Geoengineering: an incomplete solution to a poorly formulated problem

By Marin Pitavy

This essay won 1st place at the Spring 2022 Chair’s Essay Competition on the topic of: “Why geoengineering to stay under 2 degrees Celsius should be stopped” 

In the very recent days, on May 17^th, the Climate Overshoot Commission was launched. Its members include former presidents and ministers, who will elaborate a strategy to limit the climate effects of a warmer worldⁱ. Realizing that the sacred threshold of 1.5°C can no longer be met, they are looking for solutions to prepare for the “world after” and decide on our future – and they take a tempting look at geoengineering. But what exactly is it about?

A bit of history

Geoengineering was born out of man’s desire to better understand meteorological events and to influence, if not control, the natural weather elements. This desire to play God was fueled by the promise of “enjoying ages with more equitable and better climates”ⁱⁱ and protecting humanity from a new ice age.

Then, geoengineering soon fell into the hands of the military during the Cold War, as the superpowers actively researched and tested the potential of environmental modification techniques as methods of warfare. “If an unfriendly nation gets into a position to control the large-scale weather patterns before we can, the result could even be more disastrous than nuclear warfare,” warned Howard T. Orville, meteorological advisor to US President Eisenhower in 1958ⁱⁱⁱ.

During the Vietnam War, the United States made extensive use of “cloud-seeding,” a weather modification technique designed to increase precipitation by dispersing silver iodide into clouds. In an attempt to extend the monsoon season and inhibit the movement of North Vietnamese troops, the US Air Force flew 2,600 sorties over Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos between 1967 and 1972. Operation Popeye, as it came to be known, was the first recorded geoengineering program in military history.

Eager to put an end to these hostile uses of climate manipulation, the UN General Assembly approved the Environmental Modification Convention in 1976, thus banning weather warfare. It is enlightening for the future to point out that, although the motivations have changed today, the practical origins of geoengineering are well-grounded in the art of war.

A tool against climate change…

The creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 progressively revived interest in geoengineering after a long period of silence. The first IPCC report, published in 1990, predicted a temperature increase of 3°C by 2100 in a “business as usual” scenario – a temperature level likely to remain for decades, if not centuries, due to the inertia of the Earth’s climate system. With its tantalizing promise of decoupling temperatures from the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, geoengineering resurfaced in the political discourse as a potential additional pathway to mitigate global warming.

Different techniques have emerged over time. They either seek to increase the net carbon sinks of the atmosphere on a scale large enough to change the climate – known as Carbon Dioxide Removal – or to reduce the amount of solar energy absorbed into the climate system – a technology called Solar Radiation Management^iv.

Carbon dioxide removal is sometimes performed directly at the source of pollution, such as a coal-fired power plant. This technique is called “carbon capture and sequestration” and many fossil fuel plants are already experimenting it. The In Salah gas field project, for instance, launched in 2004 in the Algerian desert, captures about 60% of the CO2 emitted during gas production and stores it thousands of meters below the surface^v.

CO2 can also be removed by direct air capture, far from any source of pollution. The Orca project, in Iceland, draws 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year and stores it permanently in volcanic rocks, forming long-lasting carbonate minerals.

…with uncertain effects

While carbon dioxide removal offers a limited but already tested solution for reducing CO2 atmospheric concentration, solar radiation management is a real leap in the dark. This rather vague term refers to a wide range of practical solutions, from local techniques such as painting roofs white or growing whiter crops, to global methods like injecting aerosols in the upper atmosphere to better reflect solar radiations.

While the first set of solutions is expected to only have local effects^vi, the second one exposes the entire humanity to unknown consequences. Non-exhaustively, the flaws of aerosol injection include alteration of global hydrological cycles, droughts, crop depletion, impoverished access to fresh water^vii. In addition, if the injection was to be abruptly interrupted, a rapid increase in temperature would follow^viii.

Apart from these very worrying consequences, to which the whole humanity would be subjected, the implementation of global technologies to deal with climate change raises the question of its governance. The underlying concerns of democracy and representativeness of the people are also a source of doubt: can we even, in practice, involve everyone in a democratic process that would ultimately approve the use of a global geoengineering solution? Such a project would inevitably suffer from a lack of legitimacy.

Missing the real problem

If geoengineering does not bring a solution to climate change, it provides an answer to our despair. By promising emancipation from the planetary boundaries we have already exceeded, it offers the hope that our overconsuming way of living can be perpetuated ad infinitum.

But the confidence it confers is obviously illegitimate, and Greta Thunberg was right to denounce the madness of relying on “technologies that barely exist” in her UN speech. At the current emission levels, humanity is canceling out the annual efforts of the Orca carbon removal project in Iceland every three seconds^ix.

Moreover, focusing solely on greenhouse gases necessarily overshadows other vital environmental aspects. The Orca project “does the work of two hundred thousand trees” boasts Dr. Julio Friedmann, a renowned expert on carbon removal. Forgetting at the same time the abundant and irreplaceable ecosystem services that these two hundred thousand trees have to offer. By sheltering crop pollinators, increasing crop yields, attenuating storm water, improving air quality, enhancing human health, and making the environment more livable^{x, xi}, trees are an essential piece to our survival on Earth that no CO2 vacuum could replace. In a way, geoengineering provides an incomplete solution to a poorly formulated problem.

The root cause of the issue

Although greenhouse gas emissions are at the forefront of political attention to environmental challenges, it is now clear that they are not the only ones: the loss of biodiversity, the threat to ecosystems, air, and water pollution, among others, deserve the same attention. Combating one of these problems should not reinforce another, nor weaken our ability to overcome them.

They are rather different sides of the same coin – a 9-sided coin, to be precise, as the number of planetary boundaries, from which many social weaknesses are inherited. From various aspects, they share the very same root causes.

Paradoxically, the ecological crisis we face may be our best chance to make lasting changes for a more sustainable world in the way we live and think. Back at the time, Winston Churchill suggested to “never let a good crisis go to waste”. Tackling the tip of the iceberg with technological solutions will not prepare us to face its ground when it turns against us.

Our psychological weakness makes us discover the fragility of the Earth only when it is directly and immediately threatened. Taking advantage of it, our sudden awareness could be our fiercest motivation to act.

After resources abundance, grim reality resurfaces. But the temporary and uncertain escape route offered by geoengineering may only reinforce our dependence, at a time when lucidity is more important than ever.

Sources

ⁱ Chloé Farrand, “Former presidents of Mexico, Niger, Kiribati join commission to tackle overshoot risks”, Climate Home News, May 17, 2022, Former presidents of Mexico, Niger, Kiribati join commission to tackle overshoot risks (climatechangenews.com).

ⁱⁱ Robert Henson, The Rough Guide to Climate Change (Rough guides, 2011).

ⁱⁱⁱ Kaya Barry, Maria Borovnik, and Tim Edensor, Weather: Spaces, Mobilities and Affects (Taylor & Francis, 2020).

^iv IPCC, IPCC Expert Meeting on Geoengineering (20-22 June 2011).

^v Fred Riddiford, et al., Monitoring geological storage the In Salah Gas CO2 storage project. (Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies 7, 2005).

^vi Jatin Kala, and Annette L. Hirsch. Could crop albedo modification reduce regional warming over Australia? (Weather and Climate Extremes, 2020).

^vii Irvine, P., Emanuel, K., He, J. et al., Halving warming with idealized solar geoengineering moderates key climate hazards. (Nature Climate Change, 2019).

^viii Weisenstein, D. K., et al., An interactive stratospheric aerosol model intercomparison of solar geoengineering by stratospheric injection of SO2 or accumulation-mode sulfuric acid aerosols. (Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 2022).

^ix Ben Soltoff, “A step forward for CO2 capture,” last modified December 3, 2021, https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/03/co2-capture-iceland-climeworks-orca/.

^x Edmundo Barrios et al., Contribution of trees to the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. (International Journal of Biodiversity Science, Ecosystem Services & Management, 2018)

^xi Sudipto Roy, Jason Byrne, and Catherine Pickering, A systematic quantitative review of urban tree benefits, costs, and assessment methods across cities in different climatic zones. (Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 2012)