GeoengineeringGeoengineering solutions to climate change not likely to be ready in time

Governments have been slow to adopt measures to slow climate change, so it is not surprising that scientists and engineers have been offering different technologies which would help slow down, or even reverse, global warming. These different technologies are called “geoengineering.”

Piers Forster, a professor of physical climate change at the school of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, says that we need urgently to investigate our options to geoengineer a solution to climate change before it is too late. The reason, he writes for the latest issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is that we are running out of time to do so.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, endorsed by the delegations for 120 countries in November of last year, found that “without an immediate and large reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, global temperatures will sail into dangerous territory within the next thirty years.”

A meeting in Lima in December of the UN climate negotiations ended with little done, leading many scientists to question the political resolve of world governments to deal with the issue in a meaningful manner.

This is why Forster and others have been looking to scientific solutions to address the issue of climate change. It may not be easy, they have found, and it may not happen quickly enough to affect the change required.

“We have been researching the feasibility of such technologies as part of Britain’s Integrated Assessment of Geoengineering Proposals project, which spans engineering and the physical and social sciences. We examined two carbon capture technologies and six solar technologies in as much detail as possible, and indentified two main stumbling blocks,” he writes.

First, the rollout of the technologies could have its own stumbles, as none of them yet exists beyond the drawing board. This means that the timetable for developing and implementing these technologies may stretch out, possibly allowing fr the emergence of budgetary and social complications beyond those such technologies face today.

“International governance and legal obstacles will also slow any attempts at implementation,” he writes. “Even a carbon-capture technology like tree planting, which already exists and is benign on a small scale, becomes problematic when deployed on a large scale, requiring that competition for land and resources be taken into account. And, all of the solar technologies we simulated led to side effects, particularly in the form of changing rainfall patterns.”

Secondly, the period in which it would take to see whether geoengineering solutions are successful may be too long to allow for successful implementation, and the changes and adjustments which may be required may themselves take time to show results, if any.

“It would take at least a decade of careful observations to determine the impact and side effects of geoengineering,” he writes.

No solution to climate change will be easy, and the best thing scientists and researchers can do right now, according to Forster, is to continue to research possible solutions and technologies with all expediency, until the most effective geoengineering methods emerge.