The A&E climate doctor?

Moving in the opposite direction to a few of my previous posts on the topic of small scale or locally governed renewable projects; geoengineering (GE) has resurfaced in the last few weeks in both popular and academic circles.

Geoengineering mainly consists of two broad categories of technology/methodology:

1. Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) – to prevent the root cause of climate change
2.  Solar Radiation Management (SRM)  – to offset the effects of climate change

Within these categories;

CDR: increasing carbon sinks, using biomass for sequestration and an energy source, enhancing natural weathering to remove CO₂, and the direct uptake of atmospheric and oceanic CO₂.

SRM: brightening structures, covering deserts in reflective material, sulphate aerosols and shields/deflectors in space (Royal Society, 2009).

CDR is widely accepted as the better approach of the two as it addresses the problem and the cause of climate change, as opposed to SRM which carries higher uncertainties in regards to indirect and unforeseen effects of reducing the radiation reaching the earth’s surface. The merits of SRM are that they do act immediately and stop a certain amount of radiation reaching the earth’s surface, therefore could be used in times of emergency – although I am critical of the reality of this eventuality. Who will decide the category of ‘emergency’, and how will this be funded as there is currently no international body with a mandate to regulate geoengineering projects (Royal Society, 2009)?

Recently, research was published which caught the media’s attention; as it concluded that using SRM could have huge drought-enhancing effects in tropical regions. The research focussed on using sulphate aerosols (to the equivalent of five Mount Pinatubo eruptions!), and they showed how this affects tropical overturning circulation which controls rainfall. The droughts could be caused by the layer of sulphate aerosols removing the temperature gradient, therefore suppressing convection and reducing precipitation (Ferraro et al.,2014). This would have devastating effects on billions of people, mainly through the effect on agriculture.

The effects wouldn’t be entirely uniform but are expected to affect the tropical areas in S. America, Asia and Africa. However, the benefits of the technology are predicted be felt in the higher latitudes, therefore creating a risk of conflict between the nations who have installed/funded the technology and those who are being negatively affected by it (Carrington,2014). There will need to be an international body created to deal with the issues of geoengineering as currently “changing another country’s weather is even classed as a war crime under the Geneva Convention” (Hogenboom, 2013). The effects of creating GE technology would resonate globally (both positively and negatively), therefore this cannot be implemented unilaterally or bilaterally. However, due to the speed of previous and current climate change negotiations, I cannot see a functioning and fair international agreement being created.

In the UK, ‘SPICE’ was created to trial sulphur particle effects on the atmosphere and was tested in September 2011, and the UK was early to the game of geoengineering, as the US has only recently begun to catch up. The testing has not been done on a large enough scale to affect the global climate; yet (Macnaghten and Owen, 2011), and the UK government’s vague stance on geoengineering simply states that there is insufficient research into the technology thus far.

Personally, I feel some geoengineering methods – those which are more ‘natural’ such as reforestation and increasing other carbon sinks should be encouraged as those often involve simply restoring the environment to a previous state (i.e. before humans got their hands on it). Otherwise, geoengineering in its current state is too under-researched to become viable safely, and the levels of governance required are not present either; and I am doubtful as to whether an international agency could feasibly be created for technologies which could have such varying affects globally. Most importantly, I feel that attention given to geoengineering distracts researchers, investment and governments from the main climate change action which should occur – changing and diversifying the global energy mix to a renewables dominated system.