Geoengineering a Future

There is a well-established scientific consensus on the facts of anthropogenic global warming, and with its consequences increasingly obvious, 59% of Americans now say climate change impacts the community in which they live, while 31% say the change affects them personally. Yet in some sectors the realities of global warming are met with denial or dismissal. This skepticism should trouble but not surprise us, given the determined effort by an amalgam of political, industrial, and ideological interests whose objective is to distract public attention from and erode public confidence in not just the evidence, but even science itself.

That effort to gaslight the American people about global warming is widely pilloried (Paul Krugman, for instance, uses the term “depravity”). Moreover, it is consistently discredited by inconvenient truths such as those found in the recent United States National Climate Assessment, a dense and dire interagency report packed with stark environmental, health, and economic warnings over what awaits us if aggressive action is not soon taken. Considering the magnitude of the challenge and the rate at which it is worsening, calls for a “Green New Deal” and a “Climate Manhattan Project” are, in my view, right on target.

To this nation’s shame, however, the campaign to cloak climate change has managed to weaken our commitment to strategies of mitigation and adaptation. Perhaps I am pessimistic, but it seems likely that the only option remaining will be high-risk and large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system. As Eli Kintisch wrote in Hack the Planet, geoengineering is either our “best hope or worst nightmare,” but it is “a bad idea whose time has come.” That should worry us all.