The Ottawa Citizen has a story this morning about multibillionaire Bill Gates and his funding of projects that are aimed at controlling the Earth’s climate in the face of rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and the resulting warming of the biosphere. I won’t go into too much detail, except to say that University of Calgary scientists David Keith is among a small group of researchers who are advising Gates and receiving funding from the Microsoft co-founder. Controversy has no doubt followed. The scientists involved say don’t worry, our work is only confined to the lab. But critics of geoengineering — and I would include myself in that group — are concerned that what grows in the lab will be applied to the atmosphere without meaningful public debate about the risks. Already, there is a plan — called the Silver Lining Projects – to test out the whitening of clouds over a 10,000-square-kilometre patch of the Pacific Ocean. The idea is that this would increase their ability to reflect sunlight back out to space before it gets a chance to heat the Earth’s surface.

To me, the first phrase that pops into my mind is “Beware the law of unintended consequences.” I believe Gaia theorist James Lovelock expressed the risks best in a commentary last September in The Guardian U.K.:

Geoengineering implies that we have an ailing planet that needs a cure. But our ignorance of the Earth system is great; we know little more than an early 19th-century physician knew about the body. Geoengineering is like trying to cure pneumonia by immersing the patient in a bath of icy water; the fever would be cured but not the disease.

Many of us feel a sense of unease about using geoengineering to escape global heating. Most of the planetary therapies have side effects, potentially as severe as the disease itself. We know that the cooling by Pinatubo was accompanied by droughts; cooling alone does nothing to prevent the ocean growing ever more acid as the carbon dioxide dissolves in the water.

Before long, global heating could reach a level that makes geoengineering an enticing option. Indeed, cautiously applied it may help by buying us time either to adapt to climate change or to develop a practical scientific cure. We have, as yet, no comprehensive Earth system science; in such ignorance I cannot help feeling that attempts by us to regulate the Earth’s climate and chemistry would condemn humanity to a Kafkaesque fate from which there may be no escape. Better, perhaps, to learn from the wiser physicians of the early 19th century; they knew no cure for common diseases but also knew that by letting nature take its course, the patient often recovered. Perhaps we, too, had better use our energies to adapt and leave recovery to Gaia; after all, she has survived more than three billion years and has kept life going all that time.

Bill Gates should stick with funding cures for disease. By venturing into the realm of geoengineering, he’s demonstrating the kind of arrogance that got us in trouble in the first place. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so uncomfortable if Microsoft Windows didn’t crash so much.

Tags: Bill Gates, David Keith, Geoengineering, James Lovelock

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at 10:50 am and is filed under carbon capture, emissions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.