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Some Early Ethics of Geoengineering the Climate: A Commentary on the Values of the Royal Society Report
Published in Andrew Maynard, Jack Stilgoe, The Ethics of Nanotechnology, Geoengineering and Clean Energy, 2020
In addition to supporting research and civic engagement, GTC makes contributions to how the issue of geoengineering is framed. First, it suggests a conceptual innovation, claiming that geoengineering methods can usefully be divided into two basic ‘classes” (ix). On the one hand, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) techniques aim to ‘reduce the levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, allowing outgoing long-wave (thermal infra-red) heat radiation to escape more easily’ (76). Such methods include direct capture of carbon dioxide from ambient air, iron fertilisation of the oceans, and the installation of carbon scrubbers at power plants. On the other hand, solar radiation management (SRM) techniques endeavour to ‘reduce the net incoming short-wave (ultra-violet and visible) solar radiation received, by deflecting sunlight, or by increasing the reflectivity (albedo) of the atmosphere, clouds or the Earth’s surface’ (79). Prominent examples of such methods are sulphate injection into the stratosphere, cloud brightening, placing mirrors in space to deflect incoming radiation, and painting roofs white to reflect sunlight. GTC argues that there are major differences between CDR and SRM, and that these are ‘best considered separately’ (ix). It is also generally more sympathetic to CDR.
Ways of seeing the climate
Published in Jeroen Oomen, Imagining Climate Engineering, 2021
Scientists typically represent climate change using partial projections and interpretations of the (global) climate. The abstraction and varicosity of climate, as well as the timescales that the global climate changes on, make climate change hard to perceive. As one scientist expressed, you wouldn’t ‘mind if the temperature is increasing in 10 years by one degree’, because it ‘wouldn’t be a big difference, you wouldn’t feel it’. Climate change needs a scientific construct to become legible. Partial projections of climate change are crucially important. Without them, climate change would drop out of sight, until disruptions of the local and regional climates ‘affect every culture, economy, and everything’ (Researcher L). Through scientific research, scientists don’t just obtain knowledge about the behaviour of the climate, they also create storylines about the climate that ‘have the functional role of facilitating the reduction of the discursive complexity of a problem and creating possibilities for problem closure’ (Hajer, 1997, p. 63). They embed the ‘scientific real’ that speaks through their empirical findings in particular frames, epistemologies, and imaginaries—allowing their storylines to reduce the complexity of the global system to manageable proportions. Because ‘the climate’ is an abstract phenomenon, what it describes is conceptual. Of course, climates have real and physical consequences, but what ‘the climate’ and ‘climate change’ describe is also a discursive convention. As I have outlined in Chapters 2 and 3, the definition of the climate has changed considerably over the course of the 20th century. In the climate change debate, the climate has become a global phenomenon with local manifestations and damages (Ashley, 1983; Edwards, 2010; Hulme, 2009; Jasanoff, 2001; Miller, 2004). In this global view of climate, two indicators in particular facilitate the discursive view of the climate: global CO2 concentrations and average global surface temperature. As I explained in Chapter 3, these two metrics are important storylines. They justify both solar radiation management (SRM) research—which directly addresses global average surface temperatures through addressing the energy balance of the climate system—and carbon dioxide reduction research—which promises to lower CO2 concentrations. Such simplified storylines risk, as I have written elsewhere, ‘homogenizing the climate, disavowing multiple and complex relationships between humans and their environments’ (Oomen, 2019, p. 8), but simultaneously make it possible to selectively address the particular aspects of climate change deemed important.
Principles of risk decision-making
Published in Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B, 2022
Daniel Krewski, Patrick Saunders-Hastings, Patricia Larkin, Margit Westphal, Michael G. Tyshenko, William Leiss, Maurice Dusseault, Michael Jerrett, Doug Coyle
The challenge to realizing policy goals include, above all, the willingness of individual nations, particularly the major emitters of GHGs (China and the United States), to adopt and enforce firm, consistent targets for ceilings and reductions on GHG emissions over the long term, and for the global community of nations to cooperate in this venture. Leiss et al. (2020) examined the gap between science based GHG emission reduction targets and inadequate results of multi-decade international treaty negotiations. Current nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement remain shy of the 2030 emissions reductions target and the longer history of ‘action’ on climate change indicates that a considerable period will elapse until the challenges are addressed. In the meantime, global emissions continue to rise, and the inertia of excessive radiative forcing is still pushing the achievement of the chief policy goals far into the future. This situation has prompted some to advocate for geoengineering solutions such as the long-term dispersal of sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere, mimicking the effects of volcanic eruptions though this strategy has important uncertainties associated with it, with carbon sequestration, solar radiation management and the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere often viewed as preferable alternatives (Keith et al. 2016).