There’s been some hype in the blogosphere (and the news) about climate engineering; a subject that has been taboo in the political world for quite some time. Today I found out the reason for this by attending a lecture given by Dr. David Keith (Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment at the University of Calgary).
Climate engineering (aka: geo-engineering) is the idea of using technology to change the climate in order to, in some way, compensate for global warming. Geo-engineering modifications to the climate would typically be very fast acting and have very low monetary costs. (For example, Dr. Keith has calculated that with current technologies one could engineer another ice age with 0.01% of the global GDP). The reason it’s been a taboo in political discussion is that by suggesting that there are fast and cheap means by which humans can compensate for CO2 emissions, policy makers may get the (false!) impression that cutting emissions is not a major concern. Cutting emissions, of course, IS a major concern because geo-engineering could only ever offer a band-aid solution to climate problems. It would treat some of the symptoms, not the causes, and it would not restore the original state of our climate.
On the other hand, we may at some point want to treat the symptoms. Treating the root causes by cutting emissions is a slow process because the state of the climate depends on the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. Cutting emissions does not immediately change these concentrations. Eventually we may reach a point where cutting emissions will not be enough to compensate for the melting icecaps (for example). At that point we may decide to apply geo-engineering as a means to very quickly reduce the severity symptoms like this. In that way, future research might conclude that geo-engineering (despite its side effects) could be a better option than not-geo-engineering.
…but is this really feasible, you ask?
You might be thinking of the butterfly effect, and thinking that because of the chaotic behaviour of the climate and how sensitive it is to changes, that it’s unreasonable to think that we could ever control it. The counterintuitive answer to this (as I, myself, was surprised to learn from Dr. Keith’s lecture) is that this kind of behaviour makes it easier to control the climate. A good analogy is NASA’s Grumman X-29 aircraft (shown at left). The shape of the wings create very unstable aerodynamics, but the fact that its flight is so unstable makes it extremely maneuverable because it only takes the slightest change to modify its flight path just like our climate’s sensitivity to changes. The point is it’s not as if we are just tossing the aircraft into the air and knowing it will fly. The flightpath of the aircraft is continually being measured and checked, so we don’t need to have absolute (impossible) knowledge beforehand. The same would be true for geo-engineering. Engineers would not just make some little changes and walk away. They would continually be monitoring aspects of the climate and ecosystem for feedback and making modifications based on this feedback.
This technology is definitely coming. One major problem is that (due to the past taboo) there is no dedicated research effort looking into the specifics. Ignorance about the specifics is dangerous and Dr. Keith is trying to build an effort to look at the benefits, problems and methods of geo-engineering in general, even if the research leads to the conclusion that geo-engineering is definitely not a good option. At the moment all we have are extreme opinions on the subject.
…but who would get to make these modifications to our climate, you ask? Good question.
This creates a moral hazard. Dr. Keith gives a good analogy: Imagine, for the sake of argument, aliens came to earth and gave us a powerful bit of technology in the form of a box with two dials. One dial controls the global temperature and another controls the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. You can probably imagine that countries would fight wars over this box because no country would be able to agree upon a single setting for the dials. This box is, in fact, representative of geo-engineering technologies which are currently emerging bit by bit. This is another reason for dedicated research into the science and the policy. When the technology gets here we should have at least some idea of how we, not only as a society but as groups of societies, will deal with it.
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