The UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee had a hearing today (which you can watch online) on how geoengineering could be regulated.
This is a thorny issue, as I described in my recent article, “Planning for Plan B”, since the whole idea of geoengineering is to try to cool down the whole planet to fight global warming—either directly, by blocking some of the sunlight hitting the planet, or by pulling vast quantities of CO2 out of the air.
Either way—whether direct or indirect—it would be a gargantuan task, and many of the techniques could have severe side-effects, and even while cooling down the planet as a whole, could hurt some people in the process.
Some researchers argue that tests should go forward, because it would be a good idea to start working on these options, in case global warming turns out to be worse than we thought.
But former UK science advisor David King argued before the UK Parliament committee that some geoengineering approaches are too risky to even test right now. One type of approach, known as solar radiation management, would spray tiny droplets of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere or use other techniques to block some of the sunlight hitting Earth. But a big problem with that is it doesn’t address the root cause of global warming, which is the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Also, it doesn’t do anything about the build-up of these gases in the oceans as well, which is turning the oceans acidic and could make it hard for many kinds of marine life.
So King said:
In terms of solar radiation managment, I would move fairly swiftly into a temporary ban [until] we find a feasible way forward for that. I’m not happy about smaller experiments being conducted at this stage in time, before the unintended consequences have been fully evaluated.
You can hear an excerpt from his comments here:
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For more details, check out the documents submitted to the Parliament committee.
Related posts:
- “It’s a healthy sign that a common first response to geoengineering is revulsion.” —physicist David Keith, in testimony to the US House of Representatives' Science and Technology Committee, February 2010...
- Testing geoengineering: a catch 22 We can't test it without agreement, but who will agree to testing it?...
- Can geoengineering halt sea-level rise? New study finds that extreme approaches work best, but come with risks...
