Geoengineering from the Royal Society

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences is not a journal I’d imagine too many of you read on a regular basis – I certainly don’t. But their recent special issue is on a topic of rather broader interest than usual – geoengineering.

Perhaps the most accessible read might be the introductory overview, which notes some interesting historical precedents for the idea – and, incidentally, sheds light on the Russian perspective on the prospects of a warmer globe:

In ca 1960, for example, authors N. Rusin and L. Flit from the former Soviet Union published a long essay entitled Man versus climate. In this essay the authors, displaying a traditional Russian geographical perspective, claim that ‘ …the Arctic ice is a great disadvantage, as are the permanently frozen soil (permafrost), dust storms, dry winds, water shortages in the deserts, etc’. And, they go on, ‘ … if we want to improve our planet and make it more suitable for life, we must alter its climate’. But this must not be for hostile purposes, they caution, as ‘ almost all the huge programmes for changing nature, e.g. the reversal of the flow of northern rivers and the irrigation of Central Asian deserts, envisage improvements in the climate’ (Rusin & Flit 1960, p. 17). They recount earlier proposals for dazzling projects such as injecting tiny white particles suspended in space in the path of the solar radiation, to light up the night sky. M. Gorodsky and later V. Cherenkov put forward ‘ … proposals to surround the Earth with a ring of such particles, similar to the ring around Saturn’ (in Rusin and Flit). The plan was to create a 12 per cent increase in solar radiation, such that high latitudes would ‘ … become considerably warmer and the seasons would scarcely differ from one another’. And so it goes in this essay, detailing plans to divert rivers from the Arctic to the Russian wheat fields, or from the Mediterranean to irrigate areas in Asian USSR. One ambitious project is to create a ‘ Siberian Sea’ with water taken from the Caspian Sea and Aral Sea areas. Of course, flowery rhetoric with images of blooming now-arid zones stands in stark contrast to the ecological disaster that surrounds the Aral Sea today; environmental degradation is associated with much less ambitious engineering projects (Glazovsky 1990). But the upbeat little pamphlet, written at the height of human technological hubris in the mid-twentieth century, certainly is filled with, if nothing else, entertaining geoengineering schemes.

However, author Stephen Schneider still thinks that R&D into geoengineering is justified, stating that

Finally, my last policy category in the sequence is to consider deploying geoengineering schemes. However, as has been said by all in this issue, and as I fully agree, R&D is needed and should be an early part of the climate policy investment sequencing, even if deployment is the last resort.

Couldn’t agree more.

Some of the papers are available for free download, including a review of the prospects for “ocean fertilization”, and a discussion of a plan to use seawater to make oceanic clouds more reflective. The full paper list is here