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. 

Book summary: The Collapse of Western Civilization

This summer, twelve students read one of my sponsored summer reading books, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. I thought they might have selected the book because it's only 76 pages of text, including 10 pages of a "Lexicon of Archaic Terms" and 16 pages of an interview with the authors (the interview is excellent). However, when we got together many of them expressed surprise at its brevity.

The stage of this book is the year 2393, western civilization has collapsed due to impacts of climate change, and a historian from the Second People's Republic of China is documenting our present age leading up to the collapse (the authors' explanation for why they chose China is brilliant).

This isn't a doomsday book; it is an insightful, objective analysis of our current cultural and political limitations to deal effectively with climate change.

In general, my students enjoyed reading it, liked the different perspective from which it is written, and were surprised by the science of human-induced climate change. As with my discussions with students about Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, these students were surprised not only by the scientific measurements and models of our climate trajectory, but very surprised that they don't hear about this stuff at all on the news.

Besides the content of the four main ideas below that made this book pretty insightful, the emotional distance that the historical perspective provides has a bit of a transformative power.

Here are four key ideas expressed and expounded in this book that I wanted to share:

• "Indeed, the most startling aspect of this story is just how much these people knew, and how unable they were to act upon what they knew. Knowledge did not translate into power."

• "Those in what we might call active denial insisted that the extreme weather events reflected natural variability, despite a lack of evidence to support that claim. Those in passive denial continued life as they had been living it, unconvinced that a compelling justification existed for broad changes in industry and infrastructure... At the very time that the urgent need for an energy transition became palpable, world production of greenhouse gases increased."

• "Our historian concludes that a second Dark Age had fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on 'free' markets, disabled the world's powerful nations in the face of tragedy...A key attribute of the period was that power did not reside in the hands of those who understood the climate system, but rather in political, economic, and social institutions that had a strong interest in maintaining the use of fossil fuels."

• "The scientists who best understood the problem were hamstrung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind - including imminent threats... Meanwhile, scientists continued to do science, believing, on the one hand, that it was inappropriate for them to speak on political questions (or to speak in the emotional register required to convey urgency) and, on the other hand, that if they produced abundant and compelling scientific information (and explained it calmly and clearly), the world would take steps to avert disaster."

I recommend it.

The two heads of this teacher

Last school year I grappled with my role and responsibility as an educator with subjects to teach and a global mission to fulfill. I judge that I spoke too frequently and too laden with sadness and frustration about the climate crisis and our need for people who know better to step up.

I went into this summer knowing that I wasn't very effective last year in inspiring a community of climate activists, but unsure how to win that game and still train citizens in scientific thinking and in effective participation in science- and engineering-related fields.

Sometime in early July I found contentment in the space between the pull and the push: the need to pull the brakes on the free-market ideological god of the "hidden hand" finding global equilibrium and balance through The Market, and the push to imagine and create technological saviors for our troubled societal and global body. There's actually a middle ground on which I can be both a stand for a different perspective and a stand for scientific and design mastery.

On the one hand I am a climate activist who sees the need for minimizing product consumption and the product development that drives it. Necessity isn't the mother of invention so much as invention is the mother of necessity. And breaking our society's addiction to "progress", incorrectly and unfortunately measured by gross domestic product, is a necessary strategy in winning the climate war.

On the other hand I am a physics and engineering teacher who aims to inspire interest and inquiry, and to train students in mastering concepts and problem-solving skills related to the development of technology. Technology that we need to help mitigate the effects of human-induced global warming and other ecological crises. We need solutions and some of my students will be among those developing them.

I never had two heads, it just felt that way. There's just the one now, and I like it.

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.” 

- Rumi