Today's issue of Science magazine (firewalled) has an article and panel discussion about the results from a climatology meeting in Cambridge last week. Scientists met to discuss the issue of performing research on "geoengineering", which means large scale perturbation of the planet's atmosphere in an effort to hold back what are the clearly disruptive effects of global warming. They didn't actually state that we've gone past a tipping point, but they did agree that it was time to start performing research on methods to reverse global warming even though they all admit that it is fraught with huge uncertainties. What a big step for a group of scientists who went into the meeting with a distinct attitude that we really shouldn't be doing this because the cure could be worse than the disease. The problem is that once they confronted the realities of political inaction, the difficulties of achieving reductions in greenhouse gases and the significantly worse than predicted increases in CO2 and Arctic sea ice melting, they recognized that their options were limited.
Harvard Climatologist Jim Anderson had this to say
"The issue is really not global warming, and to state it that way is to misconstrue the primary issue. The real issue is global irreversibility, the loss of control of the system. And that to me was brought home very clearly, and it pervaded the entire discussion."
It couldn't be stated more clearly. We've lost control. Climate bloggers on dkos have been suggesting this for some time, but here you have a group of leading climatologists agreeing that "just say no" isn't working well. Between entrenched money interests and global demand for energy, there isn't much chance that we can prevent an irreversible loss of climate control. But is the cure worse than the disease? Geochemist Dan Schrag had this to say
"...[geoengineering] is not something that will ever compensate either perfectly or even imperfectly for greenhouse gas emissions. It may be a desperate measure, but it doesn't really take the pressure off for reducing greenhouse gases, because living for centuries or millennia in a climate that has elevated greenhouse gases and we're trying to compensate and making mistakes all the time--that's not a world that anybody wants."
Finally, from Oceanographer Penny Chisolm,
"This is what I struggle with. So we're trying to think about it, talk about it scientifically, but in many way we're going to have to do this blind, because it's just so extraordinarily difficult to understand the unknown unknowns, which are enormous. That's what really worries me about this. And I think a lot of us came away from that meeting much more scared than we were when we went into the meeting. Frightened about climate change, and frightened about what humans might get desperate enough to do about it."
To put this in perspective, scientists are fundamentally conservative. I obviously don't mean this politically (head-in-the-sand, narcissistic, hypocritical jingoists), but logically (show me the data, I won't believe you until you can prove it). That is in part why the IPCC has been so far off in projecting climate change; it's very conservative. So when scientists start talking about being scared about what's happening and point out the enormous risks of bioengineering I can't help but develop a profound sense of unease. This is especially true for geoengineering projects, some of which are being touted by commercial players whose interest in being correct is far less than their interest in making money.