Engineering Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

Leave it to environmentalists to be beacons of "progress."

With another round of UN climate conferencing underway in Durban, South Africa, when the environment news isn't talking about how Harper and his cronies are trying to sabotage efforts to replace the soon-to-expire Kyoto Accord, issues such as geoengineering are bubbling to the surface. It's something I've written about before - the use of technological means to modify the planetary environment, specifically in a manner that mitigates or negates the effect of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Among my series of predictions for this decade that I posted on December 31, 2009 was that "at least one major geoengineering project will be active by 2019," and I still stand by that... although I did also predict that the Conservatives would lose power and that the Greens wouldn't pick up a House of Commons seat.

Still, there's a lot of talk about geoengineering, and I really believe it's something vital we need to pursue - whether it be by brightening clouds or painting roofs white to increase the planetary albedo, thereby reflecting more sunlight and decreasing the degree to which the planet is heated, injecting sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to mimic the effects of a volcanic eruption (and, incidentally, increase the incidence of acid rain), or something else entirely. On Friday, the Toronto Star covered a report made to the Durban conference that, theoretically, increasing the planet's albedo "would have an immediate and dramatic effect" and that in a matter of years, "global temperatures would return to levels of 250 years ago."

Are you kidding? This sort of research needs to be supported immediately - it's the sort of thing every government should be able to get behind, from the ones who want action because sea level rises would wipe them from the map to the ones that don't want action because it would cut into Alberta's short-term oil profits. Sure, rising temperatures don't represent the only threatening aspect for climate change - ocean acidification will continue as long as we keep emitting huge quantities of carbon dioxide - but it gives us breathing room, more of a chance to figure out how to solve these problems.

But where problems are complicated, so are the solutions. Earth is a complex, chaotic system, and we don't understand nearly enough about it as we think we do. I recognize it's highly possible that a major geoengineering campaign could have side effects that, right now, we can't predict. For me, I'd take that as reason to start off small with pilot projects, and to invest in geoengineering methods that can easily be turned off if need be. I'll be the first to admit that managing planetary environments is difficult work - I learned that back in the 1990s, with SimEarth on the Super Nintendo.

Industrial civilization getting you down? Carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere up to 10%? With just a few adjustments here and there, you can freeze the planet over or make the oceans boil away! SimEarth for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System is ©1990/1992 Maxis & Will Wright and ©1992 FCI Inc.

Yet here come the environmentalists. Specifically the Star quotes Silvia Ribeiro of the ETC Group, an organization which describes itself as "dedicated to the conservation and sustainable advancement of cultural and ecological diversity and human rights," as stating that geoengineering is as bad as nuclear weapons. If you're keeping to the Ford embargo of the Star, here's the quote in all its cockeyed glory.

"Solar radiation management technologies are high-risk and extremely dangerous and they should be treated under international law like nuclear weapons — except, unlike nuclear weapons, we have an opportunity to ban their testing and their proliferation before the technology is fully developed, rather than trying to prevent their proliferation after the fact," she said.

Yes, how excellent! How forward-thinking! Rather than consider the possibility that certain flavors of geoengineering, if managed carefully, could mitigate the effects of climate change, we should just ban it all right now and close that door forever! Banning geoengineering won't put it in a box any more than the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty put nukes in a box - it certainly didn't keep India, Israel, North Korea, or Pakistan from getting their nukes. Honestly, in a future where geoengineering was banned, I would expect it to be far more likely for environment modification to be used as a weapon, because if it's banned, why else is anyone going to be investigating it?

What people tend to forget is that we are already geoengineering - or, if you'd rather, call it de-terraforming like Randy McDonald does. Those hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere every year don't just zilch out into nothingness. They're up there and they're having an effect, and to dismiss an entire spectrum of possibilities with which to deal with it because you're scared of what might happen is pure irresponsibility.

We need at least to do the research on geoengineering, to figure out what options are open to us. At this point, unless you expect Stephen Harper and all his pro-emitting buddies to be visited by the Ghosts of Environment Past, Present, and Future, it's probably one of our best hopes. Sure, it's difficult work, but it's difficult work we may need to do.

Engineering Instability

The concept of climate change is not a new thing. The scientific community has been speculating about it for decades and the idea of global warming - generally expressed in terms of sea level rise, since that's the most easily deduced effect - has been going strong for at least twenty years. I remember encountering it in my youth, in school and in popular entertainment that assumed Earth of the future would have a severely, obviously compromised environment.

To listen to the people who are railing about it today, though, you'd think climate change is something a bunch of bored scientists created one morning out of whole cloth. Not only is that idea ridiculous, it's dangerous - unless you're denying that carbon dioxide is a warming agent, which is an entirely different level of willful blindness - and I, personally, am tired of people and corporations that made bank from the time of free-wheeling, uncaring hubris we call "the twentieth century" working to secure that gravy train even as they destabilize the future.

Fortunately, I don't think this will be happening forever. There are two plausible reasons I can think of to explain why climate change skepticism has the strength it does today - because the actions that we would need to take to mitigate our impact on the environment would "negatively" impact current vested interests, in that they would stand to make less money than they do now, and because our effects are not yet patently obvious. There's going to be a tipping point in the public consciousness eventually - the only question is whether or not it'll come before or after the environmental tipping point. Personally, I think photos from orbit of an Arctic without ice may well be what catalyzes that, and at the rate things have been going I expect those pictures to be taken within the next ten years.

Things will change. Attitudes will shift, on both sides.

This chimney is not, so far as I know, emitting sulfur dioxide. But one day ones like it might be.

You may have heard of geoengineering, either on this weblog or elsewhere. To put it bluntly, geoengineering is terraforming Earth - that is, humanity taking an active role in the management of the planetary biosphere. At this point I feel it's necessary, part of our maturation as a species; we're at a stage where we're going to affect the environment no matter what we do, so we might as well invest in our future by keeping it as stable as we can. That having been said, though, geoengineering is not perfect. Throwing new variables into an already complex situation can easily produce chaos.

But when the alternative is watching those billions of tons of methane sequestered in Arctic permafrost be vented into the atmosphere, I'll take the chance of chaos. The most likely method of early geoengineering, because it's comparatively cheap, will probably be stratospheric injection of sulfur dioxide to create a cooling effect - the same sulfur dioxide, incidentally, which helps create acid rain.

Whoops. So there's a ready-made reason for people to oppose that flavor of geoengineering, and perhaps by extension all geoengineering - considering the degree to which environmental groups have, in my opinion, harmed the environmental cause by standing so squarely against nuclear power, I find that a pretty likely outcome. But that doesn't account for everyone. What about the sort of people who are, right now, strenuously objecting to the very concept of climate change, dismissing it as a hoax to line Al Gore's pockets? They're not all going to change their minds.

What I think is possible is that more and more people will come over to the notion that climate change is happening - but where today they deny it, tomorrow they will argue that climate change is a good thing. It's already begun, in fits and starts, and I've heard dubious claims that it would lengthen growing seasons in northern latitudes - somehow, though, I doubt it would magically make that northern soil sufficiently fertile for large-scale agriculture. I can even see governments taking up this notion, and actively working against geoengineering projects - from putting up diplomatic roadblocks in the United Nations or wherever, to actual sabotage of geoengineering installations, because, you know, climate change is somehow in the national interest.

Though it would greatly upset me, it would not surprise me - particularly given its track record in the last ten years - to see the government of Canada leading this charge. It might have been funny when Mordecai Richler joked about it in the 1990s, about selling Prince Edward Island to the Japanese just before it was submerged beneath rising sea levels and building seaside resorts in Inuvik.

Now, though, things are serious, and I'm disturbed at the great number of people who seem to think that everything is just a-OK.

Reflecting on the Climate

Not a week goes by where I don't learn something that suggests we're even more screwed than I already thought we were.

I found a new report yesterday via the BBC discussing that the latest climate models, which now take into account the deep impact of fossil fuel consumption, among other factors, on climate change, indicate that Earth's average temperature will likely increase by 4 degrees Celsius by 2070, possibly even as early as 2060. I have no reason to think that this is a liberal estimate. To the contrary - if the history of climate modelling has shown anything, it's that models frequently overestimate the stability of the environment and its capacity to keep rolling with the punches.

The only spot of light in all this is that these estimates are based on a "business as usual" forecast, the assumption that human civilization will continue burning fossil fuels along the same exponential trajectory as it does today. There is still a chance to avert the worst impacts of climate change, but realistically, unless China and India realize that the environmental system doesn't give a shit about per capita pollution, I don't believe we're going to see any kind of effective emissions cuts. World leaders are just too short-sighted, stupid, and chained to lobbyists' wallets for that sort of revolution.

I think geoengineering is the answer. Despite the risks inherent in it, I think an active guidance and maintenance of the planetary system is now absolutely necessary to our continuity and survival as a technological civilization in the long term. Really, we've been conducting geoengineering ever since we started pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in a large scale, irresponsibly and with no oversight. The planetary system is sufficiently fragile that we can no longer rely on purely natural systems such as oceanic carbon dioxide absorption to mitigate our impact on the planet.

Still, geoengineering is a big tent. It doesn't all have to be along the lines of pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. What we can do through geoengineering, what I think we've got to do, is shore up natural systems that are being overwhelmed. What we need is a bandage for the world, so we can do the work while it heals.

The melting of the Arctic ice cap is a significant threat for greater climate change because of its simple nature; white ice is far more reflective than dark seawater, and light and heat that would stick around to increase Earth's temperature is instead bounced back into space by it. This was good enough when humanity wasn't futzing with the thermostat, but now it needs a hand. If we can increase the albedo (reflectivity) of the planet, even locally, that would provide us additional breathing room in which to make the difficult shifts.

What we might do - I don't know if this is feasible from an engineering standpoint, but I can't see anything that would break the deal about it myself - is build and launch constellations of solar-powered aerostats, high-altitude balloons with station-keeping capability, over the Arctic icecap. These groups of aerostats could support, between them, sheets of thin but intensely reflective material. Enough of these put in place could create a sort of "flying icecap," but one that won't melt, while leaving the true icecap in deeper shadow and cooler temperatures. This would allow the formation of thicker, more robust ice, and allow the icecap to endure through our harshness for a bit longer.

There's no such thing as a perfect geoengineering method. Considering that all humanity lives in the laboratory, I'm sure there are a great deal of radical geoengineering methods that will never be explored because of the danger in manipulating the planetary environment too much. Consider the present, though; we already *are* manipulating the planetary environment, dangerously so. I don't think it's too much to ask to weigh the geoengineering we might do against the geoengineering we're already doing.