F.D. Flam: Geoengineering’s risks need to be studied more
More than a dozen private companies around the world are looking to profit from extreme measures to combat global warming filling the sky with sunlight-blocking particles brightening clouds or changing the chemistry of the oceans We live in precarious times when it s not hard to find the hardware and the money to change the Earth s state The trouble is that nobody knows how to control the unintended consequences A few scientists who ve studied and modeled the complexity of Earth s oceans and atmosphere say any geoengineering scheme big enough to affect the weather could put people at vulnerability of dramatic changes in the weather crop failures damage to the ozone layer international conflict and other irreversible problems Environmental lawyer David Bookbinder is more afraid of geoengineering than he is of weather change The consequences of geoengineering could happen a lot faster and with much less warning he mentioned And could provoke a really bad geopolitical predicament He explained the world lacks the legal or regulatory framework to ensure no single administration or private entity takes a risky initiative At the same time there s a clamor for tech solutions and it s only going to grow Experts are debating whether such a framework should restrict so-called geoengineering across the board or allow various small-scale experiments The world got an early warning about this Wild West situation in when a small startup called Make Sunsets caused a outrage by launching a small balloon-borne experiment over Mexico to spray sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere Now it s joined by richer more serious players including a company based in Israel called Stardust which is researching a plan to dim the skies with a particle of undisclosed chemistry In theory sulfur dioxide or similar chemicals would cool the planet by forming suspended particles of sulfuric acid that act to scatter sunlight When I wrote about the Make Sunsets occurrence the company s founder commented he thought they could profit by selling carbon credits under the belief that their actions would offset emissions They won t Such a particle release does nothing but mask the effect of the carbon buildup in the atmosphere If those releases are abruptly stopped the temperature could rise suddenly in what s been called termination shock Despite obvious risks experts have envisioned a scenario where people are dying from a prolonged summer heat dome and demand action Bookbinder reported the president governors or even private individuals might be authorized to make the decision Right now anyone can There are literally no rules He warned that if a cooling scheme initiated in one country coincided with floods droughts or crop failures in another the affected country might retaliate without direct evidence that the geoengineering caused the concern Mark Z Jacobson an atmospheric modeler at Stanford University noted we ve already seen the results of several natural experiments Specific forms of air toxicity have been cooling the planet by about degree C but that same impurity also kills millions of people from respiratory illnesses In the eruption of Tambora injected so multiple particles into the atmosphere that was dubbed the year without a summer People died from crop failure and famine One justification for geoengineering comes from the Paris Agreement which included an imperative to keep warming below degrees C We ve already surpassed that mark Preventing us from reaching even more dangerous temperatures will require more than just stopping carbon emissions We might need to find a way to pull carbon out of the atmosphere on a global scale That was the stated goal of California businessman Russ George back in when he published iron into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of British Columbia The iron in theory would fertilize algae which would absorb carbon There was never any documented scientific evidence that it helped Now several companies such as Canadian startup Planetary Technologies and U S startup Vesta are beginning to dump chemicals into the oceans in an attempt to increase the pH of the water This should in theory trigger more carbon uptake from the atmosphere Planetary Technologies has determined a way to make money by selling carbon credits With for-profit organizations already releasing chemicals into the oceans it s vital for scientists with no financial stake in this industry to collect statistics explained geochemist Adam Subhas of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute He s planning to set sail off the coast of Massachusetts this summer with a gang of experts for a small scale experimental release of sodium hydroxide traced with a fluorescent dye He declared they ll measure temperature salinity carbon dioxide concentration alkalinity and other chemical properties phytoplankton zooplankton and fish larvae An expert will be on board to monitor the effects on marine mammals The American Geophysical Union believes monetary gains should not be prioritized in small-scale research either There s a catch declared Stanford s Jacobson Small-scale experiments won t detect damage that might ensue if the projects were scaled up enough to in fact affect global warming In Jacobson s view we aren t coming close to realizing the world s prospective to switch our ability demands to renewable materials He convincingly argues that it makes no sense to resort to exotic and dangerous solutions when we haven t fully exploited what we know is safe and clean Right now various of these companies have sunk millions of dollars in investor money giving them incentives to convince the general and politicians that their particular brand of geoengineering is necessary What we need instead is more scientific content and various rules to protect us all from rash decisions and unintended consequences F D Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science She is host of the Follow the Science podcast Related Articles Thomas Friedman How 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