Geoengineering is in the Natural Order of Things
Why it will become an integral part of human evolution
Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, impacting ecosystems, economies, and societies worldwide. While climate change may have a natural component also, whatever the deniers might say, it is a fact that human activities, particularly the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, are its main short-term cause. The consequences we all know all too well are the rising global temperatures, more frequent and severe weather events such as hurricanes, severe droughts, heatwaves, floods, melting polar ice caps and glaciers, rising sea levels, etc. These are a threat to biodiversity, food and water security, human health, and infrastructure. Vulnerable communities, including those in low-lying coastal areas and developing countries, are often hit the hardest. In principle, we know what the technical solutions should be. Efforts to mitigate climate change involve reducing greenhouse gas emissions by transitioning to renewable energy sources, improving energy efficiency, protecting and restoring ecosystems, and adopting sustainable agriculture, transportation, and industry practices, etc.
However, my assessment of how this will end I already described in a doom and gloom three-part series. I don’t nurture any illusion that we will stop with the business as usual. It is unlikely we will be able to avoid the worst.
Therefore, I would like to look beyond our present limited temporal horizon and see whether our generation could be at least useful today in rebuilding what will be left of the environmental destruction tomorrow.
The problem is that traditional efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions struggle to keep pace with the accelerating impacts of climate change. Scientists are becoming aware of the fact that solar & wind power, electric cars, going all in with nuclear, hydrogen-based power generation, and … name it… won’t do the trick. It is becoming clear that all this will be insufficient and we need additional solutions.
One countermeasure that has been rarely considered in the past, but has recently gained renewed attention is geoengineering. Geoengineering refers to deliberate, large-scale interventions in the Earth's natural systems to counteract climate change by either removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or reflecting sunlight away from the Earth's surface.
The idea isn’t new and, in a sense, humanity has always ‘geoengineered’ the planet engaging in modifications of the environment throughout history, such as for agricultural, water management, or urban development purposes. These practices, while not explicitly labeled as ‘geoengineering,’ nonetheless represent deliberate alterations of Earth's natural systems. One could even say that it was precisely our inconsiderate large-scale destruction, exploitation, and pollution of the environment in the last couple of centuries that ‘geoengineered’ the climate. And now we complain about the catastrophic consequences. There are good reasons to be skeptical of any further human intervention.
However, geoengineering the atmosphere remains the only way out to avoid a climatic collapse. It remains the only credible tool for mitigating the worst impacts of climate change.
There are two main categories of geoengineering scientists are considering: solar radiation management (SRM) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). SRM techniques aim to reflect a portion of sunlight away from the Earth, thereby reducing global temperatures. One proposed SRM method involves injecting aerosols into the stratosphere to mimic the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions. CDR approaches, on the other hand, seek to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in geological formations or other long-term reservoirs. Examples of CDR technologies include afforestation, ocean fertilization, and direct air capture, etc.
SRM techniques, in particular, could provide a rapid and relatively inexpensive means of temporarily reducing global temperatures, buying time for emissions reductions and adaptation efforts. Additionally, CDR technologies could help address the root cause of climate change by directly removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
However, things are not as easy as that. For the time being, these technologies are only in their infancy and are mostly discussed in a theoretical and speculative context. Especially the second alternative is far from becoming a mature and viable technology because it would require enormous amounts of energy. A large-scale geoengineering plan for the Earth’s atmosphere is, at this stage of development, a sci-fi fantasy. The human, economic, and technological resources necessary to get the climate under human control, are almost certainly immense and beyond our present capacities.
What causes most concerns are the unexpected unpredictable and potentially disastrous side effects on the climate, on a regional or global scale. We don’t know what we are doing and the possible consequences of our actions could make things even worse, causing more problems than what geoengineering is supposed to resolve. Moreover, reliance on geoengineering as a solution to climate change could undermine efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, leading to a dangerous dependency on technological fixes rather than addressing the root causes of climate change.
While I’m aware of all these possible drawbacks and potentially negative feedback, let me explain not only why, whether we like it or not, we will be forced to take this path, but also why it is already a page written in the evolutionary history of mankind.
Climate change is irreversible
To see why, let us assume that for some unknown miracle, we stop emitting greenhouse gases. Tomorrow, some magic wand will reduce all carbon dioxide, methane, and other detrimental emissions to zero. Would this stop climate change as well? Unfortunately, the answer is negative. The longevity of human-emitted greenhouse gases in the atmosphere varies depending on the specific gas. Some gases, like carbon dioxide (CO2), can remain in the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years. Others, such as methane (CH4), have a shorter lifespan, typically only around 12 years, but are more potent in terms of their heat-trapping ability. Nitrous oxide (N2O) can persist for over a century.
Thus, we already know that shutting down emissions would only prevent us from making things worse. But the overall impact on the Earth's climate system will persist much longer and will remain irreversible for several generations to come, in the best-case scenario, and for thousands of years in the worst-case scenario.
While, so far, there is no sign that we are willing to stop the emissions in the first place. Put it bluntly, but realistically, we will have to live forever with a modified climate, no matter what we do. Reducing emissions is crucial but won’t save us. Most probably we will reach a + 3°C warming by 2080 and that will make many parts of the planet inhabitable and other parts difficult to live in (again, see here.) Life will become something varying between harsh, cruel, and eventually hellish. If we still don’t feel this way it is because the effects are delayed by decades, but they will catch us. It is just physics.
At that point, I’m afraid that nobody will care about the noble objections against geoengineering, or should we say more appropriately “retro-engineering” the climate. When the level of pain becomes unbearable, we will change our minds.
Tipping points are points of no return
The second reason that will force us to go down the road of geoengineering is that there are good chances that, because of climate change, the atmosphere will run into one or more tipping points. Tipping points refer to critical thresholds in the Earth's climate system that, once exceeded, lead to abrupt shifts in the state of the system. These shifts will result in significant and rapid changes in the environmental conditions that almost certainly would render life on this planet much more difficult.
Tipping points are characteristic of physical systems undergoing a sudden non-linear complex reorganization—so-called, ‘self-organized criticality—such as sudden cascading events. A simple example we might be familiar with from our everyday experience is how a sand pile can grow until a certain point and be subjected to a certain self-weight. Adding grains of sand onto the pile may cause nothing to happen. However, once it reaches a critical point, a single grain of sand may be sufficient to cause the entire pile to collapse in a massive slide. A sand pile may look like a very simple system but, unfortunately, it isn’t. No science can exactly predict when and how this critical physical state is reached. We only know that, sooner or later, by adding that little tiny weight of one grain onto the sand pile, will make it collapse. Here, only statistical approaches can help to make educated guesses, but you will never know when exactly the collapse is going to happen.
Notice that, while a single grain of sand is sufficient to cause the avalanche, rolling the film back to its exact previous state is impossible. While, restoring the system’s (the sandpile’s) previous physical state only approximately, will require a comparingly huge amount of energy and a long work compared to the work done and the time interval of the tipping event. These events where a small change can cause a sudden unpredictable irreversible and complete reorganization of a complex system are ubiquitous in natural and non-natural systems. From earthquakes to forest fires, from the financial market to traffic jams, from the neural networks in our brain to… well, the climate.
The most feared climate tipping point is that of the circulation of ocean currents in the North Atlantic Ocean, the so-called Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The AMOC tipping point refers to a critical threshold beyond which the circulation of ocean currents in the North Atlantic undergoes a rapid and potentially irreversible change. It plays a crucial role in regulating global climate patterns by redistributing heat from the equator towards the poles. This would have global effects, disrupting weather patterns, affecting marine ecosystems, and impacting agriculture influencing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, droughts, and heatwaves, by altering atmospheric circulation patterns and ocean-atmosphere interactions. Some say that Western Europe may even experience a little ice age. To use an analogy it is as if your skin pores would lose their transpiratory function. You may survive but your thermoregulatory system may be put upside down and your life would become much harder. For an in-depth analysis of the AMOC tipping point, see S. Rahmstorf’s paper.
Other tipping points could be the exponentially fast melting of polar ice sheets which collapse could lead to significant sea level rise, inundating coastal landscapes (we are almost there, aren’t we?) The thawing of permafrost in the Arctic or Siberian regions could release enormous amounts of methane that, in a reinforcing feedback loop, would add greenhouse gases further warming the planet. The deforestation of the Amazon rainforest could reach a tipping point where, wildfires lead to widespread soil degradation pushing it past its resilience threshold, resulting in a shift to a drier, savanna-like ecosystem. Just to mention some of the potential scenarios… And further bad news (sorry for that) is that one tipping point could trigger other tipping points with a domino effect. However, the most dreadful fact is that, as mentioned above, once we have reached that threshold, then there is no way back. It might take thousands of years or even millions of years (nobody knows) until the atmosphere will regain its previous equilibrium.
For sure the relatively stable world climate we know will be lost for many generations to come.
If this isn’t enough, let me illustrate the third reason why we will be forced to embrace some kind of geoengineering.
Human evolution was possible because of the stability of the climate
In case you didn’t know, the climate we are accustomed to is not the rule but the exception. In Earth’s natural history ice ages were the norm. The graph below shows the Earth’s average temperature anomaly in the last 800,000 years—that is, the divergence from the average temperature of the previous ten thousand years. As you can see the climate was far from stable. Between 20-30,000 years ago the Earth's temperature was 7-9 °C colder than the last 10,000 years (i.e., 8.5 to 10.5 °C colder than today).1 This is an enormous difference! For thousands of years, most of Canada and Northern Europe were covered with large ice sheets, deserts expanded, and water became scarce. Of course, humans are adaptable and did not go extinct. However, except for those humans living at tropical latitudes, their lifestyle must have been similar to that of the indigenous people in the Arctic regions before the Industrial Revolution. Especially in the winter season, life must have been extremely harsh without modern heating systems and technological comforts.
In a sense, we are living in a very comfortable and temperate age. In the last 10,000 years, Earth experienced a relatively warm and stable climate friendly to life.
Fortunately, concerns about the coming of a new ice age are unjustified. We have not to prepare for a Viking-styled civilization (unless the AMOC creates havoc in Europe…). While the exact reasons why ice ages come and go are still not fully known, according to current theories, this is mainly due to the so-called Milankovitch Cycle. Without going into the technical details, it may only be said that it depends on some orbital parameters and the inclination of the Earth, which can be calculated. We can’t say anything for sure, but it seems unlikely that we are going to fall back into one of those ‘dips’ in the graphs above anytime soon. And, yes! Ice ages were determined by the low concentrations of CO2 greenhouse gas in the atmosphere as well (mainly modulated by volcanic eruptions.). In fact, we are unwillingly doing our utmost to prevent the next ice age from happening.2
However, the decisive point to keep in mind is that we, as humans, as a species, could become what we are, precisely because of an interglacial period with a relatively stable climate (in the previous cycles it was much less stable.) Precisely these environmental conditions allowed for the development of agriculture and the growth of human settlements, complex societies, and culture, culminating in the advent of the scientific and industrial revolution. That humans developed such a cultural, scientific, and technological renaissance only in these last millennia, and not already 300,000 years ago, is no coincidence. The climatic conditions allowed for it.
We must realize how fortunate we are to live in this particular ‘season’ of Earth’s natural history. The relatively serene period we are privileged to live in nowadays was the incubator of human cultural development and is going to be quickly destabilized by our anthropogenic forcing that will tilt this delicate equilibrium between the environment and our evolution. The present climate is by no means the norm, it is an exception that needs millions of years to cycle back. If that stability will fade away, also our ability to develop may as well. Unless we take the appropriate measures.
Humans have become a developed scientific and technologically capable species that has learned to create its material comforts. We will not accept passively being plunged into a hellish inferno. The prehistoric humans had no other choice than to accept their natural destiny and adapt, migrate, or die out. We are the first living creatures on Earth that could take a different path. When the time comes, and it will come very soon in terms of the history timeline of homo sapiens, nobody will care much about the possible side effects of geoengineering. We will not accept the idea to do nothing and let Nature take its course. When life becomes unbearable people won’t care about our present fears and ethical, moral, and technical doubts about geoengineering. We have adapted to the environment by creating technological means that protect us from its ups and downs. We will do so also with the short- or long-term climate changes. Humans will have to find out how to stabilize the climate. If we like it or not we will be forced to geoengineer or fall into a harsh desert planet civilization a la Dune sci-fi novel. We have always ‘geoengineered’ the planet, but we will have to learn to treat Nature respectfully AND apply science and technology for what they are truly worth. Not to satisfy a bottomless pit of greed and ignorance, but to allow us to live in a world worth living. This will be one of the next technological and spiritual aspects of the future evolution of humankind. It is in the natural order of things.
Or…
This is one of the main objections raised by the deniers of human-made climate change. The climate has always been subjected to ‘roller-coaster’ patterns, there is no evidence that we are modifying it. So the saying goes. However, the evidence for the anthropogenic destabilization of the environment is in plain sight, even though you can’t read it from the above graph and need to do your research. And without cherry-picking the facts that confirm your ideological bias.
You may be lured into the simplistic belief that global warming caused by human greenhouse emissions could counterbalance the advent of a new ice age, and this authorizes us to stop worrying about temperature rises. It is better if you think more than twice!
Credo che la geoingegneria non troverà mai applicazione su vasta scala, anche se qualcuna tra le principali nazioni potrà fare forse tentativi circoscritti. Ma potremmo ripristinare gli ecosistemi per altre vie.
Tempo fa mi sono imbattuto in uno dei libri di Robert Monroe sulle sue esperienze extracorporee e vi ho trovato il resoconto di una sua sorprendente esperienza nel futuro (non è insolito che si sperimentino esperienze spirituali del genere, anche se durante le NDE, ad esempio, si tratta in genere di visioni): in esso veniva descritto come gli umani fossero passati a un nuovo livello di coscienza che gli permetteva anche di modificare la materia, e usavano quel potere proprio per porre rimedio ai danni prodotti al nostro pianeta. Da lettore di Aurobindo, non ho potuto evitare di pensare a questi nuovi umani come a quelli da lui preannunciati. Questo avverrà realmente? Esiste già, da una prospettiva in cui il tempo non ha significato? Non lo so, e comunque non basta a confortarmi il pensiero che tra mille e più anni si realizzerà qualcosa che ora è inimmaginabile. A mio avviso l'umanità dovrebbe già aver sofferto abbastanza ed essere pronta fin da subito a un cambiamento di coscienza collettivo. Ma è evidente che ciò non avverrà senza ulteriore sofferenza ed eventi tragici - quelli che peraltro lo stesso Monroe ha visto, ma di cui ha preferito non lasciare resoconti, sperando che non si avverassero.
Marco, when Federica refers to the vertical path to dealing with these environmental issues, perhaps a concrete example will help.
What is your view, for example, on the idea that the Earth is a living and sentient being, with its own intentional first-person perspective just as we have ours? Of course, that doesn't mean the Earth is thinking in verbal concepts and analyzing the warming of its body, but simply that the metamorphoses of its bodies have some integral relationship with its higher-order soul and spiritual existence.
That doesn't mean humanity has no relevance for the Earth organism's metamorphoses, either. On the contrary, humanity is like the brain of this organism and is becoming increasingly responsible for stewarding its psychic and bodily rhythms. Yet would you agree this can only be done properly from a place of deep spiritual insight into the higher-order intentions through which the Earth's state of being unfolds?
Otherwise, it is as if we are a doctor confronted with a patient who has a high temperature and our first response, instead of doing diagnostic tests and conversing with the patient to resonate with their inner state of being, is to dose them up with whatever medications we can find based on myopic knowledge that some of these medications were correlated with lowering temperatures in the past, even though we have no deep insight as to why there is a temperature to begin with.