Not All Geoengineering is Science Fiction!
The CBC RadioOne program “The Current” featured a nearly 30 minute segment on geoengineering on Monday, September 25, 2006 (1). Comments made by one of the guests warrant further discussion with regard to her concerns about unilateral actions that might be taken by the U.S.
Material that there was not time to discuss is also presented here along with an outline of engineering approaches that can be used within 5-10 years once issues related to environmental side effects are better understood. The reflective plastic cover strategy has been discussed at length elsewhere (2), so it is not included here except for information I wanted to present in the radio interview for which there was not enough time.
The overall point I want to make is that while some geoengineering strategies ARE science fiction, i.e., not doable for 50-100 years or perhaps ever, others can be carried out using 20th century technologies and can be applied in time to stop the melting of Arctic sea ice, glaciers and permafrost before a global catastrophe occurs.
Adaptation and Its Ugly Cousin Geoengineering
Frances Cairncross, an economist, journalist and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, BAAS, their version of AAAS I assume, stated that more attention needs to be paid to adapting to climate change, as a realization of its inevitability. She recommended that wealthy countries start budgeting the aid needed to help third world nations cope with the coming impacts.
She gave the example of how the Netherlands was able to use its wealth and engineering technology to deal with their country mostly being below sea level, but a poor country like Bangladesh will not be able to do so on its own as sea levels rise. She said that in order to lessen the impacts, restrictions should be placed on building on land below sea level everywhere.
Cairncross said that like geoengineering, talking about adaptation is considered a distraction from the real issue of reducing GHG emissions, but that environmental groups need to recognize that climate change is going to occur and better to prepare by adaptation than do nothing.
