Geoengineering, or why I flunked high school chemistry

Imagine you are back in high school. You’ve spent all day going from class to class, learning, completing assignments, the whole shebang. Finally, you are in chemistry class. You go, take your seat, and look around the classroom. You see that the class has a little under 200 students. Seems a tad odd, but let’s go with it. You also see that not all the students have chemistry sets; closer examination reveals that some sets have more materials than others. Looking at your own set, you see that you have one of the largest, with many different chemicals, containers, and several burners. The class bell rings, but no teacher shows up. You and many other students decide to mess around a little with what’s in front of you. Still, no teacher shows up. Class has ten minutes left, no teacher has shown up, and the students with sets have had 40 minutes of creative freedom. Are you scared yet? Well, I certainly am terrified.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I would recommend watching David Keith’s TED Talk video here. Go on, my blog can wait for 16 minutes. All finished? Then let us proceed.  

Keith brings up an interesting idea that has come about as a solution to the environmental problems we are facing today: Geoengineering. Like Keith, I am not a fan of geo-engineering. And also like Keith, I feel that some knowledge of it is useful for society to know about. Think of it as knowing how chemicals react, so when sophomoric chemistry students start putting x and y together, you can stop them from blowing up the whole building. Starting to see some parallels?  

We will start off with what geoengineering is. The Oxford dictionary calls geoengineering “The deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth’s climate, in an attempt to counteract the effects of global warming.” While I could do a word study and break down this definition, for the sake of this post, this definition is perfectly workable. Basically, it is humans actively attempting to the change the environment to reverse current global trends. A very effective way to complete a decidedly noble goal, but not one without risk. It is because of these risks that I have reservations about geoengineering, and why I wish to inform you all as well.

The fact of the matter is that we do not completely understand Earth’s climate system, either in the past, seeing as how climate change is considered to be anthropogenic in origin, or currently. While the idea of putting sulfur into the atmosphere definitely seems like it will reverse current warming trends, it could very well cause a larger problem down the road. We do not know enough about the consequences to go forward with such a project. It is unethical. To follow the above metaphor, it’s like mixing water with another material. It could be sodium chloride: nice, safe. It could also very well be just plain sodium, and a fire could break out.  I simply don’t trust doing something that affects such a large amount of people, in this case, all of them.

Another important aspect of geoengineering is to realize that it is global. If a student creates a foul smelling gas, the entire class knows about it. In much the same way, manipulating environmental processes doesn’t just effect a small area; If warming is global, then using the same processes to counteract it will also have to be global, if not in scope, then at least in magnitude. As I have mentioned several times: everything is connected. It’s difficult to justify doing something that isn’t 100% helpful when over 7 billion lives are at stake. You got to let that fact sink in.

The biggest danger with all this, however, is that not everyone needs to agree to it for it to be accomplished. There is no teacher in the room. Those with the capabilities to attempt geoengineering have nothing to stop them, nothing to hold them accountable. Say the U.S. decides that this isn’t worth the risk. Great, time to try something else. China, however, decides to go through with geoengineering. Now, despite how people may feel about it, we all have to live in a geoengineered world. There is no higher power authority to stop this from occurring, and that is the scariest part. That like a chemistry lab full of highschoolers, anything could happen, and I personally doubt that it will turn out good.

With all this being said, I wish I had another option to try and help the environment, but I don’t. As the future looks more and more bleak, geoengineering looks even more promising an action, and so we should prepare for its affects, even if we cannot know what they will be.