The Looming Debate Over Geoengineering

Forget Climategate, DailyMailGate, RoseGate and every other attempt by the climate change denialist machine to distract the planet from the coming klimakatastrophe. All of these 'scandals' amount to the climate change science equivalent of the Swift Boat Campaign – they're not going to go away, but there's a limit to how much traction you can get with falsehoods and wild exaggerations.

Yet, a far larger and more important debate is on the horizon — one that we'll all be hashing out for decades, possibly centuries: the debate over geoengineering, or aggressive human interventions to reduce temperatures. The black sheep of the realm of possible solutions to climate change, geoengineering has one major advantage over the majority of attempts to stave off catastrophic climate change by decoupling economic activity from carbon emissions: Because we're not sure how to do it, it seems easy.

Hence the interest of the American Enterprise Institute in geoengineering. AEI is a conservative think tank notable for its multi-pronged attacks on climate science, including quoting oft-noted climate denialist stooges in its speeches and published material. On February 25, AEI will be hosting a geoengineering summit. From the event description:

At a time when Congress prepares for a looming battle about the Environmental Protection Agency's plans to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, could geoengineering, also known as climate engineering, offer a better alternative?

AEI's has merely added a tactic to its existing strategy:

• Deny that climate change is a threat
• Delay action on climate change by claiming that the cost of averting it is too great

And now:

• Argue that regulation isn't necessary because geoengineering will make such climate change as conservatives grudgingly admit disappear!

What's dangerous about this strategy is not that geoengineering is inherently a bad idea, because we have nothing but our intuition to guide us on that count. Rather, the problem is precisely that geoengineering is completely untested, and it will take scientists decades to sort out whether or not we're going to want to add it to the arsenal of tools we have for preserving life on this planet — decades during which we must reduce emissions regardless.

Even the scientists who are beginning to pursue serious research into geoengineering argue that it makes absolutely no sense without a concerted effort to reduce emissions. In other words, geoengineering versus emissions reduction is not an either/or debate: climate change is an all-hands-on-deck emergency that may some day call for serious reduction in emissions and efforts to cool the planet while we bring down atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses.

Indeed, the journal Nature – arguably the number one scientific journal in the world – recently published an editorial called Overshoot, Adapt and Recover that proposes exactly this suite of solutions: Even as we slam on the emissions brakes, we must prepare to deal with the degree to which we are going to overshoot the 2 degrees Celsius of warming that scientists think we can allow without facing catastrophe — and that will mean adaptation at the least, and possibly geoengineering cooling efforts in addition.

By making the debate over geoengineering into a political one, AEI threatens to turn what is an extremely preliminary scientific inquiry into a cudgel that that the left and right can use to batter each other. Even scientists who study geoengineering openly voice concerns about its Moral Hazard – that is, the hazard that its very existence will be used as an excuse to further delay actions on reducing our emissions.

And, that, aparently, is exactly what AEI wants.