James Lovelock on Geoengineering

I posted two days ago on a fascinating geoengineering session at the recent AGU meeting in San Francisco. I did not intend to maintain this thread, but friend Clay Cooper sent me an article that I thought worth sharing.

The article is by Dr. James Lovelock, shown here in Daisyworld, the scientist who first proposed the Gaia hypothesis. He weighed in on geoengineering in an article published last summer, "A geophysiologist's thoughts on geoengineering".

Download Lovelock - Geoengineering 

Here is the abstract:

The Earth is now recognized as a self-regulating system that includes a reactive biosphere; the system maintains a long-term steady-state climate and surface chemical composition favourable for life. We are perturbing the steady state by changing the land surface from mainly forests to farm land and by adding greenhouse gases and aerosol pollutants to the air. We appear to have exceeded the natural capacity to counter our perturbation and consequently the system is changing to a new and as yet unknown but probably adverse state. I suggest here that we regard Earth as a physiological system and consider amelioration techniques, geoengineering, as comparable to nineteenth century medicine.

Lovelock argues that we really don't know enough about the Earth to start fiddling with it on a planet-wide scale to mitigate the effects of global warming. He also cautions against placing too much reliance on geophysics.

Among other things, he suggests that if we used stratospheric aerosols to ameliorate global warming, that "fix" would eventually lead to increased ocean acidification, for which we would need another medicine, and so on. We might have to undertake the "onerous permanent task of keeping the Earth in homeostasis. "

Not a pretty sight.

"We could find ourselves enslaved in a Kafka-like world from which there is no escape." -- James Lovelock

Comments

[Bill Konrad]

A voice of reason and intelligence in a world that claims the sky is falling.

Thank you Prof. Lovelock

[David Zetland]

If you thought the USSR was a success, then you will LOVE geoengineering /sarcasm...