“The 1.5 degree limit is deader than a doornail,” said Jim Hansen, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, “and the scenarios you would need to stay under two degrees are just imaginary.” That was last November, at the end of the third consecutive ‘hottest year in history’, but most of the years to come will be even hotter.
The permanent crisis is arriving, but it is still within our power to decide how bad it will be. ‘Mitigation’ – just cutting our greenhouse gas emissions – is still necessary, but it is no longer enough. It is too slow and we have left it too late. We also have to start holding the heat down by direct action – geoengineering.
Gwynne has spent the past three years interviewing over a hundred climate scientists and engineers for his new book ‘Intervention Earth’. Geoengineering frightens them, and at the beginning a clear majority ruled it out as ‘too dangerous’. By now, he reckons, a majority among the climate scientists has reluctantly swung the other way: we must hold the heat down to keep our societies intact while we cope with the changes.
Early research suggests that various forms of geoengineering are technically feasible and not even stunningly expensive, but it can only be a temporary patch, not a long-term solution. New emissions still have to stop, and most of the historic emissions will still eventually have to be removed. But climate engineering may be the necessary bridge to get us through the crisis without a catastrophe.
That’s why Gwynne borrowed Jim Lovelock’s famous phrase ‘planetary maintenance engineers’ (from forty years ago) for the title of this lecture. We are already starting to take on that role in various ways, although we don’t yet admit it to ourselves.
Human beings will have to intervene to keep the basic systems we have damaged running, at least until and unless we can restore most of the natural systems and the old climate. We will not see the end of this emergency in our lifetimes, nor will our children in theirs.
gwynnedyer.com
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