For years scientists have been quietly working on extreme, last-ditch solutions to slow global warming - just in case governments worldwide don’t get their acts together.
Cue scientists.
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| Jason Box, Copenhagen-based ice climatologist and former IPCC lead author. |
With the UN warning of climate catastrophe, it’s increasingly looking like a case of when, not if, we will reach for the once unthinkable fix: geo-engineering, or artificially hacking the climate.
We’re in deep shit and we need to dig ourselves out. For better or worse, geo-engineering is part of the mix going forward because we can’t get to where we need to be by conservation alone – Jason Box, Copenhagen-based ice climatologist and former IPCC lead author.
Some climate hacking has moved beyond the research labs. In Switzerland, a start-up builds giant fans that suck carbon from the air. It’s then sold to a greenhouse where it’s absorbed by plants to make them grow faster.
In the not too distant future, imagine sprinkling iron filings into the seas to encourage carbon eating plankton… Or sending armadas of ships to pump sea mist into the sky to diffuse the sun’s rays… Or using high-altitude balloons to scatter sulphur in the atmosphere to lower the temperature – a bit like what happened naturally after the Mt Pinatubo volcano erupted in 1991.
All these and more are on the drawing board.
If anything it’s too cheap, so cheap we’re talking single digit billions of dollars to potentially influence the entire planet’s climate – Harvard University’s Gernot Wagner on his sulphur blocking project.
Because it’s so cheap, it’s very likely to happen sooner or later. Some Indian billionaire or some Saudi billionaire is gonna do it all by himself – Bjorn Lomborg, political scientist.
Geo-engineering scientists know they may be playing God.
There’s a huge amount of hubris in saying, ‘Let’s fix the problem and we know exactly what’s going to happen.’ Quite frankly, it makes me anxious – Frank Keutsch, Harvard engineering professor.
Apart from some potentially nasty side effects like damaging the ozone layer, there’s also a risk that climate hacking will give government and industry an excuse to run dead on cutting carbon.
It’s not unlike America’s opioid problem, according to Frank Keutsch.
Like pain killers, this doesn’t fix the problem. We’re just reducing symptoms and then human nature can kick in and say, ‘Well you know, it’s hard to deal with changing the energy infrastructure’ - Keutsch.
The fossil fuel industry is looking to less exotic solutions. In Texas, reporter Eric Campbell tours a “clean coal” power station that’s held up as a model by the Australian Government. The idea is to capture much of the carbon before it’s expelled into the air.
But as Campbell discovers, the technology is not as clean as it seems. It’s also hugely expensive and still in its infancy…
…Which just makes it more likely that the climate hackers, perhaps sooner than you might think, will have their day in the sun.
