To turn the tide of a warming climate, should we alter it?
The concept of geoengineering — introducing human-made changes into the earth’s systems on a massive scale — has been gaining prominence as time ticks toward major climate deadlines, with little measurable progress in cutting carbon emissions.
The thought goes like this: Slowing our planet-warming emissions isn’t enough, we need to find ways to remove them, too, to avoid the worst of climate change. But as science edges closer to testing geoengineering out in the real world, some experts are warning that the consequences for the planet could be dire.
“It’s important to understand just the incredible global scales that this would have to be deployed at in order to have any meaningful impact on climate,” said Benjamin Day, senior campaigner for climate and energy justice at Friends of the Earth US, while speaking at a Globe Summit panel focused on geoengineering in the ocean. “This is actually, I think, a very treacherous path for humanity to start going down.”
But even as Day and others warn against bringing geoengineering out of the labs and into the real world for experimentation, some scientists — with the support of major international scientific bodies and the federal government — are already moving in that direction.
Adam Subhas, associate scientist of marine chemistry and geochemistry at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, has been leading a pioneering experiment that would release a solution of sodium hydroxide into the ocean to prompt it to absorb more carbon dioxide.
That work was supposed to start this month in the ocean southwest of Martha’s Vineyard, but was pushed to 2025 after federal permits were delayed. At the panel on Wednesday, Subhas said the point is to see if this method is viable on a small trial scale, and to build on science that has already been done in labs and via modeling.
“We’ve designed this project to answer very specific questions about the effectiveness and the environmental impacts of ocean alkalinity enhancement,” he said. “There’s a lot of science still left to do to understand what are the trade offs here, between impact, safety, effectiveness [and] equitability.”
Whitley Saumweber, a clinical association professor of marine affairs at the University of Rhode Island, noted that even if research ultimately results in scientists determining a method is unsafe, it’s better to do that now. He noted that, as a planet, we are not “bending the curve” of carbon emissions fast enough. The more we collectively fail on that front, the more likely there will be pressure to launch geoengineering projects to alter the climate.
Already, that assumption is being built into climate plans. “Most [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] models now are sort of anticipating that we will somehow, in the future, be able to do massive amounts of carbon dioxide removal, even though it really there’s no carbon dioxide removal method that has been proven that can be safe and effective,” Day said.
But there’s a catch-22. Even as leading scientific bodies like the IPCC suggest that removing large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — something that Subhas’ technology could very well result in — may eventually be necessary, some fear that more attention invested in that work will diminish the urgency to slash greenhouse gas emissions.
“We feel like this is actually distracting from mitigation efforts,” said Day.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t study it though, he said in response to a question by Globe reporter Erin Douglas, who moderated the panel.
“But when we’re talking about ocean field work, in the open ocean, I think even small and medium-sized experiments can have impacts on local ecology,” he said. “We are concerned.”
Sabrina Shankman can be reached at sabrina.shankman@globe.com. Follow her @shankman.