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Geo-Engineering: Strong Incentive and Great Danger

image credit: Lucy Reading-Ikkanda (www.lucyreading.co.uk)

John Benson 410,800

Senior Consultant, Microgrid Labs

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Microgrid Labs, Inc. Advisor: 2014 to Present Developed product plans, conceptual and preliminary designs for projects, performed industry surveys and developed...

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Oct 31, 2023Oct 31, 2023 3:04 pm GMT
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I have written about the subject of this post, climate change, frequently in the past, and shall also do so this time with a different spin, the hyphenated word in the title of this post.

Climatologists get a bad case of the cold sweats when someone suggests this solution, because they believe that the humans that caused climate change, will just make things worse by trying to engineer the climate more than they already (unintentionally or otherwise) have. I am hard-pressed to disagree with them.

However, I also believe we are just starting to see major effects of climate change, and these are likely to get much worse over time. If geo-engineering has the potential to give us more time to stop pumping greenhouse gas (GHG) into the atmosphere and start to draw down the concentration of GHG we have pumped in already, we need to bring it to the table, and start evaluating it.

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Matt Chester on Oct 31, 2023

It's hard to picture geoengineering in practice without my brain associating it with cartoon villains who want to block out the sun.

But aside from that silly association, I also always wonder about the international politics of it all. Does a country have a right to try geoengineering in their borders when the potential unknown impacts (good or bad) will certainly impact other regions? Is there a parallel / precedent to this?

John Benson on Oct 31, 2023

Thanks for the question, Matt.

First of all, we (the earth's economies) are already geo-engineering. We did so when the world's maritime organizations agreed to move to low-sulfur fuel-oil for ships. Net result was that we greatly reduced the effects of sulfur compounds in the atmosphere, which accelerated the effects of climate change. And of course, there are the effects of climate change which result from putting various greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, measuring these emissions, and our attempts to mitigate these emissions. The good news is that the science is pretty sound for the effects of these emission and their concentrations in our atmosphere. and this knowledge mainly came from the above geo-engineering.

Any future geo-engineering experiments will very limited and agreed on by the world's major economies.

-John

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