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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Serie: New Human Frontiers - Polity
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Climate change seems to be an insurmountable problem. Political solutions have so far had little impact. Some scientists are now advocating the so-called 'Plan B', a more direct way of reducing the rate of future warming by reflecting more sunlight back to space, creating a thermostat in the sky. In this book, Mike Hulme argues against this kind of hubristic techno-fix. Drawing upon a distinguished career studying the science, politics and ethics of climate change, he shows why using science to fix the global climate is undesirable, ungovernable and unattainable. Science and technology should instead serve the more pragmatic goals of increasing societal resilience to weather risks, improving regional air quality and driving forward an energy technology transition. Seeking to reset the planet's thermostat is not the answer.
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Table of Contents
New Human Frontiers series
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgements
Acronyms
Preface
One: Imagining an Engineered Climate
Techno-fixing the climate
What is geoengineering?
Feeding the imagination
Climate emergencies
Metaphors of agency
Summary
Two: Designing a Global Thermostat
Optimal climates
‘No more than two degrees’
A thermostat for the world
Global temperature or local weather?
Summary
Three: Governing the World's Temperature
Spicing it up
Governing research
Governing deployment
Absent voices
Summary
Four: Living in an Experimental World
Biosphere-2
The nature of the experiment
Plan B and infinite regress
Re-making the earth, re-making the human
Summary
Five: Reframing the (Climate) Problem
Approach the goal obliquely
Climate change is wicked
Climate pragmatism
Why science cannot fix climate change
Bibliography
Index
New Human Frontiers series
Harry Collins, Are We All Scientific Experts Now?
Mike Hulme, Can Science Fix Climate Change?
Copyright © Mike Hulme 2014
The right of Mike Hulme to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2014 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8205-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8206-8 (pb)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8526-7 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8525-0 (mobi)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my colleagues Martin Mahony, Rob Bellamy and Helen Pallet for reading and commenting on early drafts of this book, and also two anonymous readers of the full manuscript, who made valuable suggestions for clarification and improvement. For what remains I take full responsibility. At Polity I would like to thank Emma Longstaff for commissioning this title, Manuela-Maria Tecusan for her meticulous copy-editing and the production and marketing team, especially Neil de Cort, Elen Griffiths and Ginny Graham. The index was compiled by Bill Johncocks, who, as always, performed the task with great professionalism and diligence.
Acronyms
Preface
Between 1997 and 2009 the belief persisted among most world leaders that climate change was a problem that could at least be contained, if not completely solved. In December 1997 the Kyoto Protocol was signed at the 3rd Conference of the Parties to the United Nations' Climate Convention, committing industrialised nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 5 per cent over the next 15 years. The senior British political negotiator John Prescott famously declared: ‘This is a truly historic deal, which will help curb the problems of climate change.’ Yet 12 years later, in December 2009, the hope of reaching a ‘fair, ambitious and binding’ follow-on deal at the 15th Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen ended in failure, rancour and disillusionment. The multilateral negotiating process now moves to the 21st Conference of the Parties in Paris in December 2015, where the nations of the world have agreed, yet again, to sign a treaty that should commit all nations to start reducing emissions by 2020. Few are holding their breath.
Yet the risks associated with anthropogenic climate change continue to be encountered somewhere between our direct experience of the world and our science-fuelled imaginations. As global emissions of greenhouse gases – especially carbon dioxide – have soared in the 17 years since the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, ocean heat accumulates, Arctic sea ice shrinks, heatwaves intensify, the ocean acidifies and sea level rises. Curiously, however, global air temperature – the favoured headline indicator of climate change – has barely increased. The warming trend in global surface air temperature between 1970 and 1998 was 1.7°C per century; between 1998 and 2012, just 0.4°C per century. At the very least, this suggests that knowledge of the complete dynamics of the planetary system is not yet complete.
Yet there are few concerns in the world today that can match the global salience and cultural reach of climate change.1 After more than a quarter century of scientific investigation, public debate, political negotiation and policy development, climate change and its contested causes remain for many – although not all – a hot-button issue. All of human life is now lived out not just in the presence of a physically changing climate, but in the new discursive and cultural spaces that have been created by the idea of climate change. It is as though all human practices and disputes now can be – now have to be? – expressed through the language and symbolism of climate change.
So photography, cartoons, poetry, music, literature, theatre, dance, religious practice, architecture, educational curricula, and so on now use climate change as a medium of expression. Books dealing with climate change now appear at the rate of more than one per day in the English language alone, up from less than one per week a generation ago. And political disputes about landscape aesthetics, child-rearing, trade tariffs, theology, patents, extreme weather, justice, taxation, even democracy itself, find themselves inescapably caught up in the language and argumentative spaces of climate change. Climate change has become a new condition around which human life takes shape; we ‘feel there might not be any narrative whose meaning we cannot re-evaluate in relation to climate change’.2
So here is the paradox of climate change. While worldwide awareness of climate change as a matter of concern has grown during these last two decades, there remain few problems that are as politically intractable. Top-down multilateralism orchestrated through the United Nations – the so-called Plan A – has abjectly failed to reign in global emissions of greenhouse gases. And politically and culturally engineered behavioural changes within nation states have brought about only marginal adjustments to the underlying drivers of energy consumption and land use change. The world's expanding energy supply continues to be drawn mostly from fossil fuel sources, and the growth in material consumption was only halted – temporarily – by the global recession of 2009–10.
If neither global diplomacy nor changes in human behaviour can solve climate change, a new argument is now being advanced: the world needs a Plan B for regulating climate and, more importantly, science and technology can deliver one. By intervening directly in the heat flows from the sun to the Earth's lower atmosphere, it is deemed possible by some that a thermostat for the planet could be created. The plausibility of this global thermostat relies upon innovative atmospheric modification technologies, guided by reliable scientific knowledge of how the planet's climate works. The most frequently advanced intervention would involve injecting millions of tonnes of sulphur gas into the high atmosphere – so-called stratospheric aerosol injection, just one in a family of sunlight reflection methods. Climate control would then become possible not just for our cars, our buildings and our homes but – it is claimed – for the planet as well.
But can science fix climate change this way? And, even if it can, is it a solution we should pursue? In this book I outline the reasons why I believe this particular climate fix – creating a thermostat for the planet through aerosols injected into the stratosphere – is undesirable, ungovernable and unreliable. It is undesirable because regulating global temperature is not the same thing as controlling local weather and climate. It is ungovernable because there is no plausible and legitimate process for deciding who sets the world's temperature. And it is unreliable because of the law of unintended consequences: deliberate intervention in the atmosphere on a global scale will lead to unpredictable, dangerous and contentious outcomes. I make my position clear: I do not wish to live in this brave new climate-controlled world. In Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World,3 his ironic utopia was brought about by totalitarian engineering of the human subject – ‘Yes, everybody's happy now.’ I seek to show that, if we promote technologies for a designer climate, an equivalent pathological utopia brought about by totalitarian engineering of the planet would ‘likely’ be the result.
In Chapter 1 I introduce the idea of geoengineering – more specifically, the science and technology of injecting aerosol particles into the stratosphere to cool the planet. The emergence over recent years of the idea of engineering the world's climate is described, along with some reasons for the increasing attention the idea has been receiving. The notion of a ‘climate emergency’, which is frequently used as a justification for this type of technological pre-emption, is criticised.
The following three chapters then develop different arguments against the idea that science can fix climate change by developing a thermostat in the sky. Chapter 2 argues that the design of a global thermostat is undesirable: extreme weather and climate change pose risks to humans and the things they care about, but seeking to minimise these risks by regulating global temperature is misguided. Chapter 3 argues that such a thermostat would be ungovernable: world agreement on the desirable temperature setting is unattainable, and the mere attempt to reach such agreement is likely to unsettle international relations. An imaginary scenario for the year 2032 illustrates the point (see Box 3.3). And Chapter 4 argues that the thermostat would be unreliable: even if such a technology could be created and governed, the unintended consequences would multiply the humanitarian, political, legal and security troubles facing the world.
In conclusion, Chapter 5 offers a different view of the kinds of problems that climate and its changes present to mankind. This reframing suggests a different role for science and technology: not to try and fix climate change through planetary-scale engineering, but to serve human-inspired goals of dignity, freedom and creativity. It is not climate change that is the ultimate threat to human well-being. It is the lack of virtue. This view requires greater humility with regard to the limits of scientific knowledge than is implied by planetary engineers – and also a greater exercise of compassion and justice in the deployment of that knowledge. It recognises that human beings will never be masters of the planet in the way in which some of the new climate designers seem to be suggesting.
Notes
1 The definition of the phrase ‘climate change’ is problematic – and its meaning has changed over time. For the purposes of this book I use the idea of ‘climate change’ to embrace the physical change (and, within this concept, both natural and human-caused change) and the cultural dimensions of the phenomenon, together with their interrelationships.
2 Garrard 2013: 183.
3 London: Chatto and Windus, 1932.
One
Imagining an Engineered Climate
Techno-fixing the climate
The Nobel Prize-winning English scientist Michael Beard is on the point of unveiling to the world a wonder-fix for climate change. His solar-powered technology for splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen gas is about to demonstrate its vast potential for cheap, unlimited hydrogen-based energy:
The day after tomorrow a new chapter would begin in the history of industrial civilisation, and the Earth's future would be assured. The sun would shine on an empty patch of land in the boot heel of south-west New Mexico … and the storage tanks would fill with gas.4
But Beard's excessive and self-indulgent past behaviour catches up on him. His sins and misdemeanours lead to a tragicomic denouement as his cuckolded adversary takes a sledgehammer to the salvation technology, leaving nothing but wrecked machinery. Beard's dream of a techno-fix for climate change is crushed amid spiralling debts and the chaos of torn human relationships.
The above scenario is from the novel Solar, Ian McEwan's comic allegory of climate change. Finding a cheap and sustainable way of creating clean electricity without relying on fossil fuels is one way in which science and technology are frequently imagined to be able to fix climate change. And not just in fiction. At various times hopes have been raised that anthropogenic climate change can be solved through a transition to a hydrogen-based economy, through the wonder-technology of nuclear fusion or through a German-style Energiewende: an energy revolution based on large-scale deployment of solar, wind and other renewable energies.
But in recent years another discourse has emerged, in which science and technology are offered as a ‘fix’ for climate change, this time through the development and deployment of so-called geoengineering technologies (see Box 1.1). These rather eclectic technologies are united in their ambition to deliberately manipulate the atmosphere's mediating role in the planetary heat budget. They aim to do one of two things: either to accelerate the removal of carbon dioxide from the global atmosphere; or else to reflect more sunlight away from the Earth's surface and so to compensate for the heating of the planet caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases.
The possible realisation of geoengineering technologies – especially the idea of injecting sulphur gas into the stratosphere – was given a great scientific and psychological boost in 2006. The Nobel Prize-winning Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen wrote an influential article, titled ‘Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma’.5 In it, he suggested that the time had come for Earth system scientists to seriously research this method as a backstop technology for limiting climate change – the ultimate techno-fix for climate change. Crutzen was no Beard. He was real rather than fictional; and he was rather more disciplined in his personal life than was Michael Beard. And he had won his Nobel Prize for work of great societal benefit. Rather than the abstract ‘Beard–Einstein Conflation’ with which McEwan's eponymous celebrity scientist had endowed the world, Crutzen's recognition in 1995 was for work conducted with two colleagues on the formation and decomposition of stratospheric ozone. This work had informed the 1985 Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, which in turn led to the later global agreement to phase out production of the most damaging chloroflourocarbons that had been destroying stratospheric ozone at high latitudes.
Crutzen was careful to state in his 2006 article that injecting aerosols into the stratosphere was ‘by far not the best solution’ for climate change. Yet his intervention in 2006 spawned a series of research workshops, conferences, networks, studies, assessments and governmental hearings into the possibilities and risks of such a technology. The science reporter Eli Kintisch attended one such meeting in 2007, organised by the University of Calgary and Harvard University. ‘Should scientists study novel ways to alter Earth's climate to counteract global warming?’ asked Kintisch.6 The 50 elite researchers at the meeting concluded ‘yes’, but only after agreeing that ‘the road to understanding the science is fraught with booby traps and that deliberately tinkering with the climate could make the problem worse’.7 One of those scientists in attendance, David Battisti from the University of Washington, was seriously concerned about the meeting's outcome. Kintisch reported: ‘After speaking on the phone with his wife from his hotel room, Battisti confessed: “I told her this meeting is terrifying me”.’8
In this chapter I explain how this idea of creating a techno-fix for climate change by artificially reflecting sunlight has gained such plausibility in recent years and why some scientists such as Battisti might be privately terrified of the idea. But first I introduce the range of planetary intervention technologies that are often grouped under the label ‘geoengineering’.
What is geoengineering?
In controversial public debates it matters how terms are defined and understood. The term ‘geoengineering’ is a rather eclectic catch-all expression. The first use of geoengineering in the context of climate change was made by the Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti in 1977, in a rather obscure article titled ‘On Geoengineering and the CO2 Problem’. Marchetti was proposing to capture carbon dioxide emitted from power stations and to bury it either in the deep ocean (his preferred solution) or else underground, in the geological strata. Thirty years later, in the 2006 article referred to above, Paul Crutzen used the labels ‘geoengineering’ and ‘climate engineering’ interchangeably, to describe his proposal for stratospheric aerosol injection. More recently, the conventional definition of geoengineering has come to be this: ‘the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment in order to counteract anthropogenic climate change’. This definition is taken from the Royal Society's 2009 report Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty (Royal Society 2009), which divides geoengineering technologies into two types: solar radiation management (SRM) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR).
The former set of technologies seeks to offset global warming by reducing incoming solar radiation; and it proposes to achieve this reduction by reflecting more sunlight back into space. Hence these reflecting technologies are sometimes called sunlight reflection methods (abbreviated with the same acronym SRM). These technologies include placing mirrors in near-Earth space orbit; injecting tiny sunlight-reflecting particles into the stratosphere (Crutzen's proposal); whitening low-level marine clouds by spraying seawater into them; and whitewashing dark urban infrastructures – roads, car parks, roof tops. The latter set of technologies seeks to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and to secure it in long-term reservoirs. These sequestration technologies include ocean iron fertilisation, soil biochar, and carbon capture and storage. The latter is a process whereby carbon dioxide is captured either from the free atmosphere or from the waste flues of fossil-fuel powered stations. Box 1.1 offers a brief description of the main geoengineering technologies.
The first four technologies described below are sunlight reflection methods and leave atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide unaffected. In contrast, the four technologies in the second group remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester or isolate the carbon in a variety of reservoirs, in effect reversing the process of fossil-fuel combustion.
Stratospheric aerosol injection This sunlight reflection technology seeks to mimic the cooling effect of huge volcanic eruptions. Millions of tonnes of hydrogen sulphide or sulphur dioxide would be artificially injected into the stratosphere, where these gases would oxidise into tiny sulphate aerosol particles, just a few tenths of a micron in diameter. Surviving here for a few years, these aerosols would scatter sunlight back into space, thereby reducing lower atmospheric heating. Other types of particle for injection have been suggested, but the favoured technology would use sulphur gas.
Marine cloud brightening
