Geoengineering at issue

After receiving a state award in the Kremlin this week, this country’s leading climate boffin Professor Yuri Israel asked President Medvedev for help in organizing and hosting the world’s first international conference on geoengineering technologies.      

 Eggheads in the field are proposing to tackle the unwelcome climate change, so evident in the Russian capital these weeks, by orbiting back-scattering mirrors, by crowding the upper atmosphere with white clouds  or by intensifying evaporation with the help of vast plantations of eucalypt trees. Professor Israel himself  is advocating a stratospheric layer of fine sulfur oxide smoke, which he believes could cool the Earth by two degrees.     

Other experts reject these quick fixes as too adventurous and fraught with catastrophic climatic imbalances. One warrior in this camp is Dr Alexei Kokorin, a climate scientist at the Russia office of the Worldwide Fund for Nature: Geoengineering solutions are gravely risky and can only ne accepted as a last resort, when a global catastrophe is at hand. In other situations, it would be wiser to treat the disease rather than symptoms of it  and consider, for instance, a half-century programme of curbing and cutting the greenhouse emissions that are largely responsible for global warming.

His opinion is shared by Dr Alexander Averchenkov, a senior climate adviser to the United Nations Environmental Programme: A geoengineering project may prove unfair in that it brings improvement to one place while sharply worsening conditions in another. Politically, economically, legally or even ethically, the family of nations is simply not ready for such things. They are a legitimate subject of scientific analysis, but by no means an avenue of practical action.

In the world as it is, international climate action must be focused on reducing the greenhouse emissions and on sequestering the carbon dioxide that is already in the Earth’s atmosphere.