Geoengineering

(Beginning of Brittanica’s entry about geoengineering)

This week’s science headline in popular media has been a proposal to put a cloud of dust from the moon into space to dim the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by 1.8%. This would diminish global warming. If you want a more serious look at the idea, try New Scientist instead of tabloids.

Doing this poses all sorts of problems. I don’t expect to see it happen.

Setting up a mining operation and railguns on a large enough scale to launch of material from the moon to the Lagrange point between Earth and the sun (where the two gravitational pulls cancel each other out) would be an immense project. It would take more years to start operating than we appear to be able to wait before we make much impact on our climate.

Personally, I am intensely uncomfortable with simply expanding the range of our pillaging. That is what we would do, extracting and shooting into space 100 million tons from the moon every year as a temporary bandage on our world’s gaping wound. We are in so much trouble on this planet because on the whole, as a species, we endlessly exploit without considering sustainability. Can we please learn to stop doing this? (I say the same thing about fusion as a power source. Hydrogen is abundant, but after it undergoes fusion, it becomes inert helium. Fusion is one more non-renewable means of generating energy. We are too irresponsible to be trusted with it.)

The biggest objection I hear on the airwaves or see in print has nothing to do with that. It’s an outcry:

But that would be geoengineering!

When I looked for a definition of geoengineering to show you, the first results a search engine showed were specific about geoengineering being for the purpose of reducing global warming or mitigating climate change. I chose Britannica’s because it was closer to the way I think of it.

My two quibbles with Britannica’s definition are the term “large-scale” and the phrase “for the purpose of obtaining a specific benefit.” I believe intention does not belong in the definition.

The way I look at it, we got into the pickle we are in by unintentional or ignored geoengineering, often as a compound effect of many relatively small-scale actions.

As the Industrial Revolution fired up, air in big cities in cold places became choked with smoke. Some scientists began to express concern about whether so much burning of coal was bad. If you look through newspaper archives from the late 1800s, occasionally you’ll find an article or a letter to the editor about it. Those concerns were swept aside in pursuit of more productivity, more progress, more convenience and more money.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, there were two scientists, one woman and one man, who studied the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface. They believed fine particulate pollution in the air was dimming the sunlight that reached the ground. They were ridiculed by the scientific community. I can’t even find their names any more and I confess I have forgotten their names myself. Their vindication came after passage of the Clean Air Act in the USA. As the Act kicked in and particulate emissions declined, more sunlight came through. It turned out that emissions had been blocking up to 20% of sunlight from reaching the ground. (That is not a typographical error. Compare it with the 1.8% hoped for from shooting a vast amount of moon dust into space.)

We have learned that Exxon’s in-house research pointed decades ago to the global warming that we struggle with now. Instead of sharing that knowledge, the company campaigned against what it knew to be true.

By my definition where intentions don’t absolve us (admittedly not the way anyone else defines it) and compounded effects of many small actions matter, we are already conducting geoengineering. We have been conducting it for a long time. We did such things as chopping down the forests that used to blanket Greece, Britain and much of eastern North America. We put our geoengineering on steroids at the start of the Industrial Revolution. We switched from coal to petroleum for power, from one fossil fuel to another. We are chopping down the rain forest in the Amazon watershed now. We still drill, strip mine, burn, pave, build… without thinking. In my village a new batch of houses is going up. The ones that face south have lovely dormer windows in the southern side of their roofs, cutting the possibility for solar photovoltaic systems on them by half to two thirds.

This is how we got here, too often looking narrowly at our own interests on a household or corporate or national level and not caring about wider impact.

Raising a hue and cry against geoengineering doesn’t make sense. We geoengineered our way into the current situation. We made a problem for ourselves that is so big, there are only two ways out. We have to geoengineer deliberately with intelligence this time to mend what we broke (all of us, from households to nations), or Mother Nature will heal herself in ways we would not like.

If we’re getting smarter, we will not try to do it with grand actions on such a large scale that we are incapable of predicting the effects. We got here with smaller actions over a long (in human terms) time. A wide array of smaller actions taken up broadly spreads our eggs into multiple baskets. With one or two grand schemes, we’ve got to get it right. With lots of different methods spread out widely, we aren’t completely ruined if some of them do not perform as well as we expect.

This means climate change isn’t a problem government can solve. If my household, and yours, and yours over there, each do what we can, it adds up. Together, we geoengineer. We already have, mostly in a bad direction, without intending it. We can change direction together and geoengineer in a good direction. By this, I mean more than solar power on the roof, maybe a microwind turbine and an electric car for family transportation. I also mean a garden that is friendly to insects, birds and other wildlife. The next time you have to redo the roof, you can put on light-colored roofing. We can recycle, reuse, mend instead of using once and discarding.

We are all geoengineers in our spheres of influence. It isn’t a word to fear. It’s a word to start enacting with more awareness, in a new direction.