Intentional Climate Change Again, Again

From managing biota ("Managing Baseball... Managing Nature" — http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/10/managing-baseball-managing-nature.html), we effortlessly leap to managing the climate. Actually, it's no leap at all. We bring to this climate management project the same "rationality" and the same "sensibility" as we bring to the biotic one. We are out to "improve" nature to satisfy human desires — at least short-term ones.

We are quite deliberately — at increasing rates — burning fossil fuels, practicing agriculture, and doing lots of other things that we fully know spew greenhouse gases into the troposphere. We know that we are on course to more than double pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases. And we know that this is warming the planet — not a little, but a lot from the viewpoint of many biological, geochemical, and climate systems.

In other words, without a doubt, we are intentionally changing our climate.

In an October 24, 2007 New York Times editorial (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/opinion/24caldiera.html?ref=opinion), Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s department of global ecology, recites without credit an August, 2006 proposal by nobel laureate Paul J. Crutzen (Crutzen, P.J., "Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?", Climatic Change, 77:3-4 (August 2006), pp. 211-220, http://www.springerlink.com/content/t1vn75m458373h63/?p=ac0f8d1a677948bfa4b589a55cfa1792&pi=3). The idea is to spray aerosols — particulates, or particulate-forming chemicals — into the stratosphere in order to increase that atmospheric layer's albedo (reflectance), thereby reducing the radiative energy reaching the earth's troposphere (lower atmosphere) and surface.

Aerosol painting. Which color suites the stratosphere?

In other words, in order to fix the bad, warming effects of how we're currently intentionally changing the climate, it is proposed that we intentionally change the climate some more.

Caldeira closes by glibly posing the question:

Which is the more environmentally sensitive thing to do: let the Greenland ice sheet collapse and polar bears become extinct, or throw a little sulfate in the stratosphere?

What picture does "throwing a little sulfate in the stratosphere" conjure up? Is it, perhaps, a bit like throwing a little rice at a newly married couple? Crutzen helps us flesh out the picture. He estimates that the cost would be $25 billion to $50 billion per year, plus a half-million premature deaths from particulate pollution, unspecified damage — both biotic and abiotic — due to an increase in acid rain, plus a risk (among others) of depleting stratospheric ozone (again). He notes that the sky would whiten, but that we would be compensated by more colorful sunrises and sunsets — as happens now in areas of dense particulate pollution. He says that "the required annual S inputs are large" (p. 215), estimating the need for 5.3 Tg S to compensate for doubled greenhouse gas concentrations (p. 213). (A teragram is one million metric tonnes; a metric tonne is 1000 kg.) And he admits that spewing sulfates into the stratosphere would be "a messy operation" (p. 213). So we should consider doing it from a tropical island. It seems that doing this from the Carnegie Institute's back yard is contraindicated.

This, then, is what Caldeira means by "throwing a little sulfate in the stratosphere".

There are other possible effects. Among the ones we know enough to ask about are the effects of the concomitant warming of the lower stratosphere and tropopause (the troposphere/stratosphere interface), an increase in high cloud cover (due to a sulfate-induced increase in cloud longevity), and shifts in wind patterns that (among other effects) may warm Eurasian winters — as has been observed to accompany natural (volcanic) stratospheric sulfate "experiments". And then there are the effects that we don't even know enough to ask about — the indirect physical effects of changing the profile of solar and longwave radiation in the upper atmosphere on static and dynamic equilibria, the physico-chemical effects of increasing stratospheric heterogeneity, and (perhaps after a long causal chain that will never be uncovered until after the fact, if even then), the effects of all these things on living things on earth's surface.

No matter how much research we put into the new, cooling kind of ICC (Intentional Climate Change), there will be some effects, and not unlikely some big effects, that we will not be able to anticipate. And, while the direct effects of sulfates in the stratosphere — at least the know direct effects — are relatively short-lived (on the order of a few years), we cannot predict whether the indirect effects will be equally short-lived or whether they will be reversible.

What ought we to do?

The answer to this question is the answer to the question: "Is intentional climate change morally justified?"

We are not going to try to answer that question in this post. But it is not easy to see how the question, as it applies to engineered attempts to cool the climate, is different from the question as it applies to our current, deliberate warming behavior in any ethically relevant way. To say that climate warming is not the main point of the behavior that causes it is beside the point. We know very well what we're doing, we deliberately do it, and we deliberately continue doing it.

What are some of the morally relevant questions? Here are some:

1. The choice to proceed with cooling ICC would likely be made by the same people who have decided to continue their warming ICC and who are reaping its short-term benefits. The climate of the poor and disenfranchised would be changed, too. They, too, will have to live with the results. And, if for no other reason than their relatively adaptive incapacity, they will tend to affected disproportionately. Is this right?
2. The disenfranchised include future generations of people, as well as all the other creatures that share our planet; and these, too, are likely to be disproportionately affected. Is this right in view of the fact that we have another, far more conservative choice — the choice to discontinue our current ICC behavior?
3. Looming behind the previous question is the specter of irreversibility. Of course we can stop bombarding the stratosphere with sulfates. And we have good evidence that the particulates will dissipate well within a decade. But in such a grand experiment on such a grandly complex system, we can never know whether some part of the atmospheric system, some static or dynamic equilibrium, will make a quantum and irreversible shift. Shifts of this kind of system could easily be "forever" — for time frames that apply to the human species — 200,000 years or so for Homo sapiens, 2.5 million years or so for the entire genus Homo. In the world of morals, irreversibility counts. That a homicide cannot in any meaningful way be undone or compensated, that there is no way to right that wrong, makes it all the more egregious.
4. On the other hand, we can choose to change our own behavior and institutions that encourage undesirable behavior. This is undoubtedly difficult. But people are malleable. People can adopt different ways of living. They can change their institutions. It is possible to change; and this is undeniably a far more conservative choice. Is it right to choose the risk of catastrophic and irreversible damage in light of this alternative?
5. We do not know in any detail what the consequences are of any ICC. We do know that our attempts to intervene in systems so overwhelmingly complex always have unexpected results. By definition, we will be completely unprepared to deal with them. We know that some of the unexpected results will be problematic. There is distinct chance that one or more may be catastrophic — perhaps even more catastrophic than the problem it was to address. With lives literally in the balance, can we justify this risk?
6. Focusing on ICC for cooling will have the inevitable social and political effect of legitimizing our refusal to seriously consider changing our current warming ICC behavior. It will distract us from even considering such a change. Can this be justified?
7. These are difficult questions by any measure. Yet there is no evidence of any inclination to embed their critical examination in the process of looking into cooling ICC. This is a very different kind of examination from scientific assessment of risks and probably effects. We have the disturbing specter of research into ICC and even its implementation outside any kind of well-thought-out ethical framework. At the very least, is it right to proceed without climate ethicists?

But what ought we to do if, as Caldeira and Crutzen both agonize, we deliberately choose to continue to warm the globe with our greenhouse gas emissions? The answer is that, if we believe that our current experiment in deliberately warming the planet is wrong, then conducting a geoengineered cooling experiment would be, too. If we choose to continue our ICC for warming, that fact should not change the ethical assessment of ICC for cooling.

But what happens if, as a result of our current, intentional climate-warming behavior, we face the sort of situation that Stephen Schneider (Schneider, S. H., "Geoengineering: Could-or-Should-we do it", Climatic Change, 33:3 (July 1996), pp. 291–302, http://www.springerlink.com/index/NVQ736V7JQ017V72.pdf) portrays:

Supposing, a currently envisioned low probability [in 1996; now much higher] but high consequence outcome really started to unfold in the decades ahead (for example, 5º C warming in this century) which would characterize as having potential catastrophic implications for ecosystems . . . Under such a scenario, we would simply have to practice geo-engineering...

Would we, as this argument claims, have to practice geo-engineering in such dire circumstances? We presume that part of the force of Schneider's "have to" is "ought to". He is saying that, if we were facing a catastrophe from climate warming, we ought to implement a geoengineered cooling experiment. But again, if experiments in changing the climate are morally unjustified and unjustifiable, why would our desperation in the face of catastrophe change this? Would it, for example, change the ethically relevant fact that we would be doing something whose real consequences may well result in greater catastrophe?