Podium: Climate change is inevitable. We must adapt to it
Tuesday, 2 September 2008
If geoengineering is defined as purposeful human activity that significantly alters the state of the Earth, we became geoengineers soon after we started using fire, for cooking, land clearance and smelting bronze and iron. During this long engineering apprenticeship, we changed the Earth, but until quite recently, we were unaware that we were doing it, still less the adverse consequences.
Before we use geoengineering as a means of mitigating the consequences of climate change, then, we have to raise the following question: are we sufficiently talented to take on what might become the onerous permanent task of keeping the Earth in homeostasis?
Consider what might happen if we start by using a stratospheric aerosol to ameliorate global heating; even if it succeeds, it would not be long before we face the additional problem of ocean acidification. This would need another medicine, and so on. We could find ourselves in a Kafka-like world from which there is no escape.
Whatever we do is likely to lead to death on a scale that makes all previous wars, famines and disasters small. To continue business as usual will probably kill most of us during the century. We have to consider seriously that, as with 19th century medicine, the best option is often kind words and painkillers but otherwise to let Nature take its course.
The usual response to such bitter realism is: then there is no hope for us, and we can do nothing to avoid our plight. This is far from true. We can adapt to climate change and this will allow us to make the best use of the refuge areas of the world that escape the worst heat and drought. We have to marshal our resources soon and if a safe form of geoengineering buys us a little time then we must use it.
Parts of the world such as oceanic islands, the Arctic basin and oases on the continents will still be habitable in a hot world. We need to regard them as lifeboats and see that there are sufficient sources of food and energy to sustain us as a species. Physicians have the Hippocratic Oath; perhaps we need something similar for our practice of planetary medicine.
Perhaps the saddest thing is that if we fail and humans become extinct, the Earth System, Gaia, will lose as much as or more than we do. In human civilisation, the planet has a precious resource. We are not merely a disease; we are, through our intelligence and communication, the planetary equivalent of a nervous system. We should be the heart and mind of the Earth not its malady. Perhaps the greatest value of the Gaia concept lies in its metaphor of a living Earth, which reminds us that our contract with Gaia is not about human rights alone, but includes human obligations.
Taken from an article in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, focusing on geoengineering to avert climate change
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Copyright 2008 Independent News and Media Limited
Where do the writers of the above article and the comments below get their science! Because their opinions are not scientific! Global warming is happening now - GMT is not falling it is rising. There is no scientist who is saying any different. So it is not an unproven hypothesis, it is fact. The reason that people are worried about it is not that the world is going to be a bit hotter, it is because of the ice melting. The reason why this is a problem is because we have built our towns, cities and have much of our productive land for farming on or near coasts or below sea-level, and if the sea level rises then towns, cities and productive land will be under water. This is already happening - see Bangladesh, and the Thames Barrier. The other worry about climate change is simply that - the climate is going to change in ways we cant predict, the Gulf Stream will probably stop, that will result in very cold and very wet weather for Britain, other areas will have other problems.
Posted by Melanie Cartwright | 02.09.08, 12:53 GMT
I get the impression that this article supports anthropogenic global warming Even if this still unproven hypothesis is fact, then the mean global temperature (MGT) is likely to rise about 0.6 degrees C per century, whereas this temperature has varied by as much as 3.0 degrees C over the past 3000 years. Temperatures in the northern hemisphere were almost certainly higher in the medieval warm period around 1000 years ago, than now. Furthermore, the MGT has not risen during the past ten years, in fact it has fallen slightly. So I cannot see why these scientists are wasting time and money talking about geoengineering. Perhaps they are after government funding.
Posted by P Stroud | 02.09.08, 08:57 GMT
there is an awful lot of nonsense and habitual mantra singing that goes on about carbon footprints and carbon emissions, just as onerous and nonsensical as the singing of prayers and hymns in a church. whilst it is ludicrous that so much food is wasted, that so much plastic is dumped, and we resort to landfil even as we have the technology to recycle 90 percent of our so called waste, there is often too much made about carbon emissions rather than learning to live with the inevatable change in global conditions that can only be fully avoided by our imminent extinction. what i am saying is, whilst it is sensible to reduce carbon dioxide and methane, to clean up the mess we have made to the planet, is it not better to learn to cope with the planetary changes rather than try to revert back to some imaganary halcyon past. we have always re engineeered the planet, as this article rightly says and adapted accordingly. this is the best way forward, not the hysteria about carbon footprints.
Posted by Nick | 02.09.08, 04:08 GMT