Geoengineering: A Bad Idea Whose Time May Come?

Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog reports on a session at the recent AGU meeting on geoengineering in which climate-change scientists discussed the risks and benefits of deliberately altering the Earth's climate. One measure of the concern scientists have about Earth's climate could be gauged by the standing-room only crowd of 200 that packed the presentation room. The eleven speakers laid out some radical and dangerous ideas. They uniformly cautioned that the uncertainties and dangers of implementing any of these schemes were high, but that geoengineering may be necessary if efforts to control greenhouse gases fail and the climate begins to undergo rapid and destructive changes.

Interesting premise: what if one or a few countries decided to geoengineer without "unanimous" (or at least "substantial") buy-in from the rest of the world? That could certainly lead to some interesting situations.

By the way, the title of the post is from Masters, not me; I added the question mark.

Some light reading for the holidays.

"We are upsetting the atmosphere upon which all life depends. In the late 80s when I began to take climate change seriously, we referred to global warming as a "slowmotion catastrophe", one we expected to kick in perhaps generations later. Instead, the signs of change have accelerated alarmingly." -- David Suzuki

Comments

[Michael]

Thanks for commenting.

Actually, it is more than a few who have already geoengineered - any country who is spewing GHGs into the atmosphere practices geoengineering at some level. The problem is that they did not realize all the global implications until it was too late.

I would also argue that much of the world has implicitly "bought in" to GHG production and the resultant lifestyle created by Western industrialization. Again, they did not realize the unintended consequences. They "bought in" with insufficient information.

[groundwaterhegemony]

But a few countries have already decided to *geoengineer* without substantial buy-in from the rest of the world by introducing CO2 into the atmosphere in concentrations that have lead to the reason to consider another layer of geoengineering. What we need is a good effort of earth modification, much like the efforts of weather modification, by figuring out how to induce a volcano(s) to introduce the needed sulfur into the atmosphere. Perhaps the recent ORMAT geothermal exploration well in Hawaii where a magma chamber was encountered will provide some insight on earth modification or *volcano seeding*.