Recently someone wrote asking, ” How does geoengineering factor in with your Climate Change beliefs?”

The Cornwall Alliance as a body hasn’t addressed this question, so what I say here is solely my own thinking.

The answer depends heavily on what one means by geoengineering. Humankind has been engineering the earth in many ways, small and large, for thousands of years: building dams, felling forests, planting crops, digging canals and aqueducts, draining swamps, irrigating deserts, building roads and cities and factories and homes and skyscrapers, and more. These sorts of geoengineering are, in principle, not objectionable, though of course the wisdom of doing one or another of them in a given place at a given time is always up for debate.

More recently, some efforts have been made to control weather (short-term and local) and even climate (long-term and regional or global), e.g., by seeding clouds to attempt to cause them to precipitate sooner than they otherwise would (something that largely failed). Some now suggest trying to offset the warming effect of added greenhouse gases by intentionally injecting aerosols (e.g., seawater) high into the atmosphere to reflect some sunlight, or putting thousands of mirrors into satellite orbit to reflect sunlight away from the earth. (A few have even suggested using nuclear explosions to change the course of hurricanes away from vulnerable, high-population-density areas, an idea that very few, of course, have embraced, and that one climate scientist friend of mine, whose Ph.D. was on hurricanes, says would be utterly ineffective, because the energy in a hurricane is thousands of times that in a nuclear explosion). Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, when many scientists predicted dangerous global cooling because of industrial emissions of aerosols, some suggested building many nuclear power plants along coastlines, so that water used to cool them would, when emitted into the sea, warm the oceans, offsetting the cooling.

These types of geoengineering are obviously far more controversial, largely because they would impose their effects on far more people without their consent, but also because their long-term effects on the planet and its ecosystems would be very difficult to discern until, perhaps, harm became irreversible. And of course, efforts to cool the earth, if unintentionally timed such that their effects coincided with a natural cooling (a good possibility for the next few decades because of reduced solar energy output in Solar Cycles 25 and 26), could bring about much more cooling, which could have serious negative impacts on human wellbeing as well as the rest of life on earth (as did, e.g., the Little Ice Age and, much worse, the period(s) of glacial maximum, or Ice Age(s)).

Granted God’s instruction to mankind in Genesis 1:28 to “subdue and rule” the earth (which didn’t just mean the land, but the whole planet) and everything in it (on land, in water, and in the sky—which implies that “the earth” earlier in the verse included the atmosphere as well as the oceans), I don’t assume that there’s something immoral, in principle, about attempting to control weather or even climate. (We already “control climate” in our buildings and cars.) But I do think, of course, that a great deal of prudence and humility, combined with excellent scientific and technical and economic understanding—much of it probably well beyond our present understanding—should go into decisions about any large-scale geoengineering.

And along with those should go careful attention to the “consent of the governed,” not adopting broad-scale, high-impact government policies contrary to the wishes of citizens. Since geoengineering on a global or continental scale would involve imposing results on people from more than a single country, it would be very difficult to justify it without a sure and effective way of ensuring the consent of the governed by some democratic means—and the farther the decision-making is from local, the harder it is to ensure that.

Consequently, count me generally very skeptical of regional to continental to global prescriptions for geoengineering—increasingly skeptical as the geographic scope of the activity and its consequences expands.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash.