Heroic Technology — Geoengineering To Control The Climate

Let me say at the outset that geoengineering to control Earth's climate is not the wisest path which Homo sapiens ("Wise Man") could travel down. Because of the large scales involved, future geoengineering  may turn out to be the dumbest thing our dumb (albeit clever) species has ever done.

On Tuesday Jim Kunstler spoke of the unintended consequences of applying technology willy-nilly to solve all our problems. As global warming really gets going in the coming decades, the temptation to geoengineer the climate will become stronger and stronger.

Indeed, I think we can make a bolder prediction than that implied by mere temptation. If I am correct in my view, expressed on Monday in The Assumption Of Technological Progress, that an irresistible orientation toward technological thinking is built right into human cognition, it follows that geoengineering will necessarily be applied on large scales to control the climate. That's the way the future must look. Heroic technology will be deployed because that's just what Homo sapiens does, as opposed to making fundamental changes in its behavior to curb population and economic growth, and scale back modern civilizations to a size commensurate with sustainable living on the Earth.

Every once and a while geoengineering stories surface in the mainstream press, and then, at least at this juncture, these stories disappear as quickly as they arose. The latest go-round can be found in the Christian Science Monitor's Dumping iron in the ocean could slow global warming, say scientists. I'll quote that story, and then show you the abstract of the Nature study it was based upon.

Dumping iron in the seas can help transfer carbon from the atmosphere and bury it on the ocean floor for centuries, helping to fight climate change, according to a study released on Wednesday.

The report, by an international team of experts, provided a boost for the disputed use of such ocean fertilisation for combating global warming. But it failed to answer questions over possible damage to marine life.

When dumped into the ocean, the iron can spur growth of tiny plants that carry heat-trapping carbon to the ocean floor when they die, the study said.

Scientists dumped seven tonnes of iron sulphate, a vital nutrient for marine plants, into the southern ocean in 2004. At least half of the heat-trapping carbon in the resulting bloom of diatoms, a type of algae, sank below 1,000 metres (3,300 ft).

"Iron-fertilised diatom blooms may sequester carbon for timescales of centuries in ocean bottom water and for longer in the sediments," the team from more than a dozen nations wrote in the journal Nature.

Burying carbon in the oceans would help the fight against climate change, caused by a build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that scientists say is raising temperatures and causing more floods, mudslides, droughts and higher sea levels.

The study was the first convincing evidence that carbon, absorbed by algae, can sink to the ocean bed. One doubt about ocean fertilisation has been whether the carbon stays in the upper ocean layers, where it can mix back into the air.

A dozen previous studies have shown that iron dust can help provoke blooms of algae but were inconclusive about whether it sank.

Large-scale experiments with ocean fertilisation using iron are currently banned by the international London Convention on dumping at sea because of fears about side-effects.

Heroic Technology — various geoengineering solutions have been put forward to control the climate.
Click to enlarge.

Here's the Nature abstract.

Fertilization of the ocean by adding iron compounds has induced diatom-dominated phytoplankton blooms accompanied by considerable carbon dioxide drawdown in the ocean surface layer. However, because the fate of bloom biomass could not be adequately resolved in these experiments, the timescales of carbon sequestration from the atmosphere are uncertain. Here we report the results of a five-week experiment carried out in the closed core of a vertically coherent, mesoscale eddy of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, during which we tracked sinking particles from the surface to the deep-sea floor. A large diatom bloom peaked in the fourth week after fertilization. This was followed by mass mortality of several diatom species that formed rapidly sinking, mucilaginous aggregates of entangled cells and chains.

Taken together, multiple lines of evidence—although each with important uncertainties—lead us to conclude that at least half the bloom biomass sank far below a depth of 1,000 metres and that a substantial portion is likely to have reached the sea floor. Thus, iron-fertilized diatom blooms may sequester carbon for timescales of centuries in ocean bottom water and for longer in the sediments.

The stimulated algae bloom sucks CO₂ out of the air, injesting it by conversion to sugars (glucose) through photosynthesis, the algae dies off after a while, and then (hopefully) sinks to the ocean bottom, where the carbon remains buried for centuries. That's a pretty fancy carbon sequestration scheme, and a very slim reed to place your hopes upon. Yet hope is the vaporous quality which makes the world go round, and knowledgeable people can agree that global warming is making the future look more and more hopeless.

There is little doubt in my mind that very-large-scale heroic technology will be applied to control the climate in the future. After all, what else can people do? They can't change their fundamental behaviors. They won't stop having babies and trying to increase the material comfort (and fitness) of those offspring. So iron filings in the oceans it is! Or something else. For example, Columbia professor Klaus Lackner wants to suck the carbon right out of the air.

To address the exponential rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations since the Industrial Revolution, Professor Klaus S. Lackner, director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at the Earth Institute, is working on ambitious carbon capture and sequestration strategies. 

“Our goal is to take a process that takes 100,000 years and compress it into 30 minutes,” says Lackner.

Lackner and his team are developing a device they have dubbed an air extractor, modeled after one of the most abundant but most complicated devices in nature: the leaf of a tree.  Leaves are significant absorbers of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but planting enough trees to absorb the current overabundance of carbon dioxide in the world would leave no fertile land left for other uses.

The lack of humility before Nature displayed here takes my breath away. There's also a video you can watch. I wonder where we would put the carbon after we've sucked it out of the atmosphere. Bury it in the backyard? Store it in the basement? (We're talking about gigatons here—billions of tons.) I'm sure Klaus has an answer for that too.

I also have little doubt that heroic geoengineering will (eventually) constitute an egregious (but inevitable) Error In Judgment. And now watch the video which accompanied the Christian Science Monitor story, remembering all the while that these University of Chicago economists are talking about a very likely future. People are starting to think the unthinkable. It is only a matter of time before such thinking becomes commonplace.

 

Comments

[John D]

I had been thinking that the idea of climate engineering was ridiculous, that we would never do something that stupid. However, after reading your thoughts I now agree- this is what Homo Sapiens does. I'm sure something like all the fish eating the iron filled algae and mutating will happen and we will then come out with an anti-iron mutation solution! After all, its what we do.

[rumor]

I'm just old enough to remember the vague, looming sense of disaster that shrouded the early 80s Cold War - that sense that, irrespective of everything else, unimaginable man-made doom hung unsteadily over our heads like a sword of Damocles.

Talk of geoingeering the oceans and skies gives me the same damn cold feeling down in my stomach.

[rumor]

The thing that gets me about iron-seeding the oceans as a viable prospect for controlling greenhouse gases is that I can't but imagine that we're talking about an absolutely massive - and ongoing! - venture in order to make any kind of significant progress. Which means mining and processing metric shit-tonnes of iron, collating the iron, and shipping all that iron all over the oceanic world. Over and over.

Let's ignore the economic realities here. This naturally will require the use of an awful lot of fossil fuels. Which will naturally expend an awful lot more greenhouse gases. It will also, we fail to doubt, foster an increased collective sense that continuing to use fossil fuels will be alright. Which again should lead to more fossil fuel expenditure or, at the very least, mitigate against conservation hopes.

So we would essentially be enterting into a race with ourselves, to see what we can do faster and more efficiently - expend greenhouse gases or foster the absorption of greenhouse gases (by expending greenhouse gases).

All just in order to construct a massive climatological time bomb for our species some few centuries down the road, when that theoretically sequestered carbon looses from the ocean firmament.

[Gretchen]

Geoengineering, bioengineering, this egotistical messing with the extremely delicate balance that makes Life possible will be our end. Most of the last ouple decades inventions are based on little less thought than "we're not sure what it will do, but let's just see what happens." Scientists and engineers are incapable of planning for worst case scenario of their inventions to something so simple as to how to turn off and repair a goddamn oil outlet. How in the sam hell do they plan to fix purposely broken planetary life systems? We're in over our heads. May the great Mother and all our brothers and sisters on this planet forgive us.

[John D]

rumor, you raise a good point. It would be worthwhile to analyze the carbon footprint required to mine the iron, grind it into fine particles, then ship it off to the middle of the ocean to be assimilated. You may wind up creating as much carbon as you sequester.

[web reader]

You may have seen this story before.

http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2007/12/iron-rain.html

basically the thesis is that we already had a fleet of coal burning ships (which provide their own sulfur-aerosol trails that enhance cooling you can see the ship tracks here - http://phys.org/news/2011-10-birth-cloud-droplet.html).

Looking at the arguments being used, the logical extension is that the more coal we burn, the cooler the planet becomes. That's part of the argument here - http://www.wjla.com/blogs/weather/2011/07/is-china-s-coal-pollution-helping-slow-down-global-warming--11743.html

[Anywhere But Here Is Better]

Thanks to predatory banking practices emanating from Wall Street, we're having a lot of austerity cuts in the health service in the UK - yes, our "communist" National Health Service as your Tee-Hee Party would call it on Fux News.

Soon it seems, pregnant women attending pre-natal clinics will be turned away with the advice to waddle off into the nearest ocean and open their mouths to receive the iron supplements they need.

[JGM]

Dave,

You really should read the Kunstler books. I do believe you are right about human nature, but as Jim points out, the money ain't going to be there to do this ridiculous stuff. As other commenters and the Nature study reveals, the scale of these "solutions" would have to be unimaginably huge to have any real effect, and we can't even afford to fix our electric grid or our even our railroads as it is. Other commenters are also right that these schemes assume unending cheap energy to support the massive processes that would be involved in implementing them. As Einstein said: "We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them". Yes, Dave you are 100% right about human nature, and there probably will be more experiments along these lines, but in the end, this climate change business is all hoo-ha, and will come to nothing.

Keep posting - you're on my everyday read list!

[Raintonite]

Let's see if I have Dr. Lackner's idea right. We use the wealth created, in part, by cutting down existing forests in order to evenutally manufacture artificial trees to do what trees already do by naturally sequestering carbon.

Sheer genious.

Then, again, we could just stop using fossil fuels to cut down forests, or use remaining fuels to replant forests when and where possible.

Nah, not clever enough.

Mind you, Dr. Lackner would be feathering his own nest. Anybody can be taught to plant and nuture trees. It takes an elite scientist to manufacture trees. A lucractive job for the few. Shite for the rest of us.

It's one thing to abandon ship. It's another thing altogether when you have to abandon hope. I left the ship long ago. Today I abandon all hope.

[teri]

Dave,
One thing that is truly frightening is that it seems anyone with enough money can go ahead and experiment as they choose. I have read several stories about the Bill Gates "science" foundation's intentions to seed sulphur into the atmosphere above New Mexico. A sun-blocking umbrella, they call it, modeled on the idea of a volcano spewing ash and blocking the sun's rays, thus cooling the planet. How they reconcile their plan with the basic truth that without the sun, plants die, and without plants, humans and other (better) creatures die, is never discussed. The question of the resulting acid rain is answered by the foundation thusly: they "believe" that the sulphur particles will be released high enough in the atmosphere to "probably" not enter into the rain cycles.

Nowhere have I read that the foundation cannot legally go ahead with this idea to fuck around with the commons this way. So if you have enough cash, you can legally play god? The rest of us have no protection from these assholes?

Here is one article about the scheme: http://www.naturalnews.com/036583_geoengineering_Bill_Gates_global_warming.html