The Vanishing Face of Gaia by James Lovelock

Author:James Lovelock
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141910420
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

5

Geoengineering

There are signs that we can treat global heating by engineering or other means. We have proved that our unscheduled and unintended experiment of adding large quantities of carbon dioxide to the air by burning carbon fuel heated the planet, and we now know that it was a mistake. Does this mean that we can cure global heating by adding some other gas or material that does the opposite and cools? Scientists, including me, think that we may have little option but to try; but surely it is much better to try as a planned experiment than as a panic response to, for example, the simultaneous flooding of several coastal cities.

If geoengineering is defined as purposeful human activity that significantly alters the state of the Earth, we became geoengineers soon after our species started using fire for cooking, land clearance, and smelting bronze and iron. There was nothing ‘unnatural’ in this; other organisms have been massively changing the Earth since life began 3.5 billion years ago. Without oxygen from photosynthesizers, for example, there would be no fires.

Organisms change their world locally for purely selfish reasons: if the advantage conferred by the ‘engineering’ is sufficiently favourable it allows them, their progeny and their environment to expand until dominant on a planetary scale. Our use of fires as a biocide to clear land of natural forests and replace them with farmland was our second act of geoengineering. Third was industry for the last 200 years. Together these acts have led us and the Earth to evolve to its current state. As a consequence, most of us are now urban and our environment is an artefact of engineering. During this long engineering apprenticeship we changed the Earth, but until quite recently, like the photosynthesizers, we were unaware that we were doing it; still less were we aware of the adverse consequences.

It might seem that the fourth assessment report of the IPCC, by more than a thousand of the world’s most able climate scientists, who have worked on it since 1991, would provide us with most of what we need to know to ameliorate adverse climate change. Unfortunately it does not, and many climate scientists would acknowledge that their conclusions so far are tentative. The gaps that exist in knowledge about the state of the ocean, about that part of the Earth’s surface that is ice, the cryosphere and even the clouds and aerosols of the atmosphere make prediction unreal. The response of the biosphere to climate and compositional change is even less well understood. We may soon need geoengineering applied empirically, because careful observation and measurement show that even today some parts of climate change, for example sea‐level rise, are happening faster than the gloomiest of the forecasts.

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