Where's the Beach?
Rising Seas with Surfers on the Florida East Coast
The Daytona Beach skyline is in the background.
Geoengineering, providing methods to offset climate change by applying scientific fixes rather than changing old, bad habits, may have found its moment.
The Snowpiercer Scenario is dark and gloomy. Chris Evans bad.
Remember "Snowpiercer"? Another one of Chris Evans' attempts at serious acting, wherein he never takes off his shirt? Ok. We can barely remember it either.
Chris Evans better.
In the incoherent sci-fi thriller by the Korean director Bong Jooh-ho, an attempt to engineer the climate and stop global warming goes horribly wrong. The planet freezes. Only the passengers on a train endlessly circumnavigating the globe survive. Those in first class eat sushi and quaff wine. People in steerage eat cockroach protein bars.
Chris Evans better still. . .
OK. Got your attention now, back to geoengineering the planet to save us from the radical right wing deniers that have taken over Washington.
Scientists must start looking into this. Seriously.
Scientists must start looking into this. Seriously.
News about the climate has become alarming over the the last few months. In December 2016, startled scientists revealed that temperatures in some parts of the Arctic had spiked more than 35°F (+20°C) above their historical averages. In March 2017, others reported that sea ice in the Arctic had dropped to its lowest level on record. A warming ocean has already killed large chunks of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. And the bad news keeps coming.
Severe bleaching in 2016 on the northern Great Barrier Reef affected even the largest and oldest corals, like this slow-growing Porites colony. Photo: Terry Hughes et al./Nature
Realistically, the odds that thes process could be slowed, let alone stopped, by deploying more solar panels and wind turbines seemed unrealistic even before the current climate denying, science hating, administration took power in Washington. It is even less likely now that the new government has gone to work undermining President Barack Obama's strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
That is where engineering the climate comes in. Last month, scholars from the physical and social sciences who are interested in climate change gathered in Washington to discuss approaches like cooling the planet by shooting aerosols into the stratosphere or whitening clouds to reflect sunlight back into space, which may prove indispensable to prevent the disastrous consequences of warming.
A research plane surveying ice thickness in the Arctic in August 2016. Much of the ice in the region appears to be thinner than normal. Photo: Esther Horvath.
Aerosols could be loaded into military jets, to be sprayed into the atmosphere at high altitude. Clouds at sea could be made more reflective by spraying them with a fine saline mist, drawn from the ocea.
The world's immediate priority may be to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to meet and hopefully exceed the promises made at the climate summit meeting in Paris in December 2015. But as Janos Pasztor, who heads the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative has said, "The reality is that we may need more tools even if we [were to] achieve those goals."
The carbon dioxide that humanity has pumped into the atmosphere is already producing faster, deeper changes to the world's climate and ecosystems than were expected not long ago. Barrin gsome technology that could pull it out at a reasonable cost—a long shot for the foreseeable future, according to many scientists—it will stay there for a long time, warming the atmosphere further for decades to come.
The cruise ship Crystal Serenity, anchored outside Nome, Alaska, in August, before its inaugural voyage through the Northwest Passage. The trip would not have been possible before climate change led to diminished sea ice coverage. Photo: Mark Thiessen/AP
The world is not cutting emissions fast enough to prevent global temperatures from spiking into dangerous territory, slashing crop yields and decimating food production in many parts of the world, as well as flooding coastal cities while parching large swaths of the globe, killing perhaps millions of mostly poor people from heat stress alone.
Our commitments are being abandoned by the current administration
Meanwhile the single largest factor in climate change—global population growth—is a taboo subject to most politicians. As such global population growth continues to spiral out of control as religious conservatives of all faiths take over governments from the Middle East to North America. Family planning is a thing of the past for the foreseeable future, climate change be damned. Demographers have argued that cultural and religious factors cause high fertility in the developing world where large populations can least afford more mouths to feed. A sign of the times, the April 5, 2017 Washington Post headline screams "More births expected for Muslims than Christians Worldwide."
Our commitments are being abandoned by the current administration
Solving the climate imperative will require cutting greenhouse gas emissions down to zero, ideally in this century, and probably sucking some out. But solar geoengineering could prove a critical complement to mitigation, giving humanity time to develop the political will and the technologies to achieve the needed decarbonization.
With the new conservative administration in Washington pushing the United States, the world's second-largest emitter after China, away from its mitigation commitments, geoengineering looks even more compelling.
"If the United States starts going backwards or not going forward fast enough in terms of emissions reductions, then more and more people will start talking about these options," said Mr. Pasztor, a former United Nations assistant secretary general on climate change.
Our commitments are being abandoned by the current administration
While many of the scholars gathered in Washington expressed misgivings about deploying geoengieneering technologies, there was a near-universal consensus on the need to invest more in research—not only into the power to cool the atmosphere but also into the potential side effects on the atmosphere's chemistry and on weather patterns in different world regions.
While it is know that solar radiation management can cool the atmosphere, fears tha tfield research would look too much like deploymnet have so far limited research pretty much to computer modeling of its effects and small-scale experiments in the lab.
Our commitments are being abandoned by the current administration
Critically, the academics noted, the research agenda must inclde an open, international debate about the governance structures necessary to deploy a technology that, at a stroke, would affect every society and natural system in the world. In other words, geoengineering needs to be addressed not as science fiction, but as a potential part of the future just a few decades down the road.
Arguments against geoengineering iare in some ways akin to those made against genetically modified organisms and so-called Frankenfood. It amounts to messing with nature. But there are more practical causes for concern about the deployment of such radical technology. How would it affect the ozone in the stratosphere? How would it change patterns of precipitation?
Moreover, how could the world agree on the deployment of a technology that will have different impacts on different countries? How could the world balance the global benefit of a cooling atmosphere against a huge disruption of the monsoon on the Indian subcontinent? Who would make the call? Would the United States agree to this kind of thing if it brought drought to the Midwest? Would Russia let it happen if it froze over its northern ports?
Our commitments are being abandoned by the current administration.
Geoengineering would be cheap enough tat even a middle-income country could deploy it unilaterally. Some scientists have estimated that solar radiation management could cool the earth quickly for as little as $5 billion per year or so. What if the USA were to unilaterally decide to focus efforts to combat climate change on geoengineering alone?
That wouldn't work in the end. If greenhouse gases were not removed from the atmosphere, the world would heat up in a snap as soon as the aerosol injections were turned off. Still, the temptation to combat climate change on the cheap while continuing to exploit fossil fuels could be hard to resist for the current administration in Washington which has promised to revive cola and shown little interest in global diplomacy.
Scott Barrett, an environmental economist from Columbia University who was at the meeting in Washington, said, "The biggest challenge posed by geoengineering is unlikely to be technical, but rather involve the way we govern the use of this unprecedented technology."
These ethical considerations should be taken into account in any research program into managing the rays of the sun. Perhaps researchers should refrain from taking money from an American administration that denies climate science, to avoid delegitimizing the technology in the eyes of the rest of the world.
People should keep in mind the warming by Alan Robock, a Rutgers University climatologist, who argued that the worst case from the deployment of geoengineering technologies might be nuclear war.
But it would be a mistake to halt research into this new technological tool. Geoengineering might ultimately prove to be a bad idea for a variety of reasons. Further research could resolve those possibilities.
The best way to think of th eoptions ahead is as offering a balance of risks. On one side of the scale are whatever pitfalls geoengineering might bring. They might be preferable to the prospect of radical climate change. Thinking in terms of delirious sci-fi fantasies, the trade-off won't necessarily be between cockroach protein bars and some happy future of cheap, renewable energy. It is more likely to pit cockroach treats against some dystopian, broiling world.
Now back to Chris Evans' insistence on taking on serious acting roles where the shirt doesn't come off. New rule. The shirt comes off Chris. You were blessed with what 99% of the population wishes they had and you are from today forward required to show it. Thanks. The Management.
This post was paraphrased, edited, and some paragraphs were deleted and added, from "To Curb Global Warming, Science Fiction May Become Fact," by Eduardo Porter. A version of the original article appears in print on April 5, 2017, on Page B1 of the New York edition of The New York Times with the headline: "Plant-Cooling Technology May Be Earth's Only Hope."
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SUPERBUGS
Surfers may have the answer
The Surfer Biome Project is a unique effort to determine whether routine exposure to the ocean alters the microbial communities of the body, and whether those alterations might have consequences for surfers—and for the rest of us.
The World Health Organization is warning that a dozen antibiotic-resistant "superbugs" pose an enormous threat to human health. The WHO is urging hospital infection-control experts and pharmaceutical researchers to focus on fighting the most dangerous pathogens first. Above, Acinetobacter baumannii, a group of drug-resistant bacteria commonly found in soil and water. The WHO rated research on this and two other pathogens as "critical priority."
American military researchers identified the first patient in the USA to be infected with bacteria that are resistant to all known antibiotics. The case raises the specter of superbugs that could cause untreatable infections, because the bacteria can easily transmit their resistance to other germs that are already resistant to additional antibiotics. The resistance can spread because it arises from loose genetic material that bacteria typically share with one another.
Difficult-to-clae medical scopes inserted down the throat might be infecting patients with deadly drug-resistant bacteria. Five infections were reported in one hospital (Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center). The germs are known as CRE, which stands for carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae. They are resistant to all known antibiotics.
Ethnobotany
Drugs of the future might come from the past: botanical treatments long overlooked by Western medicine. Ethnobotany is a historically small and obscure offshoot of the social sciences, focused on the myriad ways that indigenous peoples use plants for food, shelter, clothing, art and medicine. Within this already-tiny field, a few groups of researchers are now trying to use this knowledge to derive new medicines.
A century ago, the top three causes of death were infectious diseases. More than half of all people dying in the USA died because of germs. Today, they account for a few percent of deaths at most.