CAJ - Arguments in favour of Geoengineering

To give you an insight into all the different opinions about Geoengineering, I would like to present some of the arguments in favour of Geoengineering. They should help to illustrate the necessity of Geoengineering, so here you go:

One strong argument in favour of Geoengineering says that it’s probably the only way to save summer sea ice in the arctic. Once ice goes away entirely, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to get it back. Once summer ice melts to open water, the albedo, which is the fractionof solar radiation reflected back into space as I have mentioned it in my introduction before, would drop from 0.6 to 0.1. This could accelerate rapid warming in the Arctic.  In fact, some scientists believe summer sea ice may disappear in the arctic by 2015 since the minimum sea-ice volume is falling continuously. I strongly recommend typing "Summer sea ice level dropping" into Google and looking at the results. It's quite shocking to know that these predictions might become reality soon, only 50 years from now.

This is a graph taken out from a NOAA report

They also argue with the following facta: Approximately one third of emitted carbon dioxide is already absorbed by the oceans, which became more acidic as a result. Oceans are already 30% more acidic today than they were in preindustrial times. If current emissions continue, most coral reefs could be gone by the end of the century, along with them all the ecosystems they support. Another fact is that carbon dioxide levels throughout the northern hemisphere have risen in April to 400 parts per million for the first time in history.The WMO (World Meteorological Organization) actually expects the concentration to be above 400 parts per million in 2015/16.

Furthermore, most scientists believe that reducing emissions of greenhouse gases is the safest way to prevent global warming, but they claim that this not enough to stabilise global temperature and consequently reduce global warming. Even though it’s unknown what level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere need to be reduced for a stable climate and a reduction of ocean acidification, scientists say that it is still important, if not essential, to minimise this level as much as we can. The fact itself that we do not know exactly how the climate system could react to growing greenhouse emissions is a reason to counter against it.  Therefore, Geoengineering would be the best way since it could solve the problem much quicker. It could forestall the consequences of emissions by protecting vulnerable natural ecosystems such as the arctic, or coral reefs, from damage.

Most scientists say that we should consider anything that could prevent global warming, including Geoengineering. Given our current situation where greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are continuously growing, we should not leave any prophylaxis out of  consideration.

Scientists highly encourage further research in this field too. They claim that not sufficient geoengineering research have been conducted. In fact, scientists are reluctant to do so because they fear that knowing how to engineer the climate would encourage people to do it for power purposes. Only proper studies show what can be changed to improve suggested Geoengineering techniques and how Geoengineering side effects, that may be detrimental to the ecosystems in the process, could be prevented. Only by having good research can we counterargue against Geoengineering.

They argue that if indeed climate-change predictions became suddenly reality and people became at risk, the population shouldn’t be ignorant about the ways to prevent it. Without proper research, nobody would know what can come out of a crash implementation of Geoengineering.

In addition to that, scientists who advocate in favour of Geoengineering keep saying that the costs of Geoengineering techniques are much cheaper than the costs of reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere. Particularly SRM techniques, which basically aim to reflect sunlight back into space, are cheap and convenient. A few grams of sulphate particles cost about a dollar per kilogram and considering that it could balance the warming of a tonne of carbon dioxide, this technique seems to be quite effective. In fact ,the current global warming level could be reduced at least one hundred times cheaper than by emissions cuts. A recent analysis of Geoengineering costs by McCennan concluded that the climate could be balanced with exisiting technology at a cost of less than 8 billion dollars per year. 

All in all, scientist advocate in favour of Geoengineering by giving proper facts about the current global warming situation. This makes their arguments more credible compared to the arguments against Geoengineering.