Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering
Language: English
Pages: 264
ISBN: 030020521X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This text goes to the heart of the unfolding reality of the 21st century: international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have all failed and before the end of the century Earth is projected to be warmer than it has been for 15 million years. Hamilton explores the question, 'can the crisis be avoided?' and, ' what can be done to prevent the devastation of the living world?'.
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deep ocean if carried out in a region sympathetic to diatom blooms.23 It turns out that two-thirds of the Southern Ocean has very little silicon so iron fertilization would be ineffective at sending carbon to the ocean depths. Efforts would need to be concentrated in those areas where fertilization would favour diatoms. Solving humanity’s global warming problem seems a heavy burden for these tiny marine creatures. The researchers estimate that if the silicon-rich third of the Southern Ocean were
on a slippery slope to ultimate deployment. I have already described the formation of a constituency of scientists and investors whose interests lie in further research and deployment. Path-dependency and technological lock-in are well-recognized problems.29 Most people are alive to the danger that even talking about geoengineering will further delay mitigation, which explains why geoengineering was not on the table for serious discussion until 2006 when Paul Crutzen made his landmark
patterns, but predictions of regional rainfall changes are very crude. The importance of tipping points’ that define rapid shifts from one climate state to another have become apparent from the Earth’s geological record, but our understanding of why and when they occur is rudimentary. Predicting when or how thresholds might be crossed is extremely imprecise. And how marine ecosystems will respond to acidifying oceans is barely grasped. In this light, omniscience appears as remote as ever. Apart
‘secondary’ rock strata that contained fossils there were ‘primary’ rock strata devoid of fossils, including human ones, implied an earth history prior to humans, and one of very long duration. Earth had a history before the arrival of humans; indeed, before the arrival of life. It was these discoveries that eventually led Charles Lyell in 1830 to declare that his aim was to ‘free the science from Moses’.32 It was still possible for those so inclined to argue that all stages of the Earth,
Washington think tank the Bipartisan Policy Center, Task Force on Climate Remediation Research, Geoengineering: A National Strategic Plan for Research on the Potential Effectiveness, Feasibility, and Consequences of Climate Remediation Technologies (Washington, DC: Bipartisan Policy Center, 4 Oct. 2011); the report of the Novim Group, Jason Blackstock et al., Climate Engineering Responses to Climate Emergencies (Santa Barbara: Novim Group, 2009); Morgan and Ricke, ‘Cooling the Earth through solar
