There Should Be Ground Rules For Trying to Re-Engineer the Planet’s Climate, Scientists Say

A geoengineering project in action. Image: Gizmag

If we’re not careful, some mad scientist-type is going to come along and try to re-engineer the planet’s climate all by himself. Seriously. Okay, maybe he’ll have a team of well-intentioned chemists and physicists with him, and maybe he’ll be acting upon the behest of an island nation that’s on the verge of getting swallowed whole by rising sea levels, or maybe he’ll just be partial to a particular brand of Bond villainy. Regardless, he may very well go about trying to fight climate change by spewing light-reflecting aerosols into the clouds or seeding the oceans with iron—and unless there’s a proper framework to account for such experiments in a controlled environment, he might do it quite recklessly. 

The prospect of “rogue geoengineering”—that a despairing government or enterprising businessman or activist may recklessly experiment with extreme measures to slow the planet’s warming—is actually beginning to worry scientists. Right now, few people have the gumption, or the authorization, to do even small-scale experiments that might muck with the atmosphere. That’s because everyone is justifiably terrified about meddling with the planet’s fickle atmosphere, and the scientific and international community has hitherto forbade it. 

Last year, Russ George, the CEO of a small startup, found himself in hot water after he dumped tons of iron sulfate into the ocean off the coast of Canada without permission, in an effort to get plankton to bloom, and therefore absorb more carbon. While his experiment appears to have done no harm—and is in fact producing the results he was hoping for, it clearly illustrates the risk of people going around fiddling with an already unstable climate. Can folks blast reflective aerosols into the air at their whim, too? Or what about “cloud-seeding”? Can they do that? If even dozens of people decide to take the initiative to do so, it could have impacts worldwide.

Russ George. Image: 21st Century Tech

But if they don’t, the planet could fry. So, in a new paper in the journal Science, two scientists are arguing that a policy framework should be worked out to enable such work to move ahead. Edward Parson of UCLA and David Keith of Harvard University argue that “the current deadlock on governance of geoengineering research poses real threats to the sound management of climate risk.”

They say, in other words, it’s time to mete out a framework for geoengineering research, to get governments to agree to sanction it, and to limit which projects can and cannot be attempted by law. Here’s the breakdown of their plan, from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences:

• Allow low-risk, scientifically valuable research to proceed.
• Give scientists guidance on the design of socially acceptable research.
• Address legitimate public concerns.
• End the current legal void that facilitates rogue projects.

And the key takeaway is that “Parson and Keith argue that scientific self-regulation is not sufficient to manage risks and that scientists need to accept government authority over geoengineering research. They emphasize that initial steps should not require new laws or treaties but can come from informal consultation and coordination among governments.”

Even this recommendation is apt to be highly controversial, as there are scientists who believe that geonengineering shouldn’t be on the table at all. But someone, somewhere is likely going to try their hand at re-engineering the planet’s climate in the near future anyway—it’s probably a good idea to figure out how science and governments plan to deal with them.