Sci-fi ideas no solution to problems (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Sci-fi ideas no solution to problems

8:40am Thursday 8th December 2011 in Enviro Watch By Keith Thomson

I am not often shocked or surprised, but a recent development has caught me unawares and caused me a considerable amount of disquiet.

The climate change literature has always included an almost science fiction approach to dealing with the increasing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and some of the suggestions have been very fanciful.

These geo-engineering approaches include putting sulphur and dust into the atmosphere, either shot up there with naval guns or mixed with aviation fuel, to increase cloud cover and reflect incoming solar energy.

A similar system involves placing reflective discs – tens of thousands of them – in orbit around the earth, and another involves genetically modifying vegetation so that it uses more carbon dioxide.

Others think that dumping iron filings in the sea would encourage blooms of algae, so taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, while others contemplate container-sized carbon scrubbers that can be placed anywhere.

These and other suggestions might seem harmless if they are just academic musings, but they are dangerous if they become reality. Not only would it give politicians an excuse for not investing in carbon-free energy programmes and allow them to sidestep the power of the fossil fuel companies, but it would undermine the attempts to get international agreements, such as the current deliberations in Durban.

That apart, we would also have more acidic oceans, and weather systems that we can’t control, as bad as the effects of volcanic eruptions, such as the Indonesian Tambara explosion in 1815 that obliterated the northern summer the year after. Nations would be mired in litigation and blame.

The fact that it won’t work on an international scale, and must not happen, makes it alarming that a group of British universities has just announced the date of their first pilot experiment. The SPICE project (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering) has Government funding for a giant balloon and a 20km-long hosepipe to inject particles into the stratosphere. The first test will be to pump 150 litres of water into the air.

There has been minimum consultation, and within two weeks of the announcement of the date of the trial it has been put back for six months to allow more consultation with interested parties.

I am pleased to see that a number of environmental groups, including Friends of the Earth, have become involved, and now it’s time for you and me.

If you are one of those offended by wind turbines, this should really get you going, and I do hope that local MPs are pressed strongly on the matter.

The solution to climate change is political rather than technical and we certainly don’t need geo-engineering to solve it.