Prometheus or Icarus?

Climate Geoengineering Part 1 of 4
This short series of posts addresses climate geoengineering: "the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change." I'm writing to answer the following questions:

1. Prometheus or Icarus? - Why consider climate geoengineering at all?
2. Fire and Ice - A synthetic sulphuric aerosol veil in the stratosphere?
3. Obscured by Clouds - What other options are on the horizon?
4. Kintsugi and the Moral Hazard - What would Jesus do?

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My main source of info for this series is the latest climate change-related book I'm reading, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World, by Oliver Morton. Any quotes I use that are not specifically referenced are from the book, and I can provide specific page numbers upon request.

Morton opens the book with two driving questions:

1. Do you believe the risks of climate change merit serious action aimed at lessening them?
2. Do you think that reducing an industrial economy's carbon-dioxide emissions to near zero is very hard?

What do you think?

Reading this blog, it's pretty likely that your answer to #1 is 'yes'. The second answer is likely less clear to you, but probably also a yes.

I now agree that climate engineering should be studied, developed, and debated for feasibility and potential effects, because I think that transitioning from fossil fuels is going to be extraordinarily challenging:

• There are few obvious short-term financial or experiential incentives to transition now. 
• We use a lot of fossil fuels, and nations are and will be reluctant and contrary to damaging their economies for the sake of an unseen future. (See the quotes below.)
• Climate geoengineering, as we currently see it, will not solve the multitude of problems that increased atmospheric CO2 causes (like ocean acidification and species' failure to adapt), but it may provide some breathing space to allow "more time for the development and deployment of fossil-fuel-free energy technologies more advanced than today's."
• An international project that a global geoengineering program would entail would require us to "reinvent politics" - we couldn't enact such a large-scale project in our current geopolitical playing field.
• The ideas of climate geoengineering and their possible repercussions could scare people into greater willingness to transition to renewables faster.

The leading reason to be wary of the study and development of climate geoengineering schemes is quite valid, but it's insufficient in my view to keep us from pursuing additional knowledge and data: "Simply talking about climate geoengineering [may] lead to less climate mitigation." In other words, if "people believe there's a plan B that may work, they will pursue plan A with less vigour."

I hope you stick around and read the following parts to this series. We will almost certainly be seeing climate geoengineering in our future.

"If the world had the capacity to deliver one of the largest nuclear power plants [no added CO2 with nuclear power] ever built once a week, week in and week out, it would take 20 years to replace the current stock of coal-fired plants."

"To replace those coal plants with solar panels at the rate such panels were installed in 2013 would take about a century and a half. That is all before starting on replacing the gas and the oil, the cars, the furnaces and the ships."

"Half the computer models looked at for the most recent IPCC report said that if the climate were to be kept below the two-degree [3.6º Fahrenheit] limit, emissions would have to be negative by 2100. Humans would have to be actively taking carbon dioxide out of the air, rather than just refraining from putting any more in."

 - Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade

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Please comment if you have a response to this or any of my posts. I'd love to hear from you.