The Planet Remade

"This was written by Oliver Morton, who is just a brilliant writer and longtime science editor at the Economist . I worked with him nearly 30 years ago. I’ve been thinking about questions of geoengineering—whether we will need to embark on active geoengineering to deal with the risk of climate change. Oliver is one of the popularisers of those ideas. This book is a classic. It has a literary style. He makes the argument that people are quite seriously thinking about how we might engage in certain types of geo-engineering. That kind of thing. It is about whether we could seed clouds, or cultivate photosynthetic plankton; or whether we could build some kind of a veil to reduce the solar irradiation of the planet using droplets or other techniques. One of the things that Oliver does is point out that we have already geo-engineered large parts of the nitrogen and carbon cycle over thousands and thousands of years. Artificial fertilisers are a geoengineering of the traditional nitrogen cycle. So he presents that familiarity as a way of saying, ‘Look, let’s start to think a little bit about the moral implications of how we respond to climate change.’ What comes across quite well in the book is that the people who are thinking about geoengineering are not Dr Strangelove characters, they’re actually thinking about how we care for the planet, or not, and how we control it."

"By ‘geoengineering’ we mean alteration of the world’s physical systems in a way that changes the planet’s ecological balance. Most of Oliver Morton’s book is about reducing the amount of the sun’s energy that gets through to the earth’s surface as a way of counterbalancing the increase of the heat blanket in the earth’s atmosphere. However, he also points out that the the invention of the Haber-Bosch process in the first decades of the twentieth century enabled the world to convert fossil fuels into nitrogen-based agricultural fertiliser and he calls this geoengineering as well. The application of artificial fertiliser to fields expanded the total amount of energy from food that’s available to the planet’s inhabitants. In turn, that loosened the Malthusian constraints on the world’s population. Smil has shown that before the use of fossil fuels for such things as fertiliser energy availability per person was only a few kilowatt hours a day. The increase in human wellbeing coming from greater fertiliser availability has had a growing impact on the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. It was, as George Monbiot has so beautifully written, a Faustian bargain that gave us prosperity today in return for a possible climate hell in the future. If Václav Smil and Daniel Yergin are right, we are deluding ourselves if we think we can switch to low carbon energy sources fast enough to avoid that hell. Inevitably, Oliver says, we do need to contemplate solar radiation management, that is to say using some form of chemical to block the sun’s radiation so that it doesn’t reach the earth’s surface. Yes. Oliver says that we have a big problem. We know that we want to continue to be able to use large amounts of energy, we know that it’s going to be difficult to switch to entirely non-fossil fuel sources and give people cheap reliable energy, therefore, as sensible human beings, we need to think about what happens if we cannot pull down our fossil fuel use fast enough. And what the book is really about is a plea for people to start thinking about this, rather than saying— as they tend to do at the moment—that we shouldn’t talk about geoengineering because it makes us think we have an excuse for not doing anything about carbon emissions because we can always get rid of the problem by throwing up a few thousand tonnes of sulphates into the upper atmosphere. Well, what Oliver tries to do in this book is to show that that’s not necessarily the case; that it’s really quite cheap. The contention is that solar radiation management — putting a blanket outside the stratosphere — is relatively inexpensive compared to, say, the cost of building nuclear power stations across the world to reduce the use of fossil fuels. But there are enormous ethical issues. It’s not just a question of putting a rocket up there and blasting the sulphates out. I think the world needs to look at it. I think Oliver is right to ask us not to just dismiss it. There are lots of problems with geoengineering using sulphate aerosols, including that it will probably change the world’s rainfall patterns. Areas which have a lot of rainfall at the moment might have much less in the future. Others might have too much. Getting the global community to act when one large group of people suffer and another large group of people benefit has proved to be almost impossible in the past and may well be so in the case of geoengineering. But I think Oliver Morton is right to insist that because climate change could be utterly devastating — and fairly soon — for large parts of the world we need at least to openly discuss how the global community might reach a decision to geoengineer the atmosphere. And, like the other books in this selection, it is an engaging and informative read from a fine stylist. “As sensible human beings, we need to think about what happens if we cannot pull down our fossil fuel use fast enough. ” I wanted to conclude by breaking the rules and talking briefly about a sixth text. This is not a book but a recent academic article. I’ve included it both because it is an absolutely superb piece of writing and also because it was written by a woman. All the rest of the works in this list are by men. That troubled me. Climate change already disproportionately affects women. In many places, for example, they have to travel further for water and for wood as a result of temperature and rainfall change. However the world of energy production and energy research, as well writing about energy, is wholly dominated by men. This has to change. So let me talk Olivia Judson’s fine paper for a moment. In The Energy Expansions of Evolution , which was published earlier this year and is available outside a paywall, Judson shows how from the earliest times organisms have exploited the energy available to them. Evolution, as in the development of cyanobacteria, allowed the use of different sources of energy. What Olivia shows, as with all the works in my micro-library, is that energy availability is central to the development of living things, including the human race. Energy availability has been, and will continue to be, the central determinant of human prosperity. The challenge is to find ways of farming it, and then storing it, rather than mining it from the crust. Since the sun provides at least six thousand times as much direct energy as we are ever likely to need — two orders of magnitude more than any other source — solar energy is now the obvious choice."