What if it is too late to save the climate by cutting greenhouse gas emissions? What if the amount of carbon dioxide already added to the atmosphere by human activity is so great that it is going to produce big temperature changes no matter what, with big shifts in rainfall and in ocean chemistry?
AmazonOptions remain, according to a new book, “Suck It Up,” by Marc Gunther, a journalist, blogger and speaker who specializes in energy and climate issues.
If it is too late for zero-carbon electricity generation like wind, solar and nuclear to save us, then we should be exploring radical next steps, he writes. Those include tinkering with the atmosphere by injecting tiny droplets that will reflect some of the sun’s energy back into space and scavenging for carbon dioxide in ambient air.
The idea of changing the reflectivity of the atmosphere is a form of so-called geoengineering, and it presents all sorts of novel problems. For one, once it has begun, it would presumably have to continue forever. Another is that countries could argue over how warm or cold they want the climate to be, like families on a long trip bickering over the temperature in the car.
Nature has shown that it could work, Mr. Gunther says, citing a global temperature drop in the early 1990s after Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines.
But atmospheric tinkering could have side effects like rainfall shifts that would create new groups of winners and losers. In fact, after such a program began, it might be blamed for all sorts of changes, with no definitive way of determining whether it was the geoengineering that really caused them.
Picking carbon dioxide molecules out of the air is another tricky idea, harder than picking the raisins out of Raisin Bran; carbon dioxide concentrations are in the hundreds of parts per million. It might be easier to harvest carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants, where carbon dioxide makes up about 12 percent of the gas, Mr. Gunther writes.
Factories that scavenged carbon dioxide could be located in sunny deserts, and the energy to run them could come from mirrors that concentrate the sun’s heat, he points out. If some of the solar energy were used to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, the carbon dioxide could be combined with the hydrogen to create new hydrocarbon liquids –- that is, motor fuel -– without drilling new oil out of the ground.
The question is whether sucking carbon out of the atmosphere makes any economic sense. His book traces the involvement of some very rich people, including Bill Gates, in exploring that idea.
Mr. Gunther and I have been friendly competitors for years. A blogger and editor at Fortune Magazine, he does not come down firmly on the side of either geoengineering or carbon capture from ambient air, but rather makes the sensible point that what we have tried so far, limiting carbon dioxide emissions, is not working very well.
“Suck it Up” is itself something of an experiment, a “Kindle single” available from Amazon for the Kindle or the PC, but not in print. (Mr. Gunther’s blog and Amazon’s store show pictures of a book cover, although there is no actual physical book — welcome to the morphing world of media.) At 17,000 words, it is longer than a long magazine article but shorter than an ordinary printed book. Its price — $1.99 — is also somewhere in between.
