Are scientists eager (frantic?) to uncork it? The Guardian puts its spin on a scoop:
Leaked documents ahead of key Lima meeting suggest UN body is looking to slow emissions with technological fixes rather than talks.
It’s soooo interesting when science and ethics collide. Especially when Nature is involved. Thanks to environmental historians like William Cronon and Stephen Pyne, and ecologists such as Emily Russell, we know that humans have been manipulating nature for a long, long time. It’s not as if we suddenly learned how to live in a fetid swamp like South Florida or the scorching desert of Phoenix, Arizona. Even the Amazon, that mythical icon of untrammeled nature for anthropologists and environmentalists alike, has recently been revealed as an entirely manufactured landscape in prehistory, one that supported a highly engineered and urban metropolis.
The field of environmental ethics, like environmentalism, and until recently, ecology, has not really engaged with this world-wide anthropogenic landscape history. The reason for this is an enduring (and false) dualism that humans and nature are separate: humans live in a world of their own making and nature, if left alone, exists in an exalted, pristine state. This mindset is rather ironic now, in light of the whole climate debate, which flows from the fact that humans have radically manipulated the earth’s governing climate–and by extension, the whole of nature, from the rain forest to ice caps.
So now that we’ve got this debate on geoengineering underway, I find it curious that Ben Hale, an environmental ethicist at the University of Colorado, in Boulder (and someone who I respect highly), tells us why we should forgo manipulating the climate to undo the damage we’ve done:
The problem is that we ought not to exert such control over our climate, even if we can do so with extreme precision. Doing so introduces incredibly complex moral problems that we can hardly begin to fathom.
The first problem with that statement is that we already exert sway over the climate. Why is it not reasonable to consider exerting a different kind of sway with “extreme precision” if that helps us improve the climate? As Michael Tobis wrote recently,
But what of geoengineering solutions? I am not in the least averse to using whatever tools we can bring to bear to manage the situation on the way to some sort of sustainability…
In fairness, Tobis also says there are “different classes” of geoengineering solutions that need to be distinguished. Fine. I’m down with that. At least he’s open to them.
Leaving aside the many questions that remain about the scientific merits of geoengineering, what of Hale’s moral argument against it? What is this Pandora’s Box of “incredibly complex moral problems that we can hardly begin to fathom”? Is it that we shouldn’t be fiddling with nature on such a grand scale? Well, as I’ve pointed out above, we humans have already done so all throughout our history. Why should this be any different?
Now, just to be clear, I’m not arguing in favor of geoengineering. All I’m trying to get at is why it should be precluded, since we already manipulate everything everything else on this earth, from species to ecosystems. Yes, there are scientific reservations that need to be addressed. And there are major political and economic obstacles as well. But I don’t understand the moral misgivings that Ben has expressed. Perhaps he can lay them out more precisely.
Update: Ben Hale obliges here.
Michael Tobis is to be applauded for being open to the idea of geoengineering, but he’s delusional if he thinks the climate activist community is also open to it. In my post yesterday, I argued that, for climate activists,
any discussion of climate adaptation is an unwelcome distraction from the debate at hand on mitigation. Why there isn’t room for both discussions to occur beats me.
Tobis says this is a RPJr-ism and
really a very half-baked way of thinking about the [climate] problem. Forcing things under that rubric is simply a distortion.
Now I have no idea what an RPJr-ism is, much less whether I’m guilty of such a thing. Perhaps Tobis or one of Roger’s fans in the climate activist community can define this term for me?
But to the matter at hand, let me direct Tobis back to the same quote from 2020Science that he references. It’s a commentary on the recent Royal Society report on geoengineering, and this is the response that 2020Science predicted (emphasis added):
I suspect that, like most climate change-related reports these days, “Geoengineering the climate: Science, governance and uncertainty” will have ideologues on both sides of the aisle up in arms. It dares to consider the option of actively engineering the climate on a planetary scale to curb the impacts of global warming, and advocates further research into geoengineering. In doing so, it will no doubt simultaneously enrage deniers of anthropogenic climate change, and those who fervently maintain that technological fixes are not the solution to the consequences of humanity’s excesses.
More proof that environmentalists can’t chew gum and talk about climate adaptation at the same time comes in this post from David Roberts at Grist.
The cognitive dissonance from this crowd continues to amaze me. As we learned earlier this year, the carbon load already in the atmosphere is projected to lead to irreversible climate change for the next millennium:
Among illustrative irreversible impacts that should be expected if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increase from current levels near 385 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to a peak of 450–600 ppmv over the coming century are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the “dust bowl” era and inexorable sea level rise.
With all due respect to Bill McKibben’s noble cause, respectable scientists believe we should prepare for life beyond that catchy 350 number. Real environmental journalism outlets (as opposed to activist clearinghouses) find it reasonable to have this discussion.
The irony is that Roberts posts a set of global land use & ecological impact graphs to make his point that geoengineering won’t save humanity from all the upward trends in the graphs. So if every ecological and climate indicator demonstrates that the earth is becoming less livable because of increasing carbon dioxide concentrations and other global land uses, then is it realistic to take geoengineering off the table just because someone like Richard Branson makes a glib and simplistic statement like this:
If we could come up with a geoengineering answer to this problem, then Copenhagen wouldn’t be necessary. We could carry on flying our planes and driving our cars.
I suspect that what really bugs Roberts about this is the inference in the latter part of the comment that we could carry on with our carbon-intensive lives if only we could suck all that nasty CO2 out of the atmosphere. Fair enough. I can respect that.
But the truth is that no matter happens at Copenhagen and in the U.S. Congress, some type of adaptation measures will be necessary. Roberts is a very smart guy, and I know he’s capable of chewing gum and talking about climate adaptation at the same time. The fact that he doesn’t want to likely results from his belief–which is shared widely by climate activists–that any discussion of climate adapation is an unwelcome distraction from the debate at hand on mitigation. Why there isn’t room for both discussions to occur beats me.
