More Views on Geoengineering

Yesterday, we offered some new perspectives on geoengineering in the context of nanotech and globalization. So this seems like an opportune moment for us to refer readers to previous discussions of these important topics, both here and elsewhere...

• From Joe Romm's Climate Progress blog -- Geo-Engineering is NOT the Answer
• From Jamais Cascio's Open the Future blog -- Feedback, Tipping Points, and Hard Choices
• From Worldchanging.com -- Geoengineering: A Worldchanging Retrospective

And from our own blog...

• Big Risks of Geoengineering
• Megaconstruction Projects
• Geoengineering: Go slow! Carbon reduction: Hurry!

As I'll be traveling in Spain for the next week, our blogging may be slow, but we'll try to keep you updated on what's happening as much as possible.

Hasta la vista!

Mike Treder

Comments

[danny bloom]

Hello Mike Treder
PLS FWD TO DR TReDER
I was very interested to read your remarks above. esp no. 4.....i am not sure if you have heard of me or my ideas, probably not, i am still off the radar more or less, but taking a cue from Dr Lovelock two years I envisioned POLAR CITIES to house survivors of global warming catastophic events, as you predict in No. 4, and I also called these northern settlements, NOT at the poles per se, just in the north, as LOVELOCK RETREATS....google both terms to see more. Question for you is this: do you think it will come to this, that we will need adaptation strategies like polar cities/Lovelock Retreats to house survivors in 300 to 500 years. Some say sooner. I say year 2500, just to be generous and not scare people. But what is your reaction? I am trying to get the mass media interested in my ideas, but except for the New York Times DOT EARTH blog, nobody will talk to me.....why is that?

Danny Bloom
Tufts 1971
http://pcillu101.blogspot.com

[Hal]

I think I've mentioned this before, but a perspective on geoengineering that I haven't heard much is whether it is legal, and whether some countries may oppose other countries engaging in it. Reasons to oppose geoengineering would include the kinds of considerations raised here: concerns that it might cause environmental catastrophe either by going too far or by causing some terrible side effect. But let us not forget the prospect of concerns from the other direction: that it might actually work, expressed by some country which has benefited from the warming.

That last may seem paradoxical from today's perspective, but people have a notorious status quo bias, and once things warm up and they have adjusted to them a bit, I predict that few will want to take climate back to how it was in the year 1700. Clearly countries will have different perspectives on what is the ideal climate, and once that becomes a matter of human decision making rather than something where we are at the mercy of nature, it will become grounds for conflict and even war.

So we may see climate wars in the future, the least violent form of which would be one country pulling carbon from the air as fast as it can, while another pushes carbon back into the air as rapidly as possible, each trying to nudge the climate in a direction that it views as favorable. And of course this could escalate into far more direct forms of conflict.