Muddled thinking about climate change faith. [via Instapundit]

When a panel of scientists addressed the ethical implications of geoengineering at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in February in Boston, it was a clear sign of how far this seemingly out-there field has advanced toward legitimacy.

While no proposed geoengineering fixes have yet been tested on a global scale, all of them have the irresistible lure of immediacy. Once deposited, CO2 can linger in the atmosphere for more than 100 years, meaning it will take decades or centuries for emissions-reduction policies to cool the planet significantly. Geoengineering, on the other hand, could potentially send global temperatures back to preindustrial levels within only a few years, bringing the Arctic melt to a screeching halt and keeping extreme weather patterns and rising sea levels associated with warming in check. "Every simulation that's been done shows that geoengineering doesn't bring the climate back perfectly," says Ken Caldeira, an ecologist at Stanford University, "but you could put sulfur in the stratosphere right away and it would be colder next year."

Hubristic to the nth degree? Riskier than a tightrope ballet? Absolutely. Even geoengineering's proponents concede that. "The history of intervening in complex systems to correct them is not good," says Caldeira, who has cautiously endorsed future geoengineering research. "You always think you know how the system's going to respond, but we should assume that if we start doing this, there are going to be some ugly surprises."

So far so sensible. Emissions restrictions won't work, if the models are correct, since the barn would burn down before the restrictions put out the fire. More direct intervention is risky since we don't really know what we are doing, perhaps can't know what we are doing until we get a lot better at managing complex systems.

Then it gets mystical.

"Every time a geoengineering proponent says reducing emissions is impossible, that reduces the will of society to solve the problem." . . .

Questions of usefulness and necessity aside, grand-scale sun-blocking schemes feel dubious in part because they challenge our intuitive sense that large-scale wrongs can be atoned for only with equally large-scale sacrifices. Drastic emissions cutbacks require drastic lifestyle changes, like taking shorter showers and scrapping the Hummer. Such changes feel right because they're a little painful; putting the squeeze on ourselves is suitable penance for the collective sin of spewing tailpipe fumes into the atmosphere for the past 100-plus years.

Geoengineering, by contrast, seems like an undeserved dispensation, a free-lunch promise that technology can whitewash our past transgressions.

This is a rehash of broken ideas discussed a couple of years ago in Social Dunces.

In a computer model, Dr Caldeira and colleague Bala Govindasamy simulated the effects of diminished solar radiation.

"We were originally trying to show that this is a bad idea, that there would be residual regional and global climate effects," explains Dr Caldeira.

"Much to our chagrin, it worked really well." . . .

"The knowledge that we maybe could engineer our way out of climate problems inevitably lessens the political will to begin reducing carbon dioxide emissions," observes David Keith from the University of Calgary in Canada. . .

Ken Caldeira agrees that geoengineering is, for the moment, a tempting but illusory quick fix to an intricate system; a much less problematic solution, he says, would be to change our lifestyles by reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions.

"I think the Earth's system is so complicated that our interfering with it is very likely to screw things up and very unlikely to improve things," he says. "And this is the only planet we have."

Amazing. One "scientist" thinks we should conceal knowledge of technologies that could reverse climate change because it would be harder to sell political fixes that wouldn't actually fix anything. Another thinks it would be easier to "change our lifestyles by reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions". He's apparently been out of contact with humanity since he was weaned and has no clue what the world is up to these days or even what human beings are like.

However difficult it may be to implement technological fixes for atmospheric change it will be far, far easier than trying to change society. However much things squirm around in physical reality when you intervene in a system, they are placid and constant compared to what happens when you tinker with social systems.

Though we don't understand complex physical systems well enough to predict or control outcomes of interventions, our understanding of social systems are equally meager, perhaps more so. It doesn't take much imagination to see that any number of catastrophic outcomes could, and likely would, result from the draconian restrictions advocated by the true believers in "putting the squeeze on ourselves is suitable penance for the collective sin of spewing tailpipe fumes into the atmosphere". If the nutters squeeze you can be sure that most of humanity will revolt, and some of them have the fire power to back up their objections.

Update: And another thing.

But putting our fate in the hands of a flash-in-the-pan environmental dabbler with money to burn is especially risky given that adopting a geoengineering venture would be like putting the planet on methadone. It might save us from hitting climatic rock bottom, but it would also require fastidious commitment to a treatment program with no real end in sight. Whether any entity, commercial or governmental, would be able to carry out the necessary upkeep for millenniums -- independent of regime changes, cultural shifts and shadowy future catastrophes -- is still an open question.

This assumes technological stasis, that we will never be able to truly manage the atmosphere to remove our emissions, and that we will have fossil fuels to burn for millenia. Neither idea makes any sense at all. We already have some systems for air capture of emissions, and ways to durably sequester them. More are in the pipeline and it seems silly to assume that none will succeed in coming decades, much less millenia. Besides, we don't have millenia worth of stuff left to burn, and CO2 only lasts for a century or so.