Obama climate adviser open to geo-engineering to tackle
global warming
Mooted geo-engineering fixes for climate change include placing mirrors
in space that reflect sunlight from the Earth. Photograph: Blue Line
Pictures/Getty Images
The global warming situation has become so dire that Barack Obama's chief
scientific adviser has raised with the president the possibility of
massive-scale technological fixes to alter the climate known as
'geo-engineering'.
John Holdren, who is a member of the president's cabinet, said today the
drastic measures should not be "off the table" in discussions on how best to
tackle climate change. While his office insisted that he was not proposing a
dramatic switch in policy, Holdren said geo-engineering could not be ruled
out.
"It's got to be looked at. We don't have the luxury of taking any approach
off the table," Holdren said in an interview with Associated Press. He made
clear these were his personal views.
he suite of mega-technological fixes includes everything from placing
mirrors in space that reflect sunlight from the Earth, to fertilising the
oceans with iron to encourage the growth of algae that can soak up
atmospheric carbon dioxide. Another option is to seed clouds which bounce
the sun's rays back into space so they do not warm the Earth's surface.
Such global-scale technological solutions to climate change may seem
fantastical, but increasing numbers of scientists argue that the
technologies should at least be investigated.
Holdren's comments do not mean that the US government is raising the
priority of geo-engineering. A spokesman for the US Government's Office of
Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) - which Holdren directs - said "the
administration's primary focus is still to seek comprehensive energy
legislation that can get us closer to a clean energy economy, and can create
green jobs while reducing dependence on foreign oil."
Advocates of the technology have welcomed the comments. Stephen Salter, an
engineer at Edinburgh University and a pioneer of techniques to seed clouds
so that they reflect the Sun's rays back into space, said: "Everyone working
in geo-engineering works with some reluctance: we hope it'll never be
needed, but we fear it might be needed very very urgently. Holden is echoing
that exactly. It's very encouraging – we've had extremely negative reactions
from the UK governments."
Salter said that geo-engineering techniques were the only methods that would
lower world temperatures quickly enough. Even if the world stopped emitting
CO2 tomorrow, he said, the world would continue to get hotter for several
decades. "Opponents say it would take the pressure off getting the
renewables developed. I've been working on renewables since 1973 and stopped
because we're too late, we wasted too much time. We may have a panic very
soon because of the way the Arctic ice is going."
Greenpeace chief scientist Doug Parr, however, has said: "The wider point is
not the pros and cons of particular technologies, but that the scientific
community is becoming so scared of our collective inability to tackle
climate emissions that such outlandish schemes are being considered for
serious study. We already have the technology and know-how to make dramatic
cuts in global emissions - but it's not happening, and those closest to the
climate science are coming near to pressing the panic button."
Holdren acknowledged that some of the potential geo-engineering solutions
could have side effects, and that such actions should not be taken lightly.
Though cloud-seeding, for example, would cool the earth, it would also lead
to more acidic oceans, since the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere - and
therefore the CO2 absorbed into the seas - would keep increasing. But
Holdren added: "We might get desperate enough to want to use it."
His comments seemed to go against those he made in a speech to the annual
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007.
There, he highlighted geo-engineering's potential to help cool the
atmosphere or to remove greenhouse gases, but acknowledged the methods would
likely require significant investment, and also warned against expecting a
single technological solution to solve energy and climate problems. "Belief
in technological miracles is generally a mistake," he said.
Writing last year in a special edition of the Royal Society journal
Philosophical Transactions that was dedicated to geo-engineering, Brian
Launder of the University of Manchester and Michael Thompson of the
University of Cambridge said: "While such geo-scale interventions may be
risky, the time may well come when they are accepted as less risky than
doing nothing. There is increasingly the sense that governments are failing
to come to grips with the urgency of setting in place measures that will
assuredly lead to our planet reaching a safe equilibrium."
In a series of papers, experts said that a reluctance "at virtually all
levels" to address rising greenhouse gas emissions meant carbon dioxide
levels in the atmosphere were on track to pass 650 parts per million, which
could bring an average global temperature rise of 4C. They called for more
research on geo-engineering options to cool the earth.
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