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A proposed scientific balloon flight in northern Sweden has attracted opposition from environmental groups over fears it could lead to the use of solar geoengineering
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- Title
- Balloon test flight plan under fire over solar geoengineering fears
- Authors
- Patrick Greenfield
- Published
- Feb 8 2021
- Word count
- 996 words
One of the most cogent arguments I've read against pursuing geoengineering as a solution to climate change:
Alternate view: Learning geoengineering will unleash an insane amount of understanding and learning of our climate, introduce new methods to clean it, lead to an advanced understanding of atmosphere creation, Terraforming, and create a pathway to understand how the climate has direct interactions on any given area creating more research based discussions on the topic of area given climate control and effects on a small area vs a wide area.
We understand very little about the atmosphere, any research that aides us in understanding the literal thing that is keeping us alive and developing methods to keep that life going is a net positive.
The argument that "knowledge of X Is a detriment to society" is a fallacy founded within the confines of luddite principles since the dawn of technology. We are terrified of things we don't understand, and it is our job as a species to work steadfast to understand everything we can to improve ourselves and our place in this universe.
It's not as simple as "research is good, more research is better" though. When research involves releasing things into the atmosphere and possibly (hopefully) actually changing the climate on small scales, that needs oversight and careful thought. Not all research is a net positive.
Our current track record as a species on releasing things into the atmosphere is not good. I think caution is warranted.
Economics is famously called a "dismal science", in part because it's nearly impossible to perform true scientific experiments. If you want to study the impact of, for example, a minimum wage increase, you can't have two identical cities where one raises the minimum wage and one doesn't, and their economies otherwise behave identically. The best you can do is try to build a model from one or more "similar enough" cities and try to use the model as your control group.
Geoengineering research is going to have the same problem of never being able to perform full-scale "experiments" in an isolated way. If China does geoengineering research X and India does geoengineering research Y at the same time, a shift in the winds might cause X & Y to combine, which could either change or invalidate the experimental results. And there's no way to prevent neighboring countries from receiving side effects of either experiment.
It's not that research itself is bad - I don't think anyone is saying that. They're pushing for caution and global cooperation.
I also think there's a moral hazard risk that if geoengineering is feasible, it'll be seen as a way to solve the climate crisis without needing to lower carbon emissions. That leads to the runaway scenario I quoted above, where CO2 emissions keep rising because there's no urgency to cut them anymore - "who cares, we have magic sun-blocking particles".
Atmospheric CO2 persists for thousands of years, geoengineering solutions will last for...months? years? before needing to be refreshed. That's part of what the research would need to figure out (but the Mount Pinatubo eruption the article mentions says the 0.6C drop lasted 15 months, so that's a good initial estimate).
People who get addicted to drugs develop a tolerance over time and need higher and higher doses. If we keep emitting CO2 and rely on geoengineering to stop warming, over time we'll be in an increasingly precarious state where we're "addicted" to geoengineering and need more and more of it, constantly, in order to stop warming from CO2 that's already been emitted. If we stopped for any reason (a world war, perhaps?) or reach diminishing returns of effectiveness, we might find ourselves in a position of having a huge warming event in a short time because of how much CO2 is already in the atmosphere, only just being held at bay by our geoengineering.
Another problem is that more CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't just affect the amount of heat that gets trapped. Ocean acidification is not good for many animals and plants. There is evidence that suggests that while CO2 increases plant growth, it does not increase the amount of micronutrients in plants, that is to say the amount of micronutrients per calorie becomes lower.
I'm with Raymond on this. Our childish belief that we understood our environment well enough that we could mold it to our will without consequence got us here. I'm reasonably certain more of that thinking isn't a great idea.
We don't understand the complexities of earth's systems, take as evidence our ever changing models of what exactly climate change is going to look like. We know a lot, more all the time, but when it comes to what exactly will happen to the larger systems if we tweak X, we have educated guesses at best. We should be real with ourselves, we can't even reliably predict the weather a few days out yet.
I like geoengineering as a last ditch option if we arrive at a point where there aren't any other choices. Right now we know we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we should focus on that.
It's a big problem, the future of humanity vs late stage capitalism, makes it easy to get distracted by shiny things that look comparatively easy.
I understand Raymond's very valid concerns, but I disagree with this view. I'd say more of that thinking is great idea, because it would be a welcome change of pace.
We didn't get where we are because of scientists full of hubris, who thought they can control the environment. We got here because of people chasing wealth, who at each point along the way were faced with a question, "should I do this and make some money, at the cost of some negligible environmental impact", a question to which they answered with a resounding "yes"... and it was fine, and it ushered us into age of unprecedented wealth, until all the countless negligible environmental impacts accumulated into the mess we're in right now.
We got here because of short-term, greedy optimization - which is the opposite of understanding and controlling the environment. Until now, we didn't even try controlling the environment. Now we have no choice but to do so, because we've almost pushed it out of its stability envelope. So we may as well get good at it.
Is geoengineering an answer? No. A part of the answer? Possibly, but maybe it's too dangerous. But we need to start applying a bit more brains, and a bit less of profit-chasing to the question.
Just to be clear, I never said anything about scientific hubris (though it's of course a thing). Any good scientist in a relevant field will be the first to say we don't know a hell of a lot.
As clarified by continuing to read my original post ;) I agree that greed and shortsightedness are the core problems.
That said, in the coming years a lot of people are going to want to do more than study and learn. They're going to want to actually start geoengineering. That's a problem when the actions of one country (or private group) can impact the entire world, potentially irreversibly.
At some point we'll have to come together and make decisions globally, hopefully before people start pressing buttons just to see what they do.
I largely agree with your point, but
I don't think this is the real problem. The real problem is what is "negligible" to one person is not necessarily negligible to someone else, especially when the person weighing how "negligible" something is gets an enormous payout if they can come up with a way to convince themselves that something is a lot more "negligible" than it really is.