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Some scientists think climate change needs a more radical approach. As well as trying to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, they have plans to re-engineer the Earth.

THERE is a branch of science fiction that looks at the Earth’s neighbours, Mars and Venus, and asks how they might be made habitable. The answer is planetary engineering. The Venusian atmosphere is too thick. It creates a large greenhouse effect and cooks a planet that is, in any case, closer to the sun than the Earth is to even higher temperatures than it would otherwise experience. Mars suffers from the opposite fault. A planet more distant from the sun than Earth is also has an atmosphere too thin to trap what little of the sun’s heat is available. So, fiddle with the atmospheres of these neighbours and you open new frontiers for human settlement and far-fetched story lines.

It is an intriguing idea. It may even come to pass, though probably not in the lifetime of anyone now reading such stories. But what is more worrying—and more real—is the idea that such planetary engineering may be needed to make the Earth itself habitable by humanity, and that it may be needed in the near future. Reality has a way of trumping art, and human-induced climate change is very real indeed. So real that some people are asking whether science fiction should now be converted into science fact.

Tinkering with the atmosphere or the oceans on the scale required to do this would be highly risky and extraordinarily complex. But the alternative, getting the world’s population to give up fossil fuels, is proving exceedingly hard. Geo-engineering, as it has come to be known, may be a way of buying time for the transition to a low-carbon economy to take place in an orderly manner.

In the past, geo-engineering was taboo because many felt that the very possibility of fiddling with the climate would create an excuse to avoid the hard choices a low-carbon economy would impose. However, the feeling is now growing that if politicians came to scientists for advice on the matter, it would be a good idea for them to have some to offer. To that end, the Royal Society, Britain’s oldest scientific academy, has published a series of papers in its Philosophical Transactions outlining some of the options, and suggesting a few experiments to test whether they would work.

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Last year, a private company proposed “fertilizing” parts of the ocean with iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Meanwhile, researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet.

This technology might be useful, even life-saving. But it would inevitably produce environmental effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo. So a growing number of experts say it is time for broad discussion of how and by whom it should be used, or if it should be tried at all.

Similar questions are being raised about nanotechnology, robotics and other powerful emerging technologies. There are even those who suggest humanity should collectively decide to turn away from some new technologies as inherently dangerous.

“The complexity of newly engineered systems coupled with their potential impact on lives, the environment, etc., raise a set of ethical issues that engineers had not been thinking about,” said William A. Wulf, a computer scientist who until last year headed the National Academy of Engineering. As one of his official last acts, he established the Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society there.

Rachelle Hollander, a philosopher who directs the center, said the new technologies were so powerful that “our saving grace, our inability to affect things at a planetary level, is being lost to us,” as human-induced climate change is demonstrating.

Engineers, scientists, philosophers, ethicists and lawyers are taking up the issue in scholarly journals, online discussions and conferences in the United States and abroad. “It’s a hot topic,” said Ronald C. Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech who advises the Army on robot weapons. “We need at least to think about what we are doing while we are doing it, to be aware of the consequences of our research.”

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Plans to use a state-of-the-art camera onboard a satellite to monitor deforestation levels in Africa’s Congo Basin have been unveiled.

The high resolution RALCam3 camera, designed and built by UK scientists, will provide the first detailed view of the area’s rate of forest cover loss.

The project is part of the Congo Basin Forest Fund, a £108m joint-initiative by the UK and Norwegian governments.

The fund aims to curb climate change by preventing deforestation in the region.

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Perhaps there is no greater societal need for scientific know-how than in finding new ways to meet future energy demands. Skyrocketing gas prices, an uncertain oil supply, increasing demand from around the world, and the looming threat of climate change have made identifying and developing realistic energy alternatives a national priority.

For Biodesign Institute researcher Bruce Rittmann, the threat of global warming also presents a significant opportunity for innovation and fresh solutions to today’s energy challenges.

“Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, the unprecedented expansions of human population and economic activity have been based on combusting fossil fuels,” said Rittmann. “Today, fossil fuels provide 80 percent of the energy needs to run human society worldwide: 34 percent petroleum, 32 percent coal, and 14 percent natural gas.”

In a new Perspective article published in the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering, Rittmann points the way toward developing bioenergy as the best realistic alternative to meet our current and future energy needs while cutting back on the use of fossil fuels. Rittmann directs the Center for Environmental Biotechnology and is a professor in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

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In wonkish circles, energy efficiency used to be known as “the fifth fuel”: it can help to satisfy growing demand for energy just as surely as coal, gas, oil or uranium can. But in these environmentally conscious times it has been climbing the rankings. Whereas the burning of fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases, which contribute to global warming, and nuclear plants generate life-threatening waste, the only by-product of energy efficiency is wealth, in the form of lower fuel bills and less spending on power stations, pipelines and so forth. No wonder that wonks now tend to prefer “negawatts” to megawatts as the best method of slaking the world’s growing thirst for energy.

photo credit: brenda om

Almost all blueprints for tackling global warming assume that energy efficiency will have a huge role to play. Nicholas Stern devoted a whole chapter to it in the report he wrote on climate change for the British government. In the greenest of futures mapped out by the International Energy Agency, a think-tank financed by rich countries, greater efficiency accounts for two-thirds of emissions averted. The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), the research arm of the consultancy, thinks that energy efficiency could get the world halfway towards the goal, espoused by many scientists, of keeping the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere below 550 parts per million.

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Research has cast new doubt on the wisdom of using Sun-blocking sulphate particles to cool the planet.

Sulphate injections are one of several “geo-engineering” solutions to climate change being discussed by scientists.

But data published in Science journal suggests the strategy would lead to drastic thinning of the ozone layer.

This would delay the recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole by decades, and cause significant ozone loss over the Arctic, say US researchers.

The idea of pumping sulphur into the upper atmosphere ito counteract global warming comes from nature.

Major volcanic eruptions emit vast quantities of sulphur particles that can cool the planet significantly.

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