Geo-engineering in context

I’m going to get straight to the point.  Doing this blog has not convinced me that geo-engineering is good.  Far from it, I actually feel that if the prospect of global warming and climate change wasn’t an incentive to reduce CO2 emissions, then geo-engineering certainly should be! And here is why"

• ·      SRM: some high impact solutions but ignore the cause of the problem (CO2), poses what could be global-scale environmental and social risks.
• ·    CDR: addresses the part of the problem (CO2, but not emissions), but has limited capacity for CO2 draw down, requires large scale coverage and has the potential for high regional environmental and socio-economic impact.
• ·      None of the effective methods could be implemented (safely) tomorrow; most require more thorough research and design.
• ·      This poses another problem: for many techniques, accurate global climate research cannot be confined to a lab.  Adequate research requires that we actively experiment on our planets climate; to full understand the risks we would need to live them.
• ·      All techniques require significant investment, some exceeding the value of the global CO2 emitting economy.  This investment not only includes the cost of implementation, but there are also the research and development costs to consider.
• ·      Global climate manipulation renders this a topic open for international debate, and we all know that consensus is highly unlikely short of exercising geopolitical power inequalities and manipulation.  Political interest is likely to be particularly high, as there are winners and losers in climate change, geo-engineering (the type and the extent) will change who wins and who loses (as frequently stated by David Keith).
• ·      Knowing that we have a back up plan takes the emphasis off of CO2 mitigation and climate change adaptation. We need more political leverage for reducing CO2 emissions, not less.            

           … the list goes on.

So, the question is: are all these factors enough to justify putting geo-engineering to bed and focusing on the bigger issue?

The answer is yes, BUT (and this is a massive elephant-in-the-room type but) perhaps global warming has already reached a point whereby simply curbing our emissions will not prevent a runaway global climate, a point at which we need geo-engineering.

A recent piece in New Scientist suggests that we are.  Focusing on the Arctic, it details reports that suggest 2015 will see ice retreat that exposes climate to accelerated warming, not only due to a reduced albedo, but due to methane release from the increasingly exposed Siberian Arctic seabed (obviously, as with everything related to climate change, this is highly debated.  Right or wrong, this article raises the crucial point about whether it is within our capacity to truly mitigate runaway climate warming.  Drawing from palaeo-records of the Pleistocene and Cenozoic eras, Hansen et al. (2008) discusses inertia in the earths system.   The paper tends towards the argument that the complete temperature increase that can occur in response to our current level of anthropogenic CO2 forcing has yet to be fully realised.  They suggest that inertia, particularly in delayed ocean warming, compounded by the high atmospheric residency time of CO2, means that even if we stopped emissions, thus stabilising atmospheric CO2 concentrations, it is possible that temperatures would continue to rise to ‘dangerous’ levels.  They conclude that a reduction in atmospheric CO2 of approximately 45ppm is required to stabilise these slow positive feedbacks – is geo-engineering therefore the answer?

On principle, I would warn against geo-engineering, however, on reflection I think it would be naïve to be so dismissive.  As reluctant as I am to say it, within the current context of both climate (and political) inertia, it seems that in the not so distant future geo-engineering may prove to be extremely useful.