Moisés Naím / World Energy & Oil

The numbers are in. Humanity needs to cut global greenhouse emissions by 7.6 percent every year for the next decade to meet the 1.5 degrees Celsius target agreed upon in the 2015 Paris accord. This is just one of the alarms sounded by the 2019 Environment Emissions Gap Report recently released by the United Nations.  Each year the report assesses the difference between “where we are likely to be and where we need to be” with regards to greenhouse emissions.  The report also notes that, in the past decade, global emissions of greenhouse gases have increased 1.5 percent each year on average and confirms that the world has warmed more than 1 degree Celsius from what it was in pre-industrial times.  

If current trends continue, surface temperatures are likely to increase 3.9 degrees Celsius, or 7 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of this century. To keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius, nations will need to triple their current emission goals. Even more daunting is the estimate that in order to contain temperatures at levels below 1.5 degrees Celsius, countries will have to quintuple their efforts to contain greenhouse gases.

We know the cataclysmic scenarios that result from assuming higher average temperatures. Regions that are currently home to hundreds of millions of people would be below the high-tide line by 2050. Large areas of cities such as Alexandria, Bangkok, Shanghai, Mumbai, Miami and Ho Chi Min City could become uninhabitable. Jakarta is already being flooded by a combination of rising sea levels and ground sinking, forcing an urgent move of the capital to the island of Kalimantan. Large-scale forest and urban fires are raging in diverse areas of the planet, from Brazil and Bolivia to Indonesia and California, generating changes that could be largely irreversible. Hurricanes and tornados that cause large-scale damage have increased in frequency. The projections of average global temperature point to an increase in a range between 4 to 4.9 Celsius by year 2100, in contrast with the targets of less than 3 degrees centigrade originally set at the Paris agreement or, even worse, with the modified current targets of 3 to 3.4 degrees Celsius. If impactful mitigation efforts are not significantly increased, global temperatures are bound to reach levels that will eventually make most of the planet inhabitable. 

Climate change is happening much faster than scientists anticipated while political actions aimed at containing the climate emergency have been much slower.  As a result of the seemingly structural incapacity of governments to take the actions needed to steer the planet away from this perilous trajectory, a growing number of scientists now fear that the planet’s cataclysmic climate crisis is unavoidable. Others are looking for radical new ideas to avoid this outcome. 

Enter Geoengineering

As mitigation efforts fall significantly below the necessary targets for the preservation of desirable global temperatures, increasing attention has been paid in the last few years to Geoengineering. The term is used for the large scale, technological driven interventions of natural processes aimed at containing the rise of global temperature.   For years Geoengineering was dismissed by experts as too risky, uncertain, full of dangerous unintended consequences and prohibitively expensive. Critics also stressed that the science was not there yet and all results were speculative and in need of stronger evidence. The technology was also not sufficiently developed.  But as Fred Pierce, a British author has noted, “Human intervention with the climate system has long been viewed as an ill-advised and risky step to slow global warming. But with carbon emissions soaring, initiatives to study and develop geoengineering technologies are gaining traction as a potential last resort.”

Some Geoengineering ideas

The geoengineering options being discussed are very diverse and are at different stages of research and development. Some illustrative examples of these projects are the creation of an artificial cloud cover to limit the intensity of solar rays, the massive dumping of iron or limestone into the oceans to increase their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, the building of wall containments of ice sheets to minimize sea level rise, mirrors to deflect sunrays or the use of Biochar to promote soil absorption of carbon. Biochar is a charcoal-like substance that's made by burning organic material from agricultural and forestry wastes (also called biomass) in a controlled process called pyrolysis.

Geoengineering ideas fall into two broad categories. One is designed to increase the albedo effect, which refers to the ability of surfaces to reflect more heat than dark surfaces. The idea is to find ways to boost the capacity of the earth’s surface to reflect solar rays and thus reduce global temperatures. Since the main generators of albedo are ice and clouds, and the melting of the ice sheets has weakened the albedo effect, the possibility to create additional protective cloud cover has become much more enticing. This can be accomplished by the large-scale spraying of aerosols into the stratosphere, thus seeking to reproduce the effects of large volcanic eruptions, which are known to decrease the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of the earth, thereby lowering average global temperatures.

The other category of Geoengineering ideas consists of promoting the removal of more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than nature  and, especially, human activities generates, in order to come up with a net negative emissions effect. There are several techniques that are being tried to accomplish this, such as extensive afforestation, carbon underground storage and direct air capture.

Current outlook

The alternatives mentioned above promise different degrees of impact on global temperature. The increase in the albedo effect seems to have the largest potential for impact, but the technologies needed to implement these ideas are still in their infancy.

Carbon removal technologies are in a more advanced stage of development but seem to offer less of an impact and would probably require the simultaneous use of several different initiatives in order to have the desired effect.

A comprehensive 2015 study titled “Climate Intervention” by the National Research Council of the National Academies of the United States and the collaboration of the U.S. Department of Energy indicates that the modification of albedo at a sufficient scale to alter climate is too risky a proposition at this time. Its potential to cause massive, unanticipated and largely unmanageable harm is significant. Increasingly, reports about the different engineering options in this category carry stern warnings about their hazards.  

Heroic decisions might become unavoidable

As the planet continues on its path to severe environmental deterioration an increasing sense of urgency is spreading amid the scientific community and some policy makers to adopt measures that can have a significant impact, even if they carry substantial risks to the planet. Decision-making on this all-important issue will be fiendishly difficult. A highly polarized debate is already taking place concerning the costs, benefits and risks of geoengineering versus those of the current approach, which essentially rests in the hope that governments will finally act decisively to curb emissions, an option that also carries enormous costs and risks given the current political stalemate . Similarly fierce debates are also bound to occur in deciding which type of intervention should be adopted.

Inevitably, these debates will become more urgent as soaring human suffering resulting from catastrophic climate events becomes more frequent and massive.

What to do?

Everything. The climate crisis is so consequential and the reactions to it have been so inadequate that we now need to deploy all the resources at our disposal to deal with it. No single answer, policy, technology or silver-bulleted reform alone will be enough.  What will become increasingly clear—and hopefully will lead to the adoption of more effective policies—is that there will be no solution without a substantial change in our collective mindset and behaviors. The approach should be similar to that recommended by honest nutritionists to dieters wishing to lose weight.  The most effective approach is not a temporary diet but a permanent change in lifestyle.  

Inevitably, climate change will force us to change our mindsets, lifestyles and habits. What remains to be seen is if these changes will be driven by decisions taken by humankind or will be brutally forced upon us by Mother Nature.