Tinkering with the planet’s air to cool Earth’s is inching closer to reality enough so that two different high-powered groups — one of scientists and one of former world leaders — are trying to come up with ethics and governing guidelines.
On Thursday, the newly formed which includes the former presidents of
Mexico, Niger and Kiribati, a former Canadian prime minister, the ex-chief of
World Trade Organization and other national minister level officials — will
have its first meeting in Italy in a 15-month process to come up with
governance strategy on pulling carbon dioxide out of the air, lowering
temperatures by reflecting sunlight with artificial methods and adapting to
climate change. This month, the American Geophysical Union, the largest society
of scientists who work on climate issues, announced it was forming an for
“climate intervention” that would be ready for debate during the major
international climate negotiations in November in Egypt.
This shows the idea of “solar geoengineering is finally
getting serious,” said Harvard University climate scientist David Keith, a
leader in the field.
Both groups said they aren’t quite advocating
geoengineering, which includes putting particles in the air to reflect sunlight
or whiten clouds, or the less-disputed carbon dioxide removal, such as
technology to suck carbon out of the air but also more nature-based solutions
such as more trees and getting oceans to sponge up more carbon.
But the two groups say the ideas need to be discussed with
global warming nearing and likely shooting past the international goal of
limiting temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit)
since preindustrial times. The world has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius (2
degrees Fahrenheit) since the mid-1800s and scientists say the world likely to
pass the 1.5-degree mark.
“The climate change problem is at a point where even
extreme options need to be thought about seriously,” Climate Overshoot
Commission Executive Secretary Jesse Reynolds said in a Monday interview. “Now,
to be clear, thinking about them includes the possibility of rejecting them.
But not thinking about them does not seem to be a responsible path forward.”
What’s needed are ethical guidelines before anything is
done to get the public trust, much like the scientific community did with the
possibility of human cloning, said AGU Executive Director Randy Fiser said. If
this doesn’t happen the public will have a giant backlash and won’t trust the
community, said National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt, who has
studied the issue but declined a spot on the AGU ethics panel because of other
commitments.
An earlier report bythe academy
“spoke to the double moral
hazard of climate intervention: damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” McNutt
said.
Opponents of geoengineering — such as Pennsylvania State
University climate scientist Michael Mann — worry that just talking about
guidelines will make the tinkering more likely to occur in the real world.
“I see it as a
potentially cynical maneuver to buy the ostensible moral license to move
forward with dangerous geoengineering prescriptions,” Mann said in an email. He
said not only could there be harmful side effects, but it takes the pressure
off of cutting fossil fuel emissions, which is what’s really needed.
Mann also said no one can enforce ethics or governance
rules, citing efforts to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine, but McNutt
pointed to rules governing international oceans.
With or without guidelines, some of these high-tech ideas
are going to happen, leaders of the two groups said. However, last year the
Swedish government canceled an early but politically charged test of a device
designed to put particles in the air that eventually, if fully implanted, could
create what some would call an artificial volcano cooling the globe temporarily
like 1991’s Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption in the Philippines.
“The work of looking at climate strategies continues to go
on in labs, both in the for-profit and non-profit sectors,” said AGU’s Fiser,
who said investors are funneling money into such projects.
Ethicists Nancy Tuana of Penn State and Christopher Preston of the University of Montana said if anything talking about the ethics of the tinkering with the atmosphere will put the brakes on efforts a bit more.
“It will slow it
and this is a good thing,” Preston said in an email. “Ethical thresholds placed
within frameworks are typically challenging to satisfy... An ethical framework
can lead to paralysis. Ethics is not like maths. Ethical problems don’t often
get ‘solved’.”
But not doing anything — no cuts in carbon dioxide
emissions, no carbon dioxide removal and no solar geoengineering — “that’s the
worst outcome and also the path of least resistance,” said Stanford University
ethics expert Hank Greely.
“I view climate intervention in the same way I view the
‘Hail Mary’ pass in football,” said Colorado University ice scientist Waleed
Abdalati, a former NASA chief scientist, referring to a last ditch desperation
effort in a seemingly losing cause. “There is a chance it could get us to where
we need to be, but just as no team wants to be in a position where that is the
play they have to make, scientists recognize that we as a society would never
want to be in a situation that we have to use such an approach to address the
challenge we face.”
