Scientists Endorse Geoengineering Research? Uh-Oh

Studying it is a good idea, even if you're opposed to deployment. If the situation gets even worse far faster than projected, you know that *somebody* is going to move from talking about geoengineering to trying it (and not just at small Planktos experiment levels). Being able to say "don't do X because that will make things worse, and here's why" at least gives us a chance to avoid the most counter-productive projects.

I'm with Jamais, having sufficient lead time on the research might help us avoid the worst methods, if (or more likely) when things get bad enough. A little effort spent now is well worth the effort. Provided of course that these studies don't become an excuse for business as usual.

Holy Pandora's Box, Mooney!

Or is it Frankenstein?

Even though I trust climate models as a good way to generate plausible scenarios with reasonable error bars, I wouldn't trust them as tools to evaluate potential outcomes of geoengineering experiments. There are too many factors we couldn't begin to consider.

I'm currently working on the chapter about terraforming and settling Mars in a book for young readers called Our Next Planet: Why, When, and How People Will Settle Another World.

I discuss all kinds of disasters that might befall life on this planet as the Sun ages, asteroids impact, and continents drift. Perhaps I need to add a geoengineering project run amok. Yikes!

(BTW, the main reason I give for settling other worlds is the human drive to explore, not because we'll need an extratereestrial safe haven any time soon.)

We've _been_ geoengineering for a couple of centuries.

Of course we'll be desperately flailing about doing stupid things eventually. Might as well anticipate some of them.

Odds are we'll oversteer and make things worse -- by trying to add a new tactic on top of what we're doing now -- than we would if we'd just back off what we have been doing and let the rate of change slow down.

According to Paul Crutzen:

To compensate for a doubling of CO2, which causes a greenhouse warming of 4 W/m2, the required continuous stratospheric sulfate loading would be a sizeable 5.3 Tg S, producing an optical depth of about 0.04. The Rayleigh scattering optical depth at 0.5 μm is about 0.13, so that some whitening on the sky, but also colorful sunsets and sunrises would occur. It should be noted, however, that considerable whitening of the sky is already occurring as a result of current air pollution in the continental boundary layer.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations work out "5.3 Tg S" to something like ten cubic kilometers of sulfer dioxide. The annual injection would depend on the lifetime, which depends on the particle size.

IMO a better approach would be to use slaked lime (Ca(OH)2), which would reduce, rather than increase, ocean acidification when it landed. (As well as removing a little CO2.) I wonder if a chemical process could be developed to convert CaCO3 and ammonia to Ca(OH)2 and urea, or uric acid, which could be buried in a filling ocean trench to sequester the CO2.

It seems that some are going for geo-engineering before they anything else has even been tried.

John McPhee wrote an interesting book (The Control of Nature) about geoengineering (by US Army Corps of Engineers and others).

Unfortunately, the geo-engineering track record is not particularly good (although it is funny in a pathetic sort of way).

Just look at what happened to the Everglades when all the busy little bees went to work "engineering" southern Florida's water flow.

What a disaster -- albeit no real surprise. That's what inevitably happens when you muck about with something about which you are clueless.

I knew Eli about 10 years ago - so he's writing for Science now? Weird to stumble on his name this way - is he still an insanely good runner?

I would much rather see disciplined, small research efforts going on, as long they don't overdone into "No problem, we have a solution!" things.

Really, in entities that actaully think long term:
1) First, you do a lot of little research projects.
Most don't go anywhere.
2) Then, you pick the most promising ones and develop them further.

3) Then, you take the few that are left and actually do serious deployment.

MOST R&D in climate change mitigation really ought to be in energy saving r&D (i.e., little-r, big D, lots of deployment) and alternate energy technology developments, but it seems OK to have a few people working on 20-year-out possibilities. We used to do this at Bell Labs, which is how people got to transistors and solar cells.

All this is is "progressive commitment", and it's standard R&D management. The worst thing is to get desperate and try to rush around deploying things you haven't done research on.

Geoengineering (through technology), CO2 reduction, yadda yadda yadda, they are all distractions from the unpalatable truth - there are too many people using too much resource generating too much waste.

Once the politicians can get the publics' head around the idea that people will *have* to give up their standards of living, or die in their billions, we might make some progress.

I don't think politicians (or the political and economic short term processes) are up to the task. What are *you* going to do?

I think it's important to do the research. We may need a big idea plan to save our butts if it comes to it. Besides, the
leaders don't listen to us scientists anyways, so we should do what we do. Research.