Assume that human greenhouse-gas emissions are causing dangerous changes in the Earth’s climate. What should we do about it? Public debate on climate change has focused almost solely on requiring large reductions in fossil-fuel energy consumption. Enter the journal Nature with a new feature article on another potential means of dealing with climate change.
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Dubbed geoengineering, it involves purposely “engineering” the planet’s climate in ways intended to offset warming from greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Although
Nature’s discussion of the various possibilities is fascinating on its own, the article is more interesting for its implicit insights into climate scientists’ blinkered view of how to deal with greenhouse risks.
One geoengineering possibility involves injecting sunlight-reflecting sulfate particles into the stratosphere, intended to mimic what large volcanic eruptions already do every once in a while. In a more science-fiction-like vain, another proposal would place numerous small “sunshades” in orbit to prevent a small amount of sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface. For many climate scientists, however, the goal of studying geoengineering isn’t to determine whether any particular proposal is practical or safe, but “to show, with authority, that all such paths are dead-end streets,” and that the focus needs to be on requiring large reductions in people’s fossil-fuel energy consumption.
Much of the climate community still views [geoengineering] with deep suspicion or outright hostility. Geoengineering, many say, is a way to feed society’s addiction to fossil fuels. ‘It’s like a junkie figuring out new ways of stealing from his children,’ says Meinrat Andreae, an atmospheric scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.
In fact, as Nature reports, Andreae urged Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen not to publish a recent article on climate geoengineering, fearing it would distract policymakers from what Andreae sees as the urgent need to cut fossil fuel use. Every scientist who expressed an opinion in the article thinks reducing fossil fuel use is the policy of choice for mitigating human-caused greenhouse warming.
What is so striking is how these scientists, who rightly highlight the need for careful scientific analysis in characterizing the climate effects of GHG emissions, unwittingly forsake science when thinking about how to mitigate climate change. Instead, they jump right from “burning fossil fuels causes dangerous climate change” to “therefore the best way to stop climate change is reducing fossil fuel use.”
The question of what the world’s people will have to give up if they drastically reduce their use of fossil-fuel energy remains unasked. Indeed, none of the scientists profiled in the Nature article show any awareness that the relatively inexpensive and abundant energy from fossil fuels could be anything but harmful to humankind. This myopia appears again and again:
no one thinks that, in the short term, a world cooled by engineering would be preferable to one cooled by a reduction in carbon dioxide levels. And no one thinks that, as yet, we know enough to embark on any sort of large-scale engineering. Models of geoengineering’s benefits need to be a lot more accurate than models of the harm that will be done in its absence. As [climate scientist Ken] Caldeira puts it, if you can be no more precise about the chances of harm under the status quo than to give them as 50%, that’s still something to worry about. But if a proposed intervention has a 50-50 chance of doing good or harm, that’s something to avoid.
In other words, we should worry about the risks of climate change; we should worry about the risks of geoengineering; and we should apply our most meticulous and careful scientific thought to characterizing these risks. But we should not consider — indeed we should remain utterly unaware of — the risks of forcing wealthier people to stop using, and preventing poorer people from starting to use, the fossil-fuel energy that played a leading and essential role in the vast improvements in human health, prosperity, and life expectancy during the last hundred years.
