Report: Geoengineering an option to limit climate change

(Credit: Royal Society)

Geoengineering is not a last resort, but the next necessary step to recalibrate the Earth's climate unless carbon emissions are significantly reduced in the near future, the Royal Society, the U.K.'s national academy of sciences, announced Tuesday.

"It is an unpalatable truth that unless we can succeed in greatly reducing CO2 emissions we are headed for a very uncomfortable and challenging climate future, and geoengineering will be the only option left to limit further temperature increases," John Shepherd, chair of the Royal Society's geoengineering study and a professor of Earth system science at the University of Southampton, said on behalf of the group.

The report "Geoengineering the climate: Science, governance and uncertainty" (PDF) urged carbon emissions reduction as the primary means of halting climate change. But it looked at geoengineering--engineering the environment on a large scale to purposely manipulate the world's climate--very seriously.

In past years, geoengineering has been thought of an as option of last resort, but the Royal Society asserted that some of the safer geoengineering techniques, like aggressively planting forests, could be implemented currently in conjunction with carbon reduction efforts.

Since geoengineering has the potential to affect people on a global scale, the group further recommended that an international organization like the U.N. Commission for Sustainable Development begin developing policies and a means for resolving anticipated geoengineering political conflicts.

"Assuming that acceptable standards for effectiveness, safety, public acceptance and cost were established, why should appropriate geoengineering options not be added to the portfolio of options that society will need and may wish to use to combat the challenges posed by climate change?" said the report.

With that in mind the group evaluated the safety, expense, effectiveness, and quickness of deployment for projects falling under two main classes of geoengineering: carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar-radiation management (SRM).

CDR, efforts to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, included things like afforestation, encouraging plankton growth, and carbon capture and storage in the form of burying carbon-rich biomass or using biochar for fuel.

The SRM suggestions for manipulating the Earth so that it absorbs less solar radiation included more seemingly far-out options like painting all roofs white to reflect sunlight, placing thousands of space mirrors in near-Earth orbits to reflect sunlight, and spraying aerosols into the stratosphere.

The group said it generally favored CDR projects over SRM because they involved processes closer to natural occurrences, while the side effects of SRM projects are unknown and therefore more dangerous.

[Michichael]

Oh noes! Not the carbon dioxide! Besides the fact that the CO2 in the air right now is 3,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes (3,000 gigatons). That's ~ 20 times LESS than what it was in the air 500,000,000 years ago.

So 500 million years ago there was 60,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere. Damn, us humans are so pesky that hundreds of millions of years before our species existed we were causing global warming!

Now, instead of listening to the hype about how bad CO2 is and how we need to spend billions on "climate control" because we've put such ungodly amounts of CO2 in the air, consider another logical answer. (I'll note the claimed CO2 is 30,000,000,000 tonnes a year, or 0.001% increase/year)

IT'S A NATURAL PART OF THE PLANETARY CYCLE.

Please people. Do not buy into the hype about how damaging humans are due to CO2. There's a lot worse things that we do. We're responsible for the hole in the Ozone layer, we're responsible for localized deforestation/pollution/oil spills/toxic waste. But we don't have the ability, yet, to affect the global climate with anything short of all out nuclear war, and even then probably not for long.

Study some basic chemistry and physics, don't buy into the lies the "scientists" are trying to tell you. Do your own research.

Oh, and fun fact about the purported 30 billion tonnes/year of CO2 emmissions? That's not confirmed. The USGS paper making the statement (actually 27 billion) is calculating that based on the total CARBON released. So until somebody can actually produce a real survey/study about the amount of Carbon Dioxide released, the number could very well be even smaller than a 0.001% increase us pesky humans contribute to the air.

[Mr. Dogers2U]

Actually we aren't responsible for any ozone hole, CFC's are many times heavier than air and they settle to the ground where microbes feast on them. Otherwise I agree with you.

[Mr. Dogers2U]

Oh, and I forgot to add, O3 (ozone) is a very unstable molecule with a short half life. If it weren't for the sunlight making it for us, we'd have none in a very short period of time.

[eddy m]

Oh you two are so smart - I'm in awe! You should publish your theories - you'd put 99% of the world's scientists to shame. You have to wonder what they do with their time, researching things and all that rubbish.

[Mr. Dogers2U]

Eddy, the "hole" is natural, you can read about it. It mostly occurs in the winter months when the southern pole has little sunlight hence O3 production is limited and the O3 decay still occurs. You are still a believer in the "old" made up science, try to get a clue and an education. Look up the atomic weights of CFC's and tell me how they get that high in the atmosphere.