More Edgey stuff.

"Geoengineering" technologies for counteracting some aspects of anthropogenic climate change — such as putting long-lived aerosols into the stratosphere, as volcanoes do, or changing the lifetimes and reflective properties of clouds — have to date been shunned by the majority of climate scientists, largely on the basis of the moral hazard involved: any sense that the risks of global warming can be taken care of by such technology weakens the case for reducing carbon-dioxide emissions.

I expect to see this unwillingness recede quite dramatically in the next few years, and not only because of the post-Lehman-Brothers bashing given to the idea that moral hazard is something to avoid at all costs. As people come to realise how little has actually been achieved so far on the emissions-reduction front, quite a few are going to start to freak out. . .

But what I see as world changing about this technology is not the extent to which it changes the world. It is that it does so on purpose. To live in a world subject to purposeful, planetwide change will not, I think, be quite the same as living in one being messed up by accident. Unless geoengineering fails catastrophically (which would be a pretty dramatic change in itself) the relationship between people and their environment will have changed profoundly. The line separating the natural from the artificial is itself an artifice, and one that changes with time. But this change, different in scale and not necessarily reversible, might finish off the idea of the natural as a place or time or condition that could ever be returned to. This would not be the "end of nature" — but it would be the end of a view of nature that has great power, and without which some would feel bereft. The clouds and the colours of the noon-time sky and of the setting sun will feel different if they have become, to some extent, a matter of choice.

That's Oliver again. I seem to post about his stuff often, and have done so for some time. See this old post Soul Butter which explains my interest in part.

His name doesn't come to mind first when listing nature writers since for him nature is interplanetary and even intergalactic - capital N nature. In the large. . .

Though I am in fact rooted in particular land, fully engaged in a specific place, it is global in Oliver's sense. I have long seen it this way too. It isn't only the carbon but also the nitrates, synthesized in electrical storms and that falls in rain, and other minerals that fall from the dusty skies, carried across the Pacific from China on high altitude wind currents, as well as the things I put on that land - everything from Dutch grass seeds to British cattle genes via New Zealand. Even the weeds are immigrants from every continent - as am I.

I prize a vision of natural systems that explicitly acknowledges all of this in dynamic relationship. To truly see it you need to somehow split your focus to include the micro and macro, the very far and the very near, the past, present and future, all at once. It's hard to do, but worth the effort I think.

I argue with Oliver. I don't bother to argue with those who are deeply ignorant or plainly stupid. Real argument is risky since you must actually listen to the other fellow rather than just waiting politely for your turn to speak again, and so you might be persuaded, might have to change your views, and that can wreak havoc.

I think that he is mistaken that intentional geoengineering is novel. The focus on climate is fairly recent, and the technologies have advanced, but the concept of intentional alteration of the planet is old, an ever increasing expansion of behaviors as old as civilization. What the Romans did with aqueducts and the Dutch did with dykes is not different in intent, just in scope. The Suez and Panama canals have the same root intentionality but are easier to understand as having global impact. In America we have been hacking and carving the earth all along. What was done with the Erie canal to connect the great lakes to the Atlantic ocean, and the continual engineering of the Mississippi river, are two better known examples. We could assemble a list of such engineering efforts from every continent and explain how each has had global impact. For example, connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific in Panama has had ecological impacts we are still trying to understand. Unintended consequences of intentional geoengineering is old too.

It may be, as Oliver notes, that climate engineering would make some fashionable views of nature less tenable, but they have always been myopic and provincial - an affected ignorance in service of a supernatural faith. It is only by covering their eyes, sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting loudly that such views could be held by those who are now threatened by climate engineering.

Oliver knows all of this, but looks at it from a different angle.

Critics of geoengineering approaches are right to stress this governance problem. Where they tend to go wrong is in ignoring the fact that we already have a climate governance problem: the mechanisms currently in place to "avoid dangerous climate change", as the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change puts it, have not so far delivered the goods. A system conceived with geoengineering in mind would need to be one that held countries to the consequences of their actions in new ways, and that might strengthen and broaden approaches to emissions reduction, too. But there will always be an asymmetry, and it is an important one. To do something about emissions a significant number of large economies will have to act in concert. Geoengineering can be unilateral. Any medium sized nation could try it.

In this, as in other ways, geoengineering issues look oddly like nuclear issues. There, too, a technological stance by a single nation can have global consequences. There, too, technology has reset the boundaries of the natural in ways that can provoke a visceral opposition. There, too, there is a discourse of transcendence and a tendency to hubris that need to be held in check. And there, too, the technology has brought with it dreams of new forms of governance. In the light of Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many saw some sort of world government as a moral imperative, an historical necessity, or both. It turned out not to be, and the control of nuclear weapons and ambitions has remained an ad hoc thing, a mixture of treaties, deterrence, various suasions and occasional direct action that is unsatisfactory in many ways though not, as yet, a complete failure. A geoengineered world may end up governed in a similarly piecemeal way — and bring with it a similar open-ended risk of destabilisation, and even disaster.

The idea of world government is childish, an extension of confusions about national governance. Nations are not in fact governed and never have been. The authoritarian ideal has no empirical support. Yes, authorities stand at the head of the class and make demands, and sometimes impose harsh penalties on the misbehaving children, but the idea that the children are controlled is an illusion. The failures of Kyoto and the IPCC mirror the failures within each nation and locality. No one is in charge or can be in charge. It's time for the authorities to grow up and admit what has been going on all along and will continue in future.

I think that a more accurate view of things decreases the risk of destabilisation, though nothing can remove it. I'm reminded of an old movie I saw - Serenity - a space western in which an overwheening government of an alliance of worlds routinely practiced geoengineering and social engineering - and made an unholy mess of things in the process. [Spoiler] An experimental attempt to perfect one society on one world by dosing the population with some sort of peace drug made the majority of the people too passive to even live - they sat down and died - and had the opposite affect on a small minority, turning them into ravaging demon cannibals with no respect for life.

There is risk in ad hoc governance, "a mixture of treaties, deterrence, various suasions and occasional direct action", but I think less risk than in more rigid approaches. The thing to always bear in mind is that while it is possible to imagine a benign and wise authority, none exist, even in theory. Imagination glosses over the difficult bits in a leap of faith, but that's a steam age mechanical view that denies the organic reality of life. Humans have always been imaginative, but in the past the role of god was assigned to inscrutable gods. It was a non-explanation of the unexplainable which provided some comfort by essentially shelving the subject so that people could get on with life. Now that many find such non-explanations unsatisfying we need to be more realistic and face the full complexity of the issue.

I've used this quote before but it is still apt.

People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mindset of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control.

I assumed that at first too. We all assumed it, as eager systems students at the great institution called MIT. More or less innocently, enchanted by what we could see through our new lens, we did what many discoverers do. We exaggerated our own ability to change the world. We did so not with any intent to deceive others, but in the expression of our own expectations and hopes. Systems thinking for us was more than subtle, complicated mindplay. It was going to Make Systems Work.

But self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionistic science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the most trivial, we can't optimize; we don't even know what to optimize. We can't keep track of everything. We can't find a proper, sustainable relationship to nature, each other, or the institutions we create, if we try to do it from the role of omniscient conqueror.

Mindplay is phun, but it is play. We are improved as well as entertained by play, but some part of our consciousness needs to stay grounded in reality so that we don't slip into madness and mistake our play worlds for the real world. The greatest risks we face come not from reality, but from our imaginations. Panicked attempts to remove real risk expose us to even greater risk. Be glad that the best we have been able to achieve is ad hocery, since it is better than what our imaginations promise.

Update:

The link to the Meadows column from the old Whole Earth Magazine rotted and I haven't yet found another copy anywhere. If you can help, please do so. I ripped the quote from my old post Mental Tools (2003) which has more from the column as well as my commentary. Link fixed.

Also, Oliver responds:

I suspect that changes to the boundary condition of a system may need to be thought of slightly differently from changes to components within the system. (I am not sure that I can justify this belief, and I certainly can’t do so off the cuff. More thought is needed.) I am also not quite as negative as Gary is about the chances of rational political action.