The topic of climate change combines many of my scientific and philosophical interests. In my draft book World After Capital I describe how knowledge is central to human affairs in that it allows us to solve problems. Many of the problems that we have had to solve over the years were of our own making. For instance, a lot of human diseases arose because we started living in proximity to animals and it was only the progress in medical knowledge that let us overcome those.
The latest and biggest crisis we are facing is climate change. The mechanism for how humans are causing climate change is well understood and I have written about it here on Continuations repeatedly. One of the big questions is what to do about it. I would love for us to implement an immediate and steep carbon tax, much of which could initially be redistributed to help offset the initial wealth impacts of such a tax.
But some of the proceeds should also be used to finance research into geoengineering. There is already some funding that’s happening and we should definitely step that up massively, even before we have a carbon tax (such a tax may be hard to get to given the political deadlock on this issue in many parts of the world including the US).
I first wrote about the need to research geoengineering almost 7 years ago. The climate situation has become significantly more dire since then with atmospheric CO2 up another 5%. We are now beginning to see some dreaded positive feedback loops starting us on a real acceleration of the temperature impact. One such loop is the increase in moisture in the air and another is the unfreezing of regions that contain methane in the ground. If you want to thoroughly ruin your day I suggest reading this summary.
One potential geoengineering approach is adding Sulfur Dioxide to the upper atmosphere to increase the earth’s albedo. You can think of that as a human made volcano eruption. Some scientists warn about the unintended side effects of such an approach. And while we should not dismiss their concerns we should be applying a logic that Nassim Taleb describes in Antifragile: when you are healthy or only slightly ill (e.g., a cold) you should avoid medication because of its side effects. But if you have a disease that without treatment will kill you, then side effects become largely irrelevant.
We are rapidly reaching that later state with regard to the climate. An increase in global average temperature of 3 degrees Celsius or more would likely lead to a collapse of our existing human food supply chain and hence to mass starvation. With the positive feedback loops that are now being triggered we could get there quite rapidly (by which I mean a decade or two). So if ever there was a time to throw a lot of resources into geoengineering research, it would seem to be now.
Since I like putting my money where my mouth is, one of the things I would love to contribute to is a global geoengineering prize (or series of prizes). The Virgin Earth Prize is one such effort which is focused on CO2 removal. If there are others please let me know.
