Must We Hack Our Planet’s Atmosphere?

After 940 posts as a news blog, Dot Earth is moving to the opinion side of The New York Times, where it will re-emerge in about a week.

Below is Andy Revkin’s last, and very informative, news story from his Dot Earth news blog, essential reading for those who take climate change as seriously as they should:

Can Humans Manage the Atmosphere?

March 31, 2010, 7:16 am
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

As recently as 2006, geoengineering — using countermeasures to blunt the heat-trapping impact of accumulating greenhouse gases or sop them up directly — had a someday feel to it….

…But the failure of recent efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions has built some momentum toward expanding research on such options. One step on that road was a big meeting on geoengineering science and policy questions at the Asilomar Conference Center in northern California last week. The result is intensifying debate over what is still widely viewed as a last-ditch option should worst-case projections of warming pan out. The questions transcend simple worries about environmental impacts. The biggest, perhaps, could be one of global diplomacy. Who gets to set the Earth’s thermostat? Russia and Maldives would probably have entirely different views.

A few environmental groups — including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Friends of the Earth (U.K.) [pdf] have started to express conditional support for some of this research. Many environmentalists still oppose such techno-fixes as either bound to produce unintended consequences or a cop-out that could reduce pressure to stop emissions at the source.

Please click here to read the entire article

At the end of his article, Revkin cites several new books on geoengineering (in order of publication):

“Hacking the Earth: Understanding the Consequences of Geoengineering,” Jamais Cascio

“How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate,” Jeff Goodell

“Hack the Planet: Science’s Best Hope – or Worst Nightmare – for Averting Climate Catastrophe,” Eli Kintisch

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It is the view of many of us at West Coast Climate Equity that although everything possible must be done to shift to a sustainable and energy-efficient economy – along with changing to simple life-styles and putting a cap on the world’s population – all this will not be enough to eliminate the danger of runaway climate change.

Somehow, we have to find a safe way to remove the huge amount of excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. To analogize, diet and medicine alone won’t cure our planet; surgery will also be required. Too much CO2 in our atmosphere not only contributes to global heating, sea-level rise, more severe storms and desertification; it has also caused a 30% increase in ocean acidification, and this too threatens the life of everything on Earth.