Accidental versus intentional geoengineering

Anthropocene

Many scientists argue that we have entered a new geological era. An era characterized by the ability of one species, the humans, to radically change the planet in ways impacting all other living species. This era has been dubbed "the Anthropocene" (from the Greek "Anthropos", human).

As it happens, if humans can wield such power, it's because they are able to collaborate at scale and are organized. Humans have developed complex structures which observe, interpret and analyse the environment, and feed their conclusions to decision-making bodies: the world's governments. With humans' increased abilities, the power available to the world's governments has markedly increased.

And with great powers come great responsibilities. Making good decisions, based on complete, sound data, has never been more important.

Smashing records

By now many people are aware that July 2023 has been a month of global temperature records. The Northern hemisphere has never been so hot, ever. Both land and, especially sea temperatures have broken previous records for many days in row.

^{Source: ClimateReanlayzer via https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8}

^{Source: ClimateReanlayzer via https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8}

Just as worrying, the ice surface in the Antarctic, which used to increase at this time of the year (it's winter in the Sourhern hemisphere) is much, much lower than it used to be in previous years.

^{Source: National Snow and Ice data Center}

As an anecdote, the all time (non-contested) highest temperature ever recorded on land (54,4° in Death Valley, USA, in 2020) has been broken, with a reading of 55°C.

^Source

Cleaner Air, Burning Planet

I recently discovered a very interesting author on Twitter: Leon Simmons, a Dutch climate scientist who has been among a group of such scientists pointing out that the likeliest cause for this phenomenon with huge impacts on all of us (the exceptional, record warming of 2023) is very likely the unintended consequence of a "well intentioned" (but perhaps insufficiently thought-out) political decision.

^{Sources: International Maritime Organisation and Reuters}

Accidental geoengineering

Geoengineering: taking deliberate action to "mess" with the Earth climate in a (semi-) controlled manner has long been proposed as one of several tools for dealing with climate change, and has been broadly rejected - we are understandbly queasy about the idea of playing sorcerer's apprentice!

Yet it has been pointed out that what we have done in the past centuries, by continuously injecting huge amounts of GHGs in the atmosphere is nothing less than accidental geoengineering: we have long been "messing up" with the Earth climate, except that we did it unintentionally, in an uncontrolled manner.

What we've discovered this summer is that, if part of our actions led to increasing the planet's temperature, some other parts (burning high-sulphur fuels leading to the atmospheric injection of sulphur and sulphur dioxyde) was acting in the opposite direction, shielding the Earth from even-higher temperatures.

This means that simply trying to "clean up our act" will have mixed effects: reducing GHG emmissions (which proves to be quite difficult) will slow the rate at which the Earth is warming, but reducing sulphur emmisions (which has been done more easily) had the unwelcome effect of accelerating the warming!

I have long argued that a single-minded focus on reducing GHG is ill-advised as such a policy needs to work on a global scale, is time-constrained and has the second principle of thermodynamics against it. The chances that, on a global scale (the only one that matters) we'll fail to achieve our objectives in the time available are far from small ...

The genie is out of the bottle

As much as some of us might regret it, we cannot turn back time: we are in the Anthropocene and there's no one else but us to bear the burden of responibility that is associated with our powers.

^source

I contend that our governments should set out to gather as much sound data as can be available and ask advice from the best minds out there and steer an updated path that focuses (a bit) less on reducing GHG emmissions and instead sends more resources toward developing and responsibly experimenting with geoengineering solutions.

That of course doesn't mean that we should stop our efforts of reducing CO2 emmissions. In this respect, I'm still advocating prioritising nuclear power and shale gas (in order to replace coal-based power generation as quickly as possible).

But we should acknowledge that relying solely on our capacity to reduce GHGs on a global scale is not a reasonable approach to preventing the planet from warming at a fast pace (see in this respect above the discontinuity between this July and the previous years).

We've been doing accidental, harmful geoengineering for centuries now. We have the power to do it intentionally in order to mitigate the harm we caused. We should at least seriously consider using this power, which includes allocating resources for some real-world well-thought-out testing. The discussion about geoengineering should move from the scientific-realm to the "power-wielding", governmental realm.