With big global companies decades behind the pace necessary to avert really bad alterations in the climate, it’s perhaps unsurprising to learn scientists are coming up with schemes for massive tinkering with the climate through technology.
Courtesy pdphoto.org
Hmmm… wasn’t that how we got into this mess in the first place? We seem perpetually convinced we can engineer our way out of just about anything.
And yet, reading Scott Canon’s story in the Kansas City Star on so-called “geoengineering” to avert climate catastrophe, some of the meaures seem benign enough. Painting all our roofs white? Simple enough.
But what about sending up aircraft to spew sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere? We know it would probably cool the planet — it replicates what happens when a big volcano blows. You get a masking of the atmosphere from incoming solar rays. It’s exactly what happened when Mount Pinatubo did its thing in 1991.
Even atmospheric scientist Alan Robock, who recently broached this idea, has his doubts, though. He notes that there are almost bound to be side effects we don’t anticipate, Canon wrote:
Robock said seeding the stratosphere is a bad idea. It easily could trigger droughts, deplete the atmosphere’s ozone layer, make less energy available for solar power systems, obscure the stars to astronomers and possibly destroy great swaths of ocean life. The sky would even be less blue, Robock said.
Now, some of these geoengineering ideas seem just too good to be true. Take the recent analysis by a chap from the American Enterprise Institute and an assistant professor at the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. They propose handling all the problems from global warming by spending $9 billion on ships that would spray seawater into the air. This would thicken clouds, which would — like the soot from Pinatubo — reflect a bit of the solar radiation back into space.
That idea got some attention in a recent Time magazine piece, although University of Colorado climate researcher Roger Pielke disputed its effectiveness in a critique that says it would be cheaper to just pull the CO2 out of the air.
Some of the proposals seem very Rube Goldberg, like putting massive mirrors on satellites. Or recall that a few years ago some folks were talking about dumping massive gazillions of tons of iron into the seas to help them absorb carbon dioxide. Not long after that we found out the oceans have been doing that quite effectively already — but it’s leading to ocean acification that threatens much of humanity’s food supply. (And it turns out that iron-dumping thing doesn’t work anyway.)
Politically, enviros and scientists who see the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fear that all this talk of geoengineering could torpedo legislative and diplomatic efforts to get a handle on global warming.
That’s a legitimate fear, perhaps. But as Dateline Earth has said before, and more than once, we need to find the 100 1 percent solutions to global warming. So it seems some form of geoengineering as least should be considered. Sane and sober climate scientists are saying that. As Simone Tilmes, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told Canon:
Just trying to get greenhouse gases reduced might not be enough. It’s definitely worth looking at alternatives.
Absolutely. We have been so fixated on greenhouse gases that we have forgotten that it is the essential web of life and all species within it that must be rebalanced if we are to survive. If we refocus on that, and our human behaviors which are devastating this planet, global warming will take care of itself as we become more conscious and aware of this undebateable fact…WITHOUT NATURE WE DO NOT EXIST!
Global warming is affecting every country in some way or another. It’s high time that we take some steps or else it would get too late.
Technology eventually will provide solutions, but only after we first set the criteria for solutions and have established a goal.
The criteria for alternative energy should be:
1. Not impose a public health threat, due to air pollution.
2. Its generation should have a minimum impact of the earth’s biosphere.
3. The energy should be able to be stored and only used as needed.
Many will claim that these criteria can not be met, but when one looks at how life on earth for millions of years has used water, not only as a source for organic matter, but also for energy, one wonders why we, with our present knowledge of science, can not use the same energy principle.
Autotrophic life (life using carbon dioxide as a source for carbon) uses the energy of the sun to split the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is released, while the hydrogen is used to create organic matter. Heterotrophic life (life using organic carbon as a source of carbon) releases the energy in organic matter (thereby releasing the hydrogen) and uses oxygen to bind the hydrogen back into water.
Our present energy policies are based on the chemical oxidation of organic matter, either growing on earth or stored as fossil fuel for millions of years in the earth. This burning, besides impacting the earth biosphere and causing air pollution, is clearly unsustainable, especially based on the rate this consumption is occurring during the past century.
So why not follow Nature’s own principle and establish a hydrogen/oxygen based energy economy, while applying technology to achieve this goal.
President Kennedy set the goal to go to the moon, but only then did technology achieve that goal.