Geoengineering is Being Looked At Seriously – Seriously???

January 24, 2020 – With all the procrastination in evidence regarding addressing the climate crisis, it appears that geoengineering is now being considered as an option for mitigating atmospheric warming. In Naomi Oreskes, and Erik Conway’s 2015 essay, “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future,” the authors spin a work of fiction set in the 24th century, looking back at the 21st. The narrative describes how climate change inaction by the world’s governments, followed by policy decisions that reflected poor judgment finally led to using geoengineering in the hope it would reverse atmospheric warming. After three years of aerosol injections into the upper troposphere and stratosphere, planet-wide temperatures dropped. But then the Indian Monsoon failed, an unintended and unexpected consequence of the geoengineering experiment.

The dire warnings contained in this 52-page essay, which should be read by every politician on the planet, point to the uncertainty of atmospheric tinkering by humans. The atmosphere knows no borders. So one country doing a geoengineering experiment with aerosols could unintentionally impact countries thousands of kilometers way in a “butterfly effect.”

That isn’t stopping the U.S. Congress which just gave the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) a $4 million budget to cool the Earth using two different experiments. The first would inject sulfur dioxide or other aerosols into the stratosphere to scatter sunlight in an attempt to mimic the effect of volcanic eruptions. The second involves injecting sea salt particles into low altitude clouds over the ocean to create more shade mimicking ship tracks, the long clouds that follow emissions from ocean vessels.

To make the idea more palatable to the uninformed, the word geoengineering is struck from the project. Instead, the term being used is climate intervention. You see words matter when you are describing an experiment that could have unintended consequences such as altering wind and precipitation patterns thousands of kilometers away.

This isn’t the first time that wordsmithing has appeared in association with the climate crisis. The original term of global warming that first appeared in the 1970s, became climate change under the presidency of George W. Bush. Climate change could mean cooler or warmer. It didn’t sound quite as ominous as global warming and was acceptable to those who could use the term to make comments like “the climate is always changing.”

So here we are now with climate intervention as the new terminology to describe a very dangerous next step by a government led by a global warming denier in the White House.

States David Fahey, Director of the Chemical Sciences Division of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, and the recipient of the $4 million, “When you put aerosols up into the atmosphere, it does a lot of things. That opens up this whole menu of things that you’d have to worry about.” 

There are still some impediments to a proposed future experiment. NOAA has no authority to experiment in the stratosphere and would need Congress to approve aerosol injections into that layer of the atmosphere.

In their essay, Oreskes and Conway described how the geoengineering experiment had to be stopped after the Indian Monsoon failed killing millions of people and causing a mass movement of climate-displaced refugees. Global temperatures that had dropped by 2 to 3 Celsius during the three-year of upper atmosphere aerosol injections, now soared by 5 Celsius.

In 2060 the Arctic Ocean was ice-free in the summer.

In the 2070s Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets began disintegrating.

And by 2093 the oceans rose 5 meters creating 1.5 billion climate refugees.

The mass movement of people to high ground soon overwhelmed many nations. Crop failures followed. Disease and privation ensued. Political structures and nation-states failed. In the end, billions died with 60 to 70% of life on the planet driven to extinction.

The tragic fictional history only ends in the 24th century with the survivors of the Great Collapse having learned that planet tinkering is a perilous act.

All I can say to NOAA and those who approved the $4million from the U.S. Congress, the story of Pandora’s Box is a Greek myth. Geoengineering could turn it into a reality.