, do they say Chernobyl? Do they say Three Mile Island? I don’t think they say Hiroshima or Nagasaki because that’s so far in the past. Even for me.

e360: One of the main arguments against nuclear is economic — it’s not viable in the marketplace. How much should the market play in pushing these technologies, versus the government?

Brand: It’s a strange kind of desperate argument. Probably that question applies most in the developing world where coal really is king, is the cheapest. If the market rules, coal wins almost everywhere. I’ve been saying, and I say in the book, that we have to get used to the idea that there’s a very serious role for the government here, basically to make coal expensive, and let the rest fight it out.

It’s not an issue in France and that’s why they have 80 percent nuclear. A bit of arithmetic I haven’t seen done yet is, if the U.S. were 80 percent nuclear, how many gigatons of carbon dioxide would not be in the atmosphere? We could have done that.

We didn’t for reasons very different than France. France was shattered by [the] 1973 [Arab oil embargo] and didn’t have their own coal, didn’t have their own oil. To get some energy independence, not because of anything environmental, they just went dead at it. They respect engineers in France way more than we do here and made the right thing happen and now have a huge export industry with selling energy to everybody in Europe, including all the green countries.

e360: NPR recently interviewed an Obama administration official on whether nuclear power should be an option to fight global warming. That official tried very hard to avoid even saying the word nuclear.

Brand: It’s a hot-button issue. Whether I raise it or not in talks, that’s what people want to talk about. What’s interesting to me, I’m going to go on book tour in England in January. England has just committed to ten new reactors. They’re tired of buying two gigawatts of nuclear power from France, among other things.

Frankly, my book is getting more uptake in England — even though it hasn’t come out there yet — than here. So I’m not sure if it’s my name or the subject or if they’re okay with nuclear, or what’s going on.

e360:: You were an advisor to Jerry Brown when he was governor and anti-nuclear sentiment was at its peak. If Jerry Brown becomes governor again do you see changes in policy?

Brand: We’ve talked about it. He hasn’t said, “Tell me more.” Back in the ‘70s when he first got into office, I said space is actually pretty interesting. Fifty percent of space technology comes from California. He was interested. We hired [astronaut] Rusty Schweiker, he did Space Day, he went to the first shuttle launch and landing. So he became Governor Moonbeam.

I haven’t heard him go that far on nuclear. I think it is still a third rail for all these guys. And I suppose part of what I’m trying to do is to take the charge off the rail.

e360: You don’t talk much about renewable energy in your book.

Brand: I think its very well covered so I don’t have much to add there other than nod, nod, nod, so let’s now talk about something I think I have some fresher information on.

But I think the main point I’m making with this book — and that’s why there’s two chapters about squatter cities and what’s going on in the cities and urbanization and so on — is that five out of six people don’t live in the developed world that has all this excess energy use.

They’re living much closer to the bone, and the greenest people in the world probably are the squatters in the slums of the world — a billion people. How lucky we are that they’re there, they’re getting out of poverty, they’re green as hell but they would really like electricity 24/7 and fresh water and sanitation and some other things that are going to involve more energy use. That’s either coal or nuclear as far as I can tell.

Whether we go to nuclear or not is not as important as whether they do. Or something else that is clean, scalable, and constant.

e360: What about solar?

Brand: My hope, frankly, was space solar because it’s 24/7. [California entrepreneur] Elon Musk flattened my ear on this subject. He said, “Look I do SpaceX so I know a lot about space, I do SolarCity so I know a lot about solar. I’m trying to kill anybody’s sense that there’s some realistic way to do ‘space solar.’”

He said even if you could get your solar collectors into orbit for free it still wouldn’t work. The costs and difficulties of beaming down electricity as microwaves with antennas on the ground don’t work out. For the time being, I’m persuaded by Elon on the matter.

e360: Nuclear power plants consume an incredible amount of water. Is that a concern?

Brand: Yep, water is an issue everywhere and every how. The tech I’d like to see is something more direct. That’s all hand wringing at this point. I don’t know anyone who has figured out how to turn heat into electricity without water.

e360: What has been the reaction to your proposals on genetic engineering and food?

Brand: Well, I’m a little surprised that Michael Pollan hasn’t come over because he has busted the industrialization of organic food.

The local growing of basically artisanal food is absolutely fantastic in a country where the basic nutrition problem is obesity. That’s not the major nutrition problem in much or most of the world. What they need is volume, which is the very thing the Green Revolution spoke to and answered. The second Green Revolution is the next set of good technology in agriculture. Not only green in the sense the first one was — higher yield, lower cost, cheaper food, better distribution and all that — but also green ecologically, environmentally green in terms of climate.

Kind of working backward to what the world wants and needs, and what the climate wants and needs, and ecology wants and needs, then genetic engineering looks like a very important tool.

e360: A theme running through the book is that the rest of the world has a different perspective on nuclear power and genetic engineering.

Brand: We tend to be north-centric, developed-centric. China is going full bore on nuclear. I’ve heard numbers as high as they want to build 400 reactors. And no doubt there will be problems. But there’s problems with dams, there’s problems with all these things. I think that’s the engineering essence I’m trying to have Greens become comfortable with.

When you’re trying to design solutions, you really, really have to get used to the idea of tradeoffs, risk balancing, short-term versus long-term. All this stuff that engineers are comfortable with.

I don’t want the romantic stuff to go away. I don’t want people to stop loving nature or loving some experience they’ve had with nature. They can if they want. Just add this other stuff. And so the line about the romantic loves the tree, but not its genome, and the scientist loves both.

e360: One of your more controversial chapters is on geoengineering, which strikes a lot of people, including scientists, as crazy and dangerous.

Brand: That must be next year’s controversy. I expected some pushback on that one. And I haven’t encountered it at all. Not in person, not in print. But it clearly wants and needs to be there. I think there’s all kinds of things to say.

Actually, the strongest pushback and non-embrace was in Al Gore’s new book. It’s a sentence in which he says we’ve done enough experimentation with the planet, that geoengineering is experimentation with the planet we do not need to do. He goes on about biochar [transforming organic waste into a charcoal-like fertilizer], as he should, but doesn’t think or treat that as geoengineering. I do. I think that kind of effort is a form of grass rootsy, and therefore good, geoengineering.

e360: Do you have concerns that support for geoengineering will be used by others as an excuse to carry on with business as usual?

Brand: Well, I don’t want to eliminate business-as-usual as an okay goal. I want to set aside a potential business as usual that ain’t bad. Suppose we had energy that had that quality of way more than we could use or need, and it was clean.

There is another set of people in the environmental movement who are what I’m calling calamatists, who feel that industrial civilization has committed crimes, sins against nature, and retribution is coming and we must repent, reform, and redeem ourselves in light of these terrible crimes and this terrible sin.

The way you can tell if someone is of that mode is to raise this: Suppose we had clean, squanderable energy available, what do you think of that? The ones that have that frame of mind would say that is the worst thing that could happen.

Again, I think that is not a perspective that makes a lot of sense in the developing world. You can go to African peoples and say what do you think of clean, squanderable energy, they would say, “Yes please. How soon?”

e360: Hasn’t cheap energy in this country lead to our sprawling development and other environmental problems?

Brand: Maybe, maybe. But one of the things the new urbanists changed are that suburbs as they came to be designed are boring stupid places to live. It’s not a question of whether you save energy by walking to the market, you sort of save your mind by walking to the market, by being able to bicycle the kids to school. The idea of parents, smart busy adults, having to be chauffeurs for their children has nothing to do with environmental issues at all — it’s just a weird way to live.

I just want that one on the table. Suppose we do get clean, squanderable energy. Is that okay or not okay? One scenario is that it is okay. [Local-food advocate] Alice Waters’ approach to food — artisanal growing of food — is a better approach to growing food. But you need a certain amount of prosperity and density and all these other fun things for that to happen. That is also a product of highly industrialized civilization.

Alice Waters needs a city and in the absence of a city you don’t get Alice Waters or Michael Pollan. The city is a market. It’s a sophisticated market.

e360: Thirty or 40 years ago if you picked up a book advocating these ideas, what would you have thought?

Brand: So 30 to 40 years ago I think I would have said to all the genetic engineering stuff — hot dog! I did say at that time “yes” to solar in space because I was pushing space colonies. The only practical reason that we could think of was that a business model for space colonies was beaming down solar.

Nuclear I would have said, “Bad idea,” and I did. Not actively and overtly. I just went in a somewhat knee-jerk mode and my own mode of long-term thinking at the time that it was too big a penalty to exact from future generations, because of the nuclear waste issue.

I think a lot of this stuff is shifting, and this book is a next-30-years to next-100-years book. Most of the issues we’re dealing with — [like] climate — will be sorted out one way or the other in this century. It’s going to be a thrilling century because so much is in play and so many balls are in the air.

Author Todd Woody is a veteran environmental and technology journalist based in California who writes for “The New York Times,” the “Los Angeles Times,” “Grist” and other publications. He previously was a senior editor at “Fortune” magazine, the assistant managing editor of Business 2.0 magazine and the business editor of the “San Jose Mercury News.”

Article appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360

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As the world weighs how to deal with warming, the idea of human manipulation of climate systems is gaining attention.  Yet beyond the environmental and technical questions looms a more practical issue: How could governments really commit to supervising geoengineering schemes for centuries?

In the summer of 2006, geoengineering — the radical proposal to offset one human intervention into planetary systems with another — came roaring out of the scientific closet. Deliberate climate modification, as climate scientist Wally Broecker once noted, had long been “one of the few subjects considered taboo in the realm of scientific inquiry.”

Two things spurred this dramatic reversal: growing alarm because climate change was hitting harder and faster than expected and the abysmal failure of political efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Indeed, since world leaders signed the Rio Convention on Climate Change in 1992, global emissions climbed from 6.1 billion metric tons of carbon a year to 8.5 billion tons in 2007. Dismayed by the inaction, Paul Crutzen, a Nobel laureate, published a controversial paper in August, 2006 that opened the door to the hitherto unthinkable. Since timely and sufficient reductions appeared to be, in his words, “a pious wish,” he urged serious investigation of technological proposals to offset rising temperatures.

For some, geoengineering seemed to hold out another hope: that technology might provide an escape not only from growing heat, but also from the thorny realm of hard choices and difficult international politics. Those politics were on vivid display in Copenhagen this week, as nations have agreed on the gravity of the threat but little else.

Since the release of Crutzen’s influential paper, many have voiced concerns about possible hazards posed by geoengineering schemes. For example, the artificial volcano projects, which would inject sulfate particles into the stratosphere to deflect incoming sunlight, might reduce the symptom of excess heat, but experience from past volcanic eruptions and climate models indicates that this approach would likely alter rainfall patterns and intensify drought in many regions. And because such sunshade schemes only treat a symptom rather than tackle the cause, this technofix would do nothing to prevent another dire consequence of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — increasing acidity in ocean waters. This acidity jeopardizes coral reefs, shelled marine life, and a tiny plankton Emiliania huxleyi, which plays a key role in the transfer of carbon from the atmosphere to long-term storage in deep ocean sediments.

The moral and political hazards of geoengineering are as formidable as the physical dangers.

But the biggest hitch in sunshade remedies involves politics and questions of governance, for they would require an unflagging commitment of centuries: five hundred years or so, or, if we do not make major emissions cuts, even as long as a millennium. If anything were to interrupt this geoengineering effort, which would have to keep replenishing the sulfates every few years, the world would quickly confront a doomsday scenario: Temperatures would suddenly soar upward at a rate 20 times faster than they are rising today, causing unimaginable havoc in human and natural systems and with it, the real danger of human extinction. This institutional challenge is without question a far greater obstacle than any technological difficulties. It is hard to imagine that anyone with even a passing knowledge of human history would think this long-term commitment could be a prudent gamble.

The moral and political hazards of geoengineering are altogether as formidable as the physical dangers. However inviting the prospects shimmering on the technological horizon, geoengineering “solutions” and the promise of a technofix down the road lead us easily into temptation. Indeed, these speculative technologies are already figuring in the political debate and hover in the background of diplomatic discussions, since it will be impossible to limit future warming to 2 degrees C, as G-8 leaders pledged in July, without something like a new technology to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It is easy to forget that these are proposals, not proven technologies. There is no assurance that any will actually work as imagined.

Even more troubling, these tantalizing prospects can encourage neglect of what can be done now. Former President George W. Bush often used future technology as an excuse for inaction, touting research on hydrogen fuel-cell “freedom cars” while rejecting proposals to improve the efficiency of today’s vehicles. One energy economist quipped, the freedom car “is really about Bush’s freedom to do nothing about cars today.”

Similarly, longtime climate skeptic Bjorn Lomborg claims that the best, most cost-effective approach isn’t any of the policy proposals on the table in the U.S. Congress or at the Copenhagen conference — for instance, carbon taxes or a regime of cap-and-trade — but rather one of the sunshade technologies that would boost the cooling capacity of clouds by spraying saltwater into the air to stimulate the formation of more cloud droplets.

If Lomborg and his allies in conservative think tanks tout such technofixes as a better “solution” to the climate change, others such as Crutzen and Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, see it as an insurance policy in the event of full-blown emergency. They advocate research to distinguish the merely risky geoengineering schemes from the manifestly mad. It is hard to object to a backup plan, especially as the world has not yet halted emissions, much less embarked on the deep reductions that are required.

Insurance, however, often has a perverse effect: The promise that something will be there to bail you out if the worst happens encourages imprudent behavior. The number of mountain rescues has increase because hikers carry cell phones. The National Flood Insurance Program for people living in coastal communities aimed to discourage development in high-risk areas by providing subsidized insurance if the local government agreed to guide development away from flood-prone areas, but the program instead has increased development in these danger zones. Similarly, geoengineering schemes foster the notion that technology can rescue us from climate hell, if it comes to that, and thereby discourages early, prudent action to head off the worst danger.

The promise that something will bail you out if the worst happens encourages imprudent behavior.

The political hazards of deliberate planetary manipulation are as formidable as the moral pitfalls. The technologies that scientists and engineers regard as “insurance” to safeguard the human future may precipitate new kinds of international conflict and the possibility of an arms race in geoengineering technology.

If geoengineering becomes the chosen response, the obvious question is, Who is going to make decisions that are truly global in scope, and how? Who, if anyone, will be approving, overseeing, and policing any use of geoengineering? If the time comes when the Earth needs a sunshade, there must be a guarantee, once started, that it will continue for centuries. If the monsoon fails following some geoengineering effort, there must be some authority to mediate the dispute about what caused it or compensate those who claim damages. As Stanford climate scientist Stephen Schneider has suggested, such claims are inevitable, so it would be unwise to do this without some plan for “no-fault climate disaster insurance” to provide compensation.

And how is it going to be possible to distinguish plain old bad weather from climatological warfare? In a geoengineered world, a catastrophic hurricane or devastating drought can generate suspicion, paranoia, and conflict.

The problems of the planetary era clearly require some manner of global governance, but our first attempts at this have failed miserably. Gus Speth, the former dean of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and an early leader on global problems, describes the current state of affairs bluntly: “The climate convention is not protecting climate, the biodiversity convention is not protecting biodiversity, the desertification convention is not preventing desertification, and even the older and stronger Convention of the Law of the Sea is not protecting fisheries.”

What happens if a single country opts for planetary manipulation instead of reducing emissions?

The planetary system binds us more tightly in a common destiny than the economic system. No one will be secure in a world with runaway warming. Yet governments that willingly concede some of their sovereignty to promote economic expansion will not do the same to protect planetary systems.

In the absence of some means to arrive at a collective decision and provide oversight, all sorts of conflicts and tensions are almost inevitable. What happens if a single country decides to opt for planetary manipulation instead of reducing its emissions? What if other countries object that the project is too risky? If it becomes possible to scrub carbon dioxide from the air and reduce carbon dioxide levels, the question of who gets to choose what kind of climate we want and whether nations should pay to remove their share of past emissions could spark serious disputes.

Until a shift in their rhetoric on climate change six months ago, Russian leaders, for example, were inclined to an upbeat assessment of the benefits of climate change and quick to claim land along with any oil, gas, and minerals lying beneath the no-longer-icebound Arctic. Even if their new-found concern about future warming proves genuine, the Russians might balk at a plan to reduce carbon dioxide levels to 280 to 300 parts per million — a target that would return CO2 levels to what is indisputably the safe range for the climate system. Climate scientist Ken Caldeira judged that it isn’t far-fetched to imagine “some kind of arms race of geoengineering where one country is trying to cool the planet and another is trying to warm the planet.”

The greatest temptation is the naïve hope for a quick fix that will spare us from the difficult challenges of cutting greenhouse gas emissions or finding a way to live together on a shared planet. Even if one of these geoengineering schemes does pan out, be assured that it isn’t going to prove either simple or a “solution.”

Author Dianne Dumanoski is an author and journalist who has reported on a wide range of environmental and energy issues for four decades. As an environmental reporter for The Boston Globe, she covered the effects of ozone depletion, global warming, and the accelerating loss of species. Her latest book is “The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on A Volatile Earth.”

Article appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360

[photo credit: University of Edinburgh]

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Dr. Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington provided a balanced look at the potential benefits and also the costs and possible harm that geoengineering techniques could offer in our quest to find a “Magic Bullet” to counter global warming.

Can global warming be mitigated by a technological fix such as injecting light-blocking particles into the atmosphere or chemically “scrubbing” excess greenhouse gases from the atmosphere? Department of Global Ecology scientist Ken Caldeira addressed this question in his testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology in a hearing titled “Geoengineering: Assessing the Implications of Large-Scale Climate Intervention” on November 5, 2009.

Caldeira testified that climate change poses a real risk to Americans and that the surest way to reduce this risk is to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. But other options, such as geoengineering approaches, may also cost-effectively contribute to risk reduction in certain circumstances.

Solar Radiation Management (SRM) approaches seek to reduce the amount of climate change by reflecting some of the sun’s warming rays back to space. Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) approaches seek to reduce the amount of climate change and ocean acidification by removing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The most promising SRM proposals appear to be inexpensive, can be deployed rapidly, and can cause the Earth to cool quickly. But they do not address the root causes of our climate problem or the problem of ocean acidification. Examples of SRM include injecting particles into the atmosphere or whitening clouds over the ocean to reflect incoming solar radiation. While SRM approaches may reduce overall climate risk, they may also introduce additional environmental and political risk.

The most promising CDR approaches appear to be expensive (relative to SRM, but perhaps competitive to reducing emissions) and take a long time before they could cool the Earth. However, they address the root cause of the problem — excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Examples include biological approaches such as planting forests and chemical approaches that extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or from emissions sources and store it underground.

Neither SRM nor CDR would be a climate cure-all, however.

“The best, surest, and clearest way to reduce environmental risk associated with greenhouse gas emissions is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” said Caldeira in his written testimony. “If you take the risk of climate damage seriously, you want to take action to diminish risk by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but you would not want to limit yourself to only one risk-reduction approach.”

Article by Roger Greenway appearing courtesy of ENN

[photo credit: ozgurmulazimoglu]

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Interfering with the Earth’s climate system to counteract global warming is a controversial concept. But in an interview with Yale Environment 360, climate scientist Ken Caldeira talks about why he believes the world needs to better understand which geoengineering schemes might work and which are fantasy — or worse.

Atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira first became known for his groundbreaking work on ocean acidification, a phrase originally coined as a headline for one of his papers. Of late, however, Caldeira’s research has led him into the controversial area of geoengineering — the large-scale, deliberate manipulation of the Earth’s climate system.

Many scientists have shied away from the subject because they feel it is a wrongheaded and dangerous path to pursue. But Caldeira — who heads a research lab at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University — has not been so dismissive, in part because his climate modeling has demonstrated that some geoengineering schemes may indeed help reduce the risk of climate change. In fact, few scientists have thought harder about the moral, political, and environmental implications of geoengineering.

Caldeira has become a focal point recently in the controversy surrounding the publication of Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s SuperFreakonomics, the follow-up to their previous best-seller, Freakonomics. A chapter of the book that deals with geoengineering and quoted Caldeira was circulated on the Internet prior to the book’s publication and was widely criticized for its poor understanding of climate science and its cynical, contrarian perspective.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360, conducted by author Jeff Goodell, who is working on a book about geoengineering, Caldeira spoke about how his work was misrepresented in SuperFreakonomics, as well as the prospects — and pitfalls — of plans to engineer the planet’s climate system. He views geoengineering as a last resort, one fraught with risks and unintended consequences. What if, for example, industrialized nations decide to inject heat-reflecting dust into the stratosphere and set off a climate reaction that causes drought and famine in India and China? For this and many other reasons, Caldeira argues that sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions is by far the most prudent course.

Still, given the huge volume of carbon dioxide that humanity continues to pour into the atmosphere, Caldeira says it would be folly not to undertake research into geoengineering. With the prospect that the world could reach a level of dangerous warming this century, Caldeira maintains it’s necessary to determine which projects — such as putting particles in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight into space — might work and which will not. He likens geoengineering schemes to seatbelts — a technology that might reduce the chance of injury in case of a climate crash.

But, warned Caldeira, “Thinking of geoengineering as a substitute for emissions reduction is analogous to saying, ‘Now that I’ve got the seatbelts on, I can just take my hands off the wheel and turn around and talk to people in the back seat.’ It’s crazy.”

Yale Environment 360: I want to start with this little dust-up over SuperFreakonomics. In the book, you are quoted as saying, when it comes to global warming, “Carbon dioxide is not the right villain.” Is that accurate?

Ken Caldeira: That is not accurate. I don’t believe I said anything remotely like that because I believe that we should be outlawing the production of devices that emit carbon dioxide, and I don’t think we can solve this carbon climate problem unless we drastically reduce our carbon dioxide emissions very soon.

e360: They also write that you are convinced that human activity is responsible for “some” global warming. What does that mean?

Caldeira: I don’t think we can say with certainty whether we’re responsible for 90 percent of it or we might be responsible for 110 percent of it. But the vast majority of global warming, I believe, is due to human release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

e360: Another thing that plays in to the same kind of sensibility is the idea that the doubling of CO2 traps less than 2 percent of the outgoing radiation emitted by the Earth. When that’s phrased like that, it makes it sound like it’s not really much of a problem.

Caldeira: You should think of the whole global warming problem as a 1 percent problem, at least for doubling of CO2. In absolute temperature Kelvin — scientists like to use the Kelvin scale — the current Earth temperature is around 288 degrees Kelvin, and a 3-degree warming on top of that is basically a one-percent additional warming. And so this whole issue of climate change, when viewed from an Earth-system perspective, is a story about 1 percents and 2 percents. Two percent might sound like a small number, but that’s the difference between a much hotter world, and the kind of world we’re accustomed to.

e360: The authors also cite you as saying that a doubling of CO2 yields a 70-percent increase in plant growth, suggesting it would be a boon to agricultural activity. It sounds like one of those old CO2-is-good-for-you ads. Can you explain that?

Caldeira: Yes, first of all, there are two parts of that. One is the 70-percent increase in plant growth. And that came out of a paper that we produced, I believe, in 2005.

We took a model and emitted all of the carbon dioxide available in fossil fuel resources, and that model — which has a very low climate sensitivity, and what I would consider a hyperactive land biosphere — produced 9-degree Centigrade warming globally and 20 degrees around East Antarctica.

Now that’s 16 degrees Fahrenheit globally, and something like 36 degrees around Antarctica, which could be enough to threaten the ice sheet. For that study we knew that the land biosphere model was overactive and taking up too much CO2, but we felt that was conservative to the hypothesis we were addressing, because if you had a biosphere that took up less CO2, it would only make the planet even warmer.

So we were showing, look, even if CO2 fertilization is at the high end of anybody’s imagination, we still produce rather frightening temperatures. But I do believe the basic sign is correct, that with more CO2, plants can use water more efficiently, and even the IPCC [International Panel on Climate Change] says that agricultural productivity is expected to go up with global warming.

But that will not be distributed uniformly. It’s thought that agricultural productivity will increase in the mid and high latitudes, where warmer weather will help the plants grow, but will decrease productivity in the poor equatorial nations where heat is already stressing crop yield.

e360: Overall, do you feel like your work has been accurately and fairly represented in this book?

Caldeira: The main misrepresentation is the quote that says that CO2 is not “the right villain.” Now, again, I don’t use “villain” talk myself, but if you say what’s the primary gas responsible for the planetary warming, I would say it’s carbon dioxide.

The casual reader can… come up with the misimpression of what I believe.

Now, there’s a tougher question when it comes to the other statements that are attributed to me. All of those other statements are based in fact and based on studies that either I have published or other scientists have published. And if we pull back to the case of the biosphere taking up 70 percent of CO2 — well, yes, we have a published study that said that. It also presented results saying that we might warm up the planet enough to risk melting Antarctica ultimately. And so there is a selective use of quotes.

If you spend several hours talking to somebody and they take a half-dozen things and put it in a book, then it’s going to be in the context and framing of arguments that the authors are trying to make. And so the actual statements attributed to me are based on fact, but the contexts and the framing of those issues are very different from the context and framing that I would put those same facts in…

So I think that the casual reader can… come up with a misimpression of what I believe and what I feel about things.

e360: Let’s talk a little bit more broadly about geoengineering. I was struck by something one of the authors said on NPR the other day — that he got interested in geoengineering when he realized that the problem with global warming is not that there is too much carbon in the air; it’s that it is too hot. Do you agree with that?

Caldeira: The reason it is too hot is that there is too much carbon dioxide in the air. Now the carbon dioxide itself, of course, has big negative implications for ocean acidification and ecosystems, including coral reefs. So there are direct CO2 effects.

But I think if we had some magic thing that would reverse all effects of CO2 perfectly, then you could say, “Well the problem is not CO2.” But nobody really expects that we are going to have some magic, perfect CO2 nullifier. And it’s clear to me that if we continue allowing greenhouse gas concentration to grow in the atmosphere, and try to engineer our climate to counteract those effects, that as the greenhouse gases accumulate, and our counteracting system grows ever larger and larger, that the risk of some kind of catastrophic failure of this offsetting — or the imperfections in this offsetting — would grow in time and the net result would be pretty negative, I would imagine.

So, I do see CO2 as the problem. I think to present it as if, “Well, it not’s really CO2, but the effects of CO2,” it’s like if you got shot by a bullet and you said, “Well, it wasn’t really the bullet that was the problem, it was just that I happened to have this hole through my body…”

e360: Right. Well, a lot of people think of geoengineering as a quick and cheap fix for global warming. Is it?

Caldeira: Let’s pretend for a moment that putting dust in the stratosphere is easy to do and works reasonably well. And let’s say the United States and England and the “Coalition of the Willing” decided to go ahead and deploy this system, and that China or India then went into a decade or two of deep drought.

I look at geoengineering as something only to consider if our backs were really up against the wall.

Whether the system caused that drought or not, I think the Chinese or the Indians would rightly suspect that the reason they have this drought and ensuing famines might be due to this system that was put up by these other countries. And you could easily imagine that there would be a great amount of political tension, and possibly even leading to warfare. So I think just the political dimensions and the governance dimensions of these geoengineering options suggest that we would be very reluctant to deploy these things, even if we thought they worked more or less perfectly.

Another example is that, in many climate model simulations, the area around Egypt tends to get wetter with global warming. And so what if you do this geoengineering scheme and it takes away water from countries that didn’t have water a few centuries ago? Are they are going to be happy you’re doing this? So I think just the political problems associated with perceived winners and losers are so great that a politician is not going to want to deal with these problems.

Then, of course, the system is not going to work perfectly. First of all, it’s not going to address the issues of ocean acidification. It’s not going to perfectly offset global warming, so you’ll have some residual effects. So, I look at these geoengineering options as something we would only want to consider if our backs were really up against the wall, and where all these environmental and political risks seem worth taking because the alternatives look so frightening.

e360: I know that some scientists have suggested that there should be some kind of taboo on geoengineering research. But I know that you’ve been outspoken in the need for a federally-funded geoengineering research program. Can you explain that?

Caldeira: Yes, I think we don’t know right now whether these kinds of approaches have the potential to reduce risk or not. In our climate models, the amount of climate change can be reduced by these kinds of approaches, but the climate models are an imperfect reflection of reality, and they don’t consider the kinds of political risks that I was mentioning before. And so I think we just have to say we don’t know whether these options can really reduce overall risk…

Let’s say geoengineering doesn’t work, and that it would add to risk. It seems to me it would be worth having a research program to demonstrate that beyond a reasonable doubt so we can all forget about this and move on.

On the other hand, if these options do have the potential to reduce risk, then it seems to me that we would like to have the option to reduce that risk should a time come where that would seem necessary. I kind of think of these geoengineering options as seeing, “Well, can we invent some kind of seatbelts for our climate system?” We need to drive the climate system carefully, we need to greatly reduce emissions. But even if we’re driving carefully we still run the risk of getting into an accident. And seatbelts can potentially reduce the damage when we’re in an accident.

I don’t think we’re going to reduce emissions fast enough that we’re not running some really grave risks.

But the reason I’m concerned about geoengineering is because I am so concerned about greenhouse gas emissions, and so, again, I’m in favor of essentially making greenhouse gas-emitting devices illegal. But I don’t think we’re going to reduce emissions fast enough to make me feel that we’re not running some really grave risks. And so I think we need to develop options to diminish those risks.

And it’s not just geoengineering. I’m much in favor of a very broad-spectrum approach. I think one of the things we saw with the subprime mortgage crisis is that a few million people in the United States defaulted on their mortgages and we have a worldwide economic crisis. I think we have to assume that climate change damage will be a much bigger amplitude than a few million mortgage defaults.

If there’s some kind of climate crisis in Southeast Asia, is that going to amplify and shake the whole global economic system? This is the kind of thing that Jim Lovelock is afraid of, that you’ll have “economic migrants” resulting from climate change that will ultimately destabilize modern civilization.

And so I think we also need to be doing research in how do we make our society more robust, so that these local climate damages won’t turn into global problems. We need to be doing basic adaptation planning; we need to look at geoengineering options. But the main thing we need to do is work to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions.

But thinking of geoengineering as a substitute for emissions reduction is analogous to saying, “Now that I’ve got the seatbelts on, I can’t just take my hands off the wheel and turn around and talk to people in the back seat.” It’s crazy.

e360: Can you sketch briefly what a geoengineering research program might look like?

Caldeira: The first thing I would do is use the plural, and say “programs.” Because many different things are lumped into the same category of geoengineering, which I think there’s no real good reason to link together.

For example, people like David Keith and Klaus Lackner have been looking at capture of carbon dioxide from the air, which could then be isolated underground in underground storage reservoirs. And this is a kind of slow process that will likely be expensive and take many decades to make a real difference in atmosphere CO2 concentrations. But it’s an important line of research that needs to be undertaken. But it won’t do any good in the event of an emergency. Maybe after an emergency when we realize we need to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations it would be useful.

But that’s very different from, say, putting sulfur dust in the stratosphere, which would reflect sunlight back to space, and cool the Earth, much as Mount Pinatubo did in 1991 and 1992. Again, I think there needs to be a research program on that, but I don’t see any reason to couple that with these carbon dioxide removal approaches.

So I think there at least needs to be two new programs — one looking at what are the scalable, fast-acting things we could do in the event of an emergency. What could we do fast that would start the earth cooling within a couple of years if we really wanted to? And then I think we need another research program in saying how can we backpedal out of our high greenhouse gas concentrations. Are there any things we can do to get the greenhouse gases that we’ve already emitted into the atmosphere out of the atmosphere?

e360: Do you think it’s inevitable that we’re going to try to engineer the Earth’s climate?

Caldeira: First of all, nobody can really see the future, and I’m not foolish enough to try to predict the future. But I think that there’s a very decent likelihood that we might go down a slippery slope in this direction. For example, we’ve done some simulations recently looking at this idea of whitening clouds over the ocean. John Latham has proposed this… Now we did a very idealized simulation, but in our simulations, by cooling the ocean relative to the land, this brought in a cool sea breeze from the ocean to the land, and then the sea breeze brought with it water and increased rainfall over land. Now, in principle, this could be deployed regionally. You could imagine whitening the clouds off the Sahel or off the coast of Los Angeles, and bring cooler, wetter air either to West Africa or the southwestern United States. And if we have global warming, and there’s some regional manipulation that would start making the regional climate more comfortable and more agriculturally productive, I think it’s going to be pretty hard to tell people, “No, no, you shouldn’t do that. You should swelter in the sun.”

And so I think that there are pathways that we might start regionally and slowly ramp up to something more global. I think that’s a possibility.

The other possibility is a real emergency situation where there’s a phase change in public opinion, [where] it becomes conventional wisdom that we can’t tolerate this climate change any more, that we have to do something.

Whether that will ever happen or not, I don’t know. If I had to wager, I would wager that we would never deploy any geoengineering system, and that we’re more likely just to try our best to adapt to it.

But I think there’s enough of a risk that it’s worth investigating whether there are options to reduce risk and damage.

And the way I look at it is that we’re talking here about people’s lives, and I don’t think we’re going to deploy these systems to save polar bears. I think if they’re going to be deployed, it’s going to be to help people from dying of famines, or something dramatic like that. And I think that these techniques have a potential to save lives and reduce suffering, and we should explore whether that’s true or not.

The idea that it would somehow be better to let people starve than to intervene in the climate system, we’re presented with that option… It sounds like the moral high ground to say, “Oh, well, we should never interfere with the climate system.” But we’re obviously interfering with the climate system wholesale now, and it’s possible that more intelligent interference could reduce the damage from the first interference. But it could make it worse. I don’t think we know, which is why we need the research program.

Article appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360

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