Approval for Climate Change Geoengineering Research

Reports emerged on July 20th 2009 that a major US body was on the verge of approving geoengineering research as a means of fighting climate change.  Once officially released, the AMS (American Meteorological Society’s) endorsement for the development of geoengineering technologies will make it the first of the really big scientific organisations to have made such a move.

According to the New Scientist publication, the AMS report writes that research should now take place into “deliberately manipulating physical, chemical, or biological aspects of the Earth system", in tandem with more established anti-climate change methods.  These established methods, it adds, include CO2 and other greenhouse gases emission reduction efforts, and adapting to climate change where these methods cannot be applied.

The report intimates that climate change has now reached a stage where the introduction of new measures like geoengineering are a necessity, rather than an option. 

“Even aggressive mitigation of future emissions cannot avoid dangerous climate changes resulting from past emissions”, it says.  “Furthermore, it is unlikely that all of the expected climate-change impacts can be managed through adaptation.  Thus, it is prudent to consider geoengineering's potential benefits, to understand its limitations, and to avoid ill-considered deployment.”

According to the National Academy of Sciences, geoengineering can be seen as "options that would involve large-scale engineering of our environment in order to combat or counteract the effects of changes in atmospheric chemistry."

Types of Geoengineering

Among the different types of geoengineering proposed in recent times are the following three:

• Solar Radiation Management or SRM, which is concerned with ways through which the amount of solar rays able to reach the earth’s surface can be reduced
• Greenhouse Gas Remediation, which focuses on greenhouse gas sequestration (removing it  from the air)
• Arctic Geoengineering, which is concerned with mitigating the rate of ice loss in Arctic regions.

As things stand, geoengineering remains almost entirely untested and unproven.  For one thing, little or no international standardisations on how it should take place have been set up thus far.

However, according to one advocate of geoengineering, the imminent AMS report represents an significant new moment.  “I think this is an important step towards developing an 'official' research programme on intentional climate intervention established in the United States”, the California-based Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Ken Caldeira stated.

“I think it is increasingly likely that we will see government funded research programs into ways to decrease the amount of climate change caused by increased greenhouse gas concentrations”, he added.