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Climate engineering — why not just call it that?
By James Dacey
Ok, maybe I’m being a bit pedantic here but am I the only one to be slightly confused and a little concerned by the vagary of the term “geoengineering”?
I raise this question now because yesterday the UK’s most prestigious scientific academy, the Royal Society, released a major report on the topic with the aim of clarifying the technical issues to better-inform climate policy. Politicians, however, like things to be spelt out veeerry cleeaarrly. Therefore, any confusion surrounding the central term in this policy document could stall the debate on what may become a key component of the fight against climate change.
So, let’s consult the Chambers English Dictionary, which just happens to be the only dictionary within grabbing distance at the time of writing:
“Geo” is the prefix — taken from Greek — for “Earth”; and engineer means “to put to practical use, engines or machinery of any type”.
I think you’ll agree that both of these words hold a broad range of meanings and a combination of the two makes for a very wide semantic field indeed. Use your own imagination here but I can picture all sorts of ways in which the naked Earth could be engineered — from spectacular agricultural terraces like those in the Andes to the idea of a giant Eiffel Tower replica carved into the Antarctic ice.
The Royal Society report, however, gives a specific definition of geoengineering as the “deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change”.
The report reviews a range of proposals such as launching giant mirrors into interstellar space to reflect the Sun’s rays, or injecting iron into the world’s oceans to rapidly increase the amount of phytoplankton that consume carbon dioxide.
The point is that all of these geoengineering proposals are related to the climate — specifically, technological solutions to minimizing the effects of anthropogenic climate change. So why are we not calling this “climate engineering”? It’s certainly not perfect but it’s surely a closer fit to the definition.
It just seems like the Royal Society has missed a great opportunity to kick this vague, poorly-chosen term into touch once and for all.
Anyway, if you can think of a better term that more accurately fits the definition then please feel free to offer your suggestion.
This news article was discussed by my students, who are working on ideas for science fair projects. The overall consensus was that most of the ideas are either not practical because of their cost to value ratio, or they attempted to control greenhouse gasses by tampering with natural processes and chemical balances. Two things my students felt were far too risky to attempt, since tampering with these systems could lead to new climatic and ecological problems.
Re. Ecological Science Fair Projects, comment “tampering with these systems could lead to new climatic and ecological problems.”
I generally agree but I would say that the billions of tons of CO2 we’re pumping directly into the atmosphere is a detrimental form of ‘Geo’ or ‘Climate’ engineering (I prefer the latter term). Therefore a system that removes CO2 directly from the atmosphere, e.g. artificial trees, without involving other ecological elements, such as oceans, I believe would be highly unlikely to have and real adverse climatic effects, apart from possibly removing some perceived beneficial effects of climate change such as growing fresh veg’ in Greenland. Presumably such devices could also be readily turned off if we decided that too much CO2 was being removed, thus giving us some degree of climate control, although this could prove tricky politically.
The economics of such a scheme are another matter, but it is the cost of not doing something that is most important and also most difficult to assess.
Ok, maybe I’m being a bit pedantic also, but I don’t think ‘vagary’ is an appropriate word to use in this context either.
I agree that ‘geoengineering’ is a vague poorly-chosen term. Indeed I mentioned this point in a meeting last week where I said that ‘climate engineering’ was a more preferable term. I also pointed out that the term has been used for many years by the geological community where it has a quite different meaning – see the Online Geoengineering Library at http://www.geoengineer.org/onlinelibrary/.
A downfall in forming definitions is that it inherently puts limitations on the scope of the matter being discussed.
One has to simply attempt to try and find an answer to the question; “what is science?” for example. Needless to say on can expect to be met with endless semantic disagreement.
Nevertheless we love boundaries and definitions, they act as a type of guide leading us to desired outcomes. This has been my experience in my postgraduate engineering studies (Masters of Biomedical Engineering.
The Biomedical Engineering field is with these ambiguous definitions. I am consoled by the fact that these definitions (like all good science) tend to change as developments are made, to more accurately reflect the matter being examined.
Perhaps in this case it will simply be a matter of extra, research and progress in this field before a reasonable and more concise definition is put forward.