Climate engineering is a potential alternative method to curb global warming, and this discipline has garnered considerable attention from the international scientific community including the Chinese scientists. This manuscript provides an overview of several aspects of climate engineering, including its definition, its potential impacts and risk, and its governance status. The overall conclusion is that China is not yet ready to implement climate engineering. However, it is important for China to continue conducting research on climate engineering, particularly with respect to its feasible application within China, its potential social, economic, and environmental impacts, and possible international governance structures and governing principles, with regard to both experimentation and implementation.
The massive problem of climate change
To understand what climate engineering might look like in the future, let’s first talk about why a country might want to try it.
Since the industrial revolution, humans have put about 1.74 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, largely by burning fossil fuels. That carbon dioxide traps heat, warming the planet.
One of the most important things we can do is to stop putting carbon into the atmosphere. But that won’t make the situation better quickly, because carbon stays in the atmosphere for centuries. Reducing emissions will just keep things from getting worse.
Countries could pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and lock it away, a process called carbon dioxide removal. Right now, carbon dioxide removal projects, including growing trees and direct air capture devices, pull about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere per year.
However, humans are currently putting over 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually through fossil fuel use and industry. As long as the amount added is larger than the amount removed, droughts, floods, hurricanes, heat waves and sea level rise, among numerous other consequences of climate change, will keep getting worse.
It may take a long time to get to “net-zero” emissions, the point at which humans aren’t increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Climate engineering might help in the interim.
The historic Paris climate agreement started a mantra from developing countries: “1.5 to stay alive.” It refers to the international aim to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.8 Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial times. But the world will likely pass that threshold within a decade, and global warming is showing little sign of slowing.
The world is already facing natural disasters of epic proportions as temperatures rise. Heat records are routinely broken. Wildfire seasons are more extreme. Hurricane strength is increasing. Sea level rise is slowly submerging small island nations and coastal areas.
The only known method able to quickly arrest this temperature rise is climate engineering. (It’s sometimes called geoengineering, sunlight reduction methods or solar climate intervention.) This is a set of proposed actions to deliberately alter the climate.
These actions include mimicking the cooling effects of large volcanic eruptions by putting large amounts of reflective particles in the atmosphere, or making low clouds over the ocean brighter. Both strategies would reflect a small amount of sunlight back to space to cool the planet.
There are many unanswered questions, however, about the effects of deliberately altering the climate, and there is no consensus about whether it is even a good idea to find out.
One of the largest concerns for many countries when it comes to climate change is national security. That doesn’t just mean wars. Risks to food, energy and water supplies are national security issues, as is climate-induced migration.
Who might try climate engineering and how?
Various government research arms are already gaming out scenarios, looking at who might decide to carry out climate engineering and how.
Climate engineering is expected to be cheap relative to the cost of ending greenhouse gas emissions. But it would still cost billions of dollars and take years to develop and build a fleet of airplanes to carry megatons of reflective particles into the stratosphere each year. Any billionaire considering such a venture would run out of money quickly, despite what science fiction might suggest.
However, a single country or coalition of countries witnessing the harms of climate change could make a cost and geopolitical calculation and decide to begin climate engineering on its own.
This is the so-called “free driver” problem, meaning that one country of at least medium wealth could unilaterally affect the world’s climate.
For example, countries with increasingly dangerous heat waves may want to cause cooling, or countries that depend on monsoon precipitation may want to restore some dependability that climate change has disrupted. Australia is currently exploring the feasibility of rapidly cooling the Great Barrier Reef to prevent its demise.
Creating risks for neighbors raises conflict alarm
The climate doesn’t respect national borders. So, a climate engineering project in one country is likely to affect temperature and rainfall in neighboring countries. That could be good or bad for crops, water supplies and flood risk. It could also have widespread unintended consequences.
Some studies show that a moderate amount of climate engineering would likely have widespread benefits compared with climate change. But not every country would be affected in the same way.
Once climate engineering is deployed, countries may be more likely to blame climate engineering for extreme events such as hurricanes, floods and droughts, regardless of the evidence.
Climate engineering may spark conflicts among countries, leading to sanctions and demands for compensation. Climate change can leave the poorest regions most vulnerable to harm, and climate engineering should not exacerbate that harm. Some countries would benefit from climate engineering and thus be more resilient to geopolitical strife, and some would be harmed and thus left more vulnerable.
While small experiments have been carried out, nobody has conducted large-scale climate engineering yet. That means that a lot of information about its effects relies on climate models. But while these models are excellent tools for studying the climate system, they’re not good at answering questions about geopolitics and conflict. On top of that, the physical effects of climate engineering depend on who is doing it and what they’re doing.
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