The US should seriously consider the idea of tinkering with the atmosphere to cool a warming Earth and speeding up research on how and if humanity should hack the planet, the National Academy of Sciences said Thursday.
The academy’s reportfounded by Abraham Lincoln to provide expert advice to the government, does not recommend conducting solar engineering to reflect heat back into space. At least not yet.
But a contingency plan must be investigated, the report said says, because climate change-driven extreme weather has deteriorated since the academy last looked at the highly charged issue in 2015. That requires coordinated research into whether aerial craft technology would work, its potentially dangerous side effects, its ethics, and the potential for political ramifications.
The report looks at three possible ways to cool the air: by placing heat-reflecting particles in the stratosphere, changing the brightness of ocean clouds, and thinning tall clouds.
“Climate engineering is a really stupid idea, but it might not be as stupid as doing nothing at this point or continuing to do what we’ve been doing,” Scripps told Institution of Oceanography atmospheric chemist Lynn Russell, a co-author of the report. The Associated Press. “It has many risks and they are important to learn as much as possible about it.”
The panel recommended ramping up research spending several times to $ 40 million per year, along with exit ramps to end the investigation if an unacceptable risk is found.
“I honestly don’t know if it will make sense,” said Stanford University committee chair Chris Field.
Critics, such as Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Oxford, fear that there is a “moral hazard” that offers a tempting option to use questionable technology in lieu of the necessary reduction in carbon pollution. He said the term geoengineering falsely makes it sound like humans control heat like a thermostat.
Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University sees geoengineering as a safety feature for the planet, like car airbags you hope you never need.
A Harvard team is working on a small-scale experiment where eventually a balloon would throw a few pounds of 12 miles (20 kilometers) of aerosols into the air to reflect the sun. That group hopes to carry out a system test over Sweden later this year, without injecting chemicals.
This report is more powerful than the 2015 version, which describes government oversight and how to conduct research, said academy president Marcia McNutt, who chaired the earlier study.
Is geoengineering too risky to even consider?
“It’s not so much playing with fire as examining fire so we understand it well enough to use it if necessary,” said Waleed Abdalati, a former NASA chief scientist on the 2015 panel. you need to explore high-risk options when there is just as much at stake as with climate change. “
Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears
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