ecospirit

Nobody knows what the system-wide effects of these techniques will be, because we really don't understand how the complex earth system works. All the scientists can do is model the known variables and see what the computers predict. Over the years, they have gotten better, but the models are still somewhat crude. So the scientists involved have met in secret for decades, knowing that the public would be skeptical or hostile to their plans.

The silence was broken in 2006 by Paul Crutzen, the same man who suggested the name anthropocene for the new geologic era earth scientists now agree has begun. Crutzen is skeptical of climate engineering, but he realized a backroom juggernaut was forming, and thought public scrutiny was overdue. The danger is that, once people believe that climate engineering can solve climate change, then our old fossil madness might be embraced with even greater fervor.

Hamilton's account of the history of the formation of the global geo-clique is fascinating – and chilling. Almost every climate scientist in the West worked at Lawrence Livermore Lab, including Edward Teller, inventor of the hydrogen bomb, and a hugely confident proponent of climate engineering. From Lawrence Livermore, the hot spot shifted to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which was in charge of the failed Star Wars project which besotted Ronald Reagan. Today, a “Bipartisan” Policy Center is the key organization for sorting out the various schemes, keeping climate engineering squarely inside the Beltway.

The momentum for all this built while we were not paying attention. With all the uncertainties, and the enormous hubris of taking on god-like powers, solar radiation management is almost certain to be deployed, either early on as a preventative measure (within twenty years), or as a last-ditch effort to save civilization (whenever climate disequilibrium hits an emergency level). For this reason, the way what looks sadly inevitable is regulated, and by whom, becomes of huge importance. Since it has been part of war games for quite awhile now, the danger is for unilateral action, or that allied blocks of nations will deploy SRM without consulting the rest of the world. The best outcome would be to have a world body like the UN oversee the research and deployment of this tool.

But the problems are enormous, since there will be winners and losers no matter how the application of sulfate aerosols is tweaked. All the modeling thusfar indicates that the Indian monsoon would be severely affected by lessening solar radiation striking the oceans. And China is so big, that any alterations we initiate in the climate will help some areas and hurt others, exacerbating regional and ethnic tensions there. Climate engineering's problems are immense, and deserve careful public scrutiny, which no rebranding as “climate remediation” can skirt. I will turn in my next post to the ethical dilemmas it poses.

The book's challenge for me is twofold. The first is to broaden my perspective from focusing almost exclusively on climate change as the central ecological issue of our time. Biodiversity loss, the overuse of nitrogen, land use, and water shortages are all boundaries whose interaction with climate change are crucial to the biosphere. The second is to suspend my “naturalistic fallacy” to consider the possibility that some high tech solutions might actually be worthwhile in getting us out of the mess created by the very technologies that are the hallmark of our human-dominated era, the Anthropocene (a term coined by one of the scientists in the group, Paul Crutzen, to describe our dominance of the planetary system since the beginning of the industrial era ca. 1800). This second challenge is far heavier, for it goes against some of my most cherished values.

So here is the crux. Are romantic Greens, seized by the “naturalistic fallacy,” missing the opportunity to utilize technology and market mechanisms to ease, indeed make possible, the final transition from pre-industrial poverty to sustainable energy, land use, agriculture, and housing for the nine billion humans who will be here by mid-century? Are we the ones who are unwittingly condemning billions to unnecessary starvation or death by exposure by our purist opposition to GMO's and nuclear power? What do we want to sustain, our Romantic values or the earth?

On the other hand, as Paul Kingsnorth argues in his equally challenging Orion article, “Dark Ecology,” Lynas joins a whole group of neo-environmentalists who place full faith in the very kinds of technological solutions that have often made problems worse by creating new, unforeseen ones. Moreover, they enthusiastically adopt (Kingsnorth's word is “worship”) capitalism, the very system that has ruthlessly heightened our ability to hunt, mine, burn and otherwise strip the earth of her resources, as the best economic engine for sustaining civilization while respecting those boundaries

Indeed, the book's title contains both hubris and hope. Hubris because we have usurped god (from the religious perspective), the ecosystem manager (Eugene Odum) become the God Species, able to create or destroy the post-natural (McKibben's End of Nature) world which we dominate. If we live in a web, as the ecologists eloquently show, we have the position of a master spider, spinning from a ubiquitous center in a global technocracy. And hope, because in the anthropocene, we have the tools to pull ourselves and crucially, the biosphere, out of the mess. Though he clearly understands what we're up against, Lynas is an upbeat optimist, identifying the engines of change as well as signs of coalescing international agreement after the debacle of Copenhagen, “humanity's darkest hour.” Characteristically, he points out that we have “only” crossed three of the nine boundaries, perhaps not so far along (in 2011 anyway) that we can't go back (They are: climate change, 390 ppm CO2 vs 350; biodiversity loss, 100 species extinct per million per year vs. a boundary of 10; and the nitrogen cycle, expressed in the amount of N2 removed from the atmosphere, millions of tonnes per year, 121 vs. 35.) Lynas' figures for the extinction rate are low - the range biologists give is from 1000 to 10,000 species/yr.