Carbon emission reductions are not happening fast enough and, even if they were, Professor Hugh Hunt argues they are now not enough to prevent dangerous climate impacts. Here he gives his reasons why future COP’s must take this field of research more seriously.
Is geoengineering really as crazy as opponents say?
Currently we are going full blown crazy with rising carbon emissions. The global economy is making a start but there is still no short-cut to how it iss going to decarbonize. The roads are full of cars and everything is set up for burning oil and fossil fuels are still King.
Add geoengineering on top of this is really crazy, yes, and it does seem really, really bizarre, but unfortunately, that’s where we’re at.
State of geoengineering today
There are very few researchers working on it at the moment but that is starting to change. If and when it becomes mainstream, there’s going to be a lot of interest in the work that is being undertaken in places like Cambridge. The Centre for Climate Repair (CCR) is setting the groundwork, working out what needs to be done. How can scaling up take place? What are the questions we don’t know answers to? To move something forward as as big as this is going to be, we have to start from somewhere, and CCR is making that start now.
Can geoengineering cure climate extremes?
Geoengineering definitely is not a cure, but what we need is something to get us through from where we are now; where the Arctic and Antarctic glaciers are melting very fast. We have got to fast forward 100 years in time, to when we have got emissions reductions under control. When we have got carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Then we can phase out geoengineering. That is unfortunately the timescale we are working on.
How does geoengineering scale up?
Geoengineering could be dealt with in a Manhattan Project style, but the sheer scale of it is very big. So for instance, to emulate volcanic eruptions, Mount Pinatubo caused one degree cooling over a year, but that was 10 million tons of sulfate aerosols delivered to a height of 20 kilometers. To do that, we’re going to need maybe 20,000 flights a day, shipping aerosols up to 20 kilometers. That’s not going to be rolled out in a few months.
Marine cloud brightening is an option for reflecting light back into space to try and cool the Arctic. 1000s and 1000s of autonomous boats spraying sea water? It seems unlikely that this will happen but we have to investigate every avenue.
How much time do we have?
Geoengineering definitely isn’t a cure, but what we need is something to get us through from where we are now, where the Arctic and Antarctic glaciers are melting very fast. We’ve got to get to maybe in 100 years time, when we have got emissions reductions sorted, we’ve got carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and we can phase out geoengineering. That’s unfortunately, that’s the time scale we’re in.
In summary
I’m very confident that if we decided to do geoengineering, it would work, and we make it work mainly because the principles are sound, the principles are solid. And what will happen is that by by doing it, deploying it by by bit, we learn as we do it, it will just work out.
It’s like aviation. You know, the first planes were pretty awful, but by flying, between Wright Brothers and First World War, the planes got better. Between First World War and Second World War, they were transformed. And you know, so it doesn’t take long to take a technology and transform it when you need to transform it into something very robust, stable, safe and workable.
Professor Hugh Hunt is an expert in the field of geoengineering and associate director of the Centre for Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge. Read more from professor Hunt on ClimateGenn.
