Can Geo-Engineering Fix the Climate Crisis?

The world is full of technological innovations driven with sustainability in mind. The Lexus Design Awards for example, pushed the issue to its fore: among the winners was a 3D-printed non-electric humidifier made from recycled waste ceramic, packaging that dissolves in water to create a detergent that removes excess chemicals from the clothing it carries, and a mobile habitat that can catch fog and turn it into drinking water. All are admirable. But are such new technologies thinking big enough? 

That’s the question posed by, among others, Professor Steven Koonin, the influential – and sometimes controversial – theoretical physicist at New York University, former under secretary for science under the Obama administration and author of ‘Unsettled? What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters’, which was updated again, this year.

His argument is a simple one: the data suggests that some degree of climate change, both natural and man-made, is pretty much unstoppable due to the lag between action and reaction in the climate; and that’s aside from the rarely admitted challenges of geo-politics, international trade, economic growth for the developing world and, he adds, the practical impossibility of moving to a zero carbon economy literally today – which is what it would take. 

But that need not sound as gloomy as it might. There are two other paths, he suggests, that consequently need to be given more serious consideration. One is adaptation – as he points out, human societies have for millennia lived in both the coldest and wettest as well as the hottest and driest locations on Earth through intuitive adaptation, making the right amount of local adjustment as local needs have required. And the other is technological innovation. 

Exploring Bold New Solutions

When he says ‘technological innovation’, he means on a grand, global scale and beyond the exponential growth in wind, solar and batteries already well underway. He means geo-engineering, an idea that within the last two decades has widely been considered taboo, even as in the UK, through the Royal Society, and the US through National Academies, heavyweight studies have been made. 

Commentators often speak of the need for a ‘Manhattan Project’-style response to climate change – a reference to the marshalling of the best scientific talent and huge resources in the development and building of the first atomic bombs during World War Two.

Koonin suggests that the comparison isn’t quite right, in as much as the aim of the Manhattan Project was simple and clear cut relative to that of addressing human climate change, it didn’t have to think about costs – the Allies took a ‘money no object’ approach to get the bomb built – or have to transform a serviceable system already embedded in society, as the use of fossil fuels is. Nor did it have to contend with public opinion, since the whole project was top secret.

‘There’s a primal human fear in the idea of messing with nature – it’s the Frankenstein myth. You don’t poke the beast with a stick, even though we do that already,’ says Koonin. ‘But attitudes are changing. Any [climate technology] that doesn’t address the perceived solution of reducing emissions has been seen as a distraction. But there’s a growing realisation even among non-experts of just how difficult it is to reduce human emissions, something experts were having to think about 20 years ago. How huge the problem is has only become more evident. So we have to ask what Plan B is – adaptation – and what plan C is – geo-engineering’.

That is perhaps not such a scary idea. Residents of the UAE might be familiar with one such work of engineering following the record-breaking rainfall last year, when people around the world asked whether it may not have been a random weather event at all but the result of ‘cloud-seeding’.

Indeed, the UAE is a front-runner in the development of this technology – over the last decade it has flown hundreds of missions in which aircraft ‘bomb’ the air molecules in clouds with an electric charge or, using flares, ‘seed’ them with natural salts to stimulate rainfall.

Selling that idea, Koonin concedes, is still a challenge: he – like many of his scientist peers, he suggests – is in favour of a full-bodied research programme – for the sake of preparedness – without necessarily rushing into deployment – which, he argues, should only follow once absolute certainty over where the climate is heading and why is attained. 

‘That’s not least because the biggest barriers [to deployment] will still be legal and political – say you deploy some technology and there’s an extreme weather event shortly after, it’s going to be very difficult to prove, or disprove, that the two aren’t connected,’ he says. That could result in the mothballing of tech that might, in later years, have proven a game-changer. 

But what tech does Koonin have in mind? On the clean energy front, he’s long been an advocate of small nuclear reactors – ‘we have deep experience of working with nuclear reactors, the energy is green and the negatives are minimal, so what’s not to like?’ he asks, adding, ‘only that we have to get over our psychological aversion to anything to do with radiation’.

Is Geo-engineering Key?

But on the geo-engineering front? Consider, he says, the idea of what’s technically known as Solar Radiation Management (SRM) – this goes back to mid-1970s, when it was proposed that a haze created in at the stratosphere could be generated to cool the planet, as happens after major volcanic eruptions. It’s a strange twist that a lot of Co2’s warming effect is countered by the cooling created by the aerosols we put into the atmosphere by burning coal, which, of course, we’re trying to use less of. Why so? Because aerosol’s tiny particles increase the planet’s reflectivity, or its ‘albedo’ as it’s more correctly known. So more heat from the sun is reflected back into space.

Clouds do the same. Depending on their type and formation, their height and coverage, clouds play a key role in intercepting heat or reflecting sunlight – in fact, they have as much of an influence on the flows of heat and sunlight around the globe as does human activity. Their variation is also one reason why fine-tuning stable computer models for climate is so tricky. 

Yet is it possible to increase the Earth’s reflectivity in a more simple way than trying to make more clouds? In fact, we already have the technology to disperse a haze of hydrogen sulphide high into the stratosphere – by exploding military shells or adding it to jet fuel. Estimated costs are not high, so most developed nations could run their own operation. The problem? The haze would have to be constantly replenished – if it wasn’t, the Earth’s temperature would just start climbing again. 

And, of course, while, as Koonin puts it, ‘greenhouse gases warm all of the time over all of the planet’, the cooling effect of SRM only works where sunlight is significant – so not during the winter and, of course, not at night. He adds that the effect of SRM would be different in different places around the world, so it would take some form of international agreement to determine how such a programme would be rolled out. But then tackling climate change through carbon reduction is going to take the same anyway…

If we cannot reflect more heat away from the planet, the other major technological innovation to pursue, Koonin argues, is a means of directly removing CO2 from the atmosphere, either to offset what we put into the atmosphere – which, as he notes, would also face another taboo, the idea of it allowing for the continued use of fossil fuels as the current pace of technological and economic development around the world looks set to require – or in conjunction with efforts to put less up there in the first place. 

An effective system of Carbon Dioxide Removal (or CDR) might also prove popular in that it makes the question of who put the CO2 up there in the first place less contentious – one issue that’s making international agreement so hard to reach now – and because there are no troubling side-effects, as the aim is to restore the CO2 concentration as it would otherwise have been without human inputs. 

Again, is such a thing possible? Koonin suggests the technology to capture CO2 directly from the atmosphere is not the challenge – it’s actually pretty simple – so much as the cost and the scale of it. The cost would be enormous: by one estimate he cites, it would cost around US$100 to catch and compress one ton of CO2, or one trillion dollars to do the same for 10 gigatons of CO2 a year – and that’s roughly around a third of current emissions. Some might argue that the cost is worth it for the human (and natural) flourishing that could then follow. 

But that’s not the only problem: where does anyone put the CO2 that’s captured? Some of it could be repurposed for the industrial uses of CO2 now – to make fertiliser, in oil production, in the manufacture of cement and plastics. But these wouldn’t scratch the surface of all the COs that’s been sucked out of the sky. The only solution may be to sequester the rest underground or in the ocean – and that is a huge undertaking. 

Koonin doesn’t discount the complexity, but asks only that we start sooner rather than later to work out how such things – and other bold ideas, like how to dial up or down the Earth’s ice coverage – might be done. In the meantime, he says, we should prepare for Plan B: adaptation. Again, he stresses that those who insist the only way forward is to drastically cut carbon emissions – without quite knowing how, or being clear at what cost – are likely to blanch at this notion.

‘In the end I think the [primary] way in which we address climate change has to be through adaptation, because it’s autonomous, it can be proportional, it’s agnostic as to the causes of climate change and because we’re very good at it,’ he says. ‘Look how from 1900 until now the globe has warmed 1.3degrees C, about the same amount as is projected for the next hundred years. And during that first hundred years the world has prospered like it’s never prospered before. By any metric we’re better off now than we were a century ago even as the globe warmed. Adapting is what we do’.