“Once the camel gets his nose in the tent, his body will soon follow.”
– Saying attributed to Bedouin tribesmen
It’s been creeping up on us for a couple of decades.
It’s been the subject of popular and scientific articles, books and lectures. It’s been proposed by kooks, profiteers and scientists of high repute – and resoundingly rejected by most pundits, environmental groups and government officials.
Until now. Until the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the world’s most prestigious, authoritative and purportedly objective scientific body charged with assessing the effects of global warming – mentioned it, for the first time ever, in the concluding remarks of its September 2013 Summary for Policy Makers report.
“It” is “geoengineering,” a growing body of proposals for altering the Earth’s atmosphere to slow or stop global warming. Geoengineering proposals fall into two broad categories. The first, carbon-dioxide sequestration: growing trees, fertilizing ocean plankton and other programs for extracting the principle greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and storing it elsewhere. The second, solar-radiation management: a variety of schemes for intercepting some of the sun’s rays and reflecting them back into space before they reach the Earth’s surface.
SRM proposals include seeding clouds with sulfate particles to increase their reflectivity; launching millions of small metal or plastic reflectors into space to block incoming sunlight and, similarly, injecting aerosols – tiny (sometimes molecular-scale) reflective particles – into the upper atmosphere.
It is this atmospheric SRM geoengineering that will concern us here and in upcoming columns – and I do mean concern.
But before discussing geoengineering’s potential dangers, let’s explore why some otherwise sensible people are even considering attempting this global-scale interference with the Earth’s climate.
The idea is to have a “plan B” for addressing climate change in case the world’s governments fail to reach binding agreements to cut greenhouse gases. The trends have not been encouraging. Emissions are now approaching a critical threshold (some scientists think we’ve already passed it) where, within two decades, we could be locked into what scientists agree is “dangerous climate change” – a global average temperature increase of more than 2 degrees Celsius.
If that threshold is passed, many climate scientists fear, warming could be self-perpetuating and irreversible, surpassing our ability to cope with the consequences.
Most scientists and environmentalists are opposed to atmospheric geoengineering. But a small cadre of experts is pushing for geoengineering experimentation. Recently, they have received backing from heavy-hitter financiers such as Bill Gates and Canadian tar sands magnate Murray Edwards who stand to profit either from geoengineering technology or from maintaining the status quo. Also, there have been overt and covert lobbying efforts by petrostates, especially Russia, to include geoengineering in the IPCC’s policy discussions.
Then suddenly, without explanation, geoengineering appeared in the IPCC’s latest report as a possibly legitimate approach to controlling climate change. The camel’s nose has been pushed conspicuously into the tent, and it’s time we asked “What could possibly go wrong?” at our ecological house.
Philip S. Wenz lives in Corvallis, Ore., where he teaches and writes about environmental issues. www.your-ecological-house.com.
