Four Reasons To Study A Bad Idea: Geoengineering

Scientists who worked on the National Research Council's new report on climate intervention want us to understand that they think geoengineering is a terrible idea, but they think it's crucial that we study it.
The scientists think it's a bad idea to tinker with the atmosphere and ocean to counteract climate change because there may be unintended consequences. But Admiral David Titley, former head of the Navy's oceanography command, gave at least four reasons Tuesday why we should study such bad ideas:
1. When the climate effects of carbon pollution become more pronounced, the public may demand intervention. "When something bad happens the pressure to do something will be enormous," Titley said at a lunchtime forum convened by Resources for the Future in Washington D.C. "It will be enormous on the administration, whosever administration. And if we don't have the research to say, 'Okay boss, okay Madame President, here are the risks, this will truly make things worse'—if you don't know that, you may do it because you need to do something, and that would be a really dangerous place to be."
2. Someone else may intervene. "If a country or a non-country acts to intervene in the climate, the president's going to turn around to his science advisor and his national security staff and say, 'Should I ignore this? Should I slap them on the wrist? Or should I tell them unless you cease and desist within 48 hours the full weight of the United States is going to be on them? What is the risk to our citizens and our country?' And if we don't know because we haven't done the research, that puts our intelligence community, the president's science advisor, the mission agencies, basically all of those who sponsored this (report), in a very tough situation."
3. We may have no choice but to intervene. "The other component is climate emergency. It may be the least bad of a bunch of really bad options for a period of time. God help that we don't get there, but we don't know."
4. Studying intervention may encourage mitigation. "If there is a lot of research done [on intervention] one of the outcomes is to show that there's a lot of bad ideas out there that will not work. If there's research done that actually demonstrates that they don't work, not just a bunch of powerpoint slides that say, 'Oh look at my idea,' that may help us get scared enough to actually get serious about mitigation."
Mitigation means reducing the volume of greenhouse gases we emit into the atmosphere. Intervention, better known as geoengineering, covers an array of technologies that might counter the effects of greenhouse gases, such as dispersing reflective aerosols in the atmosphere or seeding the oceans with iron to spur the growth of CO2 consuming phytoplankton.
"If you think of CO2 as trash, because that's kind of what it is, one way to think about this is, carbon dioxide removal means we need to, after 150 years, take out the trash, or at least start taking out the trash," said Titley, who, after a stint as chief operating officer at NOAA, now serves as director of Penn State's Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk.
"Reflecting sunlight, that's kind of like spraying perfume on the trash. We're not actually fixing the problem, we're trying to pretend it's not there."
The scientists emphasized the report's first recommendation—carbon mitigation—as they have done since the report was released earlier this month, out of a palpable fear that interest in climate intervention could weaken political support for mitigation.
"There's no way to have this be a silver bullet," said Jane Long, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund. "If we're not doing mitigation, there's no way to keep up with any kind of intervention."
The research that the scientists advocate is not likely to garner Congressional support, warned Bart Gordon, a former U.S. representative from Tennessee who once chaired the House Committee on Science and Technology.
"I think what we could do now is the president could put forth a task force that would try to inventory the various kinds of research already being done, have an interagency group that would try to connect those dots, not spend any additional funds, continue with the same type of authorization," Gordon said.
"As a practical matter, that's about all that's going to happen right now, but I think that could happen, and I think it could be a good start."
The scientists also would like us to stop using the term geoengineering and start saying "climate intervention." Geoengineering is a confusing term, they say, because geo- refers to the earth, not specifically to the climate, and engineering is generally something people do with systems they can control—not a system as complex as the climate.
"Engineering is something you do to a system you understand very well, where you can try out new techniques thoroughly at a small scale before staking peoples’ lives on them," writes Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago and a member, like Titley, of the NRC committee that prepared the report.
"Hacking the climate is different—we have only one planet to live on, and can’t afford any big mistakes."