Are geoengineering opponents short sighted?

The Engineer
Sept 14, 2011


Of all the things that engineers can influence, the climate is probably the most contentious. After all, nobody set out to change the climate; nobody realised that burning fossil fuels could change the climate; and even today, there are people who think that we haven’t changed the climate.

Geoengineering — the idea that we can deliberately change the climate to slow down the effects of climate change, whether on a short-range basis, such as around a major city, or over the entire planet — is a relatively new concept, and is mostly theoretical. It’s also hugely controversial, with environmental campaigners in the forefront of the opposition to it ever becoming a reality. The arguments against range from it being a distraction to the real problem, that of coping with dwindling fossil fuel resources and limiting carbon emissions to prevent buildup of greenhouse gases, to the danger of meddling in complex natural systems that we don’t understand and the likelihood of unexpected outcomes.

These are perfectly understandable and real concerns, particularly the latter; after all, as I said, the whole problem of climate change is one of unexpected outcomes. However, opposition to the UK’s first large-scale geoengineering study seems to be short-sighted.

The study, announced at the British Science Festival in Bradford this week, will see Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Oxford Universities collaborating with Marshall Aerospace to test the feasibility of releasing particles into the upper atmosphere to absorb some of the sun’s radiation and prevent it from reaching the ground. Called the SPICE (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering) project, the study will involve lifting one end of a hose to a height of 1km using a helium balloon and pumping water through it, to see how both balloon and hose behave. This, the researchers say, will assess the feasibility of using such a technique to spray substances up to 20km into the stratosphere, the altitude that would be necessary for a real cooling effect to be seen.
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