In the summer of 2012, a small group of the Haida people, a native community in Canada, had a problem. The salmon they rely on were disappearing. So the Haida took matters into their own hands. They partnered with an American businessman, drew up plans and then took a boat full of iron dust into the waters off their home island and put the dust in the ocean. When they spread the iron dust, it created a big algae bloom. They hoped the algae would soak up carbon dioxide and bring back the fish. The reaction to the experiment was immediate and negative, and looked as by some media outlets as the worlds first rogue geoengineering project. While it scared a lot of people and angered a lot of scientists, this event could be a sign of whats to come. Some very mainstream scientists are saying the climate change situation is so bad that saving life as we know it might require something radical: like shooting chemicals into the stratosphere to protect Earth from the sun. In essence, these scientists are talking about hacking the climate. In scientific circles, what the Haida did is called ocean fertilization. Jason McNamee, a spokesman for the group that carried out the experiment, says the goal was to protect the Haida people who live off the coast of Canada They get most of their protein straight out of the ocean, McNamee says. What they have noticed over the last hundred or so years is that the fisheries have become less predictable and less abundant. And while its still unclear how successful the operation was scientifically, the legal and social backlash was immediately apparent. The Canadian government condemned the dump and has launched an investigation, seizing documents and data from the companys headquarters. So this is the really knotty problem, says Matthew Watson, a climate scientist at the University of Bristol, if that experiment had been solely about salmon, nobody would have batted an eyelid. But because it was really about geoengineering, people got very worried. Watson is also the author of the Reluctant Geoengineer blog. You might do that by planting lots of trees or setting up machines that draw down CO2 and store it somewhere, or generating ocean fertilization where you add iron to the ocean and that generates phytoplankton, which locks up carbon dioxide, Watson tells NPRs Arun Rath. The whole point is that youre trying to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and put it somewhere else. A second technique is to try and reflect sunlight away from the Earth to keep the Earth cooler. You can do that, Watson says, by painting roofs white, through making natural clouds a little brighter or through volcanic aerosols. In fact, there is evidence of volcanic eruptions that have dramatically lowered the temperature on Earth. Scientists want to replicate that. But the catch is that scientists havent really tested either technique. The Climate Change Elephant In The Room Ted Parson, an environmental law professor at UCLA, works on the tough question of how international bodies should regulate climate engineering. He says there is fairly active debate on whether any international law exists that covers climate engineering, but its his view that there really isnt. There are a number of environmental treaties that are relevant to doing this, but they are all rather narrow in the constraints and obligations they impose, Parson tells Rath. So none of them would have the effect of the United States or China or any other country from doing this. One unfortunate consequence of that is that early, small-scale research that could help us understand more about whether these things would work, what risks they would pose and how you would do them most effectively, isnt really getting done, he says. And thats really quite a risky situation. An Experiment With Unclear Results One of the wild things about geoengineering is that even the scientists proposing it dont really want to do it. The need for it, says Matthew Watson, is just a sign of how bad things are. Thats why I push the research agenda so hard, he says. Im pretty appalled by the thought of full-scale deployment, but Im also pretty worried about burying our heads in the sand and not thinking about what that would mean. But where does this leave the Haida people of Canada, and other communities already feeling the negative effects of climate change? The actual results of the Canadian experiment are unclear.
Posted on: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 18:55:53 +0000
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