Geoengineering the Climate: Approaches to Counterbalancing Global Warming

For the past two hundred years, the inadvertent release of carbon dioxide and other radiatively active gases and aerosols, particularly as a result of combustion of fossil fuels and changes in land cover, have been contributing to global climate change. Global warming to date is approaching 1°C, and this is being accompanied by reduced sea ice, rising sea level, shifting ecosystems and more. Rather than sharply curtailing use of fossil fuels in order to reduce CO2 emissions and eventually eliminate the net human influence on global climate, a number of approaches have been suggested that are intended to advertently modify the climate in a manner to counter-balance the warming influence of greenhouse gas emissions. One general type of approach is carbon sequestration, which focuses on capturing the CO2 and then sequestering it underground or in the ocean. This can be done at the source of emission, by pulling the CO2 out of the atmosphere through some chemical process, or by enhancing the natural processes that remove CO2 from the atmosphere, for example by fertilizing the oceans with iron. A second general approach to geoengineering the climate is to lower the warming influence of the incoming solar radiation by an amount equivalent to the energy captured by the CO2-induced enhancement of the greenhouse effect. Proposals have been made to do this by locating a deflector at the Earth-Sun Lagrange point, lofting many thousands of near-Earth mirrors, injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, or by increasing the surface albedo. A third general approach is to alter natural Earth system processes in ways that would counterbalance the effects of the warming. Among suggested approaches are constructing dams to block various ocean passages, oceanic films to limit evaporation and water vapor feedback, and even, at small scale, to insulate mountain glaciers to prevent melting. Each of these approaches has its advantages, ranging from simplicity to reversibility, and disadvantages, ranging from costs for implementation to associated inadvertent negative environmental consequences. Unless implemented as only a bridging effort, geoengineering would require diversion of substantial, and even growing, resources from the effort to move away from reliance on fossil fuels. Because the lifetime of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere is so long, such efforts would generally need to be maintained for centuries by future generations to avoid a relatively rapid increase in global average temperature, even after emissions of CO2 had eventually been halted. In that such approaches are also fraught with uncertainties, there has been very little study of the details of how such approaches might be pursued and of their overall advertent and inadvertent consequences, leaving the area open to ongoing consideration of sometimes rather speculative possibilities.