No Rain in Spain

Once upon a time, the rain in Spain fell mainly on the plain. Now it mainly doesn't fall anywhere, thanks to a combination of poor planning and global warming. Much of the country's formerly lush farming regions are turning into desert.

Will global leaders come together to keep CO2 levels below 450 parts per million? 

It seems unlikely.

Will new technologies be developed to safely reverse upward trends in atmospheric warming, ice sheet melting, and sea level rises? 

We can hope so, but counting on it would be folly.

Will chaotic climate change kill, severely harm, or leave homeless hundreds of millions in the coming decades? 

This looks all but unavoidable. Preparation to mitigate disastrous effects is now essential, since preventing the disasters altogether may prove impossible.

Will nanotechnology come to the rescue?

Possibly, in an ideal, science fictional world. In the real world, probably not.

Two years ago on this blog, we said:

If the technological capabilities of molecular manufacturing are used effectively, disastrous climate change could be stopped in its tracks and reversed. A combination of global sensor arrays, massive computational resources, and large-area sunlight deflectors could allow climate to be understood and manipulated.

Of course, that first word is a very big IF, which we understood at the time because we qualified our apparently optimistic declaration this way:

But if unstable climate, and/or unstable global economy, and/or unstable fossil fuel supplies, and/or institutional resistance to molecular manufacturing, conspire to halt its development before general-purpose exponential manufacturing is achieved, we may lose our best hope to solve the problem.

Several of the caveats named above are occurring, unfortunately: climate change seems to be happening faster than predicted, while the global economy, fossil fuel supplies, and food production are all unstable. For those reasons and others, we're less sanguine today about the successful achievement of nanofactory technology before 2015 than we were just two years ago. Moreover, even if molecular manufacturing can be perfected that soon, there is certainly no guarantee that it actually could stop and reverse global warming. As we said in 2006: 

Or, if the technology is developed but is administered poorly (perhaps because of government-imposed failures of scientific accountability), then the problem is unlikely to be solved effectively.

After additional time to learn, reflect, and to understand the dizzying complexity of the problems that climate change presents, we are far less confident of the probability that molecular manufacturing -- or any other new technology -- will emerge to prevent terrible long-term outcomes. 

The only other way out we can see is either a fundamental change in human nature, or a sudden access to superintelligence that can make sense of and begin cleaning up the mess we've made. Both of those "solutions" have religious or eschatological overtones, and since we're not willing to place full confidence in that sort of answer, CRN will continue to insist that urgent action now with the technology we have now is the only responsible course. 

Mike Treder

Comments

[Port Orchard flowers]

that is a pretty unfortunate sight!

[Michael Deering]

hey! Much of science-fiction has become science fact.

[Tom Craver]

Check out this interesting possibility.

"if gasoline prices stay in the stratosphere, the United States may be off the hook when it comes to the atmosphere. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that if one wanted to halve carbon emissions from the U.S. automotive sector—enough to get the country into step with international efforts to reduce greenhouse gases [without doing anything else]—gasoline prices would have to double from their average levels in the early part of this decade, which have been around $2.50."

[Hal]

I would pin my hopes mostly on improved solar technology, which could reduce greenhouse emissions over the next 20 years well below current models. Ironically nanotech may play a large role in this, but not your flavor of nanotech, just the boring kind that used to be called materials science.

Secondarily I would hope for improved biotech that could either provide an alternative way of using solar, via gene-tweaked biofuels, or perhaps as an outside chance Freeman Dyson's carbon-eating trees. Carbon-eating would also be possible if your nanofacs ever come into existence.

I wonder if you guys would still view it as a horrific nightmare if the geoengineering involved removing carbon from the atmosphere. The interesting issue actually is what level of carbon to leave. People don't like to admit it, but some regions benefit from global warming. Once CO2 levels become a matter of human decision making rather than nature, we will need a mechanism to come to agreement. Otherwise we might see "carbon wars" where one country furiously pumps CO2 into the atmosphere while another pumps it out!