Hacking The Planet: World Economic Forum Raises Concerns About 'Rogue' Geoengineering

A commercial airline? Or a rogue geoengineering experiment?

The World Economic Forum has put out a new report on global risks for 2013, and the report's chapter on "X factors" - concerns more remote than the report's primary risks, but still worthy of note - includes a section on rogue "geoengineering" experiments.

Geoengineering involves large-scale efforts to either remove carbon from the atmosphere, or to remake the atmosphere's chemical or physical make-up to offset the effects of climate change. The most plausible scenario mentioned by the report uses aircraft to inject particles into the atmosphere to mimic the way eruptions of volcanic ash block sunlight, and thus cool the climate. More far-fetched scenarios go so far as deploying mirrors into orbit to reflect sunlight.

Such projects involve a host of funding and deployment problems, as well as the serious risk of unintended consequences for both the climate and the billions of humans who rely on it. For instance, a project at the UK-based Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering project, or "SPICE," working on the idea to mimic volcanic ash, was delayed in October over environmental concerns. Unfortunately, this leaves an opening for smaller nations or even commercial interests to begin experimenting with geoengineering unilaterally, say researchers at the World Economic Forum:

Nobody envisions deployment of solar radiation management anytime soon, given the difficulties in resolving a suite of governance issues (evidenced by the fact that even the relatively simple SPICE experiment in the UK foundered in the midst of controversy). Beginning with Britain's Royal Society, many academic and policy bodies have called for cautious research as well as broader conversation about the implications of such technologies.

But this has led some geoengineering analysts to begin thinking about a corollary scenario, in which a country or small group of countries precipitates an international crisis by moving ahead with deployment or large-scale research independent of the global community. The global climate could, in effect, be hijacked by a rogue country or even a wealthy individual, with unpredictable costs to agriculture, infrastructure and global stability. [...]

For example, an island state threatened with rising sea levels may decide they have nothing to lose, or a well funded individual with good intentions may take matters into their own hands. There are signs that this is already starting to occur. In July 2012 an American businessman sparked controversy when he dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of Canada in a scheme to spawn an artificial plankton bloom. The plankton absorb carbon dioxide and may then sink to the ocean bed, removing the carbon - another type of geoengineering, known as ocean fertilisation. Satellite images confirm that his actions succeeded in produce an artificial plankton bloom as large as 10,000 square kilometres.

The July 2012 incident was first reported by The Guardian in October, noting the gambit may have violated two international agreements and possibly involved misleading the local indigenous population about the nature and risks of the experiment. Russ George, the American businessman who oversaw the iron sulphate dump, is the former chief executive of Planktos Inc., and has been involved in other failed efforts to pull off large commercial dumps near the Galapagos and Canary Islands. Those attempts led to a warning from the EPA and to his ships being barred from ports by the Spanish and Ecuadorean governments. George had apparently hoped to net lucrative carbon credits.

The basic problem with geoengineering is that portions of the climate cannot be walled off to perform small-scale tests. This means geoengineering projects essentially have to jump straight from the experimental and computer modeling phases to a full-on implementation phase - as Russ George recently attempted. This means, at best, that geoengineering is last-resort, break-glass-in-case-of-emergency response to climate change, to be attempted when all other efforts have failed.

At worst, geoengineering is a distraction jumped on by interest groups, who wish to delay far more technologically and economically feasible efforts to tackle climate change by simply reducing the amount of carbon human beings emit into the atmosphere.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/01/09/1424931/hacking-the-planet

Can the ecohackers save us?

Geoengineering, or "ecohacking" - using science to change the environment on a vast scale - could become a reality faster than you think.... The article goes on to discuss several projects proposed by scientists to make global changes meant to mitigate the looming global ecological crisis. The article puts the problem as the roughly 385 parts per million (ppm) of carbon in the atmosphere today and quote a scientist saying "I think it's a good goal to not go over 450ppm".

If "The solution is mitigation," let's take a look at what they mean..

US firm Climos plans to seed the ocean with iron particles: This is a plan which would encourage the growth of phytoplankton by spreading "food" in the ocean. More food means more plankton, the plankton sequesters carbon into their bodies, eventually the plankton is either eaten by other fish etc to become part of the food chain, or the plankton dies and sinks to the ocean floor.

Atmocean plans to put large tubes in the ocean which will move vertically with the waves, pumping cool water to the surface from 200 metres down...bring more nutrients: They go on to claim that by cooling the surface temperature it could reduce hurricane intensity.

To mitigate the Greenland ice sheets from falling into the ocean and shutting down the "conveyer belt" Flynn proposed re-icing the Arctic using 8,000 giant floating platforms that would draw salty water from the ocean and spray it on to winter ice, dramatically increasing its thickness ...

To prevent light from hitting the earth, a mesh of tiny light refractors into space to sit between the Earth and the sun... The material would bend some of the sun's rays away from the planet..

The funding for these ideas would come from carbon credits. For example this idea to put refractors into space, it would require 16 trillion spacecraft and would cost a total of $1 trillion (U.S.). The only way to raise that much money is carbon credits, right?

The common aspect to all these proposals is they aren't addressing root causes, but instead acting as a kind of band aid covering up existing problems. Rather than address the real cause of increasing temperatures let's put a shield in space, or find a way to sequester the excess carbon, etc.. One of the proposals was to spray sulfur dust into the atmosphere because of an observation of global temperature decreases when volcanoes erupt spraying sulfur in the atmosphere. SULFUR!!!

The article briefly mentions complicated results. The global environment is a complex system and tweaking the system from the edges is clearly going to result in an effect like squeezing a balloon. That "mitigating" one problem tends to cause other problems, especially as scientists have only a partial understanding of the system.

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Can the ecohackers save us?

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Geoengineering to solve climate change?

Rebooting the  Ecosystem suggests that one of the approaches we should consider for solving global warming is to proactively do global engineering projects that address the symptoms. For example to seed the oceans with iron to encourage the growth of microorganisms who will eat CO2. Or for example to shoot sulfur dust into the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight before it reaches the ground.

Well, I don't know about you, but filling the atmosphere with sulfur sounds like a bad idea. Isn't sulfur rather poisonous? Isn't that why the gas companies are being required to move to low sulfur diesel?

But the bigger isn't a quibble over methods to address the symptoms. It's more the whole strategy.

By focusing on symptoms you can miss the underlying cause and never really come to a solution. It's just like when you have a muscle ache, you take an aspirin, and you keep on doing the thing which causes your muscle ache. The pain will only return, no matter how much aspirin you take, until you learn how to use your muscles differently so they don't hurt in the first place.

Doctor! Why does it hurt when I do "this"? Stop doing "that"!!

So, we know that filling the atmosphere with CO2 has a direct effect on global warming. A really good explanation with scientific evidence is in Al Gore's movie and book An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. Scientists studying the ice packs of Greenland and Antarctica have a 600,000 year record of ice to study, and one thing they've done is measure the carbon and other atmospheric constituents at the time ice bubbles were frozen into those ice packs. There's a direct correlation of carbon levels and temperature as shown by these measurements.

Clearly putting so much carbon into the atmosphere is the underlying problem.

Filling the atmosphere with some kind of reflective dust is only a bandaid. Orbiting mirrors in a geosynchronous orbit is another bandaid. The real solution will come from reducing carbon emissions.

The time to act is now.