Governments must invest in “geoengineering” – deliberate schemes to toy with Earth’s climate – according to an essay in the New York Times. A rise in greenhouse-gas emissions, despite America’s cutting down of its coal use, means a narrow focus on reducing emissions is destined to fail, claim the three authors of the essay: a former director at MIT, a retired NASA scientist and an oceanographer.
The authors advocate seeding the oceans with iron dust to encourage the growth of enormous algal blooms, which would convert large amounts of carbon dioxide to organic forms of carbon that would then be sequestered in the watery depths. They also suggest iron dust has dramatic potential to alter the earth’s climate, and may have played an important natural role in doing so in the past.
Geoengineering made headlines in January when California startup “Make Sunsets” launched weather balloons containing sulfur dioxide, in a pilot test designed to assess their effectiveness at cooling the earth. The idea of using weather balloons like this was mooted in a 2018 white paper, which noted such an approach could be used by non-governmental actors.
The revelation of the launches drew significant criticism, and the Mexican government announced it would prevent any further launches from within its territory. The CEO of Make Sunsets, Luke Eisen, was unrepentant, and claimed the company would continue to release as much sulfur into the atmosphere in 2023 as “we can get customers to pay us” to release. The company offers a “cooling credit” system, where customers can pay $10 for a gram of sulfur dioxide to be used as a payload in future balloon launches.
This latest intervention reflects the growing hysteria amongst “climate crisis” advocates. At the end of July, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres claimed the era of global warming was over, and that the world has entered “the era of global boiling”.
“Climate change is here,” he said. “It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning. It is still possible to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C [i.e. above pre-industrial levels], and avoid the very worst of climate change. But only with dramatic, immediate climate action.”
World leaders meet in the UAE in November for the COP 28 conference to agree ways to address the “climate crisis”. Among the agenda items will be how to ensure financial institutions incentivize “climate-friendly lending”, development partnerships to help “emerging economies” transition away from fossil fuels. Whether “climate reparations” will be raised again, as it was at last year’s COP 27, remains to be seen. While some leaders conceded that their nations should pay the rest of the world damages for their contribution to historical emissions, others, including Britain’s Rishi Sunak, brushed off the idea.
As the panic deepens, rational thinking will fall by the wayside. Scientists have warned of disastrous and unexpected consequences of geoengineering. A two-part study from 2015 noted that reductions in emissions should take precedence over the use of such technology, whose potential for “large-scale deployment” is still unknown. The report noted that potential risks and side-effects need to be investigated. The technology should not be used at “climate-altering scales” until these risks have been properly evaluated, it said. No such evaluation has taken place.
The New York Times, by contrast, believes caution should be thrown to the wind, and that the negative effects of runaway global warming clearly outweigh any that could be caused by geoengineering.
The article authors speak approvingly of the efforts of Russ George, an eccentric entrepreneur who dumped 100 tons of iron sulfate into the waters off British Columbia in 2012. His aim was to improve salmon numbers and also sequester carbon in the ocean. According to George, the endeavor was a success – the following year saw a record salmon harvest – but instead of praise he faced the ire not just of the government but also of scientists and environmentalists.
Two years earlier, political scientist David Victor had warned of the dangers of private geoengineering, and in particular of the emergence of “[a] lone Greenfinger, self-appointed protector of the planet and working with a small fraction of the Gates bank account, [who] could force a lot of geoengineering on his own.” The danger now, with simple forms of climate-altering technology like weather balloons loaded with sulfur dioxide, is that there will be an army of Greenfingers. But not just that. If governments get involved too, as the authors of the New York Times essay would like, the potential for disaster will be many orders of magnitude greater – and even more likely.
