Regulating an uncertain climate: Who controls geoengineering fixes?

UNEP has estimated that if current trends and policies continue, warming by the end of the century is likely to be somewhere between 1.9 and 3.1 degrees Celsius

Humanity is now focusing its energies on how it will deal with itself, and the climate agenda is no longer among its top priorities. The democracies of the West don’t have the funds to give to the developing world, the developing world is not willing to compromise on growth and other priorities, and the rest don’t matter.  And, therefore, the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming target is now going to be breached fairly early.  Many, including this author, believe that even a target of 2 degrees Celsius would have been breached. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has, meanwhile, estimated that if current trends and policies continue, warming by the end of the century is likely to be somewhere between 1.9 and 3.1 degrees Celsius, depending upon the transition-related actions taken by governments.

 

We can broadly think of three classes of impacts of this warming.  The first is the warming itself and what it means for life forms and our own wellbeing.  The second is the volatility of weather associated with this warming, best illustrated by the damages associated with extreme weather events.

 

 We have now experienced noticeable warming over the last few decades, and have also seen a markedly higher frequency of extreme weather events.  Greater warming will require us to design our homes, vehicles and street-vending spaces better, while also resorting to more artificial cooling.   With increased frequency of extreme weather events such as heat waves, storms, droughts, floods and cloud-breaks, governments and communities will need to build greater capacity to deal with climate-related local emergencies.  While difficult and costly, it’s by no means an impossible task.  In other words, though climate change will be costly and difficult to manage, these two counts at least — namely, warmer temperatures and increased weather volatility — are well within the set of actions that humanity can deal with.

 

But there is a third class of impacts as well, which is mostly discussed by climate scientists and doomsday theorists. These are climate-related tipping points—situations where a slight, localised nudge can trigger a rapid change in climate on a global scale. Unlike temperature warming, which is a continuous, linear process spread over a long period, tipping points are discrete events that unfold very rapidly once breached.

 

Some well-known tipping points are associated with the melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic, and the consequent rise in ocean levels and temperatures; the thawing of Siberian permafrost, which could release massive amounts of greenhouse gases and overwhelm all human efforts to reduce emissions; the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which could cause major disruptions in European and North American weather patterns. Even the monsoons have been identified as being susceptible to temperature-related tipping points.

 

Climate modellers have attempted to identify the timeline of such tipping points.  But it is not an easy task, as they are trying to predict the possibility of an event that has never happened before in living memory.  Yet one thing is clear: Regardless of the probability of a tipping point, it will be higher when aggregate temperatures are higher.

 

The combination of greater warming, more frequent extreme weather events, and a higher likelihood of tipping points is indeed worrisome to many. In the absence of effective global cooperative solutions, this has led to growing interest in a surfeit of solutions broadly classified under “geoengineering.”   Examples of geoengineering solutions include genetically modifying plant life to sequester more carbon dioxide, or reducing the amount of solar radiation reaching and heating the Earth (solar radiation modulation, or SRM), among others.

 

There are different types of SRM alternatives, most of which focus on reflecting some of the sunlight back into space. Stratospheric aerosol injection is one such approach, involving the release of aerosols into the stratosphere. Another alternative is marine cloud brightening, where clouds are seeded with fine ocean water droplets to make them more reflective. Of course, other possibilities exist as well. The point is that as these technologies mature, such interventions will become easier and cheaper, making them increasingly viable for consideration by decision-makers.

 

Questions surrounding SRM include who gets to use these technologies, at what scale, and for what purpose. However, by far, the most important question is how to establish a robust system for monitoring and regulating such activities.  The dangers are quite evident, there will always be many unknowns, and the adverse impact of the unforeseen could be severe.  Yet, as fears of major tipping points intensify, it is conceivable that either non-state actors (of which there are many) or even state-controlled entities might decide to go it alone. 

 

And, therefore, we need to think of regulating such action as a two-step process. 

 

In the first stage, we need to ensure that superior information on such possibilities, as well as on emerging tipping points, is made available to governments and the global public at large.  The best way to do that is to develop standardised reporting and research norms across countries—what should be reported, how much area can be covered for it to qualify as a pilot, and so on. The information so generated needs to be shared publicly so that modellers across the world can then attempt to benefit from the data generated and develop better models of tipping points and their effects. 

 

At the same time, there is a great need for a global order to regulate SRM and suchlike. Either as part of the United Nations or G20, we believe it is important to take the first step and create a group of experts, policymakers, corporations, and even defence experts.  The task of this group would be to keep a close watch on SRM proposals, pilots, and actions across countries and share its findings with governments and the public at large.   It would also be responsible for continuously identifying emerging challenges in this domain, given the rapid evolution of technologies and the accelerating pace of climate change.

 

No, I don’t believe we are at doomsday yet, and hopefully, we never will be.  But it is actions such as those outlined above that would save us from what otherwise may become a high likelihood event.  Humanity failed to take the red flags around climate warming seriously in the last century, and today, we continue to bear the costs of that inaction.

 

The author heads CSEP Research