Just five years ago, anyone who talked of easing Earth’s climate crisis by fertilizing the seas with iron, scattering particles in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight or building a sunshade in space courted ridicule.
Today, such advocates — “geo-engineers” — are getting a respectable hearing.
Their ideas are still beyond the scientific pale, for they remain contested as risky for the environment and laden with unknowns about cost, practicality and legality.
However, mainstream scientists who once dismissed these projects are now looking at them closely.
And some grudgingly accept that at least some concepts are worth exploring as a possible “Plan B” — a last-resort option if political efforts to tackle global warming fail and catastrophe looms.
Plan A hangs in the balance at the UN talks in Copenhagen, where 194 nations have been gathered together from Monday until next Friday to craft a post-2012 treaty to slash greenhouse-gas emissions.
The negotiations are hideously complex, however, a Gordian knot of interlinked issues, national interests and economic stakes.
The plodding, consensus-driven process is being far outstripped by the surge of fossil-fuel emissions, placing Earth on course for as much as 3.5˚C of warming over pre-industrial times, way over a 2˚C threshold widely considered safe.
“A lot of people don’t like to say that Plan A is not working,” Jip Lenstra, a senior scientist at the Energy Research Center of the Netherlands, said at the Copenhagen talks.
“They know that, but they don’t want to say that aloud because it’s very frustrating and it’s not the right signal at the right time,” he said. “If you are working quite hard to make a success of Plan A, and somebody says that we should look at Plan B if Plan A is not successful, that’s not a good strategy.”
Geo-engineering broke new ground this year with an assessment of its options by the UK’s Royal Society, one of the temples of science.
A 12-member panel found that some geo-engineering techniques could have “serious unintended and detrimental effects on many people and ecosystems.”
However, they cautiously said some schemes were technically feasible and could be a useful fallback tool to help the switch to a low-carbon economy provided safety worries and doubts about affordability were answered.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change inveighed against geo-engineering schemes in its landmark Fourth Assessment Report in 2007, swiping them in a brief aside as charged with potential risk and unquantified cost.
It now intends to do its own evaluation of the mavericks.
The Royal Society said geo-engineering fell into two main categories.
The most promising entails removal of carbon dioxide, such as by planting forests and building towers that would capture carbon dioxide from the air.
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