Geoengineering Volume - Nick and Tess by NickAgiotis123

geoengineering beauty in deliberation

GEOENGINEERING

VOLUME

the of

mark the

ANTHROPOCENE

a book on Climate framed through Ethical Discourse

CURATORS

Nicholas Agiotis Qiuhan Yang

Timeline of historical relations

Entanglements

Statement of Intention

Human and morethan-human

Facing Collective Truths

Star Chamber in Ethics

Ethical concerns

Geoengineering as a concern of Politics

147

Art and interpretations of the Anthropocene

184

Ecological and environmental design

199

The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report concludes it is more than 90% likely that humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible for modern-day climate change.

Human population reaches six billion.

‘Cataclysmic’ Eruption of Mount Pinatubo Hansen’s group researched and proved the cooling effects of sulphates using computer studies and utilising the explosion of Mexican volcano El Chichnón in 1982. The first calculation that many experts accepted as reasonably accurate gave a year-in, yearout global cooling effect of 2-3°C (roughly 4-5°F).

1981

the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established under the United Nations to provide a scientific view of climate change and its political and economic impacts.

1989

1991

1999

2007

Earth Future 2021+

Regenerative design. Integration between ecology and humanity. Cultural change. Human

population predicted

to reach over eight billion

Human population reaches seven billion.

2011

2013

2008

Four hours before the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Beijing, Chinese authorities launch more than 1,000 rockets containing silver iodide into the sky outside the city to keep rain clouds away from the “Bird’s Nest” stadium. A storm that was forecast to hit on Aug. 8 holds off until the 10th, keeping the crowd of 91,000 dry for the evening’s pageantry.

2023

2013-2015 the IPCC announced that it is now “extremely likely [95% confidence] that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”

The SPICE field experiments took place between 2013 and 2015, with a preparatory stage during the winter of 2012/13.

entanglements

glements

Beyond Anthropocene Beyond thethe Anthropocene Blinded by ambition

WHOWHO AR

TRADITIONAL MITIGATION METHODS TRADITIONAL MITIGATION METHODS

Casuse and effect

CULTURE AND ETHICS CULTURE AND ETHICS Long term reprecussions

geoengin

TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT

REARE WE WE

Lack of development due to State issues

GEOPOLITICS GEOPOLITICS International Relations

entanglements

neering

DESIGNING FOR A BETTER FUTURE DESIGNING FOR A BETTER FUTURE

INTENTION

STATEMENT

Geoengineering is typically critiqued as a problematic method of combating climate change where most mainstream western understandings tend to fail in considering the situation that it may become the only effective solution. We frame our learnings into geoengineering by proposing resources that take into account the catastrophic trajectory Earth is following to propose that current mitigation methods may become questionable, effectiveness seems futile as time to make effective change is scarce. Thus, our volume interrogated an array of geoengineering approaches to consider sources that suggest geoengineering–if considered within a whole systems analysis and on smaller scales–may become a feasible proposal. Nevertheless, our volume still maintains exploration of discourse that acknowledges the unpredictability and challenges that geoengineering technologies–if not researched comprehensively or applied carefully–may pose. Through careful deliberation we aim to epitomise cultural-ethical concerns towards modern climate intervention and offer a logically curated collection of resources which calibrate multidimensional discourse. Our research began with a deep understanding of one text which framed geoengineering from an ethics standpoint, igniting thoughts about new ideas such that considered the role of humans in the Earth systems, the cogitation of religious deontological paradigms, where the question of playing god in climate intervention arises, and how art and design can arouse

interconnectivity between human and more-than-human agencies.

Texts such as Lowell Pritchard’s “Gambling with Global Warming,” which attempts to mediate the interests of global economies and the urgency to respond to climate change explores one standpoint regarding the ethics of geoengineering. In a different light, Donna Haraway’s “Staying with the trouble” approaches the ethics of the Anthropocene through a philosophy of humanism. Through texts as such, we aim to develop an understanding of the facets of ethics of geoengineering. The various facets of ethics concerning geoengineering also become a question of politics. Ethics and politics interact and outcomes risk conflict between governments. More specifically, geoengineering when conducted unilaterally suggests that other governments may be forced to deal with the consequences if the adverse outcomes have been insufficiently researched ¹. Moreover, geoengineering may evolve ultimately to a matter of warfare along with other potential political conflicts and thus, conducting ‘correct’ geoengineering requires immense research into all of the dimensions it concerns. So in order to deliberate this matter thoroughly we studied all aspects of philosophical ethical dilemmas, including those which may be controversial such as Stephen Gardiner’s opinion of ‘moral schizophrenia’ amongst bureaucratic agencies. As a result, we have addressed the issue of ethical-shortsightedness evident in most mainstream studies of climate engineering, by taking into account the importance of emotional and moral reflection throughout the public domain. This is what led us to conclude that art and design have an important

1 Unilateral - (of action or decision) performed by or affecting only one person, group or country involved in a situation without the agreement of another or the others. -Oxford Languages Definition

embody

Designing for the future will also need to be an imperative mindset architects alike should adopt, due to the fact that buildings and landscapes bear the same role as art in its capacity to inspire reflection, we stress the importance of this perspective in order to create a more meaningful connection between humans and their environment. As we continue to evolve culturally, landscape design should draw focus to ecological health whilst retaining its natural aesthetic beauty and also be able to provide practical value. Now more than ever, designers ought to consider the environment’s desires and plan accordingly, so as to emphasise the importance of these surroundings to the future generations.

a change in cultural values along with more effective and well-founded methods of mitigation, may be able to prevent climate catastrophe.

Although many of these considerations have not been adopted by the human collective, we do acknowledge the more than grim future that awaits. Geoengineering ideas are not all unethical and immoral, however it is a practice which has to be intensely researched and implemented

STATEMENT

societal

role to play within our contemporary world.Art has the ability to values through time,it does not need academic interpretation or a profound knowledge in the relevant field, all it requires is a passionate response drawn from the individual’s imagination and the ability to draw meaning from that interpretation. Such cultural reflections can be extremely effective in helping society decide what is morally virtuous especially when global matters like Geoengineering is concerned, allowing for a deeper understanding of its implications.

with caution. We remain hopeful that On the other hand, geoengineering, in the right form, may be the only feasible option if other alternatives are not enough and we absolutely need to act on climate change. Is it worth risking some of these backfiring impacts in the face of climate devastation? Or does this bring us back to a question of morality again?

‘What are a tree’s interests? A puffin’s needs? What does a waterfall want? And what, in a world defined by humans and our tenacious belief in human exceptionalism, are their nonhuman rights? It is urgent to ask such questions, since the climate crisis affects everything on the planet – humans, animals, plants, and inanimate objects. We must attempt to dissolve the boundaries of our individual existences and recognise our many entanglements with all living and nonliving entities. In doing so, we can forge a collective space to explore sustainable, more-than-human futures – a space for Future Assemblies.’ – Olafur Eliasson

INTENTION

This is an answer no one can give us, however we can all be influenced by our surroundings and the cultural identity of humankind.

HUMAN

AND

THAN

human and more-than-human

HUMAN

“Alone, in our separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both too much and too little, and so we succumb to despair or to hope, and neither is a sensible attitude.” -Donna Haraway

The

In the wake of the IPCC Climate Report published in August, 2021. Scientists have warned us of the grim trajectory Earth is facing in what can be considered to be the third stage of the Anthropcene. overwhelming fear of an ambiguous future hover over the heads of policy makers and a number of communities in the general population, leading some to consider the deployment of technological climate engineering methods. In order to fully understand and consider the possible implications of Geoengineering, we argue that the Anthropocene epoch has to be fully recognised and the impact of human socio economics and industrial patterns will require reflection moving forward. Since the beginning of the Industrial revolution, Earth has been undermined and exploited as a means for survival and economic progress, the continuation of this excess consumption is leading to a global tipping point beyond prediction. Society is at a point now where these problems have been recognised by leaders but only through an overtly simplistic lens, even undermining the moral righteousness of the community. We pose several recommendations on the basis of our researchTo comprehend deep time and histories of the environment, not within a single timeline but as a dynamic relationship between the host and its inhabitants.

Implicate cultural change collectively, each inhabitant taking responsibility for their actions. Recognising the material way in which humans have come to view the world, thus: Changing societal perspectives of human and the more-than-human. Acknowledging the deep interconnectedness each has on the other and bridging the gap of social hierarchy which has been ingrained in some contemporary cultures.

Deliberate global endeavours without ethical shortsightedness, taking into account the security and survival of future human/morethan-human matters. To make it clear, we are not arguing for or against Geoengineering practices, in fact we believe there are aspects of projects which could play an important role in securing the future of ‘the world of living things’. However, it is important that ALL ethical and moral concerns are carefully reflected before any attempts are made.

Unfortunately, we do not think our species is there yet.

Staying with the trouble, introduction

Donna Haraway

Donna Haraway perfectly externalised values which have been overlooked in the mainstream, building on the idea of more-than-human entities and how humans can use the ideas posited by Haraway to enrich their individual belief set. By acknowledging the present and taking “response-ability” for the ongoing environmental issues as a collective, humankind can then offer complex responses to complex problems.

They make and unmake; they are m

“The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present.”

Trouble is an interesting word. It derives from a thirteenth-century French verb meaning “to stir up,” “to make cloudy,” “to disturb.” We—all of us on Terra— live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response. Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy—with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence. The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings. Chthulucene is a simple word.2 It is a compound of two Greek roots (khthôn and kainos) that together name a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth. Kainos means now, a time of beginnings, a time for ongoing, for freshness. Nothing in kainos must mean conventional pasts, presents, or futures. There is nothing in times of beginnings that insists on wiping out what has come before, or, indeed, wiping out what comes after. Kainos can be full of inheritances, of remembering, and full of comings, of nurturing what might still be. I hear kainos in the sense of thick, ongoing presence, with hyphae infusing all sorts of temporalities and materialities. Chthonic ones are beings of the earth, both ancient and up-to-the- minute. I imagine chthonic ones as replete with tentacles, feelers, dig- its, cords, whiptails, spider legs, and very unruly hair. Chthonic ones romp in multicritter humus but have no truck with sky-gazing Homo. Chthonic ones are monsters in the best sense; they demonstrate and perform the material meaningfulness of earth processes and critters. They also demonstrate and perform consequences. Chthonic ones are not safe; they have no truck with ideologues; they belong to no one; they writhe and luxuriate in manifold forms and manifold names in all the airs, waters, and places of earth. They make and unmake; they are made and unmade. They are who are. No wonder the world’s great monotheisms in both religious and secular guises have tried again and again to exterminate the chthonic ones. The scandals of times called the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene are the latest and most dangerous of these exterminating forces. Living-with and dying-with each other potently in the Chthulucene can be a fierce reply to the dictates of both Anthropos and Capital. Kin is a wild category that all sorts of people do their best to domesticate. Making kin as oddkin rather than, or at least in addition to, godkin and genealogical and biogenetic family troubles important matters, like to whom one is actually responsible. Who lives and who dies, and how, in this kinship rather than that one? What shape is this kinship, where and whom do its lines

made and unmade. They are who are.

connect and disconnect, and so what? What must be cut and what must be tied if multispecies flourishing on earth, including human and other-than-human beings in kinship, are to have a chance? An ubiquitous figure in this book is sf: science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far. This reiterated list whirls and loops throughout the coming pages, in words and in visual pictures, braiding me and my readers into beings and patterns at stake. Science fact and speculative fabulation need each other, and both need speculative feminism. I think of sf and string figures in a triple sense of figuring. First, promiscuously plucking out fibers in clot- ted and dense events and practices, I try to follow the threads where they lead in order to track them and find their tangles and patterns crucial for staying with the trouble in real and particular places and times. In that sense, sf is a method of tracing, of following a thread in the dark, in a dangerous true tale of adventure, where who lives and who dies and how might become clearer for the cultivating of multispecies justice. Second, the string figure is not the tracking, but rather the actual thing, the pattern and assembly that solicits response, the thing that is not oneself but with which one must go on. Third, string figuring is passing on and receiving, making and unmaking, picking up threads and dropping them. sf is practice and process; it is becoming-with each other in surprising relays; it is a figure for ongoingness in the Chthulucene. The book and the idea of “staying with the trouble” are especially impatient with two responses that I hear all too frequently to the horrors of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. The first is easy to describe and, I think, dismiss, namely, a comic faith in technofixes, whether secular or religious: technology will somehow come to the rescue of its naughty but very clever children, or what amounts to the same thing, God will come to the rescue of his disobedient but ever hopeful children. In the face of such touching silliness about technofixes (or techno-apocalypses), sometimes it is hard to remember that it remains important to embrace situated technical projects and their people. They are not the enemy; they can do many important things for staying with the trouble and for making generative oddkin. The second response, harder to dismiss, is probably even more destructive: namely, a position that the game is over, it’s too late, there’s no sense trying to make anything any better, or at least no sense having any active trust in each other in working and playing for a resurgent world. Some scientists I know express this kind of bitter cynicism, even as they actually work very hard to make a positive difference for both people and other critters. Some people who describe themselves as critical cultural theorists or political progressives express these ideas too. I think the odd coupling of actually working and playing for multispecies flourishing with tenacious energy and skill, while expressing an explicit “game over” attitude that can and does discourage others, including students, is facilitated by various kinds of futurisms. One kind seems to imagine that only if things work do they matter—or, worse, only if what I and my fellow experts do works to fix things does anything matter. More generously, sometimes scientists and others who think, read, study, agitate, and care know too much, and it is too heavy. Or, at least we think we know enough to reach the conclusion that life on earth that includes human people in any tolerable way really is over, that the apocalypse really is nigh.

multispecies justice

“A gameover attitude imposes itself in the galeforce winds of feeling”

That attitude makes a great deal of sense in the midst of the earth’s sixth great extinction event and in the midst of engulfing wars, extractions, and immiserations of billions of people and other critters for something called “profit” or “power”—or, for that matter, called “God.” A game-over attitude imposes itself in the gale-force winds of feeling, not just knowing, that human numbers are almost certain to reach more than 11 billion people by 2100. This figure represents a 9-billion-person increase over 150 years from 1950 to 2100, with vastly unequal consequences for the poor and the rich—not to mention vastly unequal burdens imposed on the earth by the rich compared to the poor—and even worse consequences for nonhumans almost everywhere. There are many other examples of dire realities; the Great Accelerations of the post–World War II era gouge their marks in earth’s rocks, waters, airs, and critters. There is a fine line between acknowledging the extent and seriousness of the troubles and succumbing to abstract futurism and its affects of sublime despair and its politics of sublime indifference. This book argues and tries to perform that, eschewing futurism, staying with the trouble is both more serious and more lively. Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all. That kind of material semiotics is always situated, someplace and not noplace, entangled and worldly. Alone, in our separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both too much and too little, and so we succumb to despair or to hope, and neither is a sensible attitude. Neither despair nor hope is tuned to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick co-presence. Neither hope nor despair knows how to teach us to “play string figures with companion species,” the title of the first chapter of this book. Three long chapters open Staying with the Trouble. Each chapter tracks stories and figures for making kin in the Chthulucene in order to cutthe bonds of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. Pigeons in all their worldly diversity—from creatures of empire, to working men’s racing birds, to spies in war, to scientific research partners, to collaborators in art activisms on three continents, to urban companions and pests—are the guides in chapter 1. In their homely histories, pigeons lead into a practice of “tentacular thinking,” the title of the second chapter. Here, I expand the argument that bounded individualism in its many flavors in science, politics, and philosophy has finally become unavailable to think with, truly no longer thinkable, technically or any other way. Sympoiesis—making-with—is a keyword throughout the chapter, as I explore the gifts for needed thinking offered by theorists and storytellers. My partners in science studies, anthropology, and storytelling—Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Thom van Dooren, Anna Tsing, Marilyn Strathern, Hannah Arendt, Ursula Le Guin, and others—are my companions throughout tentacular thinking. With their help, I introduce the three timescapes of the book: the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, and the Chthulucene. Allied with the Pacific day octopus, Medusa, the only mortal Gorgon, figured as the Mistress of the Animals, saves the day and ends the chapter. “Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble,” chapter 3, spins out the threads of sympoiesis in ecological evolutionary developmental biology and in art/science activisms committed to four iconic troubled places:

coral reef holobiomes, Black Mesa coal country in Navajo and Hopi lands and other fossil fuel extraction zones impacting especially ferociously on indigenous peoples, complex lemur forest habitats in Madagascar, and North American circumpolar lands and seas subject to new and old colonialisms in the grip of rapidly melting ice. This chapter makes string figures with the threads of reciprocating energies of biologies, arts, and activisms for multispecies resurgence. Navajo-Churro sheep, orchids, extinct bees, lemurs, jellyfish, coral polyps, seals, and microbes play leading roles with their artists, biologists, and activists throughout the chapter. Here and throughout the book, the sustaining creativity of people who care and act animates the action. Not surprisingly, contemporary indigenous people and peoples, in conflict and collaboration with many sorts of partners, make a sensible difference. Biologists, beginning with the incomparable Lynn Margulis, infuse the thinking and playing of this chapter. “Making Kin,” chapter 4, is both a reprise of the timescapes of Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Chthulucene, and a plea to “Make Kin”, “Not Babies.” Antiracist, anticolonial, anticapitalist, proqueer feminists of every color and from every people have long been leaders in the movement for sexual and reproductive freedom and rights, with particular attention to the violence of reproductive and sexual orders for poor and marginalized people. Feminists have been leaders in arguing that sexual and reproductive freedom means being able to bring children, whether one’s own or those of others, to robust adulthood in health and safety in intact communities. Feminists have also been historically unique in insisting on the power and right of every woman, young or old, to choose not to have a child. Cognizant of how easily such a position repeats the arrogances of imperialism, feminists of my persuasion insist that motherhood is not the telos of women and that a woman’s reproductive freedom trumps the demands of patriarchy or any other system. Food, jobs, housing, education, the possibility of travel, community, peace, control of one’s body and one’s intimacies, health care, usable and woman-friendly contraception, the last word on whether or not a child will be born, joy: these and more are sexual and reproductive rights. Their absence around the world is stunning. For excellent reasons, the feminists I know have resisted the languages and policies of population control because they demonstrably often have the interests of biopolitical states more in view than the well-being of women and their people, old and young. Resulting scandals in population control practices are not hard to find. But, in my experience, feminists, including science studies and anthropological feminists, have not been willing seriously to address the Great Acceleration of human numbers, fearing that to do so would be to slide once again into the muck of racism, classism, nationalism, modernism, and imperialism.

“Feminists have also been historically unique in insisting on the power and right of every woman, young or old, to choose not to have a child.”

But that fear is not good enough. Avoidance of the urgency of almost incomprehensible increases in human numbers since 1950 can slip into something akin to the way some Christians avoid the urgency of climate change because it touches too closely on the marrow of one’s faith. How to address the urgency is the question that must burn for staying with the trouble. What is decolonial feminist reproductive freedom in a dangerously

nonhierarchical systems troubled multispecies world? It cannot be just a humanist affair, no matter how

“Feminists have also been historically unique in insisting on the power and right of every woman, young or old, to choose not to have a child.”

anti-imperialist, antiracist, anticlassist, and pro-woman. It also cannot be a “futurist” affair, attending mainly to abstract numbers and big data, but not to the differentiated and layered lives and deaths of actual people. Still, a 9 billion increase of human beings over 150 years, to a level of 11 billion by 2100 if we are lucky, is not just a number; and it cannot be explained away by blaming Capitalism or any other word starting with a capital letter. The need is stark to think together anew across differences of historical position and of kinds of knowledge and expertise. “Awash in Urine,” chapter 5, begins with personal and intimate relations, luxuriating in the consequences of following estrogens that connect an aging woman and her elder dog, specifically, me and my companion and research associate Cayenne. Before the threads of the string figure have been tracked far, remembering their cyborg littermates, woman and dog find themselves in histories of veterinary research, Big Pharma, horse farming for estrogen, zoos, des feminist activism, interrelated animal rights and women’s health actions, and much more. Intensely inhabiting specific bodies and places as the means to cultivate the capacity to respond to worldly urgencies with each other is the core theme. Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and ants and acacia seeds populate chapter 6, “Sowing Worlds.” The task is to tell an sf adventure story with acacias and their associates as the protagonists. It turns out that Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of narrative comes to the rescue, along with biologist Deborah Gordon’s theories about ant interactions and colony behavior, to elaborate the possibilities of ecological evolutionary developmental biology and nonhierarchical systems theories for shaping the best stories. Science fiction and science fact cohabit happily in this tale. With Le Guin as their scribe, the prose of acacia seeds and the lyrics of lichens give way to the mute poetics of rocks in the final passages. “A Curious Practice,” chapter 7, draws close to the philosopher, psychologist, animal-human student, and cultural theorist Vinciane Despret because of her incomparable ability to think-with other beings, human or not. Despret’s work on attunement and on critters rendering each other capable of unexpected feats in actual encounters is necessary to staying with the trouble. She attends not to what critters are supposed to be able to do, by nature or education, but to what beings evoke from and with each other that was truly not there before, in nature or culture. Her kind of thinking enlarges the capacities of all the players; that is her worlding practice. The urgencies of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Chthulucene demand that kind of thinking beyond inherited categories and capacities, in homely and concrete ways, like the sorts of things Arabian babblers and their scientists get up to in the Negev desert. Despret teaches how to be curious, as well as how to mourn by bringing the dead into active presence; and I needed her touch before writing the concluding stories of Staying with the Trouble. Her curious practice prepared me to write about the Communities of Compost and the tasks of speakers for the dead, as they work for earthly multispecies recuperation and resurgence. “The Camille Stories: Children of Compost” closes this book. This invitation to a collective speculative fabulation follows five generations of a symbiogenetic join of a human child and monarch butterflies along the many lines and nodes

of these insects’ migrations between Mexico and the United States and Canada. These lines trace socialities and materialities crucial to living and dying with critters on the edge of disappearance so that they might go on. Committed to nurturing capacities to respond, cultivating ways to render each other capable, the Communities of Compost appeared all over the world in the early twenty-first century on ruined lands and waters. These communities committed to help radically reduce human numbers over a few hundred years while developing practices of multispecies environmental justice of myriad kinds. Every new child had at least three human parents; and the pregnant parent exercised reproductive freedom in the choice of an animal symbiont for the child, a choice that ramified across the generations of all the species. The relations of symbiogenetic people and unjoined humans brought many surprises, some of them deadly, but perhaps the deepest surprises emerged from the relations of the living and the dead, in symanimagenic complexity, across the holobiomes of earth. Lots of trouble, lots of kin to be going on with.”

“The urgencies of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Chthulucene demand that kind of thinking beyond inherited categories and capacities, in homely and concrete ways, like the sorts of things Arabian babblers and their scientists get up to in the Negev desert”

“

As Donna Haraway reminds us, to be a one, you must be a many. Future Assembly will need to recognize our status as assemblies, from the microbial gut-brain to the human dependence on the hospitality of our shared planet. Just as we give standing to the fictive entities of corporations and the protected entity of the human child, can we not give standing to the life forms on which we humans are utterly dependent? Oceanic phytoplankton that make our atmospheres; arboreal canopies that breathe in our CO2; the mycorrhizae that knit soil together – I voice them and give them standing. With Future Assembly, we’re constructing a place for kinship with the fellow companions who sustain our planet as habitable for all these unlikely energy forms that are alive – mineral, animal, microbial, photosynthesizing giant. These entities need protocols of respect and relation by which we account for the more-than-human that makes life

”

possible. -Caroline A. Jones

Mud- All world, all times. Introduction to Textures of the Anthropocene, Grain, Vapor, Ray Katrin Klingan, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol and Bernd M. Scherer

The introduction to ‘Textures of the Anthropocene’ conceives a new meaning to what it is to be human in the contemporary world highlighting not only nature- culture connections but the multidimensional concepts needed to understand that

Textures; grain, vapour and ray alludes to the geographical layers as well as the complex kinship between humans, their environment and the role each element play within the milieu. being in the Anthropocene is amongst others.

Therefore it is important to consider how nonhuman matters will be affected before mass geoegineering strategies are implemented.

Oracle

“The Anthropocene as aesthetic project.”

A declared state. The Anthropocene, the age of man. Mars rising—order and imagination, war and change. 1943—some words by Vladimir Vernadsky on the noösphere. Bergsonism. The angel of history. Pythia, Oracle of Delphi. The eidolon. Mundus patet (I): gap, rupture. The Earth as “agent.” What do geologists hear when they listen to the Earth? Anthropogenic impact, a brief overview. The angel of flux. This is a history of imagination. Hannah Arendt and the stature of man. Gregory Bateson and the cosmic crocodile. Kakosmos. The importance of storytelling. The Anthropocene is a situation (John Dewey). Being-in-the-world. The principle of flux. TRANS-science. Finally, human? Earth The empirical sciences. Michel Serres. Tinkering with flux. Matter and information. 2011, Japan—the Tohoku earthquake. “Jinji discontinuity.” In-between. Earth transits. Again, storytelling—we are proposing a method. Generating practices. What is the stratigraphic basis for the Anthropocene? Atlas, textures. What a mess! Introducing mud—a material description. Speculative Earth science. More mud—problems of scale and boundary. Figures of transition, TRANS-forms. Fluid processes. Creature An un-form. Odradek. First World War. Mundus patet (II): the open trenches. Mud—distorted, def igured, an entity. A Baroque interlude: Walter Benjamin and the Trauerspiel. Ephemera, the ruin. Natural history. The language of things. Noise. Animated mud: the Golem. The name and magic. Mud as fundament. The Anthropocene and today: catastrophe everywhere. What is wrong with our world? Saturn returns. The Middle Ages and melancholy: Johan Huizinga. Homo ludens—man the player, playing man. Poeisis. Our common sense, a sensible education. Freedom. Gaia Science, eternal return. Remembrance. The Anthropocene as aesthetic project. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Earth

“We are changing paradigm.”

The empirical sciences precede. Michel Serres writes in his Biogea: We are changing paradigm. In a different way more difficult, subtle and complete, the life and Earth sciences, henceforth put in the centre of cognition, take over. They practice a more sharing, open, connected way of knowing, in which he who knows participates in the things he knows, is even reborn from them, tries to speak their language, listens to their voices, respects their habitat, lives the same evolutionary history, is enchanted by their narratives, limits finally, through them or for them, his power and his politics […]. The life and Earth sciences are once again sewing together the tear that was separating the

subject and its objects. Dare I say they become human from it? Yes.35 By extension, there is also no need to be afraid of the empirical scientists’ use of computer simulations and information science, as these are the astounding means by which to tinker with the flux and let it speak. Perfecting the arts of modelling, of weaving together myriad lines of codes with different computer languages, the computational geosciences are the ones that heuristically construct and deconstruct the flows that constitute the Earth, integrating and “integrating over” the flowing grains of eroded dust, the vapours of the sea, and the radiation balances within the atmosphere. Whether the circulation of the winds and seawaters, or the cycling of substances through the spheres—the oxygen, carbon, water, and nitrogen cycles—or the emergence and decay of life, the Earth and life sciences give a first approximation to the kakosmos at hand. In fact, these fields are those that have the guts to sew together matter and information. Dare we say that they possess an ontological reason for this? The history of imagination, a fluid entity itself, does not pay attention to our modern horror of contamination between the two realms: matter and information. Knowledge has always been a way to simulate, to find the mediatic analogue, the fine-haired lines, and delicately strewn dots, to articulate words with which one may argue. No need to deny the Earth sciences anything less. To allow such a homogenisation of categories to take place abjures that old dispute about whether a “representation of the real” can or cannot take place. Instead, it is the entanglement of the knowing subject with matter itself, for matter knows too. Ruptures, both systemic and historical, allow us to grasp textures. The 2011 Tohoku earthquake, along the active fault zone off the coast of northeast Japan, and the deadly tsunami that ensued are a good case in point. The catastrophic calamity brought about as the Earth!—roaring, gushing, tremoring—unleashed its forces resulted in the devastation of entire coastal regions, the dispersion of pollutants across land and sea, dwellings and refineries in flames, and, eventually, the reverberating disturbances of ground and water accumulated in the meltdown of three nuclear reactors. The entire event went down as the costliest disaster in world history. An inelastic deformation along the Pacific Ring of Fire caused a sudden release of strain energy. Due to the lubrication of clay sediments sitting atop the Pacific plate,36 the tectonic plate slid and flowed 30–50 meters under the plate beneath Honshu!—!the largest fault slip ever recorded. As a result, the earthquake moved the main island of Honshu a few meters farther east, toward North America. Tremor and tsunami also prompted Japanese geologists to focus on what they have named “Jinji unconformity,” or “Jinji discontinuity.”37 The Japanese word is a combination of two Kanji characters— “Jin” meaning “human,” and “Ji” meaning “natural”—and hence the term refers to the stratigraphic boundary that separates the sedimentary layers of dominantly man-made deposits from geologically formed strata. It is another term apt to define the base layer of the Anthropocene, one of many that are under discussion in defining the start of “our” age.3⁸ For Japanese geologists it is also an immediate concern: “Understanding the configuration of boundaries is crucial

“The history of imagination, a fluid entity itself, does not pay attention to our modern horror of contamination between the two realms: matter and information.”

because liquid and gaseous pollutants often migrate along or come to rest on them.”39 Still, isn’t the Jinji discontinuity a boundary between two zones of imagination, two imagined grounds, one geological and the other artificial? Will such a boundary ever achieve consolidation? Where should one distinguish between “nature” and “culture” so that we may delineate an orderly transition from one age to another?

“Matter and matters intertwine.”

An earthquake is not just shaking rock, a tsunami not simply a solitary wave of seawater. Along with it comes a range of other motions: redistribution of mass and sedimentary load, surging groundwater, liquefied soils, boiling sands, as well as, by extension, dislocated ecologies, collapsing infrastructures, and, as is clear in the case of the Japanese geologists,also epistemic readjustments. A t ectonic rupture affects a massive flow of materials and metrics. Matter and matters intertwine. Active faults and plate-shifts do not discriminate between epistemology and materiality; the resulting rupture is a recomposition of agencies, in this case a reminder that the Earth is an actor. “The problem,” writes Latour, “becomes for all of us in philosophy, science, or literature, how do we tell such a story.” Indeed, the ordering of events and the naming of the catastrophe significantly vary according to which historical methodology one employs. A social historian will focus on different criteria than a geologist will for that matter. An earthquake helps us storytellers address how narratives around happenings in time unfold: on the one hand, the sequence of events can be chained together to examine the relations of cause and effect, a method that informs many of the decisions and actions taken by sociopolitical agents, from emergency-aid task forces to environmental management. On the other hand, the event might also be seen as a matrix where many phenomena aggregate, from plate tectonics to offshore drilling, a kind of composite image whereby discontinuous elements relate to one another, but may not necessarily bear causal relations. And these imaginary narratives generate modes whereby a story may be told; or rather, they allow for stories to generate specific practices. Mutability and transformation are all there is, and our stories, seen as a history of imagination, account for this. There is no distinction of value between one and the other, between a sovereign species and a world of objects, subject to its will, detached from the immediacy of being-in-the-world. In 1963, responding to the recent inauguration of the Space Age, and all the dreams of life-beyondEarth it had stirred within the public imagination, Hannah Arendt would argue that humanity is inconceivable without its terrestrial habitus. She would argue further that even modern science, claiming “objectivity,” whereby the senses have all but been denied from its practitioners’ inquiries, forcibly detached from scientists’ lives as earthlings, is itself the result of worldly entanglement. No matter how much it may wish for an idealized Archimedean point, a vantage point completely outside the body, sensation, and abode, science is worldly. All thought—from the layman’s musings, the poet’s song, and the physicist’s discovery—is bound to its environment, Arendt posited: “All of this makes it more unlikely every day that man will encounter anything in the world around him that is not man-made and hence is not, in the last analysis, he himself in a different guise.”2⁰ In the introduction to his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind,

published in 1972, anthropologist Gregory Bateson considers the problem of “origin” within fundamentally diametric cosmological imaginaries, specifically revealing not only the historian’s methodological problem of narrative composition, but also the general tendency in modern science to insist on an overarching ordering principle. Taking the Book of Genesis as one example, Bateson writes “the passage deals at length with the problem of the origin of order,” while “the problem of the origin and nature of matter is summarily dismissed” in the text’s seeming disinterest in the material status of entities such as “heaven,” “earth,” “water,” “light,” and “darkness.” Hence, a separation is being made between order on the one hand, which is fixed, stable, and predictable in placement, and matter on the other, which is flowing, dynamic, and ongoing in its movement. With man as the summation of divine creation, the story finds its conclusion in the human task of naming, rounding out the mystery of political order in the physical kingdom through a “natural” process of sorting, dividing, placing, and, finally, classifying. As if God were the first Linnaeus!21 As a cultural counterpoint, Bateson refers to the creation narrative of the Iatmul tribe in New Guinea among whom he carried out extensive fieldwork. The legend goes that, in the beginning, a cosmic crocodile paddled through a muddy sea; the constant movement of his legs kept the mud suspended in the water. One day, the great hero Kevembuangga came along with his spear and killed the cosmic crocodile. As a result, the constant intermingling of earth and sea came to an end, and the mud, compacting into a mass, dried out and formed the land. For Bateson, the conception of “order” in Genesis invokes a “cosmos” through a notion of agency based on mastery over matter. In the Iatmul tale, order appears as an unintentional consequence within inherently dynamic processes, that is, through a disorderly entanglement corresponding with what Bruno Latour has termed a kakosmos, an order based on inherent disorder.22 ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Everything is constituted by a principle of flux. The pathways that enable the flow of particles and substances, the processes that transport, transform, and apply energy, have altered to an unrecognizable degree. We have penetrated the inner workings of the planet’s metabolism, dissolving the limits between inside and outside. Energies dissipate, land - scapes melt together, and the history of the Earth is set in transit, accelerated, forced to endure us. In order to make the Anthropocene “firm,” to ground it in its material, cultural, and technical substances, it seems necessary to approach it via its textures and mediations: as fluid stuff, circulating, sedimenting, leaking, crystallizing, diffusing, melting, and petrifying. As soon as we settle into a state we are shaken out of it again, excited, perturbed, agitated, toward a movement that reorganizes itself. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// In this highly unstable moment of planetary transition, is our transformation that of everyone, everywhere, everything? Does this transient situation propose a “TRANS-science,” that is, a yet-to-be articulated science of the future that cuts across all the sciences, technologies,

and epistemological cultures at hand? Or is it a “trans-cience,” as opposed to “conscience,” which is the capacity to evaluate and make judgments that penetrate against the grain; the ability to implement diagonal intentions, the cultivation of states of consciousness that occupy the in-between, or even the promise of some collective, ethical entanglement that leaves no singularity, no solitude, no objective removal from the situation in which we mere humans find ourselves. Is the Anthropocene a call for aesthesis? Yes, a “sensible education!”33 In order to render ourselves sensitive to something that has no scale, we must cultivate our capacities for perception, or rather “render ourselves sensitive, a capacity that precedes any distinction between the instruments of science, art, and politics.”3⁴

“What are we becoming? Finally, human?”

“Active faults and plate-shifts do not discriminate between epistemology and materiality; the resulting rupture is a recomposition of agencies, in this case a reminder that the Earth is an actor.”

MATERIALISM A SCULPTURE ON REVERSED ENGINEERING Studio Drift

This exhibition by Studio Drift communicates the reliance humankind have on raw resources dominant throughout daily life. These materials are an implication to all in modern society, not just the political agencies who seek control over them and by physically embodying these values, it allows for community reflection based on the actions they undertake and choic-

Raising awareness in the hopes that everyone can become a custodian of the future.

es they make.

“Materialism is an ongoing research project in which the artists explore the everyday “made objects” that surround people.”

Materialism confronts the viewer on a very elementary level with the things we surround ourselves with and the materials that comprise them. The work calls for contemplation on how people deal with the raw materials at their disposal.Everyday products such as a vacuum cleaner, Volkswagen Beetle, pencil, or PET bottles, have been reduced to the exact quantity of the specific raw materials from which they are made, shown in the form of rectangular blocks.

In one example, DRIFT completely dissected a Volkswagen Beetle, to the level of t each group’s accumulated mass. These masses are represented in 42 pure material v surprising amounts of horsehair, cotton, and cork, amongst other unexpected comm and material knowledge almost four decades ago. Control over raw materials is still at the heart of numerous geopolitical tensions an is implicated. Everything that is bought and consumed has an impact, reinforcing Materialism works to reveal the dimensions of the materialism these systems feed, incessantly rip away from it, squander, and then dispose of with little thought. Und ter bottle, people are collectively acting as a deviant child stealing from his mother reason and observation to unveil the mysteries of nature, to understand its materia centuries ago, has yielded immense knowledge but also the realisation that it is all introduced millions of new ‘artificial species’ through industrialisation and ecos and contain myriad materials forged together by design.

the smallest component, then organised all of these by their material and measured volumes that begin to tell a variety of stories. The automobile, from 1980, contained modities. These relate a tale about availability, tradition, and the state of our technical

nd, while people might like to think of these as a matter for politicians, everyone complex systems of resource extraction, labor, manufacturing, and distribution. , illuminating the excessive use of the earth’s gifts, irreplaceable matter that humans derstood this way, in pursuit of the most basic things, like a pencil or a plastic war. Since the Renaissance, scientists have probed the world systematically, using ality, and begin to question humanity’s relationship to it. That process, which began but a drop in the ocean of what is knowable. During the same time, civilisation has systems of commerce, objects that support our pleasant contemporary existence

Yet nowadays, people feel disconnected from this materiality, blind to the inner workings and composition of all these artificial things. For Materialism, the artists ‘de-produce’ the produced, deconstructing familiar things about which we tend only to consider their function. DRIFT makes clear how much of the matter within these objects is extracted from the earth. In the process, they reverse the mandates of engineering required for mass production which are standardisation, modularisation, and abstraction. Nauta and Gordijn essentially create uniqueness, unity, and ‘deabstraction’ in the form of simple geometric blocks.

These blocks of varied, pure colour make visual rhymes with the earliest works of Abstract art such as paintings of Kazimir Malevich, Hilma af Klint, and Piet Mondrian. And, although the goal of ‘deabstraction’ may sound opposed to the work of these 20th century artists, the purpose of their work and of Materialism is aligned: to make the

essential nature of the world visible.

COLLECTIVE

FACING

facing collective truths

TRUTHS

The eruption of Mount Pinatubo changed the trajectory of modern climate mitigation, the local weather patterns altered temporarily while the global temperatures experienced a decrease by about 0.5 degrees over the next two years. An event that would be usually

seen as catastrophic and violent initiated a number of in depth analysis and research around the world,

attempting to replicate its effects on a global scale as a means to fight global warming, and while science does not account for morale or emotional values, we acknowledge the foundational role it plays in Geoengineering. From data gathered in scientific journals, there is potential that climate engineering, if implemented safely and agreed upon by all states, could work to buy human-kind some time. For example, Stratospheric Aerosol Injection of sulphur dioxide via plane or high altitude balloon could have the same cooling effect as Mount Pinatubo and also theorised to bring rainfall patterns back to its pre-industrial averages. Although empirical studies outline the potential of modern climate mitigation, they are conducted on a technological and relatively small scale in comparison of what would be done globally, and at times the one sided studies can mislead the wider public into thinking that strategies as such only has positive outcomes, therefore should be implemented without hesitation.

These scientific journals enriched our discourse

and way of thinking, they helped us understand the motivation behind research efforts. However, the ultimate takeaway is that science and knowledge are crucial to the evolution of mankind, but the wider public have to be made aware of gaps which occur in studies and learn to compare the results of multiple papers addressing different facets of one singular project.

Estimating global Agricultural effects of Geoengineering using volcanic eruptions Jonathan Proctor, Solomon Hsiang, Jennifer Burney, Marshall Burke, Wolfram Schlenker.

The eruptions of El Chichon and Mount Pinatubo have both played a vital role in initiating research to replicate the cooling effect observed in the aftermath of the event. This scientific journal then uses the data compiled from both volcanic eruptions in order to gather empirical estimates on the effect SSI would have on agricultural crops. Empirical stimulations of potential SRM effects stressed the impact on cooling and precipitation effects alluding to the fact that global yield may increase due to this cooling.

However previous studies have only accounted for the benefit of scattering on unmanaged ecosystems, not isolated crops, a set of data outlined in the following article proves that if solar radiation control is utilised to mimic the effects of volcanic eruptions, it would do little in mitigating the agricultural disturbance from climate warming.

Solar radiation management is increasingly considered to be an option for managing global temperatures1,2, yet the economic effects of ameliorating climatic changes by scattering sunlight back to space remain largely unknown3. Although solar radiation management may increase crop yields by reducing heat stress4, the effects of concomitant changes in available sunlight have never been empirically estimated. Here we use the volcanic eruptions that inspired modern solar radiation management proposals as natural experiments to provide the first estimates, to our knowledge, of how the stratospheric sulfate aerosols created by the eruptions of El Chichón and Mount Pinatubo altered the quantity and quality of global sunlight, and how these changes in sunlight affected global crop yields. We find that the sunlight-mediated effect of stratospheric sulfate aerosols on yields is negative for both C4 (maize) and C3 (soy, rice and wheat) crops. Applying our yield model to a solar radiation management scenario based on stratospheric sulfate aerosols, we find that projected mid-twenty- first century damages due to scattering sunlight caused by solar radiation management are roughly equal in magnitude to benefits from cooling. This suggests that solar radiation management— if deployed using stratospheric sulfate aerosols similar to those emitted by the volcanic eruptions it seeks to mimic—would, on net, attenuate little of the global agricultural damage from climate change. Our approach could be extended to study the effects of solar radiation management on other global systems, such as human health or ecosystem function.

“This suggests that solar radiation management— if deployed using stratospheric sulfate aerosols similar to those emitted by the volcanic eruptions it seeks to mimic— would, on net, attenuate little of the global agricultural damage from climate change.”

Geoengineering—the purposeful alteration of the climate to offset changes induced by greenhouse gas emissions—is a proposed, but still poorly understood, approach to limit future warming5. One of the most widely suggested geoengineering strategies is solar radiation management (SRM). SRM proposals typically involve spraying precursors to sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to produce particles that cool the earth by reflecting sunlight back into space6. The closest natural analogues to these SRM proposals are major volcanic eruptions7. Eruptions of El Chichón (1982, Mexico) and Mount Pinatubo (1991, the Philippines) injected 7 and 20 Mt of sulfur dioxide, respectively, into the atmosphere, which was then oxidized to form stratospheric sulfate aerosols (SSAs)8. These particles propagated throughout the tropics over several weeks and spread latitudinally over the following months, increasing the opacity of the stratosphere—as measured by optical depth—more than an order of magnitude above baseline levels for multiple years (Fig. 1a–c, e). The eruptions of El Chichón and Pinatubo had substantial effects on the global optical environment and climate. We analyse daily data from 859 insolation stations9 (n = 3,311,553 station-days; Fig. 1d) paired with stratospheric aerosol optical depth (SAOD)10 and cloud fraction data under all-sky conditions. We find that the Pinatubo eruption (global average of +0.15 SAOD) reduced direct sunlight by 21%, increased diffuse sunlight by 20% and reduced total sunlight by 2.5% (Fig. 1f, Extended Data Table 1, Supplementary Information, section II). These global all-sky results generalize previous clear-sky estimates at

individual stations11. Globally, this reduction in insolation led to cooling of about 0.5 °C8 and redistribution and net reduction in precipitation12, effects that were partially offset by a concurrent El Niño event (Fig. 2). On the basis of these observations, it has previously been suggested that SRM cooling could mitigate agricultural damages from global warming4. The net effect of SRM, however, remains uncertain owing to possible unintended consequences from SSA-induced changes. Here we empirically estimate how the alteration of sunlight by SSAs may directly affect agricultural yields, after accounting for effects mediated by temperature, precipitation and clouds. The sign of the ‘insolation effect’ of SRM on agriculture is theoretically ambiguous13–1⁶. Scattering light decreases total available sunlight—which tends to decrease photosynthesis—but increases the fraction of light that is diffuse, which can increase photosynthesis by redistributing light from sunsaturated canopy leaves to shaded leaves below15,17. It is unknown whether damages from decreasing total light or benefits from increasing diffuse light dominate in crop production. The sign of this insolation effect will depend primarily on two factors: the forward-scattering properties of the aerosol and the relative benefit of diffuse light for the growth of edible yield (Supplementary Information, section III.5). The latter may depend on canopy geometry, photosynthetic pathway (for example, C3 or C4) and ambient conditions13,1⁸. Previous studies of unmanaged ecosystems have tended to find that scattering increases biomass growth15,19—although not always18— and, importantly, that edible yield production may not directly correlate with biomass growth. Studies of agricultural systems tend to estimate the negative effects of tropospheric aerosol scattering13,1⁶ and positive effects of solar brightening20 on yields. Simulations of potential SRM effects focus on cooling and precipitation effects21 and suggest global yields may increase owing to cooling4, although these analyses do not account for the full effect of scattering. To our knowledge, this is the first study to estimate and account for the net effects of SSA radiative scattering on yields, thereby testing whether the benefits of SSA scattering demonstrated in unmanaged ecosystems15,19 also apply to agricultural production, as has often been hypothesized4,14. This analysis is also, to our knowledge, the first global empirical study of the insolation effect on crops as well as the first study to leverage a quasiexperimental design to estimate the total effect of SRM on any economic sector. The theoretically ideal experiment would measure the total effect of SRM on yields using many identical Earths, half of them treated with SSAs. In practice, we approximate this experiment with one Earth during sequential periods of high and low SSA exposure, exogeneously determined by volcanic eruptions. We identify the insolation effect of SSAs on yields22 (Extended Data Fig. 1) by comparing countries to themselves over time, with changing SSA treatment— measured in SAOD composited from satellite and other observations10 (Fig. 1e)— while controlling flexibly for potentially confounding climate variables, including temperature, precipitation, cloud fraction and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) (Supplementary Information, section III.3). Our multivariate fixed-effects panel estimation strategy (equation (16) in Supplementary Information) accounts for unobserved time-invariant factors—such as soil type or historical propensity for civil unrest—

“Scattering light decreases total available sunlight—which tends to decrease photosynthesis— but increases the fraction of light that is diffuse, which can increase photosynthesis by redistributing light from sunsaturated canopy leaves to shaded leaves below.”

Fig. 1 | Large volcanic eruptions alter the global optical environment.a–c, SAOD (1,000 nm) before the Pinatubo eruption (March 1991) (a), two months after the eruption (August 1991) (b) and the next year, after the aerosol cloud had spread (March 1992) (c). d, Surface insolation observing stations used in our analysis of the effect of SAOD on insolation; light blue stations additionally measure diffuse light. e, SAOD (550 nm) from 1975– 201010. f, Annual average daily total (orange), direct (yellow) and diffuse (red) sunlight across all stations; before averaging, each measurement at a given station on a given day-of-year was demeaned (by subtracting the mean of all observations from the respective station and day-of-year), to remove seasonal effects as well as differences in geography and observational protocols.

Fig. 2 | Global summary statistics of key model variables. a, SAOD for years after the eruptions of El Chichón (March to April 1982) and Pinatubo (June 1991) (dotted lines). b–e, The ENSO 3.4 index (b), surface air temperature (c), precipitation (d) and cloud fraction (e) during the same period. f, Yields of maize (orange), wheat (grey), soy (blue) and rice (green) decline after the eruptions. Climate and yield values are growing season averages, de-trended by country-specific quadratic time trends and averaged over countries in the sample. SAOD data are processed similarly, but are not de-trended.

as well as country-specific time-trending variables, such as access to fertilizers or trends in damaging tropospheric ozone23. Our primary analysis focuses on the Pinatubo eruption because the concentration and distribution of resulting SSAs were measured with substantially more accuracy than were those of earlier eruptions24. We validate the model by verifying that the estimated responses of crop yields to temperature and precipitation are consistent with previous studies25 (Extended Data Fig. 2). We find that the changes in sunlight from SSAs reduce both C4 (maize; P < 0.01, n = 2,501 country-years) and C3 (soy, rice and wheat; P < 0.05, n = 4,828 crop-country-years) yields, by 48% and 28%, respec-tively, per unit SAOD (Fig. 3a, model 1). This indicates that the global average scattering from Pinatubo (+0.15 SAOD) reduced C4 yields by 9.3% and C3 yields by 4.8% (Fig. 3b), although some of this loss was probably offset by SSA-induced cooling, making it difficult to observe directly. By contrast, process models19 and empirical analyses of unmanaged-ecosystem biomass growth15 tend to estimate a posi-tive insolation effect, which suggests that either the diffuse fertilization effect is weaker for crops than ecosystems or scattering light alters the relative production of biomass and edible yield. Our finding that SSA scattering from Pinatubo negatively affected yields is robust to removing temperature, precipitation, ENSO and cloud controls (Fig. 3a, models 2–5), estimating the effect separately for each crop, accounting for the zenith angle of incoming sunlight, using two alternative datasets of SSA SAOD, dropping observations from the countries in which the major eruptions occurred and adding surface CO2 as a control(Extended Data Table 2).

Fig. 3 | Empirical estimates of the insolation effect of SSAs on crop yield. a, The estimated effect of increasing SSA optical depth by one unit on C4 (blue) and C3 (green) yields, owing to changes in sunlight (model 1, equation (16) in Supplementary Information, and Extended Data Table 2). Models 2–5 drop and then sequentially add temperature (T), precipitation (P), cloud (C) and ENSO (E) controls. Models 7–8 estimate effects separately for Pinatubo (year ≥ 1990, circles) and Chichón (year < 1990, squares); Model 8 uses a different SAOD dataset (SPARC). b, Reconstructions of the SSA insolation effect using model 1. Each line represents a single country overtime. c, As in b, but using model 7. d, Simultaneously estimated insolation effects two years before and two years after the current growing season. See Supplementary Information sections III.2.3, III.2.2 and III.4. In a, d, whiskers represent 95% confidence intervals.

“Failing to account for the insolation effect, as was done in the only previous global estimate , substantially overestimates the benefits of SRM to agriculture.”

We examine the effect of future, current and past SSAs on current yields, finding that only contemporaneous exposure to SSAs matters (Fig. 3d). We estimate the yield–insolation response flexibly, and fail to reject that the response is linear over the support of our data (Extended Data Fig. 3). Extending the analysis back in time increases the sample size but also the measurement error, owing to weaknesses in the historical observational system. The estimated insolation effect for both C3 and C4 crops becomes smaller, and remains significant for C4 crops, as we sequentially include data from the eruptions of El Chichón (1982) (Fig. 3a, model 6) and Agung (1963) (Extended Data Table 2 column 9). This pattern is consistent with both systematic ‘attenuation bias’ from the mis-measurement of SAOD before the satellite era26 and differences in the radiative properties of the SSAs generated by Pinatubo and El Chichón, discussed below. Two results support the idea that our analysis captures a sunlight- mediated effect. First, the response of C3 crops is less negative than that of C4 crops (P < 0.01). C3 crops benefit from scattering more than C4 crops because the C3 photosynthetic rate saturates at lower light levels13. Second, per unit of SAOD, aerosols from El Chichón are both more forward scattering (Extended Data Tables 1, 3) and less damaging to yields (Fig. 3a, models 7, 8) than those of Pinatubo. This pattern is consistent with diffuse fertilization increasing edible yield. It also suggests that aerosol radiative properties may explain some heterogeneity in the estimated insolation effect across these eruptions. This heterogeneity substantially affects reconstructed yield losses from SSA scattering (Fig. 3c). We are, however, unable to determine whether this difference in the estimated insolation effect across eruptions is due to a difference in the radiative properties of the SSAs or to a differing degree of measurement error and, in turn, attenuation bias (Supplementary Information, section III.6). To calculate the total effect of SSAs on yields for a future SRM scenario, we apply our empirical results (Fig. 3a, model 1) to output from an earth system model and compare future yields under two scenarios: (1) climate change under Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 (RCP4.5)—a modest mitigation pathway—and (2) the same, but with sulfur dioxide injection to balance all additional anthropogenic forcing after 202027. Over cropped areas in this simulation (2050–2069), the SRM treatment (average +0.084 SAOD) decreases the average temperature by 0.88 °C, reduces precipitation by 0.26 mm per month and increases the cloud fraction by 0.0081 relative to the control during the maize growing season (Extended Data Fig. 4). In turn, average maize yields increase by 6.3% owing to this cooling (Fig. 4a), decrease by 5.3% owing to SRM-induced dimming (Fig. 4b) and change by <0.2% owing to altered precipitation and clouds (Fig. 4c, d). We sum these partial effects to construct the total effect of SRM, and repeat the analysis for soy, rice and wheat (Extended Data Fig. 5). We find that, relative to the control, SRM treatment has no statistically discernible effect on yields once we have accounted for optical effects (P > 0.1 for all crops; Fig. 4e, Extended Data Fig. 6). Failing to account for the insolation effect, as was done in the only previous global estimate , substantially overestimates the benefits of SRM to agriculture. Our analysis finds that volcanogenic SSAs have statistically signifi-cant and economically substantial insolation-mediated costs that are roughly equal in

magnitude to their benefits from cooling. This suggests that anthropogenic SSAs used in SRM may not be able to substantially lessen the risks that climate change poses to global agricultural yields and food security (Extended Data Fig. 7).

Fig. 4 | Partial and total effects of SRM on yields. a–d, The partial effects of SRM—relative to a cilmate-change-only scenario (RCP4.5)—on expected maize yields from 2050–2069, owing to changes in temperature (a), insolation (b), precipitation (c) and cloud fraction (d). Statistically insignificant changes (P > 0.05) are hatched. Changes in uncropped land have been masked out by setting the values to zero. e, Global partial and total effects of SRM (cropped-fraction weighted average) for maize (red), soy (turquoise), rice (green) and wheat (purple). Error bars show 95% confidence intervals for the predicted effect.

Our finding that SSAs from El Chichón were more forward scattering and less damaging than SSAs from Pinatubo indicates that optimizing the radiative properties of particles used in SRM might mitigate insolation- mediated damages. However, we cannot rule out the possibility that this difference was due instead to poor observation of the SSAs from El Chichón. Farmer-level adaptations, such as switching to varieties more resistant to dimming, could theoretically mitigate the insolation- mediated damage of SRM. However, given that farmer-level adaptations to extreme heat have been modest28, it is not clear that adaptation to dimming will be easier. Our quasi-experimental results are consistent with the sunlight- mediated effect of tropospheric aerosols16 and emissions of their precursors29 on Indian wheat and rice yields, further supporting the notion that we capture a sunlight-mediated response. It is however possible that other factors, such as increased ultraviolet-light exposure from stratospheric ozone destruction, could explain part of the estimated effect. Notably, changes in tropospheric ozone concentrations due to Pinatubo are thought to be negative30, which would increase yields—suggesting that our results might underestimate the SSA insolation effect.

“However, given that farmer-level adaptations to extreme heat have been modest, it is not clear that adaptation to dimming will be easier.”

Received: 18 June 2017; Accepted: 29 June 2018; Published online 8 August 2018. 1. Crutzen, P. J. Albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulfur injections: a contribution to resolve a policy dilemma? Clim. Change 77, 211–219 (2006). 2. Ocean Studies Board. Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool the Earth (The National Academies, Washington DC, 2015). 3. MacMartin, D. G., Kravitz, B., Long, J. C. S. & Rasch, P. J. Geoengineering with stratospheric aerosols: what do we not know after a decade of research? Earths Future 4, 543–548 (2016). 4. Pongratz, J., Lobell, D. B., Cao, L. & Caldeira, K. Crop yields in a geoengineered climate. Nat. Clim. Change 2, 101–105 (2012). 5. Pachauri, R. K. et al. Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (eds Core Writing Team, Pachauri, R. K. & Meyer, L. A.) (IPCC, Geneva, 2015). 6. Robock, A., Marquardt, A., Kravitz, B. & Stenchikov, G. Benefits, risks, and costs of stratospheric geoengineering. Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L19703 (2009). 7. Robock, A., MacMartin, D. G., Duren, R. & Christensen, M. W. Studying geoengineering with natural and anthropogenic analogs. Clim. Change 121, 445–458 (2013). 8. Robock, A. Volcanic eruptions and climate. Rev. Geophys. 38, 191–219 (2000). 9. World Radiation Data Centre. ‘Global radiation. Daily sums, monthly sums and means’ and ‘Diffuse radiation. Daily sums, monthly sums and means’. World Meteorological Organization http://wrdc.mgo.rssi.ru/ (accessed 1 August 2015). 10. Sato, M., Hansen, J. E., McCormick, M. P. & Pollack, J. B. Stratopheric aerosol optical depths 1850– 1990. J. Geophys. Res. 98, 22987–22994 (1993). 11. Dutton, E. G. & Christy, J. R. Solar radiative forcing at selected locations and evidence for global lower tropospheric cooling following the eruptions of El Chichón and Pinatubo. Geophys. Res. Lett. 19, 2313–2316 (1992). 12. Trenberth, K. E. & Dai, A. Effects of Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption on the hydrological cycle as an analog of geoengineering. Geophys. Res. Lett. 34, L15702 (2007). 13. Greenwald, R. et al. The influence of aerosols on crop production: a study using the CERES crop model. Agric. Syst. 89, 390–413 (2006). 14. Roderick, M. L. & Farquhar, G. D. Geoengineering: hazy, cool and well fed? Nat. Clim. Change 2, 76–77 (2012). 15. Gu, L. et al. Response of a deciduous forest to the Mount Pinatubo eruption: enhanced photosynthesis. Science 299, 2035–2038 (2003). 16. Gupta, R., Somanathan, E. & Dey, S. Global warming and local air pollution have reduced wheat yields in India. Clim. Change 140, 593–604 (2017). 17. Roderick, M. L., Farquhar, G. D., Berry, S. L. & Noble, I. R. On the direct effect of clouds and atmospheric particles on the productivity and structure of vegetation. Oecologia 129, 21–30 (2001). 18. Alton, P. B. Reduced carbon sequestration in terrestrial ecosystems under overcast skies compared to clear skies. Agric. For. Meteorol. 148, 1641–1653 (2008). 19. Mercado, L. M. et al. Impact of changes in diffuse radiation on the global land carbon sink. Nature 458, 1014–1017 (2009). 20. Tollenaar, M., Fridgen, J., Tyagi, P., Stackhouse, P. W. Jr. & Kumudini, S. The contribution of solar brightening to the US maize yield trend. Nat. Clim. Change 7, 275–278 (2017). 21. Xia, L. et al. Solar radiation management impacts on agriculture in China: a case study in the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP). J. Geophys. Res. Atmos. 119, 8695–8711 (2014). 22. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Crops, NationalProduction. FAOSTAT http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QC (accessed 1 January 2016). 23. Hsiang, S. Climate econometrics. Annu. Rev. Resour. Econ. 8, 43–75 (2016). 24. Thomason, L. & Peter, T. (eds) SPARC Assessment of Stratospheric Aerosol Properties (ASAP). SPARC Report No. 4 http://www.sparc-climate.org/publications/sparc-reports/ (SPARC Scientific Streering Group, 2006). 25. Schlenker, W. & Lobell, D. B. Robust negative impacts of climate change on African agriculture. Environ. Res. Lett. 5, 014010 (2010). 26. Wooldridge, J. M. Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data (MIT

Press, Cambridge, 2002). 27. Niemeier, U., Schmidt, H., Alterskjær, K. & Kristjánsson, J. E. Solar irradiance reduction via climate engineering: impact of different techniques on the energy balance and the hydrological cycle. J. Geophys. Res. Atmos. 118, 11905–11917 (2013). 28. Carleton, T. A. & Hsiang, S. M. Social and economic impacts of climate. Science 353, aad9837 (2016). 29. Burney, J. & Ramanathan, V. Recent climate and air pollution impacts on Indian agriculture. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, 16319–16324 (2014). 30. Tang, Q., Hess, P. G., Brown-Steiner, B. & Kinnison, D. E. Tropospheric ozone decrease due to the Mount Pinatubo eruption: reduced stratospheric influx. vv

THE ANTHROPOCENE: ARE HUMANS NOW OVERWHELMING THE GREAT FORCES OF NATURE? Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen and John R. McNeill

With the epoch of Anthropocene still facing its challenges with acceptance and adaptation of the term in legitimate practice. This scientific journal outlines the impact of Humankind on the global system by- using statistics and scientific underpinnings,

it substantiates the cause and effect that humanity’s socioeconomic, political and technological developments have had on rapid environmental changes. Although there is evidence proving that humans have impacted the environment since the first man made fires, their actions were largely local and remained within the realms of natural variability. However from the onset of industrialisation, the risk-reward system set in place a new attitude towards the non-human, where it was understood that resources are a means to survival for the growing population. Thus, moving into the next stage of the Anthropocene means

implementing changes made by the global collective in order to ensure when the tipping point of this epoch is reached, Earth can still remain habitable.

We explore the development of the Anthropocene, the current epoch in which humans and our societies have become a global geophysical force. The Anthropocene began around 1800 with the onset of industrialisation, the central feature of which was the enormous expansion in the use of fossil fuels. We use atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration as a single, simple indicator to track the progression of the Anthropocene. From a preindustrial value of 270-275 ppm, atmospheric carbon dioxide had risen to about 310 ppm by 1950. Since then the human enterprise has experienced a remarkable explosion, the Great Acceleration, with significant consequences for Earth System functioning. Atmospheric C02concentration has risen from 310 to 380 ppm since1950, with about half of the total rise since the preindustrial era occurring in just the last 30 years. The Great Acceleration is reaching criticality. Whatever unfolds, the next few decades will surely be a tipping point in the evolution of the Anthropocene.

The phenomenon of global change represents a profound shift in the relationship between humans and the rest of nature. Interest in this fundamental issue

“powerful monopolistic tool”

INTRODUCTION Global warming and many other human-driven changes to the environment are raising concerns about the future of Earth’s environment and its ability to provide the services required to maintain viable human civilizations. The consequences of this unintended experiment of humankind on its own life support system are hotly debated, but worst-case scenarios paint a gloomy picture for the future of contemporary societies. Underlying global change (Box 1) are human-driven alterations of i) the biological fabric of the Earth; ii) the stocks and flows of major elements in the planetary machinery such as nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus, and silicon; and iii) the energy balance at the Earth's surface (2). The term Anthropocene (Box2) suggests that the Earth has now left its natural geological epoch, the present interglacial state called the Holocene. Human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the Earth into planetary terra incognita. The Earth is rapidly moving into a less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, and probably wetter and stormier state.

“From a preindustrial value of 270-275 ppm, atmospheric carbon dioxide had risen to about 310 ppm by 1950.”

has escalated rapidly in the international research community, leading to innovative new research projects like Integrated History and future of People on Earth (IHOPE) (8). The objective of this paper is to explore one aspect of the IHOPE research agenda-the evolution of humans and our societies from hunter-gatherers to a global geophysical force. To address this objective, we examine the trajectory of the human enterprise through time, from the arrival of humans on Earth through the present and into the next centuries. Our analysis is based on a few critical questions: - Is the imprint of human activity on the environment discernible at the global scale? How has this imprint evolved through time? - How does the magnitude and rate of human impact compare with the natural variability of the Earth's environment? Are human effects similar to or greater than the great forces of nature in terms of their influence on Earth System functioning? - What are the socioeconomic, cultural, political, and technological developments that change the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature and lead to accelerating impacts on the Earth System? Pre-Anthropocene Events Before the advent of agriculture about 10000-12000 years ago, humans lived in small groups as hunter-gatherers. In recent centuries, under the influence of noble savage myths, it was often thought that pre-agricultural humans lived in idyllic harmony with their environment. Recent research has painted a rather different picture, producing evidence of wide spread human impact on the environment through predation and the modification of landscapes, often through use of fire (9). However, as the examples below show, the human imprint on environment may have been discernible at local, regional, and even continental scales, but preindustrial humans did not have the technological or organizational capability to match or dominate the great forces of nature. The mastery of fire by our ancestors provided human kind with a powerful monopolistic tool unavailable to other species, that put us firmly on the long path towards the Anthropocene. Remnants of charcoal from human hearths indicate that the first use of fire by our bipedal ancestors, belonging to the genus Homo erectus, occurred a couple of million years ago. Use of fire followed the earlier development of stone tool and weapon making, another major step in the trajectory of the human enterprise. Early humans used the considerable power of fire to their advantage (9). Fire kept dangerous animals at a respectful distance, especially during the night, and helped in hunting protein-rich, more easily digestible food. The diet of our ancestors changed from mainly vegetarian to omnivorous, a shift that led to enhanced physical and mental capabilities. Hominid brain size nearly tripled up to an average volume of about 1300 cm3, and gave humans the largest ratio between brain and body size of any species (10). As a consequence, spoken and then, about 10 000 years ago, written language could begin to develop, promoting communication and transfer of knowledge within and between generations of humans, efficient accumulation of knowledge, and social learning over many thousands of years in an impressive catalytic process, involving many human brains and their discoveries and

innovations. This power is minimal in other species. Among the earliest impacts of humans on the Earth's biota are the late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, a wave of extinctions during the last ice age extending from the woolly mammoth in northern Eurasia to giant wombats in Australia(11-13). A similar wave of extinctions was observed later in the Americas. Although there has been vigorous debate about the relative roles of climate variability and human predation in driving these extinctions, there is little doubt that humans played a significant role, given the strong correlation between the extinction events and human migration patterns. A later but even more profound impact of humans on fauna was the domestication of animals, beginning with the dog up to 100 000 years ago (14) and continuing into the Holocene with horses, sheep, cattle, goats, and the other familiar farm animals. The concomitant domestication of plants during the early to mid Holocene led to agriculture, which initially also developed through the use of fire for forest clearing and, somewhat later, irrigation (15). According to one hypothesis, early agricultural development, around the mid-Holocene, affected Earth System functioning so fundamentally that it prevented the onset of the next ice age (16). The argument proposes that clearing of forests for agriculture about 8000 years ago and irrigation of rice about 5000 years ago led to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (C02) and methane (CH4) concentrations, reversing trends of concentration decreases established in the early Holocene. These rates of forest clearing, however, were small compared with the massive amount of land transformation that has taken place in the last 300 years (17). Nevertheless, deforestation and agricultural development in the 8000 to 5000 BP period may have led to small increases in C02 and CH4 concentrations (maybe about 5-10 parts per million for C02) but increases that were perhaps large enough to stop the onset of glaciation in northeast Canada thousands of years ago. However, recent analyses of solar forcing in the late Quaternary (l8) and of natural carbon cycle dynamics (19, 20) argue that natural processes can explain the observed pattern of atmospheric C02 variation through the Holocene. Thus, the hypothesis that the advent of agriculture thousands of years ago changed the course of glacial-interglacial dynamics remains an intriguing but unproven beginning of the Anthropocene. The first significant use of fossil fuels in human history came in China during the Song Dynasty (960-1279) (21, 22). Coal mines in the north, notably Shanxi province, provided abundant coal for use in China's growing iron industry. At its height, in the late 11th century, China's coal production reached levels equal to all of Europe (not including Russia) in 1700. But China suffered many setbacks, such as epidemics and invasions, and the coal industry apparently went into a long decline. Meanwhile in England coal mines provided fuel for home heating, notably in London, from at least the 13th century (23, 24). The first commission charged to investigate the evils of coal smoke began work in 1285 (24). But as a concentrated fuel, coal had its advantages, especially when wood and charcoal grew dear, so by the late 1600s London depended heavily upon it and burned some 360 000 tons annually. The iron forges of Song China and the furnaces of medieval London were regional exceptions, however; most of the world burned wood or charcoal

“The Industrial Era (ca. 18001945): Stage 1”

rather than resorting to fuel subsidies from the Carboniferous.

Figure 1. The mix of fuels in energy systems at the global scale from1850 to 2000. Note the rapid relative decrease in traditional renewable energy sources and the sharp rise in fossil fuel-based energy systems since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,and particularly after 1950. By 2000 fossil fuel-based energy systems generated about 80%

Preindustrial human societies indeed influenced their environment in many ways, from local to continental scales. Most of the changes they wrought were based on knowledge, probably gained from observation and trial-anderror, of natural ecosystem dynamics and its modification to ease the tasks of hunting, gathering, and eventually of farming. Preindustrial societies could and did modify coastal and terrestrial ecosystems but they did not have the numbers, social and economic organisation, or technologies needed to equal or dominate the great forces of Nature in magnitude or rate. Their impacts remained largely local and transitory, well within the bounds of the natural variability of the environment. The Industrial Era (ca. 1800-1945): Stage 1 of the Anthropocene One of the three or four most decisive transitions in the history of humankind, potentially of similar importance in the history of the Earth itself, was the onset of industrialization. In the footsteps of the Enlightenment, the transition began in the 1700s in England and the Low Countries for reasons that remain in dispute among historians (25). Some emphasize material factors such as wood shortages and abundant water power and coal in England, while others point to social and political structures that rewarded risk-taking and innovation, matters connected to legal regimes, a nascent banking system, and a market culture. Whatever its origins, the transition took off quickly and by 1850 had transformed England and was beginning to transform much of the rest of the world. What made industrialization central for the Earth System was the enormous expansion in the use of fossil fuels, first coal and then oil and gas as well.

Hitherto humankind had relied on energy captured from ongoing flows in the form of wind, water, plants, and animals, and from the 100- or 200-year stocks held in trees. Fossil fuel use offered access to carbon stored from millions of years of photosynthesis: a massive energy subsidy from the deep past to modern society, upon which a great deal of our modern wealth depends. Industrial societies as a rule use four or five times as much energy as did agrarian ones, which in turn used three or four times as much as did hunting and gathering societies (26). Without this transition to a high-energy society it is inconceivable that global population could have risen from a billion around 1820 to more than six billion today, or that perhaps one billion of the more fortunate among us could lead lives of comfort unknown to any but kings and courtiers in centuries past. Prior to the widespread use of fossil fuels, the energy harvest available to humankind was tightly constrained. Water and wind power were available only in favoured locations, and only in societies where the relevant technologies of watermills, sailing ships, and windmills had been developed or imported. Muscular energy derived from animals, and through them from plants, was limited by the area of suitable land for crops and forage, in many places by shortages of water, and everywhere by inescapable biological inefficiencies: plants photosynthesize less than a percent of the solar energy that falls on the Earth, and animals eating those plants retain only a tenth of the chemical energy stored in plants. All this amounted to a bottleneck upon human numbers, the global economy, and the ability of humankind to shape the rest of the biosphere and to influence the functioning of the Earth System. The invention (some would say refinement) of the steam engine by James Watt in the 1770s and 1780s and the turn to fossil fuels shattered this bottleneck, opening an era of far looser constraints upon energy supply, upon human numbers, and upon the global economy. Between 1800 and 2000 population grew more than six-fold, the global economy about 50-fold, and energy use about 40-fold (27). It also opened an era of intensified and ever-mounting human influence upon the Earth System. Fossil fuels and their associated technologies-steam engines, internal combustion engines-made many new activities possible and old ones more efficient. For example, with abundant energy it proved possible to synthesize ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen, in effect to make fertilizer out of air, a process pioneered by the German chemist Fritz Haber early in the 20th century. The Haber-Bosch synthesis, as it would become known (Carl Bosch was an industrialist) revolutionized agriculture and sharply increased crop yields all over the world, which, together with vastly improved medical provisions, made possible the surge in human population growth. The imprint on the global environment of the industrial era was, in retrospect, clearly evident by the early to mid 20th century (28). Deforestation and conversion to agriculture were extensive in the midlatitudes, particularly in the northern hemisphere. Only about 10% of the global terrestrial surface had been "domesticated" at the beginning of the industrial era around 1800, but this figure rose significantly to about 25-30% by 1950 (17). Human transformation of the hydrological cycle was also evident in the accelerating number of large dams, particularly in Europe and North America (29). The flux of nitrogen compounds through the coastal zone had increased over 10-fold since 1800

“The Great Acceleration (1945-ca. 2015): Stage 2”

(30). The global-scale transformation of the environment by industrialization was, however, nowhere more evident than in the atmosphere. The concentrations of CH4 and nitrous oxide (N20) had risen by 1950 to about 1250 and 288 ppbv, respectively, noticeably above their preindustrial values of about 850 and 272 ppbv (31, 32). By 1950 the atmospheric C02 concentration had pushed above 300 ppmv, above its preindustrial value of 270-275 ppmv, and was beginning to accelerate sharply (33). Quantification of the human imprint on the Earth System can be most directly related to the advent and spread of fossil fuel-based energy systems (Fig. 1), the signature of which is the accumulation of C02 in the atmosphere roughly in proportion to the amount of fossil fuels that have been consumed. We propose that atmospheric C02 concentration can be used as a single, simple indicator to track the progression of the Anthropocene, to define its stages quantitatively, and to compare the human imprint on the Earth System with natural variability (Table 1). Around 1850, near the beginning of Anthropocene Stage 1, the atmospheric C02 concentration was 285 ppm, within the range of natural variability for interglacial periods during the late Quaternary period. During the course of Stage 1 from 1800/50 to 1945, the C02 concentration rose by about 25 ppm, enough to surpass the upper limit of natural variation through the Holocene and thus provide the first indisputable evidence that human activities were affecting the environment at the global scale. We therefore assign the beginning of the Anthropocene to coincide with the beginning of the industrial era, in the 1800-1850 period. This first stage of the Anthropocene ended abruptly around 1945, when the most rapid and pervasive shift in the human-environment relationship began. The Great Acceleration (1945-ca. 2015): Stage 2 of the Anthropocene. The human enterprise suddenly accelerated after the end of the Second World War (27) (Fig. 2) Population doubled in just 50years, to over 6 billion by the end of the 20th century, but the global economy increased by more than 15fold. Petroleum consumption has grown by a factor of 3.5 since 1960, and the number of motor vehicles increased dramatically from about 40million at the end of the War to nearly 700 million by 1996.From 1950 to 2000 the percentage of the world's population living in urban areas grew from 30 to 50% and continues to grow strongly. The interconnectedness of cultures is increasing rapidly with the explosion in electronic communication, international travel and the globalization of economies. The pressure on the global environment from this burgeoning human enterprise is intensifying sharply. Over the past 50years, humans have changed the world's ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any other comparable period inhuman history (37). The Earth is in its sixth great extinction event, with rates of species loss growing rapidly for both terrestrial and marine ecosystems (38). The atmospheric concentrations of several important greenhouse gases have increased substantially, and the Earth is warming rapidly (39).More nitrogen is now converted from the atmosphere into reactive forms by fertilizer production and fossil fuel combustion than by all of the natural processes in terrestrial

“Stewards of the Earth System? (ca. 2015-?): Stage 3”

ecosystems put together (Fig. 3) (40). The remarkable explosion of the human enterprise from the mid-20th century, and the associated global-scale impacts on many aspects of Earth System functioning, mark the second stage of the Anthropocene- the Great Acceleration (41). In many respects the stage had been set for the Great Acceleration by 1890 or 1910. Population growth was proceeding faster than at any previous time in human history, as well as economic growth. Industrialization had gathered irresistible momentum, and was spreading quickly in North America, Europe, Russia, and Japan. Automobiles and airplanes had appeared, and soon rapidly transformed mobility. The world economy was growing ever more tightly linked by mounting flows of migration, trade, and capital. The years 1870 to 1914 were, in fact, an age of globalization in the world economy. Mines and plantations in diverse lands such as Australia, South Africa, and Chile were opening or expanding in response to the emergence of growing markets for their products, especially in the cities of the industrialized world. At the same time, cities burgeoned as public health efforts, such as checking waterborne disease through sanitation measures, for the first time in world history made it feasible for births consistently to outnumber deaths in urban environments. A major transition was underway in which the characteristic habitat of the human species, which for several millennia had been the village, now was becoming the city. (In1890 perhaps 200 million people lived in cities worldwide, but by 2000 the figure had leapt to three billion, half of the human population). Cities had long been the seats of managerial and technological innovation and engines of economic growth, and in the Great Acceleration played that role with even greater effect. However, the Great Acceleration truly began only after 1945.In the decades between 1914 and 1945 the Great Acceleration was stalled by changes in politics and the world economy. Three great wrenching events lay behind this: World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Taken together, they slowed population growth, checked-indeed temporarily reversed-the integration and growth of the world economy. They also briefly checked urbanization, as city populations led the way in reducing their birth rates. Some European cities in the 1930sin effect went on reproduction strikes, so that (had they maintained this reluctance) they would have disappeared within decades. Paradoxically, however, these events also helped to initiate the Great Acceleration. The lessons absorbed about the disasters of world wars and depression inspired a new regime of international institutions after 1945 that helped create conditions for resumed economic growth. The United States in particular championed more open trade and capital flows, reintegrating much of the world economy and helping growth rates reach their highest ever levels in the period from 1950 to 1973. At the same time, the pace of technological change surged. Out of World War II came a number of new technologies-many of which represented new applications for fossil fuels-and a commitment to subsidized research and development, often in the form of alliances among government, industry, and universities. This proved enormously effective and, in a climate of renewed prosperity, ensured unprecedented funding for science and technology, unprecedented recruitment into these fields, and unprecedented advances as well. The Great Acceleration took place in an intellectual, cultural, political, and

The Industrial Era (ca. 1800-1945): Stage 1

legal context in which the growing impacts upon the Earth System counted for very little in the calculations and decisions made in the world's ministries, boardrooms, laboratories, farmhouses, village huts, and, for that matter, bedrooms. This context was not new, but it too was a necessary condition for the Great Acceleration. The exponential character of the Great Acceleration is obvious from our quantification of the human imprint on the Earth System, using atmospheric C02 concentration as the indicator (Table 1). Although by the Second World War theC02 concentration had clearly risen above the upper limit of the Holocene, its growth rate hit a take-off point around 1950.Nearly three-quarters of the anthropogenically driven rise inC02 concentration has occurred since 1950 (from about 310 to380 ppm), and about half of the total rise (48 ppm) has occurred in just the last 30 years. Stewards of the Earth System? (ca. 2015-?): Stage 3 of the Anthropocene. Humankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years, to come. To develop a universally accepted strategy to ensure the sustainability of Earth's life support system against human-induced stresses is one of the greatest research and policy challenges ever to confront humanity. Can humanity meet this challenge? Signs abound to suggest that the intellectual, cultural, political and legal context that permitted the Great Acceleration after 1945 has shifted in ways that could curtail it (41). Not surprisingly, some reflective people noted human impact upon the environment centuries and even millennia ago. However, as a major societal concern it dates from the 1960s with the rise of modern environmentalism. Observations showed incontrovertibly that the concentration of C02 in the atmosphere was rising markedly (42). In the 1980s temperature measurements showed global warming was a reality, a fact that encountered political opposition because of its implications, but within 20 years was no longer in serious doubt (39). Scientific observations showing the erosion of the earth's stratospheric ozone layer led to international agreements reducing the production and use of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) (43). On numerous ecological issues local, national, and international environmental policies were devised, and the environment routinely became a consideration, although rarely a dominant one, in political and economic calculations. This process represents the beginning of the third stage of the Anthropocene, in which the recognition that human activities are indeed affecting the structure and functioning of the Earth System as a whole (as opposed to local- and regional-scale environmental issues) is filtering through to decision-making at many levels The growing awareness of human influence on the Earth System has been aided by i) rapid advances in research and understanding, the most innovative of which is interdisciplinary work on human-environment systems, u) the enormous power of the internet as a global, self-organizing information system, ni) the spread of more free and open societies, supporting independent media, and iv) the growth of democratic political systems, narrowing the scope for the exercise of arbitrary state power and strengthening the role of civil society. Humanity is, in one way or another, becoming a self-conscious, active agent in the operation of its own life support system (44)

This process is still in tram, and where it may lead remains quite uncertain However, three broad philosophical approach es can be discerned in the growing debate about dealing with the changing global environment (28, 44). Business-as-usual In this conceptualisation of the next stage of the Anthropocene, the institutions and economic system that have driven the Great Acceleration continue to dominate human affairs This approach is based on several assumptions First, global change will not be severe or rapid enough to cause major disruptions to the global economic system or to other important aspects of societies, such as human health. Second, the existing market-oriented economic system can deal autonomously with any adaptations that are required This assumption is based on the fact that as societies have become wealthier, they have dealt effectively with some local and regional pollution problems (45). Examples include the clean-up of major European rivers and the amelioration of the acid rain problem in western Europe and eastern North America. Third, resources required to mitigate global change proactively would be better spent on more pressing human needs The business-as-usual approach appears, on the surface, to be a safe and conservative way forward. However, it entails considerable risks As the Earth System changes in response to human activities, it operates at a time scale that is mismatched with human decision-making or with the workings of the economic system. The long-term momentum built into the Earth System means that by the time humans realize that a business-as-usual approach may not work, the world will be committed to further decades or even centuries of environmental change. Collapse of modern, globalized society under uncontrollable environmental change is one possible outcome An example of this mis-match in time scales is the stability of the cryosphere, the ice on land and ocean and in the soil Depending on the scenario and the model, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (39) projected a global average warming of 1 1-6 4 C for 2094-2099 relative to 1980 1999, accompanied by a projected sea-level rise of 0 18-0 59 m (excluding contributions from the dynamics of the large polar ice sheets). However, warming is projected to be more than twice as large as the global average in the polar regions, enhancing ice sheet instability and glacier melting. Recent observations of glacial dynamics suggest a higher degree of instability than estimated by current cryosphenc models, which would lead to higher sea level rise through this century than estimated by the IPCC in 2001 (46). It is now conceivable that an irreversible threshold could be crossed in the next several decades, eventually (over centuries or a millennium) leading to the loss of the Greenland ice sheet and consequent sea-level rise of about 5 m Mitigation. An alternative pathway into the future is based on the recognition that the threat of further global change is serious enough that it must be dealt with proactively. The mitigation pathway attempts to take the human pressure off of the Earth System by vastly improved technology and management, wise use of Earth's resources, control of human and domestic animal population, and overall careful use and restoration of the natural environment. The ultimate goal is to reduce the human modification of the global environment to avoid dangerous or difficult-to-control levels and rates of change (47), and ultimately

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to allow the Earth System to function in a pre-Anthropocene way. Technology must play a strong role in reducing the pressure on the Earth System (48). Over the past several decades rapid advances in transport, energy, agriculture, and other sectors have led to a trend of dematerialization in several advanced economies. The amount and value of economic activity continue to grow but the amount of physical material flowing through the economy does not. There are further technological opportunities. Worldwide energy use is equivalent to only 0 05% of the solar radiation reaching the continents Only 0 4% of the incoming solar radiation, 1 W m-2, is converted to chemical energy by photosynthesis on land. Human appropriation of net primary production is about 10%, including agriculture, fibre, and fisheries (49). In addition to the many opportunities for energy conservation, numerous technologiesfrom solar thermal and photo voltaic through nuclear fission and fusion to wind power and biofuels from forests and crops-are available now or under development to replace fossil fuels. Although improved technology is essential for mitigating global change, it may not be enough on its own Changes in societal values and individual behaviour will likely be necessary (50) Some signs of these changes are now evident, but the Great Acceleration has considerable momentum and appears to be intensifying (51) The critical question is whether the trends of dematerialization and shifting societal values become strong enough to trigger a transition of our globalizing society towards a much more sustainable one. Geo-engineering options. The severity of global change, particularly changes to the climate system, may force societies to consider more drastic options For example, the anthropogenic emission of aerosol particles (e g , smoke, sulphate, dust, etc ) into the atmosphere leads to a net cooling effect because these particles and their influence on cloud properties enhance backscattering of incoming solar radiation. Thus, aerosols act in opposition to the greenhouse effect, masking some of the warming we would otherwise see now (52). Paradoxically, a cleanup of air pollution can thus increase greenhouse warming, perhaps leading to an additional 1 C of warming and bringing the Earth closer to "dangerous" levels of climate change This and other amplifying effects, such as feedbacks from the carbon cycle as the Earth warms (53), could render mitigation efforts largely ineffectual. Just to stabilize the atmospheric concentration of C02, without taking into account these amplifying effects, requires a reduction in anthropogenic emissions by more than 60%-a herculean task considering that most people on Earth, in order to increase their standard of living, are in need of much additional energy. One engineering approach to reducing the amount of C02 in the atmosphere is its sequestration in underground reservoirs (54) This "geo sequestration" would not only alleviate the pressures on climate, but would also lessen the expected acidification of the ocean surface waters, which leads to dissolution of calcareous marine organisms (55). In this situation some argue for geo-engineering solutions, a highly controversial topic. Geo-engineering involves purposeful manipulation by humans of global-scale Earth System processes with the intention of counteracting anthropogenically driven environmental change such as greenhouse warming (56) One proposal is based on the cooling effect of aerosols noted in the previous paragraph (57). The idea is to artificially enhance the Earth's albedo by releasing

sunlight-reflective material, such as sulphate particles, in the stratosphere, where they remain for 1-2 years before settling in the troposphere. The sulphate particles would be produced by the oxidation of S02, just as happens during volcanic eruptions. In order to compensate for a doubling of C02, if this were to happen, the input of sulphur would have to be about 1-2 Tg S y_1 (compared to an input of about 10 Tg S by Mount Pinatubo in 1991). The sulphur injections would have to occur for as long as C02 levels remain high. Looking more deeply into the evolution of the Anthropocene, future generations of H. sapiens will likely do all they can to prevent a new ice-age by adding powerful artificial greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Similarly, any drop in C02 levels to low concentrations, causing strong reductions in photosynthesis and agricultural productivity, might be com bated by artificial releases of C02, maybe from earlier C02 sequestration. And likewise, far into the future, H. sapiens will deflect meteorites and asteroids before they could hit the Earth. For the present, however, just the suggestion of geo engineering options can raise serious ethical questions and intense debate. In addition to fundamental ethical concerns, a critical issue is the possibility for unintended and unanticipated side effects that could have severe consequences. The cure could be worse than the disease. For the sulphate injection example described above, the residence time of the sulphate particles in the atmosphere is only a few years, so if serious side-effects occurred, the injections could be discontinued and the climate would relax to its former high C02 state within a decade. The Great Acceleration is reaching criticality (Fig. 4). Enormous, immediate challenges confront humanity over the next few decades as it attempts to pass through a bottleneck of continued population growth, excessive resource use and environmental deterioration. In most parts of the world the demand for fossil fuels overwhelms the desire to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. About 60% of ecosystem services are already degraded and will continue to degrade further unless significant societal changes in values and management occur (37). There is also evidence for radically different directions built around innovative, knowledge-based solutions. Whatever unfolds, the next few decades will surely be a tipping point in the evolution of the Anthropocene.

“ The cure could be worse than the disease.”

References

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implies a hot future Nature 435, 1187-1190 53 Fnedlingstein, P , Cox, P , Betts, R , Bopp, L , von Bloh, W , Brovkin, V , Doney, V S , Eby, M I, et al 2006 Climate-carbon cycle feedback analysis, results from the C4MIP model intercomparison J Chm 19, 3337-3353 54 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2005 Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage A Special Report of Working Group III Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Geneva, Switzerland, 430 pp 55 The Royal Society 2005 Ocean Acidification Due to Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Policy document 12/05 The Royal Society, UK, 68 pp 56 Schneider, S H 2001 Earth systems engineering and management Nature 409, 417-421 57 Crutzen, P J 2006 Albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulfur injections A contribution to resolve a policy dilemma dim Chang 77,211-220 58 Raupach, M R , Marland, G , Ci is, P , Le Quere, C , Canadell, J G , Klepper, G and Field, C B 2007 Global and regional drivers of accelerating C02 emissions Proc Nat Acad Sei USA in press 59 This paper grew out of discussions at the 96th Dahlem Conference (“Integrated History and future of People on Earth [IHOPE]”), held in Berlin in June 2005 We are grateful to the many colleagues at the Conference who contributed to the stimulating discussions, and to Dr Julia Lupp, the Dahlem Conference organizer, for permission to base this paper on these discussions 60 First submitted 31 May 2007 Accepted for publication 00 October 2007v

Effects of Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption on the hydrological cycle as an analog of geoengineering Kevin E. Trenberth and Aiguo Dai Kevin E. Trenberth and Aiguo Dai’s scientific article ‘Effects of Pinatubo volcanic eruption on the hydrological cycle as an analog of geoengineering’ investigates the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines as a main focus of the work. The article discusses and reveals adverse impacts on the climate as a result of the eruption on the hydrological cycle of the earth, such as the temporary sharp decreases in precipitation. This is discussed to reveal the negative impacts of the eruption as a contrast to the positive that was taken from the eruption, that there were mass cooling effects on the earth (0.5-degree cooling for a year after the eruption globally) due to the sulphur dioxide injected into the air from the eruption.

The article highlights that as a result of the temporary decrease in precipitation, there was also trends of higher drought occurrences globally, which one could assume from lack of rainfall. Thus, the article claims that such impacts as a result of the eruption injecting sulphur dioxide into the air also may have adverse impacts should geoengineering using sulphur dioxide be conducted. Moreover, the article suggests humans should not intervene with the climate systems with a lack of understanding of potential adverse impacts.

The problem of global warming arises from the buildup of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels and other human activities that change the composition of the atmosphere and alter outgoing longwave radiation (OLR). One geoengineering solution being proposed is to reduce the incoming sunshine by emulating a volcanic eruption. In between the incoming solar radiation and the OLR is the entire weather and climate system and the hydrological cycle. The precipitation and streamflow records from 1950 to 2004 are examined for the effects of volcanic eruptions from El Chichoń in March 1982 and Pinatubo in June 1991, taking into account changes from El Ninõ-Southern Oscillation. Following the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in June 1991 there was a substantial decrease in precipitation over land and a record decrease in runoff and river discharge into the ocean from October 1991 – September 1992. The results suggest that major adverse effects, including drought, could arise from geoengineering solutions. 1. Introduction The main purpose of this paper is to document the apparent effects of the Mount Pinatubo eruption in June 1991 [Hansen et al., 1992; Minnis et al., 1993] on the hydrological cycle, which showed a remarkable slowing in 1992 as measured by precipitation over land and associated runoff and river discharge into the ocean. If these changes were indeed associated with the stratospheric veil of aerosol that resulted from the eruption, then it has direct implications for the suggestions of geoengineering solutions to global warming [Crutzen, 2006]. The central concern with geoengineering fixes to global warming is that the cure could be worse than the disease. A cooling signature in broad terms is thought to be characteristic of the effects of volcanic eruptions on climate [Hansen et al., 1992; Minnis et al., 1993; Robock, 2000; Jones et al., 2003], or at least those that eject significant amounts of material into the stratosphere. Direct injection of particles can have a short-term cooling effect but such particles may not stay very long as they fall out. Rather, the injection of gases such as sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere which are subsequently oxidized to form tiny sulfate particles are the main source of an increase in albedo and net loss of energy [Robock, 2000]. Particles in the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, USA troposphere are rained out on a time scale of several days, but may remain in the stratosphere for many months. The net radiative effects of volcanic aerosols on surface and tropospheric temperatures [Wigley, 2000; Jones et al., 2003; Free and Angell, 2002] have the biggest and clearest signal in land temperatures in the second and third summer following tropical eruptions [Jones et al., 2003]. Precipitation and hydrological effects are more difficult to analyze and model [Broccoli et al., 2003]. In the period of available reliable hydrological data, after 1950, there were three large tropical volcanic eruptions (Agung in May 1963, El Chichoń in April 1982 and Pinatubo in June 1991). All 3 occurred at or near times of El Ninõ events, complicating the task of sorting out the volcanic from ENSO signals [Wigley, 2000]. The best documented and biggest veil of

aerosol by far was from Pinatubo, thus providing the main focus of this article. As Agung is at 8.3°S, its influence over northern land may have been limited or delayed compared with El Chicho´n (17°N) and Pinatubo (15°N), and global precipitation analyses [Adler et al., 2003] are not available prior to 1979, limiting analysis of the effects before then. Several studies have documented the effects of the Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption and resulting stratospheric aerosols that had a peak global visible optical depth of about 0.15 [Hansen et al., 1992; Minnis et al., 1993] on the subsequent climate [Hansen et al., 2002; Wielicki et al., 2005; Harries and Futyan, 2006]. Top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation measurements such as from the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) show how the veil of debris that formed in or was injected into the stratosphere blocked out the sun and resulted in a significant decrease in absorbed solar radiation (ASR) in the Earth-atmosphere system. This was caused by an increase in albedo by up to 0.007 because of the reflection of up to an additional 2.5 W m-2 of solar radiation over the following two years [Wielicki et al., 2005; Harries and Futyan, 2006]. More- over, the drop in radiative forcing is reasonably simulated by models [Hansen et al., 1992, 2002; Robock, 2000; Ammann et al., 2003; Stenchikov et al., 2006]. The effect was largest in the Tropics (see Figures 1 and 2). In the Pinatubo case, the effect was to lower air temperatures, reduce total water vapor in the atmosphere [Trenberth and Smith, 2005; Soden et al., 2005], and reduce the outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) back to space with a lag of a few months [Harries and Futyan, 2006]. The latter compensates somewhat for the lower ASR but there is nonetheless a loss in net global radiation at TOA signaling a cooling following the eruption (see Figure 2). Several models have simulated decreases in surface temperature [Hansen et al., 1992, 2002; Robock, 2000; Broccoli et al.,

“The primary driver of the climate system is the uneven distribution of incoming and outgoing radiation on Earth.”

“Figure 1. (a) Annual water year (Oct. to Sep.) continental freshwater discharge (solid line,

2003; Ammann et al., 2003; Gillett et al., 2004] although often with too large an amplitude.

shading indicates ±one standard error, 1 Sv = 106 m3 s-1) into the global oceans from 1950 – 2004 estimated using historical streamflow records from the world’s largest 925 rivers supplemented with simulated streamflow [Qian et al., 2006] using a land surface model forced with observed precipitation and other atmospheric forcing. Also shown is observed precipitation [Qian et al., 2006] (dashed line) integrated over global land areas (1.2 108 km3 which excludes some inland drainage areas). The correlation (r) between the two curves is 0.65. (b) As for Figure 1a but with ENSO-related variations removed. The r is 0.42. The year tick marks indicate the mid-point of the Oct. – Sep. period so that the anomaly for 1992 is the mean for Oct. 1991 – Sep. 1992. The arrows indicate times of Agung, El Chicho´n, and Pinatubo eruptions.

Based on the temperature decreases, it has been proposed that a possible partial solution to global warming may be to emulate the effects of a volcanic eruption by injecting material into the stratosphere as a form of ‘‘geoengineering’’ [Crutzen, 2006; Wigley, 2006]. However, global warming is not caused by increased sunshine, rather it arises from the increased greenhouse effect owing to the buildup of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels and other human activities by trapping OLR and thus warming the planet. The effect is about 1% of the natural energy flow [Karl and Trenberth, 2003]. In other words, the problem is the increased trapping of OLR by greenhouse gases and the solution proposed is to change the incoming solar radiation. The primary driver of the climate system is the uneven distribution of incoming and outgoing radiation on Earth. The incoming absorbed solar radiant energy is transformed into various forms (internal heat, potential energy, latent energy, and kinetic energy), moved around in various ways primarily by the atmosphere and oceans, stored and sequestered in the ocean, land, and ice components of the climate system, and ultimately radiated back to space as infrared radiation [Trenberth and Stepaniak, 2004]. The requirement for an equilibrium climate mandates a balance between the incoming and outgoing radiation and further mandates that the flows of energy are systematic. These drive the weather systems in the atmosphere, currents in the ocean, and fundamentally determine the climate [Trenberth and Stepaniak, 2004]. Reducing incoming solar radiation affects the natural flow of energy through the climate system and the whole operation of the climate system and, in particular, the hydrological cycle. 2. Hydrological Cycle and Volcanoes We examine the changes in land precipitation and continental freshwater discharge to illustrate the potential hydrological impacts of similar volcanic or geoengineering events. A review of precipitation P datasets suitable for our Figure 2. (top) Adapted time series of 20°N to 20°S ERBS non-scanner wide-field-of-view broadband shortwave, longwave, and net radiation anomalies from 1985 to 1999 [Wielicki et al., 2002a, 2002b] where the anomalies are defined with respect to the 1985 to 1989 period with Edition 3_Rev 1 data [Wong et al., 2006]. (bottom) Time series of the annual water year (Oct. to Sep.); note slight offset of points plotted vs. tick marks indicating January continental freshwater discharge and land precipitation (from Figure 1) for the 1985 to 1999 period. The period clearly influenced by the Mount Pinatubo eruption is indicated by grey shading.

purpose [Trenberth et al., 2007] reveals con-

siderable uncertainties over the ocean [Yin et al., 2004] and even over land [Adam et al., 2006] where rain-gauge records are unavailable for many areas and measurement errors occur. As these are mostly systematic, they may not influence anomalies. For reasons discussed by Qian et al. [2006], we use a merged land precipitation product which was derived by combining the precipitation for 1948 – 1996 from Chen et al. [2002] with the version 2 of the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) data [Adler et al., 2003] for 1997 – 2004. As all the land precipitation products examined by Trenberth et al. [2007] show similar anomalies near 1964 and 1983 and a sharp decline around 1992, our conclusions are not affected by the choice of precipitation products used here. Long-term changes in global mean precipitation (based on GPCP 1979 to 2005) are small [Curtis and Adler, 2003; Gu et al., 2007] but there is a strong inverse relationship between land and ocean precipitation in both the annual cycle and the interannual variability [Gu et al., 2007]. During El Ninõ events there tends to be a decrease in precipitation over land but an increase over the oceans [Curtis and Adler, 2003], and during 1983 and 1992 there were El Ninõs underway. We use updated streamflow gauge records from 925 of the world’s major rivers [Dai and Trenberth, 2002] and fill the gaps in this streamflow data set with simulated- streamflow from a stand-alone integration of the Community Land Model (CLM) [Dickinson et al., 2006] driven by observation-based atmospheric forcing [Qian et al., 2006]. The CLM is a comprehensive land surface model that represents the land surface with five primary subgrid land cover types, 16 plant functional types, and 10 layers for soil temperature and water, with explicit treatment of liquid soil water and ice. The CLM-simulated streamflow is highly correlated with streamflow gauge records [Qian et al., 2006], and it is used (through regression) to fill the missing-data gaps in streamflow records from world’s major rivers from 1948 – 2004. This new streamflow data set is then used to construct the continental discharge into the oceans accounting for contributions from the unmonitored areas outside of the 925 river basins [Dai and Trenberth, 2002]. The regression error and the difference between the observed and estimated (using the regression and CLM- simulated flow) streamflow are used as a measure of uncertainties for the derived continental discharge. The time series for the global land precipitation and river discharge into the oceans (Figure 1a) from 1950 through 2004 show the level of natural variability and also the singular nature of the anomalous values in the water year of 1992 (October 1991 to September 1992) following Pinatubo. During the 1992 water year, the precipitation is 3.12 standard deviations (0.069 Sv, computed with 1992 included) below normal and the river discharge is 3.67 standard deviations (0.031 Sv) below normal, both highly statistically significant at <1% level (and <0.1% level for the latter). The 1992 anomalies are much larger than variations for all other years during this 55 year period, including during the much stronger 1982/1983 and 1997/ 1998 El Ninõ events. More modest decreases are also seen in 1983 after El Chichoń, although these are not statistically significant. However, they were more pronounced over the tropics and the change was significant there [Gu et al.,” “2007]. There is no clear signal following Agung in 1963 unless it was delayed until 1965.

“The coincidence of Pinatubo effects with the natural tendency during the 1992 El Nin˜o event for precipitation to move off shore may have exacerbated the effects on the land hydrological cycle.”

Owing to the tendency for land precipitation to be reduced during El Ninõ events, we used linear regression with the Ninõ 3.4 sea surface temperature index (Figure 1b) to remove the expected effects of El Ninõ Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on the two series, by performing a regression based on all years but with 1983 and 1992 removed. For precipitation the variance is reduced by 43.9% and for discharge by 35.7%, and the relation between the two series is not as strong, but in both cases the 1992 anomalies are still statistically significant at <1% level. The TOA tropical broadband radiation anomalies from ERBS [Wong et al., 2006] (Figure 2) illustrate the changes in shortwave reflected (the inverse of ASR), longwave (OLR) and net radiation associated with the Pinatubo eruption and highlight the much larger change in the Tropics than for the global values [Harries and Futyan, 2006], with over 6 W m-2 decrease in net radiation. For the same period, the precipitation and river discharge values from Figure 1 a are also given. Note that the precipitation and discharge anomalies for 1992 are for the period Oct. 1991 – Sep 1992, which is before the canonical maximum El Ninõ warming in late-1992. The corresponding regional changes in precipitation, runoff streamflow and river discharge are also correspondingly greater in the Tropics (Figures 3a and 3b), a point emphasized by plotting in units of mm/day, while higher latitude effects are better illustrated by the Palmer Drought Severity Index (Figure 3c); a normalized drought index reflecting the balance between atmospheric moisture supply (i.e., precipitation) and demand based on a crude estimate of evapotranspiration (a function of temperature) [Dai et al., 2004]. Widespread regions of moderate or severe drought occurred following the Pinatubo eruption, and the year 1992 has a peak percentage of global land areas under drought conditions [Dai et al., 2004]. Although some of the regional precipitation anomalies shown in Figure 3a (over the maritime continent, the U.S., South America, and Southern Africa) resemble canonical patterns of El Ninõ-induced precipitation changes, many of the changes (over Europe, South Asia and northern South America) are not El Ninõ- like or are stronger than ENSO-induced anomalies. The runoff changes (Figure 3b), which directly result in the continental discharge anomaly, largely follow the precipitation anomaly patterns. We have examined global GPCP precipitation 12-month running means which indicate lowest values in late 1991 to early 1992 of 0.07 mm day-1 below the 1979 to 2004 average. Because global ocean values were also slightly below average, it is evident that the large land precipitation decrease in 1992 was not merely a shift in location between land and ocean. This is evidently a characteristic signature that enables the volcanic signal to be distinguished from ENSO effects and it is seen following both the El Chichoń and Pinatubo events [Gu et al., 2007]. Only for Pinatubo was a large downward excursion of land precipitation found in model ensemble runs [Broccoli et al., 2003] although a volcanic drying signal is detectable in several models [Broccoli et al., 2003; Gillett et al., 2004]. The coincidence of Pinatubo effects with the natural tendency during the 1992 El Ninõ event for precipitation to

“Figure 3. (a) Observed precipitation anomalies (relative to 1950 – 2004 mean) in mm/day during October 1991 – September 1992 over land. Warm colors indicate below normal precipitation. (b) As for Figure 3a but for the simulated runoff [Qian et al., 2006] using a comprehensive land surface model forced with observed precipitation and other atmospheric forcing in mm/day. (c) Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI, multiplied by 0.1) for October 1991 – September 1992 [Dai et al., 2004]. Warm colors indicate drying. Values less than -2 (0.2 on scale) indicate moderate drought, and those less than -3 indicate severe drought.”

move off shore may have exacerbated the effects on the land hydrological cycle. Nonetheless the fact that the 1992 precipitation and discharge anomalies are so much larger than for any other years suggests that the Pinatubo eruption played an important role in the record decline in land precipitation and discharge, and the associated drought conditions in 1992. 3. Implications for Geoengineering Geoengineering by blocking the sun addresses neither the central problem of climate change nor acidification of the oceans. Instead, adverse effects on the hydrological cycle may result from blocking sunlight before it reaches the Earth surface. More energy absorbed at the surface returns to the atmosphere through evaporation than through radiation or sensible heating [Kiehl and Trenberth, 1997], and the latent heat released occurs elsewhere as water vapor is transported many hundreds of kilometers before it condenses in the form of rain or snow. Hence cutting down solar radiation is apt to reduce precipitation and change” “atmospheric heating patterns that are dominated by latent heat release [Trenberth and Stepaniak, 2004]. It would alter a vital link (latent heating) in the flow of energy through the climate system between the incoming and outgoing radiation. This important effect is not included in simple models [Wigley, 2006] that involve only surface temperature and respond with surface cooling to a veil of aerosol that cuts out some sunshine. Creating a risk of widespread drought and reduced freshwater resources for the world to cut down on global warming does not seem like an appropriate fix. Our results suggest that considerable caution should be used regarding any intentional human intervention in the climate system that we do not fully understand.

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Reversing climate warming by artificial atmospheric carbon-dioxide removal: Can a Holocene-like climate be restored? Andrew H. MacDougall

Andrew H. MacDougall investigates one of the main geoengineering technologies, carbon dioxide removal, which is a process for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in order “to return atmospheric concentration of CO2 to a “safe” level” in efforts to prevent global warming. MacDougall suggests that “a climate resembling that of the Holocene can be restored by 3000 CE”. Models such as the Earth-system model (ESM) are used to fuel the investigations MacDougall discusses and reinforce the conclusions that he makes. MacDougall also concludes, however, that even with significant efforts to perform carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere, we will “live with the consequences of fossil fuel emissions for a very long time”.

Most climate modeling studies of future climate have focused on the effects of carbon emissions in the present century or the long-term fate of anthropogenically emitted carbon. However, after carbon emissions cease, there may be a desire to return to a “safe” CO2 concentration within this millennium. Realistically, this implies artificially removing CO2 from the atmosphere. In this study, experiments are conducted using the University of Victoria Earth system- climate model forced with novel future scenarios to explore the reversibility of climate warming as a response to a gradual return to preindustrial radiative forcing. Due to hysteresis in the permafrost carbon pool, the quantity of carbon that must be removed from the atmosphere is larger than the quantity that was originally emitted (115–180% of original emissions). In all the reversibility simulations with a moderate climate sensitivity, a climate resembling that of the Holocene can be restored by 3000 CE.

“Once net anthropogenic carbon emissions cease, the natural sources and sinks of carbon will govern the atmospheric concentration of CO2”

1. Introduction Once net anthropogenic carbon emissions cease, the natural sources and sinks of carbon will govern the atmospheric concentration of CO2. Long-term simulations using Earth-system models suggest that over thousands of years carbon will be gradually incorporated into the oceans [e.g., Archer, 2005; Eby et al., 2009]. However, long-term model simulations also indicate that most of the temperature anomaly created by burning of fossil fuels will persist even 10000 years into the future. The simulations of Eby et al. [2009], for example, suggest that 70–80% of the peak surface temperature anomaly would remain by the year 12000 CE, for a large range of cumulative carbon emissions (160–5120 Pg C). Given these model ﬁndings any attempt to return atmospheric concentration of CO2 to a “safe” level (after having greatly exceeded such a threshold) will likely require synthetic removal of carbon from the atmosphere. A number of previous model studies have performed simulations where anthropogenic carbon is removed from the atmosphere [e.g., Cao and Caldeira, 2010; Held et al., 2010; Samanta et al., 2010; Boucher et al., 2012; Zickfeld et al., 2013]. These studies have been designed to explore the reversibility of climate change with respect to various metrics of the Earth system, such as surface temperature or thermosteric sea-level rise [e.g., Zickfeld et al., 2013], or to separate the fast from the slow components of climate warming [Held et al., 2010]. Each of these previous studies has imposed highly idealized rates of atmospheric CO2 removal. Cao and Caldeira [2010] and Held et al. [2010] prescribed instantaneous returns to preindustrial CO2 concentrations, while Samanta et al. [2010] and Zickfeld et al. [2013] prescribe linear reductions in CO2 concentrations. In the study of Boucher et al. [2012] CO2 transitions from 1% increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration a year to a 1% decreases in atmospheric CO2 concentration a year, creating a very abrupt transition from large positive carbon emission to large negative carbon emissions. Boucher et al. [2012] employed the Hadley Centre’s complex Earth-system model (ESM) HadGEM2-ES and document the most extensive examination of hysteresis within an ESM. The study found that most metrics of the Earth system exhibit hysteresis both with respect to temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration. Zickfeld et al. [2013] document part of a

model intercomparison of Earth- system models of intermediate complexity (EMICs) carried out in preparation for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5). For two of the model experiments, the EMICs were forced with a prescribed return to preindustrial forcing over a period of 100 and 1000 years beginning in year 3000 CE. All of the EMICs simulated surface temperature and thermosteric sea-level anomalies with respect to the preindustrial era that persisted for centuries after the return to preindustrial CO2 concentrations. Of interest is that two of the EMICs suggested that more carbon would have to be removed from the atmosphere than had originally been emitted to the atmosphere to return to a preindustrial CO2 concentration. Several technologies have been proposed to remove CO2 from the atmosphere [e.g., Shepherd, 2009]. Of those proposed, only bio-energy carbon capture and storage (BECS) [Azar et al., 2006] and chemical open-air capture of CO2 [Keith et al., 2006] are considered technologically both feasible and capable of removing sufficient quantities of carbon to reverse the change in atmospheric CO2 concentration [Matthews, 2010]. Of the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) used in IPCC AR5 [Moss et al., 2010], only the lowest (RCP 2.6) envisions large scale deployment of CO2 removal technology (in the form of BECS). How- ever, global net primary productivity, a desire not to further compromise fragile ecosystems, and the need to grow sufﬁcient food to feed the human population imposes a limit to the extent that BECS can be deployed [e.g., Shepherd, 2009]. To achieve the magnitude of negative emissions needed to reverse the higher RCPs chemical open-air capture, powered “Figure 1. (a–d) Forcing for each of the Mirrored Concentration Pathways (MCPs). Note that all of the MCPs except MCP 2.6 reach peak CO2 concentration after the year 2100 CE.

by a carbon neutral energy source, would likely need to be deployed [Matthews, 2010]. For the model experiments described below, a set of novel future climate scenarios are introduced that prescribe a gradual return to preindustrial CO2 concentrations, land use, and non-CO2 radiative forcing. That is, these scenarios describe a future where a decision has been made to restore the Earth to preindustrial atmospheric composition and land use in hopes of

“ more carbon would have to be removed from the atmosphere than had originally been emitted to the atmosphere to return to a preindustrial CO2 concentration.”

restoring a Holocene-like climate. The scenarios are used to force the University of Victoria Earth-System Climate Model (UVic ESCM), which is used to diagnose carbon emission compatible with the scenarios, in addition to examining the reversibility of various metrics of the Earth-system, including the Greenland ice sheet. 2. Methods 2.1. Future Scenarios Four future scenarios where designed based on the RCPs are used in IPCC AR5 [Moss et al., 2010]. Each of the scenarios follows an RCP exactly up until that RCP reaches its peak CO2 concentration. After peak CO2, each of the scenarios prescribes a decline in atmospheric CO2 concentration in an exact mirror image to the original rise in CO2 concentration (Figure 1a). Non-CO2 greenhouse gases decline linearly to their preindustrial forcing beginning in the year of peak CO2 and reaching their preindustrial forcing in the same year CO2 reaches 280 ppmv (Figure 1b). Sulphate emissions are taken to be zero once CO2 concentration begins to decline (Figure 1c). Land use is also reversed in these simulations, with land being abandoned in the opposite order that it was acquired until the land use of 1850 is restored (Figure 1d). The pattern of land-use change causes a complication for the scenario based on RCP 4.5, where large-scale reforestation occurs before peak CO2 is reached. In the derived scenario, a period of deforestation occurs after atmospheric CO2 begins to decline. These scenarios are named the Mirrored Concentration Pathways (MCPs) and are distinguished with the same number as each RCP is derived from. The peak CO2 concentration occurs in year 2053, 2130, 2151, and 2251 for MCPs 2.6, 4.5, 6.0, and 8.5 respectively. 2.1.1. Rationale for Mirrored Future Scenarios [8] The scenarios introduced here are an attempt to extend climate warming reversal experiments to an idealized but more plausible transition from net positive to net negative carbon emissions. The assumption that atmospheric” “CO2 concentration decline will mirror its prior increase is intentionally simple, however, this assumption does follow intuitive economic logic. That is, carbon extraction begins slowly as CO2 removal machines with a finite lifespan are deployed at some rate. The rate of extraction grows as the machines become more numerous, and new machines become more efficient. As CO2 concentration approaches its preindustrial concentration, the extraction rate slows as old machines are no longer replaced to avoid having obsolete infrastructure when the goal of 280 ppmv CO2 concentration is reached. Although it may be possible to reduce atmospheric CO2 faster than its original increase, such a scenario risks inducing a rate of global cooling greater than the original warming rate. Given the challenges of adapting to a quickly changing climate, it seems unlikely that a high rate of cooling would be desirable. The MCPs are therefore a simple approximation of a fast but plausible return to preindustrial forcing. [The mirrored CO2 paths of the MCPs are to some extent similar to the CO2 paths in the reversal experiments of Samanta et al. [2010] and Boucher et al. [2012]. However, the MCPs account for the historic trajectory of CO2 emissions and non-CO2 influences on radiative forcing, neglected in previous reversibility studies.

“Figure 2. Earth-system metrics as simulated by the UVic ESCM under each of the four MCPs. Dotted lines are simulations with a climate sensitivity of 2.0ıC, solid lines are simulations with a climate sensitivity of 3.2ıC, and dashed lines are simulations with a climate sensitivity of 4.5ıC. Metrics were generated using the (a–f and h) frozen ground version of the UVic ESCM and the (g) dynamic ice sheet version of the model, and combining output from (i) both version of the model. Note that the combined sea-level rise includes only contributions from thermosteric rise and Greenland and does not include contributions from Antarctica, small glaciers and ice-caps, or ground-water mining.”

“intermediate complexity”

[To return to a preindustrial forcing, it is necessary to return to preindustrial land use. An exact reversal of land use as envisioned by the MCPs is implausible. However, assuming a continued increase in agricultural yields until the mid 21st century [e.g., Fischer et al., 2009], it should be possible to feed a population of under 10 billion people on a fraction of the global land surface similar to that used for agriculture in 1850 [e.g., Fischer et al., 2009]. 2.2. The UVic ESCM [11] The UVic ESCM is a coupled climate model of intermediate complexity with a full three dimensional ocean general circulation model [Weaver et al., 2001], complex land surface [Meissner et al., 2003], thermodynamic-dynamic sea ice model, and simplified energy and moisture balance atmosphere [Weaver et al., 2001]. The model has both a terrestrial and an oceanic carbon cycle. The terrestrial carbon cycle is simulated using the Top-down Representation of Inter- active Foliage and Flora Including Dynamics (TRIFFID) dynamic vegetation model [Cox et al., 2001; Matthews et al., 2004]. The inorganic ocean carbon cycle is simulated following the protocols of the ocean carbon-cycle inter-comparison project [Orr et al., 1999]. Ocean biology is simulated using a nutrient phytoplankton zoo plankton detritus

“The primary driver of the climate system is the uneven distribution of incoming and outgoing radiation on Earth.”

ecosystem model [Schmittner et al., 2008]. Ocean sedimentary processes are simulated using an Oxic only model of sediment respiration [Archer, 1996]. Two variants of the UVic ESCM are used for the experiments in this manuscript (1) the frozen ground version of the UVic ESCM which includes a deep soil column extending to 250 m depth, soil hydrology in the top 10 m of soil, full freeze-thaw physics, and a representation of the permafrost carbon pool [Avis et al., 2011; MacDougall et al., 2012]; and (2) the dynamic ice sheet version of the UVic ESCM which couples the Pennsylvania State University ice sheet model into the UVic ESCM providing for simulation of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and ice shelves [Fyke et al., 2011]. Both variants of the UVic ESCM are forced with each of the MCPs. The frozen ground version is used to diagnose CO2 emissions compatible with each MCP and to simulate the metrics of the Earth-system displayed below, except for eustatic sea-level rise. The ice sheet version is used in its Greenland only configuration to estimate the stability and ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet under each MCP. To generate an uncertainty range for the model estimates, the climate sensitivity of the UVic ESCM is varied by artificially modifying the outgoing long-wave radiation [Zickfeld et al., 2008]. Each MCP was simulated three times, once each for climate sensitivities of 2.0, 3.2, and 4.5ıC for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. This range covers the “likely” uncertainty range for climate sensitivity from the fourth assessment report of the IPCC [Hegerl et al., [Hegerl et al., 2007]]. The central value (3.2ıC) is the inherent climate sensitive of the frozen ground version of the UVic ESCM. 3. Results Various metrics of the Earth-system are shown in Figure 2 for each MCP and climate sensitivity. In every simulation, surface air temperature shows an asymmetric decline toward preindustrial temperatures following the peak CO2 concentration. None of the simulations shows a full recovery to the nineteenth century temperatures by the end of the 30th century (Figure 2a), with a residual climate warming of 0.1–1.7ıC for the full range of simulations. Similar to previous studies [e.g., Samanta et al., 2010; Boucher et al., 2012], the simulated northern sea ice extent closely follows surface temperature with a recovery beginning soon after temperatures begin to fall (Figure 2d). Permafrost area shows a delayed recovery after surface temperatures begin to fall. In MCP 8.5, permafrost area continues to decline for over a century after peak surface air temperature before commencing a slow recovery. Only under MCP 2.6 does permafrost area reach its 1990s extent by the year 3000 CE (Figure 2f ). We note that in every simulation, the meridional overturning circulation returns stronger that its preindustrial strength (Figure 2e). The thermosteric contribution to sea- level peaks no more than 150 years after the peak surface temperatures is reached, after which it begins a slow decline (Figure 2h). Consistent with previous studies [e.g., Boucher et al., 2012] ocean surface pH very closely follows atmospheric CO2 concentration, to the extent that the model simulations under each climate sensitivity are indistinguishable (Figure 2c). The simulated Greenland ice sheet remains stable under the three lower

MCPs despite the high sensitivity of the ice sheet component used in the UVic ESCM to variations in climate sensitivity [Fyke et al., 2011]. Under MCP 6.0, with a climate sensitivity of 4.5ıC, the ice sheet losses 0.26 m sea-level equivalent before restabilizing after CO2 is restored to 280 ppmv. Under the high-concentration pathway (MCP 8.5), the ice sheet contributes substantially to sea-level rise, adding 2.69 m to sea level under the high- climate-sensitivity simulation. The contribution to sea level from the Greenland ice sheet is simulated to be largely irreversible on the millennial timescale considered in this study. Under the middle two MCPs, the ice sheet has regained less that 10% of the mass it had lost by the end of the simulations in the year 3000 CE. The UVic ESCM has a relatively low arctic amplification, another parameter that the ice sheet component is very sensitive to [Fyke, 2011]. Simulations with a higher polar amplification could result in substantially larger contribution to sea-level rise from the Greenland ice sheet. Table 1 displays the total fossil emissions and total drawdown for each of the simulations with a climate sensitivity of 3.2ıC. Consistent with the behavior of the UVic ESCM in the EMIC AR5 intecomparison [Zickfeld et al., 2013], more carbon needs to be removed from the atmosphere than was originally emitted to the atmosphere to restore a preindustrial CO2 concentration. However, with the addition of the permafrost carbon pool model component, the quantity of carbon that must be removed has grown to between 127 and 153% of that originally emitted to the atmosphere (for the medium climate sensitivity simulations). For the low climate sensitivity model runs, the quantity of carbon that must be removed is between 115 and 130% of that originally emitted to the atmosphere and for the high climate sensitivity model runs between 140 and 181%. Most of this excess carbon originates from the permafrost carbon pool which presumably will gradually reform once permafrost begins recovering. Rates of permafrost carbon pool formation in Alaska following deglacition were on the order of 7 g C m–2 a–1 for non-peat land soils [Marion and Oechel, 1993]. Assuming a similar rate following restoration of preindustrial forcing and assuming a permafrost area of approximately 16 million km2, one would expect burial of about 0.15 Pg C a–1 into permafrost soils. For MCP 4.5, this implies that it would take on the order of 3000 years to restore the permafrost carbon pool. To provide a quantitative sense of the timescales for restoring a Holocene-like climate signiﬁcant events simulated for MCP 4.5 with climate sensitivity 3.2ıC are described below. Under MCP 4.5, atmospheric CO2 concentration peaks in the year 2130. Surface air temperature” “Table 1. Cumulative Fossil Fuel Carbon Emissions and Cumulative Carbon Drawdown for Each of the MCPsa” “Scenario” “Fossil Emissions (Pg C)” “Drawdown (Pg C)” “Ratio (%)” “MCP 2.6” 584 896 153 “MCP 4.5” 911 1389 152 “MCP 6.0” 1513 2112 140

“Assuming a similar rate following restoration of preindustrial forcing and assuming a permafrost area of approximately 16 million km2, one would expect burial of about 0.15 Pg C a–1 into permafrost soils.”

“MCP 8.5” 3898 4899 127 “a Results are for model runs with a climate sensitivity of 3.2ıC. peaks two decades later at 2.8ıC above the preindustrial temperature. Ocean pH and northern sea ice are restored to their 1990 states by 2280 and 2450, respectively. Sea-level peaks in 2251, and in the year 3000, surface air temperature is 0.3ıC above the preindustrial temperature. Diagnosed net negative emissions begin soon after CO2 concentration peaks and reach their apex of –9.7 Pg C a–1 in year 2220. The apex negative emissions are very close to the magnitude of present day positive fossil fuel emissions [Olivier et al., 2012]. Negative emissions gradually decline over the following centuries until 2630 when direct human interference in atmospheric composition ends. 4. Discussion 4.1. A Holocene-Like Climate Recent paleoclimate reconstructions of the Holocene suggest that globally temperatures rose rapidly ﬂowing the end of the last ice age, plateaued between 9000 and 5000 years Before Present (BP) at approximately 0.4ıC above mid twentieth century temperatures [Marcott et al., 2013]. Beginning at about 5000 BP, temperatures gradually declined until the rise of industrial civilization resulted in rapid anthropogenic warming [Marcott et al., 2013]. Present day surface air temperatures may not yet have exceeded the full range of those estimated for the Holocene [Marcott et al., 2013]. [19] If one assumes an upper bound of Holocene-like surface temperature estimates to be those as much as 1ıC above the preindustrial surface air temperature [e.g., Marcott et al., 2013], all but one of the simulations presented here suggests a restoration of a Holocene-like climate by the year 3000 (MCP 8.5 with a climate sensitivity of 4.5ıC is the exception). Given that in our simulations, the oceans cool slower than the land surface, there are likely to be large differences between the restored climate and the preindustrial climate at the continental and region scale. 4.2. The Effectiveness of Removing Carbon Many of the problems associated with climate warming originate from the rate of temperature change as opposed to its absolute magnitude [e.g., Thomas et al., 2004]. Although the rate of temperature reduction during the carbon removal stage of the MCPs is slower than the prior rate of temperature increase, the simulated rate of cooling is substantial enough to warrant concern. However, if rates of cooling were found to be too fast, carbon could simply be removed at a slower rate. It is likely that the ability to adapt to a cooling climate would be a key consideration in setting the rate of atmospheric carbon removal in addition to the economic and technological feasibility of carbon removal. [Restoring atmospheric CO2 concentrations to their preindustrial level implies totally decarbonizing the global economy followed by developing the infrastructure to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Matthews [2010] estimated that the economic scale of carbon removal technology would be of similar scale to the fossil fuel powered industry. Therefore, a society that de-

5. Conclusions Here novel future scenarios were developed to investigate a gradual return to preindustrial radiative forcing to assess the possibility and time frame of restoring a Holocene- like climate. The four scenarios follow the RCPs up until each RCPs reaches its peak CO2 concentration after which atmospheric CO2 is reduced in a mirrored image to its original increase. The scenarios were used to force the UVic ESCM under a range of model climate sensitivities. The simulations suggest that a Holocene-like climate can be restored under all but the highest emissions and climate sensitivity permutation by the year 3000 CE. Due primarily to a strong permafrost carbon cycle feedback in the model, more carbon needs to be removed from the atmosphere than was originally emitted to restore a preindustrial atmospheric CO2 concentration. Removing carbon from the atmosphere was able to restabilize the simulated Greenland ice sheet. How- ever, the ice sheet regrows slowly regaining less than 10% of its lost mass by the year 3000 CE under the middle two scenarios. These results suggest that even with monumental effort to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, humanity will be living with the consequences of fossil fuel emissions for a very long time.

“These results suggest that even with monumental effort to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, humanity will be living with the consequences of fossil fuel emissions for a very long time.”

cided to restore a Holocene-like climate would have to devote a significant fraction of its industrial output to removing carbon from the atmosphere. From the model experiments presented above and those published in literature [e.g., Cao and Caldeira, 2010; Held et al., 2010; Samanta et al., 2010; Boucher et al., 2012; Zickfeld et al., 2013], the only components of the Earth-system to demonstrate a lack of reversibility are those associated with ice sheets, and even they may recover over many thousands of years. Whether this reversibility is a feature of the natural Earth system or some artifact of our modeling methods is a question requiring further study. State-of-the-art Earth-system models do not yet simulate complex ecosystem dynamics. These systems are of the most concern for reversibility [e.g., Thomas et al., 2004] as the extinction of biological species is not easily reversed. Despite the technological feasibility of reversing the physical and chemical aspect of climate warming on a millennial timescale, irreversible damage to the biosphere from climate change remains an enduring concern [Barnosky et al., 2011].

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dynamics in glacial inception: A study with the UVic Earth System Model, Clim. Dyn., 21, 515–537. Moss, R. H., et al. (2010), The next generation of scenarios for climate change research and assessment, Nature, 463, 747–754, doi:10.1038/nature08823. Olivier, J. G., J. A. Peters, and G. Janssens-Maenhout (2012), Trends in Global CO2 emissions; 2012 Report, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency; Ispra: Joint Research Centre. Orr, J., R. Najjar, C. Sabine, and F. Joos, (1999), Abiotic-HOWTO, Internal OCMIP Report, LSCE/CEA Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France. Samanta, A., B. T. Anderson, S. Ganguly, Y. Knyazikhin, R. R. Nemani, and R. B. Myneni (2010), Physical climate response to a reduction of anthropogenic climate forcing, Earth Interact., 14, 1–11. Schmittner, A., A. Oschlies, H. D. Matthews, and E. D. Galbraith (2008), Future changes in climate, ocean circulation, ecosystems, and biogeo- chemical cycling simulated for a business-as-usual co2 emission scenario until year 4000 AD, Global Biogeochem. Cycles, 22, GB1013, doi:10.1029/2007GB002953.” “Shepherd, J. (2009), Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty, GB, Royal Society, London. Thomas, C. D., et al. (2004), Extinction risk from climate change, Nature, 427, 145–148. Weaver, A. J., et al. (2001), The uvic earth system climate model: Model description, climatology, and applications to past, present and future climates, Atmosphere–Ocean, 39, 1–67.” “Zickfeld, K., M. Eby, H. D. Matthews, and A. J. Weaver (2008), Setting cumulative emissions targets to reduce the risk of dangerous climate change, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 106, 16,129–16,134, doi:10.1073/pnas.0805800106. Zickfeld, K., et al. (2013), Long-term climate change commitment and reversibility: An EMIC intercomparison, J. Climate, 26, 5782–5809.”

STAR

CHAMBER

star chamber in ethics

ETHICS

ETHICAL

CONCERNS

ethical concerns

CONCERNS

The difficulties that arise from geoengineering proposals and considerations are particularly attributed to concerns for its morality and tendency to be unethical. More specifically, the idea

that various forms of geoengineering–mainly through artificial processes and those such as solar radiation management (SRM)–have not been tested and researched thoroughly enough to predict their potential adverse effects is a main concern that makes up a vast amount of arguments on the morality of geoengineering. Hence, texts in this chapter propose new ways of thinking about the human-nature relationship and how we can understand our value and role as humans on earth in order to appreciate and respect the more-than-human forces on earth. Such an idea is explored in the introduction to ‘Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain, Vapour Ray’. Other texts in this chapter such as Donna Haraway’s introduction to ‘Staying with the trouble’ proposes the concepts such as for humans to make relationships or her term ‘kin’ with the ‘more-than-human species’ on earth, which refers to the other living creatures, the systems and make-up of the earth. She proposes this to suggest that developing closer relationships with the earth allows us to better deal with the issues such as climate change once we have a more intimate understanding of our world. Thus, these texts construct potential ways to approach geoengineering activities with a more thoughtful ethical understanding of our position on earth so that we can respond to its challenges with a more ecocentric perspective. Some texts such as ‘Geoengineering and Moral Schizophrenia: What’s the Question?’ by Stephen M. Gardiner offer a more radical, somewhat controversial critique on the ‘ethical shortsightedness’ of mainstream views of geoengineering which also contributes to directing a better ethical approach. The chapter additionally explores how current proposals and methods of geoengineering such as Adrian Currie’s ‘Geoengineering tensions’ do not consider the potential adverse impacts and are

Moreover, they suggest better geoengineering alternatives which cooperate with environmentally moral standards. perceived as unethical.

Geoengineering and Moral Schizophrenia: What’s the Question? Stephen Gardiner

Its is important to note here, that we do not condone the author’s use of the word ‘Schizophrenia’ in this publishing, however we believe this piece to be crucial in understanding a darker side of climate ethics. Please be aware that the following content may be uncomfortable for some readers, continue at your own discretion.

Stephen Gardiner contends in his (somewhat controversial) chapter of Climate Change Geoengineering: Legal, Political and Philosophical Perspectives, that mainstream discourse surrounding geoengineering

suffers from ethical short-sightedness, hence threatening to undermine the superficial appeal of the climate emergency. This has caused some human collectives to be split in two minds when considering the conditions appropriate for geoegineering, it is easy to let the chaotic- even helpless climate trajectory overwhelm society therefore instigating an “all-or-nothing” mentality, mainstream arguments for geoegineering suggests the obligation for humans to act on the issue before it becomes a global catastrophe and alludes to the logical choice of solution Z while neglecting A-Y altogether. However Gardiner theorises that arguments as such are too broad and often shallow in their consideration: leading to ethical short-sightedness when discussing a serious global (and future) matter.

“Given the looming threat of catastrophe, we are told, geoengineering simply must be taken seriously.”

“Not to be moved by what one values – what one believes good, nice, right, beautiful, and so on – bespeaks a malady of the spirit.” Michael Stocker Humanity stands on a precipice. Mainstream science tells us that climate change is real, accelerating, and might credibly result in global catastrophe. For decades, it has warned that greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced (mitigation) and that we should prepare for those impacts that are no longer avoidable (adaptation). Yet global emissions of the main culprit, carbon dioxide, continue to grow at a startling rate, and very little action has been taken to prepare. In the face of this escalating threat, a previously marginalized proposal has reemerged and become mainstream. Geoengineering – roughly “the intentional manipulation of planetary systems at a global scale” – is now being seriously discussed. Especially prominent are approaches that might provide a quick fix to hold off an imminent climate catastrophe. Currently, the leading proposal is that humanity try to offset the heating effects of increases in greenhouse gases by injecting sulfates into the stratosphere, as a way of reducing incoming solar radiation (i.e., “planetary sunblock”). Although most believe this form of “solar radiation management” to be “risky”, and probably also “unsustainable” over the long term, respected researchers and institutions are urging national governments to create research programs, and begin envisioning mechanisms of governance. Given the looming threat of catastrophe, we are told, geoengineering simply must be taken seriously. At first glance, such arguments, and the emergency framing more generally, appear straightforward, irresistible and overtly ethical. Clearly, global environmental catastrophe would be very bad for many things we value. If so, don’t we have a strong moral obligation to do “whatever it takes” to prevent it, including encouraging the would-be geoengineers? In the face of such a threat, what ethical objections could possibly be strong enough to rule out geoengineering? This chapter considers whether, in context, these are the most important questions to be asking. Its central claim will be that they are not. Although the issue of whether to pursue geoengineering as such is relevant, focusing on it obscures much of what is at stake morally-speaking, and in ways that threaten to trivialize our understanding of our predicament. One way to illustrate this is by showing how the currently dominant framing of the geoengineering debate in terms of “whatever it takes”-style emergency arguments is often ethically shortsighted and morally schizophrenic. It is ethically short-sighted (in the sense of “missing the bigger picture”) in so far as it arbitrarily marginalizes central moral issues such as how we got into this predicament, and why we are not seriously pursuing better ways out. It is also frequently morally schizophrenic (in the sense of being “a state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements”) since it tends to bring on a form of creative myopia: it requires us to emphasize and endorse strong ethical concerns that we are otherwise unwilling to act on, and which would, if earnestly and coherently embraced, lead us to approach both climate policy in general and geoengineering in particular in very different ways. In short, the worry is that, even if ethically serious people have reason to support (some forms of) geoengineering research

and perhaps even deployment in the abstract, their approach would look very different from anything currently under consideration, let alone actually likely to transpire. This diagnosis has three important implications. First, it threatens to undermine the superficial appeal of the emergency arguments, and to render them seriously misleading in practice. Second, it has explanatory value: it seems likely many people’s ethical unease about the current push towards geoengineering rest in part on concerns about ethical short-sightedness and moral schizophrenia. Third, importantly, it suggests that not all ethical resistance to geoengineering relies on potentially controversial theses about its moral status. For example, those troubled by the geoengineering turn in climate policy need not believe geoengineering as such to be inherently bad, nor a violation of the appropriate relationship of humanity to the rest of the natural world, nor even ultimately morally impermissible. Instead, some ethical resistance can involve far narrower fears about the context within which geoengineering is currently being pursued, and how this is likely to evolve in the foreseeable future. Before proceeding, some clarifications may be helpful. First, the target of most of the chapter is our collective reasoning and behavior, where the most salient collectives are humanity as such, the dominant nations, and especially the current generation of the world’s affluent, who wield most of the political power, and to whom most arguments for engaging in geoengineering are in practice ultimately addressed. One consequence of this is that the chapter is not directly concerned with the issue of whether and how ethical responsibility is transmitted from collectives to individuals. Though I am inclined to think that individuals are normally accountable to some extent for what they do together, the issue is complex and I will neither argue for that view here, nor sketch its implications for geoengineering. Second, when discussing collectives, my focus is on improving the quality of public argument, rather than prosecuting claims of ethical responsibility. In particular, I am not concerned with questions of who should be accused of moral schizophrenia, and how they should be held accountable. Instead, my interest is in how we (collectively) should best think and talk about the challenge that confronts us in a setting where the integrity of public discussion is itself at risk. Third, in focusing on undifferentiated collectives such as humanity as such and the current generation, I am not claiming that such collectives are currently unified in appropriate structures of agency (e.g., by competent institutions). Instead, I assume only that there is a sense in which they should be so unified, and that public argument often proceeds on this assumption. Nevertheless, fourth, I also do not assume that thinking about collectives is the only or most central way in which geoengineering (or climate policy more generally) should be understood from the ethical point of view. Indeed, (as we shall see in section 1) elsewhere I have argued that one of the key features of climate change and similar problems is the way in which they complicate and potentially undermine effective collective agency. My remarks should thus be seen as picking out only one salient dimension of our ethical problem (and so in the context of that overall picture, rather than in competition with it). The chapter proceeds as follows. Section 1 considers the general ethical

“ it seems likely many people’s ethical unease about the current push towards geoengineering rest in part on concerns about ethical shortsightedness and

context in which the push towards geoengineering emerges, and clarifies the problem of ethical short-sightedness. Section 2 identifies the problem of moral schizophrenia, introduces a provocative hypothetical case, and suggests that it is analogous to geoengineering. Section 3 briefly sketches some implications of the analysis. Section 4 clarifies the analogy by responding to three basic objections. Section 5 summarizes the main claims of the chapter. 1. Ethical Short-sightedness and the Context of Climate Engineering

moral schizophrenia.”

1.1 Three Questions The question people usually ask about geoengineering is: ‘Are you for it or against it?’ Unfortunately, as stated, this question is not very well formulated. On the one hand, no one favors geoengineering under just any circumstances, for just any reason. For example, a geoengineering program aimed at preventing rain from ever falling on a sitting President of the United States would be morally absurd. More realistically, very few scientists (that I know of) believe that sulfate injection is justified right now. Instead, the vast majority are united in thinking that such an intervention would be too risky given our present state of ignorance about the consequences. On the other hand, it seems likely that most people would accept geoengineering under some circumstances, if the only alternative were truly dire enough, and the consequences of geoengineering were sufficiently benign and understood with very high confidence. However, much then depends on what counts as ‘dire,’ ‘benign’ and ‘high confidence.’ Given these concerns, a better question would be: ‘Under what conditions do you think geoengineering might become justified?’, where the conditions to be considered would include, for example, the threat to be confronted, the background circumstances, the governance mechanisms, the individual protections to be provided, the compensation provisions to be made, and so on. Call this, the Justificatory Question. In a way, the emergency arguments for geoengineering (mentioned above) aim to dodge the justificatory question. For one thing, they tend to be stated in a very general form, with the key term – usually ‘catastrophe’ - left undefined. In addition, they do not explicitly address any of the other potential conditions just mentioned (such as compensation and individual protections). Instead, they appear implicitly to assume either that such conditions are met, or else that their relevance is overwhelmed by whatever “catastrophe” lurks in the background, so that anything else is a side issue at best. In the latter case, the thought is that whatever the catastrophe is, it is sufficiently bad to justify geoengineering, even if (for example) the geoengineering is not at all benign, its wider implications are not well-understood, and other protections are not in place. This dodging of the justificatory question gives rise to a number of problems. First, as stated, the emergency arguments are opaque. It is left to the audience to fill in the key content of ‘catastrophe,’ and to make their own implicit judgments about tolerable negative impacts, confidence levels, and so on, and the importance of other issues, such as governance and compensation. Second, this suggests that the widespread initial sympathy for the argument may be shallow. For example, some scientists may be drawn to it because they fear the “catastrophe” of a mass extinction, and would favor a robust system of international compensation to offset any negative effects of geoengineering,

whereas some economists may approve of the emergency arguments because they fear the much more modest “catastrophe” of a short-term global recession, and would vigorously oppose climate policies that involve any form of compensation or liability for damages. Taking the justificatory question seriously both exposes such difficulties, and helps to bring out important underlying issues at stake in geoengineering. The justificatory question is, then, both intellectually interesting, and at least potentially of extreme practical and political importance. Nevertheless, I will argue that it is neither the only, nor probably the most pressing, ethical question to be asking about geoengineering. In particular, I propose that we also examine the moral context of the push towards geoengineering, and the shape of the policies likely to emerge given that context. Call this the Contextual Question. One reason for the importance of the contextual question is that pursuit of geoengineering is not some abstract venture being embarked on in an idealized world by agents with no history. Instead, it is being done for particular reasons, by particular agents, and in response to specific problems. This has implications for how we understand what geoengineering is, and is likely to become. It also affects what our ethical obligations are. Indeed, I shall suggest that the contextual question is not only relevant to the justificatory question, but is also neither subsumed nor dwarfed by it. On the contrary, in the real world any ethically respectable answer to the justificatory question will have to take seriously the contextual question, or else risk superficiality and a dangerous short-sightedness. 1.2 A Perfect Moral Storm So, what is the ethical context for climate engineering? In my view, climate change is “a perfect moral storm”. It is genuinely global, seriously intergenerational, and poses deep theoretical problems. Each of these characteristics presents dangerous obstacles to ethical action. Taken together, they constitute a profound, and perhaps hitherto unprecedented, challenge. At the heart of the matter is the fact that those most responsible for past and current emissions, the relatively affluent, and especially those in the developed nations, benefit (or at least believe that they benefit) from high and unsustainable carbon emissions, but most of the costs of such emissions, and especially the most severe, are projected to fall on future generations and nonhuman nature, and especially the future poor. In short, the current generation of the affluent face strong temptations to pass the buck for their behavior on to others who are extremely vulnerable to them. This buck-passing is especially problematic when the benefits taken by the affluent are relatively modest or superficial (e.g., the joy of wearing shorts and t-shirts indoors in winter) in comparison to the severe risks (e.g., famine) that they impose on others. The ethical challenge of the perfect moral storm is to overcome the temptation of such buck-passing. So far, the current generation has been slow to respond. As a matter of substance, since the first IPCC report of 1990, carbon dioxide emissions have risen by more than 30% globally. This is partly because of explosive economic growth in developing nations, and especially China. However, most developed nations have also seen increases. In addition, they produce substantially more emissions per capita, their historical contributions

“catastrophe” “vigorously oppose climate policies that involve any form of compensation or liability for damages.”

“they appear implicitly to assume either that such conditions are met, or else that their relevance is overwhelmed by whatever “catastrophe” lurks in the background, so that anything else is a side issue at best.”

to the problem are considerably larger, and much of the growth in the developing countries is fueled by goods that they consume. As a matter of procedure, things are hardly more encouraging. Despite more than twenty years of serious diplomatic activity, including a global treaty, the world still awaits a convincing effort to confront the challenge. The diplomatic circuit has progressed from Rio to Kyoto to Bali to Copenhagen to Cancun and Durban. Yet the key questions remain unresolved, and perpetually deferred until later. Some may object that the reasons for the slow response have more to do with the fact that many remain unconvinced that climate change is a real, or major, problem. However, elsewhere I have argued that this may also involve buck-passing, since the perfect moral storm threatens corruption of the understanding, both epistemic and moral. In essence, for those able to exploit their spatial and temporal position, passing the buck to future generations and the world’s poor is tempting, but having to acknowledge that this is what one is doing is ethically uncomfortable. Far better, then, to try to seize the moral high ground, denying that there is a problem at all or that it will be severe, arguing that continuing to do nothing actually benefits future people, asserting that they should clean up the mess because they’ll be richer, and so on. Even if such arguments do not bear close scrutiny, they at least provide moral cover under which buck-passing can continue without too much embarrassment. As Robert Samuelson puts it in another intergenerational setting: Theres a quiet clamor for hypocrisy and deception; and pragmatic politicians respond with ... schemes that seem to promise something for nothing. Please, spare us the truth.’ If we take the perfect moral storm analysis seriously, much of the recent political history of climate change is worrying. Nevertheless, we should not expect buck-passing always to take the form of escalating emissions and political misdirection. For example, perhaps at some point denial and claims that the future can and should take care of itself begin to strain all credibility. More importantly in the present context, the current generation might begin to worry that their misbehavior may have gone far enough to pose real threats to itself (i.e., in the short- to medium-term). For such reasons, we can expect a buck-passing strategy to evolve over time. Though this worry is probably not enough to provoke a truly ethical policy (e.g., one that takes future generations seriously), it may make a difference. For example, if catastrophe may be coming quickly, then even a buck-passing generation has reason to do something. In particular, at such a point, any number of quick, short-term fixes (i.e., ones good for one or two generations) are sure to be attractive, especially if they appear to have low start up costs and to impose most of their risks on others (e.g., in the future or in other parts of the world). In a perfect moral storm, then, it is easy to see why we might be drawn towards the age of geoengineering, and why this might suggest a deep ethical problem. In context, there is every reason to expect a buck-passing generation to be tempted by geoengineering interventions that do not constitute real solutions to the genuine global, intergenerational and ecological problem of the perfect moral storm, but rather “shadow solutions” that address their own distinct concerns, but may be disguised as the real thing. In particular, we should be wary of parochial geoengineering, where the current generation secures short-term benefits for itself only by passing on much more serious long-term risks to the

future, and predatory geoengineering, where one country chooses a particular form of geoengineering mainly to set back the interests of a geopolitical rival. These temptations are too easily hidden behind appeals to ethical emergency; yet they are threats that an ethics of geoengineering – or indeed any reasonable appraisal – must take seriously. At first glance, the possibility of buck-passing geoengineering may seem farfetched. However, consider the following. It is often said that two of the major advantages of the sulfate injection strategy are that it is reversible, and that we have “proof of concept” from past volcanic eruptions. Nevertheless, each of these claims is readily contestable. First, once sulfate injection is masking a significant temperature effect, it may not be reversible in any meaningful sense, since withdrawing the intervention might then result in a rapid bounce-back at least as dangerous as the climate change it is aimed at preventing. Second, it is not clear that we have proof of the relevant concept: sulfates injected into the stratosphere by volcanoes typically wash out in a year or two, whereas effective geoengineering would need to be in place for many decades and perhaps centuries. Both contestations seem relevant to the perfect moral storm. These objections are highly salient if we care about long-term impacts and longterm reversibility. If we don’t, then the standard claims look more relevant. If we forget the perfect moral storm, then we may miss the importance of this observation. 2. Moral Schizophrenia We can get a sharper sense of how the emergency framing of geoengineering puts our focus in the wrong place and on the wrong questions by drawing attention to a problem closely connected to ethical short-sightedness, namely moral schizophrenia. 2.1. Moral Schizophrenia The term ‘schizophrenia’ is formed from the Greek scizein (‘to split’) and frhn (‘mind’); hence, to be schizophrenic is ‘to have a split mind.’ As a medical condition, schizophrenia is defined “a mental disease occurring in various forms, all characterized by a breakdown in the relation between thoughts, feelings, and actions,” and “frequently accompanied by delusions and retreat from social life.” When used more broadly, it is reasonable to say that schizophrenia is “a state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements.” In a classic paper, Michael Stocker describes the general phenomenon of moral schizophrenia as follows: “One mark of a good life is a harmony between one’s motives and one’s reasons, values, justifications. Not to be moved by what one values – what one believes good, nice, right, beautiful, and so on – bespeaks a malady of the spirit. Not to value what moves one also bespeaks a malady of the spirit. Such a malady, or such maladies, can properly be called moral schizophrenia – for they are a split between one’s motives and one’s reasons.” Stocker, then, is concerned with the split between (on the one hand) an agent’s underlying reasons, values or justifications for action, and (on the other hand)

“These temptations are too easily hidden behind appeals to ethical emergency; yet they are threats that an ethics of geoengineering – or indeed any reasonable appraisal – must take seriously.”

what in fact moves her (her “motives”). Moreover, Stocker treats the problem as one of disharmony, and harmony as a mark of a good human life. Presumably, the basic phenomenon of splitting can arise in distinct ways in different situations, and might be accounted for by a variety of views in moral psychology. Nevertheless, for our purposes, the details of exactly how the relevant split occurs, and the psychological ontology underlying it, will not be too important, since it will be sufficient to gesture at the problem in a general way. Moreover, we will focus on just one kind of moral schizophrenia, which I will call creative myopia. This arises when an agent invokes a set of strong moral reasons to justify a given course of action, but this course of action is supported by these reasons only because the agent has ruled out a number of alternative courses of action more strongly supported by the same reasons, and where this is due to motives she has that are less important, and are condemned by those reasons. We shall examine the abstract shape of this case more carefully in a moment. However, the key contextual claim will be that some emergency arguments for geoengineering require the agent to endorse strong ethical concerns that she is otherwise unwilling to act on, in the sense that if she were truly committed to those concerns, then she would not be so interested in geoengineering, and/or she would be interested in geoengineering policies of a markedly different kind (e.g., those reflecting a much broader set of ethical and other concerns). In order to motivate the thought that this kind of schizophrenia poses an ethical problem, I will now consider two analogous cases - one highly abstract and the other more concrete - and then compare them to the situation facing us with geoengineering. Both cases are intended to function as paradigms of creative myopia, and so are rather extreme, in order to provoke the relevant moral intuitions more clearly. Moreover, though they are designed so as to be broadly relevant to the current geoengineering debate, the situation with geoengineering need not be anywhere near so stark for the analogies to be relevant. Perhaps our collective behavior is not as morally problematic as that of our protagonists; still, that does not mean that it is not problematic at all, and (in the abstract) in a similar general way. The analogies do not have to be perfect to have force, and I am not claiming that geoengineering is a paradigm case. 2.2. Agent 1 Here’s the highly abstract case. Suppose Agent 1 is engaged in activities that he morally ought not to be engaged in. He has a large number of options available to him to address the situation. When these are ranked according to strong moral values he acknowledges, he faces a set of possible responses, from A-Z, where A is the best and Z the worst. Suppose then that, despite recognizing A as the best option, he nevertheless refuses to take it, but offers no very serious - let alone adequate - reason for doing so (moral or otherwise). In addition, suppose that, although he acknowledges that options B and C are also good options, he dismisses these too, and in the same way. Indeed, Agent 1 will not consider any of the good or decent options put in front of him, and neither will he consider the best of the more flawed alternatives. Instead, he rejects every option suggested from A-X, and (again) without serious grounds for

doing so. Nevertheless, despite this, Agent 1 is not quite comfortable doing nothing; instead, he is willing to consider options Y and Z (and only these). Y and Z are pretty bad options (though not necessarily inherently morally bad, or absolutely prohibited). In particular, though it is possible that Y and Z may help a lot, they also bring with them very serious risks, including a realistic threat that they may make matters much worse. However, Agent 1 claims that, since Y and Z are (arguably) better than nothing, his pursuit of them is entitled to some moral respect, and that (therefore) he deserves some praise for being open to, and then ultimately choosing, one of these options. In particular, he cannot understand why some are so keen to criticize him for focusing on Y and Z. Indeed, he protests: “Can’t people see that not doing Y and Z might result in a catastrophe that we should desperately try to avoid?”, and “Why (then) can’t they stop being fussy about the “ethics” of the situation, and support a solution that might actually help?” It seems clear that Agent 1 is behaving badly. A good deal of this is just because he is refusing options A-X without serious grounds for doing so. However, his protests also manifest a further problem. In particular, his appeals to emergency are ethically misleading, and distract our attention from what is really at stake, morally-speaking. Questions about whether Y or Z are indeed justified, and under what conditions, are perhaps interesting ones (intellectually and practically); nevertheless, they miss much of what is actually going on, and in ways that suggest ethical short-sightedness and moral schizophrenia. To begin with, consider matters from an external point of view. First, Agent 1’s emergency argument for Y or Z seems to require an arbitrary narrowing of the ethical point of view. For example, his questions implicitly set aside a whole host of central issues, such as that his ethical problem is self-inflicted, that he is responsible for radically circumscribing the live options for responding, that in doing so he has picked out much worse options than are otherwise available, and so on. Second, this narrowing strongly implies that Agent 1 is guilty of a severe abdication of moral responsibility, and that this is itself a central feature of the case. Third, given this, Agent 1’s appeal to the importance of Y and Z – and especially the way he admonishes his critics for failing to appreciate their importance – seems at the very least ethically out of place. Indeed, in an extreme case, Agent 1’s myopia may be so profound as to cast doubt on whether his is a genuine appeal to moral reasons at all. From the external perspective, we might begin to wonder whether Agent 1 is merely using the language of morality as a cloak to cover other motives, and as a ruse to confuse others. Of course, though myopic appeals to morality are often consciously disingenuous, this need not be so. In some situations, Agent 1 will be sincere, but only at the cost of internal disharmony, and pronounced moral schizophrenia. From the internal perspective, there seem to be at least three markers of the relevant disharmony. First, Agent 1’s general attitude lacks internal coherence. On the one hand, he is invoking strong moral reasons, and demanding that we all take responsibility (“We must do whatever we can to avoid catastrophe!”). On the other hand, his commitment to these reasons is called into question by the twin facts (a) that

“These results suggest that even with monumental effort to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, humanity will be living with the consequences of fossil fuel emissions for a very long time.”

taken by themselves the moral reasons suggest very different courses of action (i.e., A-X), and (b) that these courses of action are ruled out only by Agent 1’s other motives, which are morally indefensible in light of the same moral reasons. Second, the internal incoherence threatens to undermine the force of the intended moral requirement. How is Agent 1 supposed to register the moral reason to do the radically circumscribed options (i.e., Y or Z) as authoritative or weighty, when he has already dismissed that reason when it supports the better options (i.e., A-X)? At best, Agent 1 can be acknowledging the force of moral reasons only in a severely attenuated sense. Though he is asserting that they matter to him, they do so only in a very limited domain where most of what is at stake in terms of those values has already been determined, by him and in ways that do not respect those same values. Given this, it is not clear how the moral reasons gain their purchase, what their apparently “residual” role is. How does Agent 1 himself understand the pull of the moral values in the case of Y and Z, when he has refused them on dubious or insufficient grounds in the other cases? Some explanation is needed, not least by Agent 1 to himself. Third, the first two markers of disharmony suggest that from the internal perspective Agent 1 is at risk of losing his grip on moral reasons, so that his attitude can be maintained only at some further cost. The prime candidates here are self-deception and delusion. (Note that medical schizophrenia is often accompanied by delusion.) However, we should also consider another possibility. Perhaps Agent 1 admits that he is being incoherent, but nevertheless persuades himself that he is not capable of doing better, perhaps because (he tells himself) the contrary motives are just too powerful for the moral reasons to have the purchase that he recognizes that they should. This claim also implies a “malady of the spirit,” a profound alienation of the agent’s moral reasons from what actually moves him. 2.3. Wayne’s Folly The moral problems with Agent 1’s moral schizophrenia can be made more vivid if we turn to a more concrete paradigm case: Wayne is married to a wonderful woman. On the face of it, they have a great relationship, and his wife assumes that this is so. Unfortunately for her, she is mistaken. Wayne has a secret. He likes to play the field and sleep around. He especially enjoys having sex with women in demographic groups at high risk of contracting serious sexually-transmitted diseases, such as HIV and AIDS. He does this on a regular basis, but also continues to have sex with his wife. In neither case does he take any precautions. His wife is ignorant of what is going on. What Wayne is doing is morally wrong, for a number of reasons. His activities impose risks of severe harm on his wife and many of his other sexual partners as well. They also violate the relationship he has with his wife. In addition, in his more lucid moments, Wayne firmly believes that his behavior is frivolous as well as immoral. His life is very good already, including his relationship with his wife. Moreover, he admits to himself that the time and resources he

In addressing his folly, Wayne has lots of options. He could simply cease his promiscuity. He could also tell his wife that he is recklessly unfaithful. Failing that, he could pursue any number of strategies to minimize the threat to his wife (and other partners). For example, he could practice “safe” sex, sleep with fewer other women, or women less at risk. However, Wayne is unwilling to do any of these things, in the latter cases even though he acknowledges that they probably would not make much difference to his own enjoyment, and may make none at all. Instead, he prefers just carrying on as he is, ignoring the wider perils. If asked why, he would simply say that he is used to his life, whatever its flaws, and finds change uncomfortable. If pressed, he may even admit that he “just can’t be bothered.” Nevertheless, this is not the end of the story: Wayne is willing to do something. A friend tells him of a scientist who is launching a start-up company dedicated to finding a simple pill that can mask the effects of AIDS. The pill aims to manipulate the body’s immune system, so as to offset the effects of the virus. The work is highly speculative, and does not offer any kind of solution to the other health threats posed by Wayne’s activities (e.g., syphilis). It is also highly plausible to think that it will end up having other harmful side-effects. (It is just too early to tell.) Despite this, Wayne decides to invest $10 – a very small amount of his disposable income – in the new company. Indeed, he tells himself that he is responding to a moral emergency, and so is morally required to do this, and has done “the right thing.” As a result, he feels better about himself, even though he continues his activities as before. Moreover, he professes that can’t understand those who criticize his donation: “Can’t they see that donating to AIDS research might prevent a catastrophe that we should desperately try to avoid?”; given this, “why can’t they stop being fussy about the “ethics” of the situation, and support a solution that might actually help?” What should moral philosophy say about Wayne? The obvious answer is that he is deeply immoral. He should stop sleeping around and exposing his wife (and other partners) to such risks. He has no right to do so, and it is morally vicious for him to continue. This is most of what needs to be said. However, we might add, as a minor side point, that if he is intent on continuing, it is also bad for him to refuse to reduce the risks of his behavior (e.g., by wearing a condom). Indeed, at this point, his recklessness becomes so extreme as to seem callous. We might doubt that he cares for his wife at all, even as an innocent human being, let alone as someone he claims to love. We might even want to say that Wayne shows himself to be not only unjust, but also morally indecent. It is natural to ask the (rhetorical) question: ‘What kind of person is Wayne?’ 2.2 Climate Parallels Wayne’s Folly reflects the abstract case of Agent 1, and the result is just as morally disturbing. There are deep ethical problems with what Wayne does,

“why can’t they stop being fussy about the “ethics” of the situation, and support a solution that might actually help?”

consumes while engaging in his infidelity would be much better employed elsewhere. Though he enjoys his liaisons, Wayne concedes that they are not of high value, even to himself.

and with what kind of person he is. The central issue for us is his ethical reasoning. In particular, the thought is that Wayne’s argument from moral emergency is deficient, in part because it is ethically short-sighted and morally schizophrenic. The case of Wayne’s folly is intended to be uncontroversial. The interesting questions are not about Wayne, but about whether there are important parallels between his situation, and ours with respect to climate change and geoengineering. The resemblance need not be exact to be worrying. After all, analogies are seldom perfect (otherwise they wouldn’t be analogies). Instead, the issue is whether the two cases have enough in common to underwrite the same ethical verdict. In short, as the current generation of the world’s more affluent slide toward geoengineering, are we collectively vulnerable to the same kinds of moral censure as Wayne? At first glance, there are some striking parallels. The first set involves the basic ethical problems posed by political inertia on climate change. First, like Wayne’s activities, our high emission levels impose risks of severe harm on innocent others (in our case: future people, nonhuman life, and the world’s poor). In addition, if anything, our case is worse, since Wayne’s victims would in principle at least be able to resist the threat he poses if they became aware of it. This is not so for most of the victims of climate change. Second, like Wayne’s, our behavior violates morally important relationships. Not only does imposing large risks on others undermine our moral stature with other nations and peoples around the world, but it also alienates us from future generations of our own communities, and further strains our already fragile relationship with nature. Third, like Wayne’s behavior, much of our emitting seems at least relatively frivolous in the face of the threat it imposes on others. Climate change is projected to cause death, disease, dislocation and in general widespread suffering. But many carbon emissions in the richer countries support activities that risk triviality by comparison, and objectives that could be achieved in much less damaging ways. For example, they are spent on heating houses that are much larger and warmer than people really need them to be, and which are only occupied for a small fraction of the day; they are used for inefficient cars that mostly carry only one person at a time; they are required to manufacture products that are thoughtlessly consumed and quickly disposed of, with little tangible benefit for anyone; they are used for excessive business travel that companies would prefer not to pay for and individuals would rather not take; and so on. The second set of broad parallels involves the fact that, like Wayne, we have lots of options. At the moment, we are accelerating hard into the climate problem. Global emissions are increasing rapidly, and so are those of most nations. Yet we could do much to combat this. First, we could do things differently using existing technology. Though we probably should not simply stop emitting carbon immediately - since too much of our economies depend on fossil fuels, and since a very large and instantaneous shift would likely cause economic collapse - even fairly aggressive action on cutting emissions seems much less problematic. In the United States, for example, the prospect of gains that would actually save resources is well documented, as is the availability of alternative energy sources (especially if we cease heavy subsidies to those that cause the

damage). Second, we could invest more on innovation, such as in research in alternative energy, on ways to design large-scale infrastructure so as to be less carbon intensive or even carbon neutral, and so on. Third, we could actually retrench. In the face of the moral problems posed by our actions, we could choose to do less. This may involve absolute sacrifices in quality of life, and may require protecting the more vulnerable from making such sacrifices. However, it is not clear that this would be unwarranted. In addition, there is much to suggest that quality of life may not actually suffer. Not only can we be creative about how to live with less carbon (including being creative in the marketplace), but much research suggests that quality of life is not tightly linked with conventional economic performance beyond some threshold that most developed nations have already substantially exceeded. Under such circumstances, surely we could at least try some level of retrenchment, as opposed to acceleration. If we found ourselves going too far – if it were just too painful to bear - we could always turn back. This concern becomes more vivid if we note the spectacular differences in national levels of per capita emissions across the globe. For example, in 2007 average global emissions per capita were 1.28 metric tons of carbon. However, some countries averaged around five tons of carbon per person (e.g., the US was at 5.20 tons, Australia at 4.84), others between two and three (e.g., Germany was at 2.61, the UK at 2.41, New Zealand at 2.11), others at around one (e.g., China at 1.35, Argentina at 1.27), and others at much less (e.g., Brazil at 0.52, India at 0.39, and Bangladesh at 0.08). Is it so obvious that (for example) Americans would be dramatically worse off living on emissions levels similar to those of (say) the British, Germans, or New Zealanders (2.11)? More radically, is it clear that any of these countries should insist on maintaining greater per capita emissions levels than (say) Argentines or Brazilians, especially given their greater initial wealth and technological expertise? After all, perhaps Wayne should be content just to have sex with his wife. This brings us to the third broad parallel between Wayne’s folly and the climate case. At the moment, it seems that, despite their availability, we are not yet willing to take up any of these options in a robust way. As a result, the new push within the scientific and policy communities is toward geoengineering. At the time of writing, this push seems likely to succeed. It is plausible that, while resisting substantial emissions cuts, some developed countries will be willing to spend a very small amount of their national budgets (a few hundred million in the case of the UK and US) pursuing research on climate engineering, even though they know that such engineering may not work, will not fix all the problems even if it does work, and raises serious issues of its own, including of negative side-effects, legitimate governance and irreversibility. However, this is ethically worrying. Isn’t this a little like Wayne’s $10 bet on the AIDS research? If it is, aren’t we in serious ethical trouble? 3. Implications The concerns with ethical short-sightedness and moral schizophrenia may account for (and also justify) a fair amount of resistance, even moral outrage, concerning the push towards geoengineering. Hence, potentially they have explanatory value. In addition, they explain this resistance without invoking

“‘our’ pursuit of geoengineering, but the relevant ‘we’ here is problematic”

other ethical concerns that are also in play, but which may involve more controversial claims. In particular, neither concern requires assuming that geoengineering is necessarily or inherently bad, or (more specifically) that it constitutes a violation of humanity’s relationship to nature. Consider the schizophrenia concern. Nothing in Wayne’s folly suggests that AIDS research or vaccines are problematic in themselves. Instead, the natural assumption is quite the opposite: that they are a good thing. Similarly, in drawing the analogy between the cases, we need not presuppose that there is anything bad about geoengineering research or deployment considered in isolation. Of course, this is not to say that proponents of the short-sightedness and schizophrenia arguments must deny that there is something independently bad about geoengineering. Instead, the point is merely that they need take no position on such matters. If claims about the independent badness of geoengineering can be justified on other grounds, they will add to the myopia and schizophrenia concerns. These points (about explanatory power and ethical presuppositions) are worth noticing for several reasons. First, the fact that both the short-sightedness and schizophrenia concerns can coexist with a wide variety of views about the moral importance of nature (or lack thereof) may provide us with strong pragmatic reasons to highlight it. Perhaps focusing on this ethical worry is a better bet for motivating comprehensive climate action than some more contentious arguments. Second, at any rate, it seems important that these concerns are not lost amid the efforts of some geoengineering proponents to frame the issue completely in terms of moral emergency. Third, and more generally, the diagnoses of ethical short-sightedness and moral schizophrenia can play a subsidiary role in supporting the perfect storm hypothesis, since these phenomena appear predictable under the circumstances of the perfect moral storm. If a group (e.g., the current generation of the affluent) is tempted to pass the consequences of its behavior onto others (e.g., future generations), but uncomfortable about admitting that this is what it is doing, then it will be susceptible to forms of argument that appear to justify this, even if they pervert our moral understanding of what is at stake. Shortsighted and schizophrenic arguments fit the bill nicely. 4. Objections The analogy between Wayne’s Folly and our predicament with geoengineering may be attacked in a number of ways. Though a complete defense will not be possible within the confines of this chapter, the aim of this section is to cast doubt on some initial reasons for rejecting the analysis. 4.1. Who is Wayne? The first objection claims that the analogy trades on an ambiguity: it talks of ‘our’ pursuit of geoengineering, but the relevant ‘we’ here is problematic. This threatens the argument because if the people responsible for climate change are not the same as those pursuing geoengineering, then the analogy with Wayne’s folly fails. Suppose, for example, that while some political actors and institutions have acted like Wayne, others (e.g., especially climate scientists, environmental organizations) have not. Then one might claim that, since some

of these groups have consistently argued for action on climate change (albeit unsuccessfully), there is no ethical short-sightedness or moral schizophrenia in their now urging the pursuit of geoengineering. Much as they may lament the ongoing political inertia, they are merely trying to make the best of a bad situation by offering some aid to future generations and the world’s poor within that inertia. My first response is to clear up the ambiguity. I intend the ‘we’ in the analogy to refer to society in general and the especially the public bodies that represent it. This is appropriate because a large percentage of the discussion of geoengineering is public argument directed at political institutions, particularly in the form of calls for research programs and action to establish governance structures. In context, many geoengineering advocates are appealing to the same institutions that have (even in their view) been failing adequately to address climate change. Hence, though such advocates may not themselves be subject to the analogy, the bodies that they seek to persuade are. Since these are the bodies that will decide, the analogy retains its force. 4.2. What About a “Pure” Actor? The first response is the most important. However, there remains room for debate. In particular, perhaps some of the problems raised by the analogy to Wayne’s folly could be sidestepped if other actors stepped in to take up the cause of geoengineering. Suppose, for example, that a new actor were to embark on a geoengineering program, an actor untarnished by the history of the climate problem, and uncompromised by its current relationships and options. Returning to the analogy with Wayne’s folly, wouldn’t this be like people other than Wayne supporting AIDS research? And what could be wrong with that? Surely such an actor could legitimately forget the contextual question and move straight to the justificatory question? I have two basic replies. First, in context, finding an agent that has the requisite capabilities to do geoengineering, but is not at all compromised by its past history and future trajectory, may not be so easy. This is especially so given that that the major candidates are likely to remain nation states and large corporations. Hence, we should not be too quick to assume that a “pure actor” can be found. Second, there are independent reasons for thinking that the justificatory question cannot be quickly isolated from the contextual question, and these cast doubt on the import of the “pure actor” model. A full defense of this claim would take more space that I have here. So, instead, let me simply gesture toward some relevant concerns. To begin with, whether we are talking of actual or pure actors, we should beware of any arguments that appear simply to assume or stipulate that the form of geoengineering that ultimately emerges on the international scene is likely to be ethically benign. This worry can be made intuitively plausible simply by listing four examples of ethically worrying forms of geoengineering: • Rogue geoengineering (such as that undertaken by a lone State, corporation or individual without appropriate consultation with and approval of others)

• Nonconsensus geoengineering (such as that carried out by a “coalition of the willing” consisting of (say) the Western powers alone, or China and India alone, or Iran and fellow Islamic states alone, without the approval of the other nations affected) • Predatory geoengineering (such as that which aims to systematically disfavor the interests of some countries in choices between geoengineering schemes or levels of intervention, perhaps in order to secure other strategic advantages) • Militarized geoengineering (such as the weaponization of the climate control system)

“pure actor”

These forms of geoengineering are ethically worrying for the same basic reasons. For geoengineering to be morally acceptable any would-be-geoengineer, including an otherwise ethically untainted actor, would be required to act with appropriate authority, and in accordance with adequate norms of global, intergenerational and ecological ethics. However, both requirements strongly suggest that there must be due consultation with existing “impure” actors, consideration of their rights and responsibilities, and judgments about their likely future behavior. Given this, it seems unlikely that even a pure actor could simply set aside the contextual question. Its shadow falls over the whole enterprise. 4.3. Can We Just Get on With Our Science (Please)? Perhaps some will accept the problems facing the pure actor model, but nevertheless insist that if scientists want to do research on geoengineering, we should let them. After all, they might say, isn’t free enquiry one of the basic tenets of scientific research, and indeed of a free society more generally? This objection is a red herring, based on two mistaken inferences. First, to defend the importance of the contextual question is not to advocate that geoengineering research should not be undertaken, still less that it should be banned absolutely. Indeed, as I have emphasized, the key complaints - ethical short-sightedness and moral schizophrenia – are directed at some emergency arguments for geoengineering, and need not even take a position on the worth of geoengineering itself, or geoengineering research considered in isolation. (Recall that the Wayne’s folly example also takes no position on the worth of AIDS research, which I assume to be highly positive.) It is not the projects themselves that are (currently) under scrutiny, but the reasons used to justify their pursuit. Second, the issue of research is not as “all-or-nothing” as the objection suggests. In particular, there is a large difference between, on the one hand, defending traditional, curiosity-based research, to be published and funded according to normal academic practices (e.g., peer reviewed journals, NSF applications) in competition with other projects (including other climate projects), and, on the other hand, arguing for the establishment of a new, independent and targeted research program on grounds of moral emergency. In particular, the latter requires extra defense. This is relevant because the “free enquiry” argument is most naturally at home in defending the first category of research, but

most of the current advocacy for geoengineering falls into the second. Given this, it seems reasonable to say that the current advocacy does bear special scrutiny. In addition, there is another side to this point. Normal, curiosity-driven research is subject to scrutiny too, when it competes with other projects for research time and funds, and for publication. So, it is worth emphasizing that putting geoengineering into its own category by appealing to moral emergency actually privileges geoengineering research over other kinds of research, in part by shielding it from normal competition. In other words, in context, the issue is not so much that calling for special scrutiny involves discriminating against geoengineering research (as the objection suggests), but rather that strong reasons are needed for privileging geoengineering by exempting it from the usual norms. On my reading of the situation, the arguments from moral emergency are an attempt to provide such reasons. Given that this is their aim, they should be scrutinized. My claim is that taking the contextual question seriously is essential to that task. (Note that I do not claim that successful reasons cannot be found, only that there is work to be done.) 4.4. Don’t Scientists Have a Special Moral Obligation to Pursue Geoengineering? A fourth objection suggests that whether or not pure actors need to confront the contextual question, the unique position of scientists means that they have a special obligation to pursue geoengineering. Consider the following argument: “Scientists have consistently (albeit unsuccessfully) argued for action on climate change. Much as they may lament the ongoing political inertia, there is no schizophrenia in their now urging the pursuit of geoengineering. After all, they are merely trying to make the best of a bad situation by offering some aid within that inertia. Indeed, aren’t they morally obligated to do this? Surely if it might help, it is worth a try, and the scientists are the only ones in the position to do the trying, because they have the relevant expertise.” In my view, this argument raises a serious ethical question; however, the answer it offers is overly simplistic, and so unhelpful even to scientists. To see why, it is helpful to distinguish the different social roles played by scientists. One role is that of advisors to decision-making bodies. This seems to be the role that is prominent in the major reports mentioned earlier. However, the worry about moral schizophrenia casts doubt on advocacy for geoengineering within that role. Consider a new variant on Wayne’s folly. Suppose that Wayne has a friend who is appalled at his behavior, and so frequently draws Wayne’s attention to what is wrong with it, what the alternatives are, and so on. Wayne listens, but ultimately ignores his friend’s advice. His friend believes that this is because Wayne does not like the options available, and would prefer a path that is easier on him, even if it is more risky and dangerous for others. What should his friend do? Should he devote himself to exploring the risky options? Does he have an ethical reason to do this? The main point to make is that this is not obvious. Notice that there are strong considerations that point in the opposite direction. On the one hand, it seems

“They do not want science to function as an enabler, facilitating bad behavior. This, I believe, is one reason why some scientists are so worried about the potential “moral hazard” of pursuing geoengineering: that it will itself encourage society at large into further inertia on mitigation and adaptation.”

“Indeed, aren’t they morally obligated to do this?”

unlikely that the friend has any strong obligation to Wayne to do so. He has already given Wayne a number of good options that Wayne refuses to take, and without good reason. On the other hand, the friend may think that he has some obligations to Wayne’s wife and the other women involved. However, it is also not obvious that these are best served by the friend’s advising Wayne to pursue the donation to AIDS research, or pursuing such research himself. In Wayne’s folly, it is highly tempting to argue that the friend would do better to act more directly (for example, by telling Wayne’s wife). These complications are relevant to the pursuit of geoengineering. The fact that existing institutions are failing to act on the good options need not mean that scientists have a strong obligation to commence work on other (inferior) options instead. If they have already suggested good options, they might justly claim that their responsibility is only to work harder promoting or refining the better options. In context, for example, perhaps scientists should try harder to engage the public on the dangers of climate change, or at convincing them that they are telling the truth when they do so. The fact that geoengineering might turn out to be useful is not enough. Other things might be much more useful, and more likely to work (e.g., like A-X in the Agent 1 example). Of course, scientists are often not merely in the role of dispassionate advisors. They are sometimes in the role of individual researchers following their own intellectual agendas, advancing their own careers, and so on. This role is perfectly defensible in so far as it goes. However, even here, scientists can ask themselves how their motives and aims interact with those of ethically compromised actors, and also with their role as advisors. Most obviously, there are difficult issues about conflicts of interest. For instance, some scientists who could contribute to geoengineering research have a personal stake in its pursuit. They stand to win major grants, academic prestige, and in some cases lucrative economic opportunities for their own businesses. Given this, there is the clear potential that their role as advisors might become compromised when they advocate for the pursuit of geoengineering. Hence, safeguards are needed, both for society (to make sure that this does not happen) and for the individual scientists (to protect them from the appearance that it has when it has not). Less obviously, there are live questions that revolve around the background motives and beliefs of scientists, and especially about the role of these in the difficult ethical situation of the perfect moral storm. For example, returning to Wayne’s folly, suppose that the AIDS researcher does not try to talk Wayne out of his behavior, but rather encourages it because he wants the funding, or the recognition. Then, his role might be morally problematic. Some have similar fears about geoengineering research. They do not want science to function as an enabler, facilitating bad behavior. This, I believe, is one reason why some scientists are so worried about the potential “moral hazard” of pursuing geoengineering: that it will itself encourage society at large into further inertia on mitigation and adaptation. It is not just that they are concerned about undermining conventional climate policy per se. They are also concerned about their professional responsibilities to society, and the potential for moral schizophrenia. They do not want to be, or appear to be, complicit in continuing moral failure. None of this implies that scientists cannot or should not pursue geoengineering,

or that ethical geoengineering is impossible. Instead, the discussion serves to highlight the real ethical difficulties that face scientists when they consider geoengineering research in the real world, difficulties that are enhanced when one considers the contextual question. In summary, the worry about the fourth objection – that scientists have a moral obligation to pursue geoengineering given ongoing inertia and the potential for catastrophe – is that it paints too simple a picture of the ethical context within which scientists actually operate. This context is fraught with genuine moral challenges that ought not be dismissed so quickly. Again, the contextual question becomes important, and we lose much if we try to bypass it too quickly with arguments from moral emergency. 4.5. What Other Options? At this point, some might object by introducing a crucial new move. Much of the discussion so far, they will say, depends on the assumption that there are other good or decent options. However, they will continue, this assumption may now be false. Instead, it is possible that climate change has already progressed far enough that critical climate thresholds will be breached in the next few decades regardless of what we do about mitigation, and where this breaching is profoundly dangerous for humanity regardless of what we now do about adaptation. Perhaps, the thought goes, “our goose is already cooked” in so far a conventional methods are concerned, and geoengineering – in the form of an offsetting dose of sulfates, for example – is already the only option left. In this case, we are not like Agent 1 in having options A-X still open. Let me make a preliminary point before offering a more central response. The preliminary point is that this is a new argument, and there are several contextual worries about it. One is that it involves bold scientific claims about the extent of our current pre-commitment to climate change, and the inability of conventional policies to overcome it. These claims are controversial, and so require independent defense. For example, the Royal Society’s landmark report on geoengineering explicitly declares that “decarbonisation at the magnitude and rate required [to avoid global average temperatures exceeding 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels this century] remains technically possible” and “global failure to make sufficient progress on mitigation of climate change is largely due to social and political inertia.” Given this, they reject the new framing. A second contextual concern is that the argument looks likely to be morally schizophrenic unless it really is accompanied by serious efforts at mitigation and adaptation. After all, the claim is not that our goose is certainly already cooked (this would be scientifically implausible), but only that it is scientifically credible to say that it might be. Given this, there remain strong reasons to engage in conventional ways. In addition, there is no guarantee that the geoengineeering research will be successful, or that the situation for its use will arise. Mitigation and adaptation may yet turn out to be the best responses available (even if they are insufficient to ward off some forms of catastrophe). Let us turn now to a more central response to the objection. Suppose one believes that there is a credible threat that we are already precommitted to catastrophe. What would follow about the pursuit of geoengineering? Let us begin by extending Wayne’s folly once again. Suppose Wayne concedes that our

think of actually doing “Typically, when people

“Typically, when people think of actually doing something about geoengineering the climate, their focus is predominantly on the idea of throwing a few million dollars at scientific research.”

scruples would be well-founded if we assume that merely telling his wife of the danger (so that she can protect herself), or practicing safe sex will be enough. However, he goes on to claim, in fact he has been reckless for so long that there is a credible risk that she has already contracted HIV. If so, then the speculative research may well be the only thing that can save her. Of course, he admits, he should own up, or at least practice safe sex, as well as give the $10 (though he shows no sign of being ready to do either). But surely, he insists, the case for the research is unassailable, and he is morally right to invest. Indeed, he asserts (again) that if the risk is realized, this is a much more important thing for him to do than anything else. Suppose, then, that there is a credible threat that Wayne’s wife already has HIV. Is $10 to the start-up really his best and only option? It seems not. Most obviously, he might consider investing more than $10. If he really has his wife’s welfare at heart, and if he acknowledges his responsibility for her predicament, surely it ought to be a lot more. Less obviously, but much more importantly, there are other things he could be doing. He could be investigating ways of supporting and looking after her if she does contract the illness. He could be looking into the best doctors and health care available. He could be considering what will make her days more bearable. (And so on.) In general, Wayne should not assume that the matter is closed even if some investment in research is necessary. Similar worries are extremely important in the geoengineering case. Typically, when people think of actually doing something about geoengineering the climate, their focus is predominantly on the idea of throwing a few million dollars at scientific research. However, if the claim is truly that we are already precommitted to severe climate change, this approach seems ethically shortsighted. Surely the state of the planet is worth more than this, and surely the response should be broader. If we really are facing down a global catastrophe, then more is required by way of preparation than merely giving a few scientists funds for modeling and small-scale experiments. For example, issues such as how to protect vulnerable people and infrastructures loom large, as do those of how to compensate those for whom adequate protection is not possible. Talk about geoengineering research dollars can only be a small part of the ethical picture, and wider concerns need to be integrated into any further pursuit of geoengineering. In particular, there needs to be some plan about how to manage a world that is geoengineered in response to looming climate catastrophe, and especially about how to do so in a politically legitimate and morally defensible way. Like Wayne’s $10, the call for a limited push on narrow scientific research seems ethically short-sighted and morally schizophrenic. If one is really concerned about already being committed to a climate catastrophe, much more is at stake. We can phrase the point more abstractly using our earlier example of Agent 1. When this example is applied to climate change, options Y and Z might not be the only ones that include some scientific research on geoengineering. On the one hand, on the positive side, perhaps options S-Z all include this, but S-X include much else besides. For example, perhaps they also include very substantial adaptation funding, geopolitical reform, compensation, and so on, together with major research into geoengineering and other remedial efforts. If one focuses all one’s attention on the very restricted geoengineering options

(Y and Z) considered completely in isolation, one misses the fact that the wider geoengineering options (S-X) are arbitrarily excluded. Again, there is ethical short-sightedness, and in a way that brings on moral schizophrenia. On the other hand, on the negative side, the narrowing also obscures other (less ethically welcome) options that also arise in an atmosphere of wider moral corruption. In particular, though Z might be the last option on the list considered by any remotely ethical agent, unethical agents may have more extensive lists. For example, in the climate case, an unethical agent may be happy to consider not only ‘modest geoengineering research only’, but also research on predatory, parochial and other buck-passing forms of geoengineering as well. If we ignore the contextual question, we may miss the importance of these worries. 4.6. Aren’t We Already Advocating for a “Portfolio” Approach? Some may complain that this response goes too far in suggesting an analogy between Wayne’s $10 and current calls for geoengineering research. In practice, they will say, most scientific reports suggest that geoengineering research should be pursued alongside substantial mitigation and adaptation, as part of a “portfolio” approach. Hence, they are not suggesting “modest research only,” and indeed are explicitly open to a broader strategy. I am not so sure. First, (as I’ve just suggested) we have to be concerned not just about how geoengineering is being advocated by scientists, but also about how such arguments are likely to be received and acted on. Given past political inertia, there are realistic worries about whether the other “parts of the portfolio” will be enacted. Moreover, if a robust portfolio were really being enacted, the need for geoengineering research might be at least less pressing, and perhaps nonexistent. Given this, it is far from clear that a few throwaway lines on the need for a comprehensive approach to climate change are really enough. The ethical context of those lines matters. Second, in any case, it is not obvious that those who currently advocate for a portfolio approach have a full appreciation of the ethical implications of geoengineering. Mitigation and adaptation are not all that is at stake here. As mentioned, ethical geoengineering would have to address difficult issues of global governance and compensation. However, these would involve deep questions about global legitimacy and international justice that are barely even on the agenda. For example, even when major reports mention governance, they tend to assign it to venues that seem inadequate to the profound issues raised. The Royal Society report, for instance, recommends the United Nations Commission for Sustainable Development, and does not even mention fora such as the UN Security Council, NATO, the G20, or the US Congress. Again, the specter of moral schizophrenia raises its head. If the threat is so profound as to justify the risks of geoengineering, why isn’t there more emphasis on taking the ethical challenges of actually doing geoengineering more seriously, and preparing to meet them? One answer, of course, is that no one thinks that serious responses to the ethical challenges are really on the table, politicallyspeaking, even if they are morally necessary. This revives the basic worries about moral schizophrenia in the perfect moral storm. Third, the terms “comprehensive” and “portfolio” are misleading. Many

“The jus condition

possible climate policies are not even being considered, and some of them for ethical reasons. Advocates often claim that the potential for emergency puts geoengineering back on the table, but similar arguments might be offered in favor of other strategies not currently being considered, such as drastic cut backs in consumption, serious population measures, and so on. I am not advocating such measures. Instead, my point is that most “portfolios” are far from comprehensive, and ethical judgments are already involved in determining their content. Given this, including geoengineering cannot be defended merely on the grounds of the need to be “comprehensive”; instead, other arguments must be offered. 5. Conclusion This chapter distinguishes two questions as central to the ethics of geoengineering. The justificatory question asks ‘Under what future conditions might geoengineering become justified?’, where the conditions to be considered include, for example, the threat to be confronted, the background circumstances, the governance mechanisms, individual protections, compensation provisions, and so on. The contextual question asks ‘What is the ethical context of the push toward geoengineering, and what are its implications?’ I claimed that early discussions of geoengineering often marginalize both questions because they tend to focus on arguments from emergency that illegitimately brush them aside. Moreover, I argued that discussion of the contextual question has an important role to play in explaining what is ethically problematic about some arguments for geoengineering, and that it does so without appealing to (potentially controversial) claims about the moral status of nature or our relationship to it. The key ideas were that some arguments for geoengineering are ethically short-sighted, and morally schizophrenic. These ideas were illustrated through two examples, one abstract (Agent 1), and one more concrete (Wayne’s Folly). Although both examples were extreme and idealized, even the imperfect analogies provide reasons for concern about our current predicament with geoengineering. Ethically serious discussion of geoengineering should confront such worries, rather than hide behind overly simplistic appeals to moral emergency. As Stocker puts it, “to refuse to do so bespeaks a malady of the spirit.”

stificatory question asks ‘Under what future ns might geoengineering become justified?’”

THE ANTHROPOCENE AND THE CONVERGENCE OF HISTORIES Dipesh Chakarbarty

contemporary societies, especially those at the forefront of policy making, to view ‘Anthropocene warming’ from

Chakrabarty

stresses

the

need

for

a lens which considers all histories and futures. In order to properly address matters of anthropogenic climate change, Chakrabarty suggest a change in human perception of the planet, recognising that humans are in the position of “passing

guests” rather than “possessive hosts.” Which indicates a variability in human linear ‘time’ compared to that of the planetary system’s, therefore counteraction approaches such as Geoengineering can lead to irreversible changes beyond human time and should be deliberated in consideration of the

extensive planetary context.

“ h f p o h n a b s a p t t p s f a a p

“three histories that, from the point of view of human history, are normally assumed to be working at such different and distinct paces that they are treated as processes separate from one another for all practical purposes: .”

Anthropocene warming brings into view the collision – or the running up against one another – of three histories that, from the point of view of human history, are normally assumed to be working at such different and distinct paces that they are treated as processes separate from one another for all practical purposes: the history of the Earth system; the history of life including that of human evolution on the planet; and the more recent history of the industrial civilisation (for many, capitalism). Humans now unintentionally straddle these three histories that operate on different scales and at different speeds. The very language through which we speak of the climate crisis is shot through with this problem of human and in- or non-human scales of time. Take the most ubiquitous distinction we make in our everyday prose between non-renewable sources of energy and the ‘renewables’. Fossil fuels we consider non-renewable on our terms but as Bryan Lovell, a geologist who worked as an advisor for BP and is an ex-president of the Geological Society of London, points out, fossil fuels are indeed renewable if only we think of them on a scale that is (in his terms) ‘inhuman’: ‘Two hundred million years from now, a form of life requiring abundant oil for some purpose should find that plenty has formed since our own times’ (Lovell 2010, 75). Paleoclimatologists tell a very long history when it comes to explaining the significance of anthropogenic global warming. There is, first of all, the question of evidence. Ice core samples of ancient air – more than 800,000 years old – have been critical in establishing the anthropogenic nature of the current warming (Solomon et al. 2009, 446 Box 6.2). There are, in addition, palaeoclimatic records of the past in fossils and other geological materials. In his lucid book on the oil industry’s response – not always or uniformly negative – to the climate crisis, Bryan Lovell (2010) writes that those in the industry who supplied compelling evidence of the serious challenge that greenhouse gas emissions posed to the future The Anthropocene and histories 45 of humanity were geologists, they who could read deep climate histories buried in sedimentary rocks to see the effects of ‘a dramatic warming event that took place 55 million years ago’. In the literature, this event is known as the late Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). How far the arc of the geological history explaining Anthropocene warming projects into the future may be quickly seen from the very subtitle of David Archer’s The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate . ‘Mankind is becoming a force in climate comparable to the orbital variations that drive glacial cycles,’ he writes. The long lifetime of fossil fuel CO 2 creates a sense of fleeting folly about the use of fossil fuels as an energy source. Our fossil fuel deposits, 100 million years old, could be gone in a few centuries, leaving climate impacts that will last for hundreds of millennia. The lifetime of fossil fuel CO 2 in the atmosphere is a few centuries, plus 25% that lasts essentially forever. (Archer 2009, 11) The carbon cycle of the Earth will eventually clean up the excess carbon dioxide we put out in the atmosphere, but it works on an inhumanly long time scale. Anthropocene warming thus produces problems that we ponder on very different and incompatible scales of time. Policy specialists think in terms of years or decades while politicians in democracies think primarily in terms of their electoral cycles. Understanding what anthropogenic climate change is and how long its effects may last calls for thinking on very large and small scales at once, including scales that defy

“having to wrestle with our inevitably anthropocentric thinking in order to supplement it with forms of disposition towards the planet that do not put humans first.”

the usual measures of time that inform human affairs. This is another reason that makes it difficult to develop a comprehensive politics of climate change. Archer goes to the heart of the problem here when he acknowledges that the million-year timescale of the planet’s carbon cycle is ‘irrelevant for political considerations of climate change on human time scales’. Yet, he insists, it remains relevant to any understanding of anthropogenic climate change because ‘ultimately the global warming climate event will last for as long as it takes these slow processes to act’ (Archer 2009, 21). Significant gaps between cognition and action thus open up in the existing literature on the climate problem, between what we scientifically know about it – the vastness of its non- or in-human scale, for instance – and how we think about it when we treat it as a problem to be handled by the human means at our disposal. The latter have been developed for addressing problems we face on familiar scales of time. I call these gaps or openings in the landscape of our thoughts ‘rifts’ because they are like fault lines on a seemingly continuous surface: we have to keep crossing or straddling them as we think or speak of climate change. They inject a certain degree of contradictoriness in our thinking for we are being asked to think on different scales at once. I want to discuss here three such rifts: (1) the various regimes of probability that govern our everyday lives in modern economies, now having to be supplemented by our knowledge of the radical uncertainty (of the climate); (2) the story of our necessarily divided human lives having to be supplemented by the story of our collective life as a species, a dominant species, on the planet; and (3) having to wrestle with our inevitably anthropocentric thinking in order to supplement it with forms of disposition towards the planet that do not put humans first. We have not yet overcome these dilemmas to settle decidedly on any one side of them. They remain as rifts. In what follows, I elaborate on these rifts with a view to demonstrating that the analytics of capital (or of the market), while necessary, are insufficient instruments in helping us come to grips with the Anthropocene. I will go on to conclude by proposing that the climate crisis makes visible an emergent, but critical distinction between the global and the planetary that will need to be explored further in order to develop a perspective on the human meaning(s) of global warming. Probability and radical uncertainty Modern life is ruled by regimes of probabilistic thinking. From evaluating lives for actuarial ends to the working of money and stock markets, we manage our societies by calculating risks and assigning probability values to them. ‘Economics,’ writes Charles Pearson, ‘often makes a distinction between risk, where probabilities of outcomes are known, and uncertainty, where probabilities are not known and perhaps unknowable’ (Pearson 2011, 25 n6). This is surely one reason why economics as a discipline has emerged as the major art of social management today. There is, therefore, an understandable tendency in both climatejustice and climate-policy literature – the latter dominated by economists or law scholars who think like economists – to focus not so much on what palaeoclimatologists or geophysicists who study planetary climate historically

have to say about climate change but rather on what we might call the physics of global warming that often presents a predictable, static set of relationships of probability and proportion: if the share of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere goes up by X, then the probability of the Earth’s average surface temperature going up by so much is Y. Such a way of thinking assumes a kind of stability or predictability – however probabilistic it may be – on the part of a warming atmosphere that palaeoclimatologists, who focus more on the greater danger of tipping points, often do not assume. This is not because policy thinkers are not concerned about the dangers of climate change; nor because they are ignorant of the profoundly nonlinear nature of the relationship between greenhouse gases and rise in the planet’s average surface temperature. They clearly are. But their methods are such that they appear to hold or bracket climate change as a broadly known variable (converting its uncertainties into risks that have been acknowledged and evaluated) while working out options that humans can create for themselves striving together or even wrangling among themselves. The world climate system, in other words, has no significant capacity to be a wild card in their calculations in so far as they can make policy prescriptions; it is there in a relatively predictable form to be managed by human ingenuity and political mobilisation (Weitzman 2009, 26). The Anthropocene and histories on the other hand, in what they write to persuade the public is often remarkably vitalist. In explaining the danger of anthropogenic climate change, they often resort to a language that portrays the climate system as a living organism. James Lovelock compares life on the planet to a single living organism. Archer describes the ‘carbon cycle of the Earth’ as ‘alive’ (Archer 2010, 1). The image of climate as a temperamental animal also inhabits the language of Wallace (Wally) Broecker who, with Robert Kunzig, thus describes his studies: Every now and then . . . nature has decided to give a good swift kick to the climate beast. And the beast has responded, as beasts will – violently and a little unpredictably. (Kunzig and Broecker 2008, 100) The vitalism of this prose does not arise because climate scientists are less ‘scientific’ than economists and policy makers. The vitalist metaphors issue from climate scientists’ anxiousness to communicate and underscore two points about Earth’s climate: that its many uncertainties cannot ever be completely tamed by existing human knowledge and hence the inherent unpredictability of its exact ‘tipping points’. As Archer puts it: The IPCC forecast for climate change in the coming century is for a generally smooth increase in temperature. . . . However, actual climate changes in the past have tended to be abrupt. . . . [C]limate models . . . are for the most part unable to simulate the flip flops in the past climate record very well. (Archer 2009, 95) It is in fact this sense of a ‘climate beast’ that is missing from both the literature inspired by economics and that inspired by political commitments on the left. Climate uncertainties may not always be like measurable risks. ‘Do we really need to know more than we know now about how much the Earth will warm? Can we know more?’, asks Paul Edwards rhetorically. ‘It is now virtually certain that CO 2 concentrations will reach 550 ppm (the doubling point) sometime in the middle of this century,’ and the planet ‘will almost certainly overshoot CO 2 doubling’. Climate scientists, he reports, are engaged in the speculation ‘that we will probably never get a more exact estimate than we already have ’ (Edwards 2010, 438–9). ‘Climate scientists are historians,’ writes Edwards, and like historians

‘every generation of climate scientists revisit the same data, the same events – digging through the archives to ferret out new evidence, correct some previous interpretation,’ and so on. And ‘just as with human history, we will never get a single, unshakable narrative of the global climate’s past. Instead we get versions of the atmosphere, . . . convergent yet never identical’ (Edwards 2010, 431). Moreover, ‘all of today’s analyses are based on the climate we have experienced in historical time’. Edwards quotes the scientists Myles Allen and David Frame: ‘Once the world has warmed by 4ºC, conditions will be so different from anything we can observe today (and still more different from the last ice age) that it is inherently hard to say when the warming will stop.’ The first rift that I speak of thus organises itself around the question of the tipping point of the climate, a point beyond which global warming could be catastrophic for humans. That such a possibility exists is not in doubt. Paleoclimatologists know that the planet has undergone such warming in the geological past (as in the case of PETM event). But we cannot predict how quickly such a point could arrive. It remains an uncertainty that is not amenable to the usual cost– benefit analyses that are a necessary part of risk-management strategies. As Pearson explains, ‘BC [benefit–cost analysis] is not well suited for making catastrophe policy’ and he acknowledges that the ‘special features that distinguish uncertainty in global warming are the presence of nonlinearities, thresholds and potential tipping points, irreversibilities, and the long time horizon’ that make ‘projections of technology, economic structure, preferences and a host of other variables 100 years from now increasingly questionable’ (Pearson 2011, 31, 26). ‘The implication of uncertainty, thresholds, tipping points,’ he writes, ‘is that we should take a precautionary approach,’ that is, ‘avoid taking steps today that lead to irreversible changes’ (Pearson 2011, 30). However, the precautionary principle, as Sunstein explains it, also involves cost–benefit analysis and some estimation of probability. But we simply don’t know the probability of the tipping point being reached over the next several decades or by 2100, for the tipping point would be a function of the rise in global temperature and multiple, unpredictable amplifying feedback loops working together. Under the circumstances, the one principle that Hansen recommends to policy thinkers concerns the use of coal as a fuel. He writes: ‘So, if we want to solve the climate problem, we must phase out coal emissions. Period’ (Hansen 2009, 176). Not quite a precautionary principle but what in the literature on risks would be known as the maximin principle: ‘choose the policy with the best worst-case outcome’ (Sunstein 2002, 129). Yet this would seem unacceptable to governments and business around the world, for without coal, which China and India are still dependent on to a large degree (around 70 per cent of their energy supply), how would the majority of the world’s poor be lifted out of poverty in the next few decades and thus equipped to adapt to the impact of climate change? Or would the world, scrambling to avoid the tipping point of the climate, make the global economy itself tip over and cause untold human misery? Thus, would avoiding ‘the harm’ itself do more harm, especially as we do not know the probability of reaching the tipping point in the coming few decades? This is the dilemma that goes with the application here of the precautionary or the maximin principle. At the heart of this rift is the question of scale. On the much more extended canvas on which they place the history of the planet, palaeoclimatologists see climatic tipping points and species extinction as

“BC [benefit– cost analysis] is not well suited for making catastrophe policy.”

perfectly repeatable phenomena, irrespective of whether or not we can model for them. Our strategies of risk management, however, arise from more human calculations of costs and their probabilities over The Anthropocene and histories 49 plausible human timescales. Anthropocene warming requires us to move back and forth between thinking on these different scales all at once. Our divided lives as humans and our collective life as a dominant species Human-induced climate change gives rise to large and diverse issues of justice: justice between generations, between small island-nations and the polluting countries (both past and prospective), between developed, industrialised nations (historically responsible for most emissions) and the newly industrialising ones, and so on. Peter Newell and Matthew Paterson thus express a sense of discomfiture about the use of the word human in the expression human-induced climate change (just as some, such as Alf Hornborg in this volume, are discomforted by the undifferentiated anthropos of the Anthropocene). ‘Behind the cosy language used to describe climate change as a common threat to all humankind,’ they write, ‘it is clear that some people and countries contribute to it disproportionately, while others bear the brunt of its effects’ (Newell and Paterson 2010). The climate crisis, write John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York in their thoughtful book, The Ecological Rift , is ‘at bottom, the product of a social rift: the domination of human being by human being. The driving force is a society based on class, inequality, and acquisition without end’ (Foster et al. 2010, 27). There are good reasons why questions of justice arise. Only a few nations (some 12 or 14 including China and India in the last decade or so) and a fragment of humanity (about one-fifth) are historically responsible for most of the emissions of greenhouse gases to date. This is true. But we would not be able to differentiate between humans as actors and the planet itself as an actor in this crisis if we did not realise that, leaving aside the question of intergenerational ethics that concerns the future, anthropogenic climate change is not inherently – or logically – a problem of past or accumulated intra-human injustice. Imagine the counterfactual reality of a more evenly prosperous and just world made up of the same number of people and based on exploitation of cheap energy sourced from fossil fuel. Such a world would have been more egalitarian and just – at least in terms of distribution of income and wealth – but the climate crisis would have been worse! Our collective carbon footprint would have only been larger – for the world’s poor do not consume much and contribute little to the production of greenhouse gases – and the climate change crisis would have been on us much sooner and in a much more drastic way. It is, ironically, thanks to the poor – that is, to the fact that development is uneven and unfair – that we do not put out even larger quantities of greenhouse gases into the biosphere than we actually do. Thus, logically speaking, the climate crisis is not inherently a result of economic inequalities – it is really a matter of the quantity of greenhouses gases we put out into the atmosphere. Those who connect climate change exclusively to historical origins/formations of income inequalities in the modern world raise valid questions about historical inequalities; but a reduction of the problem of climate change to that of capitalism (folded into the histories of modern European expansion and empires) only blinds us to the nature of our present, a present defined by the coming together of the relatively shortterm processes of human history and other much longer-term processes that

raises, by implication a very important issue – the simultaneously acknowledged and disavowed problem of population

belong to the history of the Earth system and of life on the planet. Agarwal and Narain’s insistence that the natural carbon sinks – such as the oceans – are part of the global commons and hence best distributed between nations by applying the principle of equal access on a per capita basis if the world were to ‘aspire . . . to such lofty ideals like global justice, equity and sustainability,’ raises, by implication a very important issue – the simultaneously acknowledged and disavowed problem of population (Agarwal and Narain 1991, 5, 9). Population is often the elephant in the room in discussions of climate change. The ‘problem’ of population – while due surely in part to modern medicine, public health measures, eradication of epidemics, the use of artificial fertilisers, and so on – cannot be attributed in any straightforward way to a logic of a predatory and capitalist West, for neither China nor India pursued unbridled capitalism while their populations exploded. If India had been more successful with population control or with economic development, its per capita emission figures would have been higher. (That the richer classes in India want to emulate western styles and standards of consumption is obvious to any observer.) Indeed, the Indian Minister in charge of the Environment and Forests, Jairam Ramesh, said as much in an address to the Indian Parliament in 2009: ‘per-capita is an accident of history. It so happened that we could not control our population’ (Ramesh 2012, 238). Population remains a very important factor in how the climate crisis plays out. For without their having such large populations that the Chinese and Indian governments legitimately desire to ‘pull out of poverty’, they would not be building so many coal-fired power stations every year. The Indian government is fond of quoting Gandhi on the present environmental crisis: ‘Earth [ prithvi ] provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not enough for every man’s greed.’ Yet ‘greed’ and ‘need’ become indistinguishable in arguments in defence of continued use of coal, the worst offender among fossil fuels. India and China want coal; Australia and other countries want to export it. It is still the cheapest variety of fossil fuel. Coal represents around 30 per cent of world energy, a share that is growing. Coal companies in the United States, Australia and elsewhere see enormous export opportunities in India and China, which defend the use of coal by referring to the needs of their poor. Population is also a problem because both the total size and distribution of humanity matter in how the climate crisis unfolds, particularly with regards to species extinction. Humans have been putting pressure on other species for quite some time now, a fact I do not need to belabour. Indeed, the war between humans and wild animals such as rhinoceroses, elephants, monkeys and big cats may be seen everyday in many Indian cities and villages. That we have consumed many varieties of marine life out of existence is also generally accepted. Ocean acidification threatens the lives of many species (see Hansen 2009). And, clearly, as many have pointed out, the exponential growth of human population in the twentieth century has itself had much to do with fossil fuels through the use of artificial fertilisers, pesticides and pumps for irrigation (Smil 2013, 11–12).The Anthropocene and histories 51 But there is another reason why the history of human evolution and the total number of human beings today matter when we get to the question of species survival as the planet warms. One way that species threatened by global warming will try to survive is by migrating to areas more conducive to their existence. This is how they have survived past changes in the climatic conditions of the planet. But now

there are so many of us, and we are so widespread on this planet, that we stand in the way. Curt Stager puts it clearly: As Anthropocene warming rises toward its as yet unspecified peak, our longsuffering biotic neighbors face a situation that they have never encountered before in the long, dramatic history of ice ages and interglacials. They can’t move because we’re standing in their way. (Stager 2011, 66) The irony of the point runs deeper. The spread of human groups throughout the world and their growth in the age of industrial civilisation now make it difficult for human climate refugees to move to safer and more inhabitable climes (Denny and Matisoo-Smith 2011). Other humans will stand in their way. Burton Richter puts the point thus: ‘The population now is too big to move en masse , so we had better do our best to limit the damage that we are causing’ (Richter 2010, 2). The history of population thus belongs to two histories at once: the very short term history of the industrial way of life – of modern medicine, technology, and fossil fuels as well as of fertilisers, pesticides and irrigation – that accompanied and enabled the growth in our numbers and the much, much longer-term evolutionary or deep history of our species, the history through which we have evolved to be the dominant species of the planet, spreading all over it and now threatening the existence of many other lifeforms. The poor participate in that shared history of human evolution just as much as the rich do. In a recent paper the Duke University geologist, Peter Haff, has convincingly argued that it would not be possible to sustain the lives of seven – soon to be nine – billion people on the planet without modern forms of energy and communications technology touching all our lives in some significant ways. Without this network of connections, he argues, the total human population on Earth will collapse to about 10 million. The ‘technosphere’, he argues, has become the condition of possibility enabling so many of us, both rich and poor, to live on this planet and act as its dominant species (Haff 2013). Per capita emission figures, while useful in making a necessary and corrective polemical point in the political economy of climate change, hide the larger history of the species in which both the rich and the poor participate. Population is clearly a category that conjoins the two histories. Are humans special? The moral rift of the Anthropocene warming reveals the sudden coming together of the usually separated syntactic orders of recorded and deep histories of humankind, of species history and the history of the Earth system, revealing the deep connections through which the planet’s carbon cycle and life interact with each other and so on. It does not mean that this knowledge will stop humans from pursuing, with vigour and vengeance, our all too human ambitions and squabbles that unite and divide us at the same time. In their fascinating paper on the Anthropocene, Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeill have drawn our attention to what they call – after Polanyi, I assume – the period of the ‘Great Acceleration’ in human history, from 1945 to the present, when global figures for population, real GDP, foreign direct investment, damning of rivers, water use, fertiliser consumption, urban population, paper consumption, transport motor vehicles, telephones, international tourism, and McDonald’s restaurants (yes!) all began to increase dramatically in an exponential fashion (Steffen et al. 2007). The year 1945, they suggest, could be a strong candidate for an answer to the question, When did the Anthropocene begin? While the Anthropocene may stand for all the climate problems we face today collectively, as a historian of human affairs it is impossible for me not to notice that this

They ate and were eaten in the same way th period of so-called Great Acceleration is also the period of great decolonisation in countries that had been dominated by European imperial powers and that made a move towards modernisation (the damming of rivers, for instance) over the ensuing decades and, with the globalisation of the last twenty years, towards a certain degree of democratisation of consumption as well. I cannot ignore the fact that ‘the Great Acceleration’ included the production and consumption of consumer durables – such as the refrigerator and the washing machine – in western households that were touted as ‘emancipatory’ for women. Nor can I forget the pride with which today the most ordinary and poor Indian citizen now possesses his or her smart phone or a fake and cheap substitute. The lurch into the Anthropocene has also been globally the story of some longanticipated social justice as well, at least in the sphere of consumption. This justice between humans, however, comes at a price. The result of growing human consumption has been a near-complete human appropriation of the biosphere. This raises a question that bears striking similarity to the question that Europeans often asked themselves when they forcibly or otherwise took over other peoples’ lands: by what right or on what grounds do we arrogate to ourselves the almost exclusive claims to appropriate for human needs the biosphere of the planet? The idea that humans are special has, of course, a long history. We should perhaps speak of anthropocentrisms in the plural here. There is, for instance, a long line of thinking – from religions that came long after humans established the first urban centres of civilisation and created the idea of a transcendental God through to the modern social sciences – that has humans positioned as facing the rest of the world, as nature. These later religions are in strong contrast, it seems, with the much more ancient religions of hunting-gathering peoples (I think here of Australian Aborigines and their stories) that often saw humans as part of animal life. The humans were not necessarily special in these ancient religions. They ate and were eaten in the same way that other animals did. They were part of life. Recall Durkheim’s position on totemism. In determining ‘the place of man’ in the scheme of totemistic beliefs, Durkheim was clear that totemism pointed to a doubly conceived human, or what he called the ‘double nature’ of man: ‘Two beings co-exist within him: a man and an animal.’ And again: ‘we must be careful not to consider totemism a sort of animal worship. . . . Their [men and their totems’] relations are rather those of two things who are on the same level and of equal value’ (Durkheim 1982 [1915], 134, 139). The very idea of a transcendental God puts humans in a special relationship to the Creator and to His creation, the world. The literature on climate change thus reconfigures an older debate on anthropocentrism and so-called nonanthropocentrism that has long exercised philosophers and scholars interested in environmental ethics: do we value the non-human for its own sake or because it is good for us? (see Buell 2001, 224–42). Nonanthropocentrism, however, may indeed be a chimera for, as the Chinese scholar Feng Han points out in a different context, ‘human values will always be from a human (or anthropocentric) point of view’ (Feng Han 2008). Ecologically-minded philosophers in the 1980s made a distinction between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ versions of anthropocentrism. Strong anthropocentrism had to do with

hat other animals did. They were part of life.

‘Double nature’ of man:

unreflexive and instinctive use or exploitation of nature for purely human preferences; weak anthropocentrism was seen as a position arrived at through rational reflections on why the nonhuman was important for human flourishing (Norton 1984, 131–48). Lovelock’s work on Anthropocene warming, however, produces a radically different position, on the other side of the rift as it were. He packs it into a pithy proposition that works almost as the motto of his book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia : ‘to consider the health of the Earth without the constraint that the welfare of humankind comes first’ (Lovelock 2009, 35–6). He emphasises: ‘I see the health of the Earth as primary, for we are utterly dependent upon a healthy planet for survival.’ What does it mean for humans, given their inescapable anthropocentrism, to consider ‘the Earth as primary’ or to contemplate the implications of Archer’s statement that the world was not ‘created specially for us’? I will consider this question in the following and concluding section of this essay. Climate and capital, the global and the planetary In his book, Living in the End Times , Slavoj Žižek made some interesting criticism of my essay ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’ (Chakrabarty 2009). Responding to my points that there were ‘natural parameters’ to our existence as a species that were relatively independent of our choices between capitalism and socialism and that we therefore needed to think deep history of the species and the much shorter history of capital together, Žižek remarked: Of course, the natural parameters of our environment are ‘independent of capitalism or socialism’ – they harbor a potential threat to all of us, independently of economic development, political system, etc. However, the fact that their 54 Dipesh Chakrabarty stability has been threatened by the dynamic of global capitalism nonetheless has a stronger implication that the one allowed by Chakrabarty: in a way, we have to admit that the Whole is contained by its Part , that the fate of the Whole (life on earth) hinges on what goes on in what was formerly one of its parts (the socio-economic mode of production of one of the species on earth). (Žižek 2010, 333) Given this premise, his conclusion followed: we also ‘have to accept the paradox that . . . the key struggle is the particular one: one can solve the universal problem (of the survival of human species) only by first resolving the particular deadlock of the capitalist mode of production. . . . [T]he key to the ecological crisis does not reside in ecology as such’ (Žižek 2010, 333–4). That the capitalist or industrial civilisation, dependent on the large-scale availability of cheap fossil-fuel energy, is a proximate or efficient cause of the climate crisis is not in doubt. But Žižek puts capitalism in the driver’s seat; it is the ‘part’ that now determines ‘the whole’. My position is different: to say that the history and logic of particular human institutions have become caught up in the much larger processes of the Earth system and evolutionary history (stressing the lives of several species, including ourselves) is not to say that human history is the driver of these large-scale processes. These latter processes continue over scales of space and time that are much larger than those of capitalism; hence the rifts we have discussed. As Stager and Archer point out, however much the ‘excess’ carbon dioxide we put out today, the long-term processes of the Earth system, its million-year carbon cycle, for instance, will most likely ‘clean it up’ one day, humans or no humans (Solomon et al. 2009, 20; Stager 2011, Chapter 2). Which is why it seems more consistent to see these long-term Earth system processes as co-actors in the drama of global warming. This is also suggested by the fact that, unlike the problems of wealth accumulation or income inequalities, or the questions posed by globalisation, the

This chapter was first published in a longer form as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories, Critical Inquiry 41 (Autumn 2014) 2014. © 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Note: In the interest of editorial consistency, the author’s expression ‘global warming’ has at times been replaced by ‘Anthropocene warming’ in this essay.

“The realisation that humans – all humans, rich or poor – come late in the planet’s life and dwell more in the position of passing guests than possessive hosts, has to be an integral part of the perspective from which we pursue our all-too-human but legitimate quest for justice on issues to do with the iniquitous impact of anthropogenic climate change. .”

problem of Anthropocene warming could not have been predicted from within the usual frameworks deployed to study the logics of capital. The methods of political economic investigation and analyses do not usually entail digging up 800,000-year-old ice-core samples or making satellite observations of changes in the mean temperature of the planet’s surface. Climate change is a problem defined and constructed by climate scientists whose research methods, analytical strategies and skill-sets are different from those possessed by students of political economy. Once we grant processes belonging to the deeper history of Earth and life, the role of co-actors in the current crisis (playing themselves out on scales both human and non-human) highlights Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s observation that ‘The planet is the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it’ (Spivak 2012, 338). Spivak was on to something here. Her formulation takes a step towards pondering the human implications of the kind of planetary studies that inform and underpin the science of climate change. The Anthropocene and histories 55 This science drives a clear wedge between an emergent conception of the planetary and existing ideas regarding the global. For even though the current phase of warming of the Earth’s atmosphere is indeed anthropogenic, it is only contingently so; humans have no intrinsic role to play in the science of planetary warming as such. The science is not even specific to this planet – it is part of what is called planetary science. It does not belong to an Earth-bound imagination. Our current warming is an instance of planetary warming that has happened both on this planet and on other planets, humans or no humans, and with different consequences. It just so happens that the current warming of the Earth is of human doing. The ‘global’ of globalisation literature, on the other hand, cannot be thought without humans directly and necessarily placed at the very centre of the narrative. The scientific problem of climate change thus emerges from what may be called ‘comparative planetary studies’ and entails a degree of interplanetary research and thinking. The imagination at work here is not human-centred. It speaks to a growing divergence in our consciousness between the global – a singularly human story – and the planetary, a perspective to which humans are incidental. The Anthropocene is about waking up to the rude of shock of the recognition of the otherness of the planet. The planet, to speak with Spivak again, ‘is the species of alterity, belonging to another system’. And ‘yet,’ as she puts it, ‘we live on it.’ If there is to be a comprehensive politics of climate change, it has to begin from this perspective. The realisation that humans – all humans, rich or poor – come late in the planet’s life and dwell more in the position of passing guests than possessive hosts, has to be an integral part of the perspective from which we pursue our all-too-human but legitimate quest for justice on issues to do with the iniquitous impact of anthropogenic climate change.

Geoengineering tensions

Adrian Currie Adrian Currie’s article ‘Geoengineering tensions’ explores the contemporary

moral, political and prudential

discourse and tensions regarding geoengineering. One event the text consistently refers to and discusses is ‘The SPICE Project’, a project created where particles are released into the air via balloons as part of investigations in engineering the climate. The articles covers two main tensions. The first tension regards the existence of geoengineering technologies in the modern world means that we may begin to disregard and give less effort towards carbon reduction. Essentially, we may see geoengineering as an easy way to subdue and slow the effects of climate change. This section in the text explores the arguments both for and against the addressed tension. The second tension discussed in this article is that, in addition to geoengineering research being grave and there being validity difficulties, geoengineering also seems

to be quite difficult to carry out in terms of the conservatism of scientific research due to issues regarding scientists focusing on more mainstream issues to achieve credit, the expenses of geoengineering research, and chances of test failure in geoengineering research.

Adrian Currie’s article ‘Geoengineering tensions’ explores the contemporary moral, political and prudential discourse and tensions regarding geoengineering. One event the text consistently refers to and discusses is ‘The SPICE Project', a project created where particles are released into the air via balloons as part of investigations in engineering the climate. The articles covers two main tensions. The first tension regards the existence of geoengineering technologies in the modern world means that we may begin to disregard and give less effort towards carbon reduction. Essentially, we may see geoengineering as an easy way to subdue and slow the effects of climate change. This section in the text explores the arguments both for and against the addressed tension. The second tension discussed in this article is that, in addition to geoengineering research being grave and there being validity difficulties, geoengineering also seems to be quite difficult to carry out in terms of the conservatism of scientific research due to issues regarding scientists focusing on more mainstream issues to achieve credit, the expenses of geoengineering research, and chances of test failure in geoengineering research. Adrian Currie’s article ‘Geoengineering tensions’ explores the contemporary moral, political and prudential discourse and tensions regarding geoengineering. One event the text consistently refers to and discusses is ‘The SPICE Project’, a project created where particles are released into the air via balloons as part of investigations in engineering the climate. The articles covers two main tensions. The first tension regards the existence of geoengineering technologies in the modern world means that we may begin to disregard and give less effort towards carbon reduction. Essentially, we may see geoengineering as an easy way to subdue and slow the effects of climate change. This section in the text explores the arguments both for and against the addressed tension. The second tension discussed in this article is that, in addition to geoengineering research being grave and there being validity difficulties, geoengineering also seems to be quite difficult to carry out in terms of the conservatism of scientific research due to issues regarding scientists focusing on more mainstream issues to achieve credit, the expenses of geoengineering research, and chances of test failure in geoengineering research. Discussion of geoengineering has largely focused on two kinds of questions: (1) What are the moral or legal requirements and ramifications concerning geoengineering?1 (2) How ought geoengineering research be governed? This already rich discussion pays little attention to the social mechanisms which underwrite and drive scientific research. On my view, such mechanisms add an important dimension to understanding geoengineering and its effective governance. Here, I’ll focus on the academic context. Industry and other research sources are likely both driven by different incentives structures and require different governance (e.g., Holman & Bruner, 2017). As such, I’ll leave discussion of those contexts for later work. In what follows, I’ll first sketch a set of epistemic issues surrounding geoengineering research. With that in place, I’ll turn to the two tensions which I think the SPICE case highlights. I’ll then reflect on these tensions and argue that some approaches to governing geoengineering research are less attractive

“These results suggest that even with monumental effort to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, humanity will be living with the consequences of fossil fuel emissions for a very long time.”

than they may initially appear and further suggest that the governance of geoengineering ought to be sensitive to the kinds of incentives which govern scientific research. It’s worth noting that one of the tensions—those relating to ‘moral hazards’ and international governance—should be old news: it is the focus on insights from the philosophy of science, and the interaction between the two tensions, which underwrites what is original in what follows. In the conclusion, I’ll briefly consider to what extent my discussion bears on the governance of emerging technology more generally. Although there are particular features which sets geoengineering apart from other new, powerful technologies, I’ll suggest that the general lesson that the effects of governance measures need to be understood in the context of science’s incentive structures is a general one. I’ll also highlight the challenge this places to our traditional conception of scientists and their roles in society. 2. Epistemic challenges to geoengineering Developing geoengineering technologies is not a simple prospect. Geoengineering proposals are diverse, but typically involve one of two strategies. One set increases the Earth’s albedo without intervening on global carbon, such as the SPICE project’s interest in aerosol spraying. Another set reduces atmospheric carbon without intervening on emissions themselves, such as afforestation or enhanced weathering. By and large these techniques are epistemically similar due to being (1) theoretically well-understood, but (2) practically very tricky because of targeting large scale and complex systems. Let’s take these in turn. Scientific knowledge often consists in relatively simple theoretical understanding of complex systems. For instance, part of the Earth’s climate absorption is determined by the amount of silicate minerals exposed to weathering. Atmospheric CO2 is dissolved into rainwater to form acids which in turn slowly dissolve (‘weather’) silicate rock, which is eventually carried by rivers into the oceans where the carbon is used by various biological organisms to form shells and the like. Thus carbon is transferred from the atmosphere to the geological carbon bank. Enhanced weathering, in effect, speeds this process by increasing the amount of exposed silicate—thus upping the Earth’s carbon absorption (perhaps, but not necessarily, accompanied by the stimulated growth of phytoplankton). Or to take another example, global temperature is a function of the sun’s intensity, the Earth’s albedo (that is, how much sunlight is reflected back into space), and the amount of energy trapped by atmospheric greenhouse gases. As such, increasing the Earth’s albedo could mitigate temperature increases driven by a more concentrated atmosphere. So, ways of increasing albedo (aerosol injection, etc…) could stabilize the Earth’s temperature. Geoengineering strategies, then, piggy-back on well-understood, well-supported scientific theories. This theoretical simplicity, however, belies geoengineering’s epistemic and practical difficulty. Despite our basic theoretical understanding of the factors which contribute to the Earth’s carbon budget, actually intervening on these is a vastly different proposal (Hulme, 2017; Svoboda & Irvine, 2014). This is because global systems are large scale and complex. The latter feature undermines our capacity to infer from theoretical understanding to actual results. There

is no guarantee, for instance, that increased exposed silicate rock (and thus increased oceanic carbon) is all that is required for those carbonates to be stored. The interdependencies of the Earth’s systems are tricky customers for predictable intervention. The former feature—scale—undermines our capacity to experimentally or indirectly probe what the results of such interventions might be. The very features that make experiments scientifically desirable, the isolated, repeated manipulation of causal factors, undermines their capacity to be particularly informative of how those features play out in the bustling world beyond the experimental setup.3 Further, there is no real reason to think that the effects of geoengineering will be uniform across contexts: the world is not only complex, but heterogeneous. The complexity and scale of the systems geoengineering targets, then, limits our capacity to probe and understand the risks and byproducts of actual interventions. There are, of course, various strategies scientists adopt to reduce uncertainty in these circum-stances. These largely involve navigating between various surrogates, using small-scale experimentation, computational simulations, and so forth.5 Further, nature sometimes provides ‘natural experiments’, most relevantly the 1991 Pinatubo eruption (Newhall, Hendley, & Stauffer, 2005), which increased global atmospheric sulphuric acid, lowering average temperature by roughly half a degree for a few years. But for understanding the possibility and likely effects of actual geoengineering, field experiments are crucial. Geoengineers frequently draw allusions to the practices of medical science. In that context, extensive research on various experimental systems, such as animal trials, are carried out before human populations are put at risk. However, random controlled trials—the gold standard of evidence-based medicine (EBM)—are a crucial lynchpin, and indeed, there is at least some reason to think that the EBM folk are right to grant low credence to evidence from laboratory work (Lemoine, 2017; Solomon, 2015). To ascertain the effectiveness of some medical treatment we ultimately have to test it on its intended subjects. A similar lesson, I suspect, holds for geoengineering: ascertaining geoengineering’s effects (intended or otherwise), effectiveness, and necessary engineering features, requires field experiments (Keith, Duren, & MacMartin, 2014; Dykema, Keith, Anderson, & Weisenstein, 2014). On the extreme, Robock, Bunzl, Kravitz, & Stenchikov, (2010) claim that full deployment is required to test geoengineering technology (although see MacMynowski, Keith, Caldeira, and Shin (2011)). That geoengineering requires applied research into the effectiveness of such measures, and that such measures must be em-ployable at large scales, necessitates a multi-disciplinary effort such as that of SPICE. Climate and atmospheric scientists, chemists, engineers, modellers, and so forth, are all required. As I’ll discuss further below, although multi-disciplinarity has a positive spin in public and funding contexts, in many scientific contexts it can be unattractive. In addition to navigating the varying standards, practices and languages across disciplines, multi-disciplinary publications are often not valued in the same way that publications in the central journals of ‘home’ disciplines are. This is particularly true in hiring contexts, making such projects unattractive to early career researchers; and further in funding contexts, where both peer review and centralized decisions about dividing resources make a research area’s reputation critical.

“ the more we are able to mitigate the eﬀects of climate change, the less urgent it will become to meet the likely radical economic, demographic and political changes that dramatic carbon reduction requires..”

We can, then, identify several features of geoengineering relevant going forwards. First, research into geoengineering is ne-cessarily speculative: that is, much of the territory is uncharted, making false starts and dead ends likely.6 Second, much of the research requires explicit field-testing of both deployment technologies and climatological agents: often expensive, ‘splashy’ (likely to draw public attention), and, given the first point, epistemically risky. Third, the research is necessarily multi-disciplinary. As we’ll see, the second tension I’ll discuss makes these features problematic, and undermines some of the measures intended to navigate the first tension. Let’s move to those now. 3. The first tension There are moral and prudential arguments pulling us both towards, and away from, further geoengineering research (Lawford- Smith & Currie, 2017). On the one hand, the availability of geoengineering technologies might undermine carbon reduction efforts. That is, the more we are able to mitigate the effects of climate change, the less urgent it will become to meet the likely radical economic, demographic and political changes that dramatic carbon reduction requires. Moreover, getting geoengineering right likely requires international agreement and governance that simply is not in place. This suggests that developing geoengineering technologies is in itself dangerous. But on the other hand, such technologies have enormous potential to hold back the worst of the damages of climate change, providing necessary breathing space while emission reduction slowly takes effect. On one side, ‘arming the future’ with geoengineering might in itself guarantee its need by reducing pressure on carbon reduction.7 But on the other side, surely disarming the future is unconscionable. I’m going to assume that the potential benefits of geoengineering research are well-known and more-or-less obvious. To quote the Oxford Geoengineering Program, Failure to conduct research may leave us in a situation where some parties might be tempted to view geoengineering as a cheap or fast-acting means to counter climate change and seek to implement an inadequately researched technique. Conversely we may decide not to implement a technique which would have been able to counteract climate change safely, but not do so as we had not conducted adequate research. Either way ignorance could pose an existential threat to our society. (OGP, 2011, italics added) Not researching geoengineering could either lead to action being taken with inadequately understood technology, or not deploying potentially lifesaving technology due to a lack of knowledge. I’ll focus on the prudential arguments against geoengineering research. Consider what Ricardo Navarro, engineer and environmental activist, has to say on the webpage of HOME, the organization behind the anti-SPICE letter. The same countries and companies that have neglected climate change for decades, are now proposing very risky geoengineering technologies that could further disrupt the weather, peoples and ecosystems. For them geoengineering is a “perfect” excuse to claim they can keep on heating the planet because later they will cool it off with dangerous experiments. As global environmental

“These results suggest that even with monumental effort to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, humanity will be living with the consequences of fossil fuel emissions for a very long time.”

movements, we cannot allow the geoengineers to experiment with the planet and its peoples. (from http://www.etcgroup.org/ content/hands-mother-earth, accessed 23/3/2017) Navarro believes the development of geoengineering technologies will have extremely bad consequences. First, undermining pressure for lowering carbon emissions; second, the technology is itself risky. That is, geoengineering interventions are ‘dangerous experiments’. But further, the development of the technology required for geoengineering interventions carries indirect risks due to providing ‘excuses’ for not lowering carbon emissions. Ironically, the first claim would in fact be somewhat mitigated if only the kinds of research the second claim disallows went forward. Thus, the tension I’m interested in is actually embedded in HOME’s arguments themselves The kind of objection Navarro voices is often discussed as a ‘moral hazard’, and the objection is nothing new vis-à-vis geoengineering. Another objection which I’ll discuss below concerns the capacities of international communities to maintain geoengineering measures once they are implemented, and to govern the financial and environmental cost which could result. Without a good answer to those concerns, we might think that the technology’s use would increase rather than alleviate harm. Worries regarding the moral hazard of geoengineering should be taken seriously, especially in light of our collective slow pace at turning off climate change’s anthropogenic tap. As Mclaren puts it, While there are many other reasons for slow progress on mitigation— from vested interests to collective action problems—we cannot definitively rule out a contribution from moral hazard around climate engineering. Moreover, given the glacial rate of progress hitherto on mitigation the simple risk of mitigation deterrence might motivate us to find ways to counteract it. (McLaren, 2016, 599) There is also, of course, a set of more normative concerns both in Navarro’s statement and others like it. These include worries about hypocrisy, justice, and hubris. Such issues are complex, and I’ll leave them to one side (although see Corner and Pidgeon (2010), Hale (2012), Lawford-Smith and Currie (2017), Preston (2013), Preston (2017)). What interests me here is the relationship between the kinds of measures taken by both scientists and those interested in positively governing geoengineering in light of both” “this worry, and the next tension. 4. The second tension The first tension—between arguments in favour of developing geoengineering technologies, and the dangers their development might bring—is fairly well understood. The second tension has received less attention. It focuses on the urgency and epistemic difficulty of geoengineering research on the one hand, and the potential conservatism of scientific research on the other. I’ll focus on how science’s conservatism is driven by the dynamics of career paths and the requirements of funding (see Avin forthcoming, Currie under review). Although science’s organization makes it very productive insofar as lots of research gets done, it also makes it conservative, in that research tends to ‘pool’ into a few—ideally promising—research programs (Weisberg,

cheap or fast-acting means to counter climate change

2013; Strevens, 2013). The productivity of scientific research is driven by incentives towards scientific credit (awards, publications, promotions, etc…) which lead scientists to publish often, and attempt to provide output which will maximize research impact. Although intuitively we might think that ‘im- pactful’ research will be somehow radical or revolutionary, this is typically not the case. Work which is too outside the mainstream will be blocked by referees both in publication and funding, and regardless will likely not garner much attention due to being out-of- step with thriving research programs (Stanford, 2015). Although new programs certainly emerge, and sometimes achieve band- wagon status, there is a sense in which these production-boosting features of science are not diversity-boosting.10 Moreover, scientists, as well as funding bodies, must make bets about which research directions will be fruitful (Turner, 2016). This aspect partly explains the potential impact of the cancellation of SPICE’s balloon-launch: it signals that the venture was simply too hard; a bad bet. Geoengineering is precisely the kind of research which science’s conservatism makes it tricky to actually do. As we saw in Section 2, research on surrogates and proxies provides crucial but inadequate ways of filling out our theoretical knowledge, but actually figuring out how to deliver the technologies, and the results of such interventions, requires expensive field-tests. Further, due to the research’s speculative nature, failures should be expected, risky ‘bold’ hypotheses are necessary, and thus the direction of research is difficult to predict, making the kind of specific, likely epistemic dividends which funders prefer unavailable (Currie, 2018 chapter 11). In the face of perceived risk, an additional stressor comes from the requirement for careful, fairly extensive consultation throughout research. This further gums up already slowly-moving gears (see for instance, Parson and Keith (2013)). Further, the requirement for transparency potentially puts at risk some of the incentives which makes science productive (i.e., partial ownership of the goods reaped by new discoveries). Moreover, such research is necessarily multi-disciplinary, drawing on climate modelling and material engineering, among other fields. As mentioned above, different disciplines have different expectations about evidence, publishing, and so forth. Differences in the treatment and purposes of patents between engineers and scientists is one reason why SPICE’s balloon-launch was cancelled (Stilgoe et al., 2013). Further, career-wise, scientists’ home disciplines are often much more interested in ‘core’ research and publishing: too much integrated, multidisciplinary work can actually hurt career prospects, especially for earlycareer researchers. This all makes geoengineering look like a bad bet for practicing scientists. Indeed, the attempts by scientist themselves to provide guidelines for geoengineering is testament to how important they think it is despite its unattractiveness from a career and funding perspective. Even if this doesn’t stop research in geoengineering wholesale, it at least changes the kinds of people who get involved. On the plausible assumption that a diversity of personalities, research-styles, and so forth, are important for a thriving research program (O’Connor & Bruner, 2017), such decreases in diversity are problematic even beyond concerns for the justness of such

programs. 5. Navigating the tensions? So, we have a tension between the epistemic and social context of geoengineering and the dynamics which promote scientific success; and a tension between arguments in favour of the urgency of geoengineering research, and those emphasizing the risks of engaging in research in the first place. Although it is helpful to analyse these separately, in practice both must be navigated together, and this, as I’ll show, changes how we should think about strategies the geoengineering community has adopted (purposefully or otherwise), partly in light of SPICE. The two moves I want to highlight are first, a tendency towards rebranding; second, an attempt to split the availability of geoengineering mitigation from carbon reduction strategies, and to split geoengineering research from geoengineering deployment. Before getting to that, it will be helpful to outline the aspect of Navarro’s argument which I’ll focus on. (1) Geoengineering research would enable the deployment of geoengineering technology; (2) The capacity to deploy geoengineering technology would decrease carbon reduction; (3) Therefore, geoengineering research would decrease carbon reduction. By this argument, there is a coupling between geoengineering research and the capacity to deploy such technology, and a coupling” “between our capacity to deploy such technology and a decrease in carbon reduction.11 These two dependencies capture Navarro’s worry about ‘excuses’: if premise 2 is true, the availability (or perceived availability) of geoengineering technologies would lead at least some players (governments, businesses, etc…) to be less worried about their carbon output. As Albert Lin has put the worry: … geoengineering could be inaccurately perceived as a comprehensive insurance policy against climate change. This mis- perception could create various incentives that would exacerbate the problems that geoengineering is intended to ameliorate (678). Or, from Duncan Mclaren: … decision makers may reduce mitigation effort, believing climate engineering to represent adequate insurance against climate risk (2016, 596). Note that this ‘excuse’ version of ‘moral hazard’ comes in an explicit and implicit form. Explicitly, agents might recognise the benefits (for them) of using geoengineering as a reason to not reduce emissions; implicitly, incentives to avoid potentially costly reduction measures could have the same effect without explicitly self-interested action. Naturally, another premise is required to get Navarro’s desired conclusion: that reductions in carbon emission decreases would be negative; disastrous. I don’t think that premise comes for free: the kinds of social changes required for dramatic emission reduction could quite easily have negative consequences. Indeed, trying to understand what social, political and economic interventions are required—not mentioning the actual costs or benefits of such changes— is extraordinarily tricky. Under some circumstances we might choose—and choose rightly—to research, develop, and perhaps implement geoengineering

“ Under some circumstances we might choose—and choose rightly— to research, develop, and perhaps implement geoengineering measures even if we have good reason to believe they will lead to less emphasis on carbon reduction.”

measures even if we have good reason to believe they will lead to less emphasis on carbon reduction. Ben Hale (2012) has rightly complained that the ‘moral hazard’ argument against geoengineering is in fact a set of quite different arguments, which often require different support and policy responses. Just as, as I’ll suggest below, the term ‘geoengineering’ hides a large number of quite disparate practices, ‘moral hazard’ arguments come in various quite different forms (although see McLaren (2016) for discussion of a broad, inclusive definition of moral hazard, which I follow here). Having said this, for my purposes, the coarse-grained argument above is suitable as it allows us to get a grip on the relationship between rebranding and decoupling—the two strategies we’ll consider—and the two tensions I’ve just outlined. Let’s consider another, analogous argument which recognises how geoengineering measures would challenge international governance. After all, geoengineering requires ongoing maintenance (Wong, 2017), and there is at least potential for a failure of that maintenance to lead to ‘exit shock’; a much faster (and thus more damaging) warming than otherwise (Irvine, 2015). Moreover, the winners and losers of various geoengineering measures are likely to be varied, and ensuring that just process and responsibility (whatever that should look like) is achieved is not only difficult, but potentially involves new international agreements and discussions. The analogous argument could go as follows: (1) Geoengineering research would enable the deployment of geoengineering technologies; (2) Having the capacity to deploy geoengineering technology without proper global governance in place would be disastrous; (3) Proper global governance is not in place; (4) Therefore, geoengineering research would be disastrous. As with the previous argument, this relies on the coupling of research with the capacity to deploy, and a coupling of those capacities with bad outcomes.12 Szerszynski et al. (2013) argue that solar radiation management is “… a form of technology which is ‘inherently political’ in the sense of being unfavourable to certain patterns of social relations and favourable to others” (2811). Specifically, they claim that such technology is unfavourable to democratic governance. If such arguments hold water, and research and deployment are coupled, then insofar as democratic governance matters, the consequences of geoengineering research could be dire. In addition to this structural feature, both arguments share the properties of, first, turning on empirical and governance issues which are outside of what we take the usual sphere of scientific research to include, and second, involving the behaviour of actors (the public, governments, etc…) which scientists have limited control over. These two features will be crucial for my arguments. Again, even if these arguments cannot be mitigated, the urgency of geoengineering measures might ultimately be judged to trump such outcomes: perhaps one disaster is preferable over another. 5.1. “Rebranding” Since SPICE cancelled its launch, there has been a tendency for scientists interested in geoengineering to adopt a kind of ‘divide and conquer’ strategy: not all geoengineering measures are equal, and indeed shouldn’t be unified

under one banner.13 Even before” “2012, the so-called ‘Asilomar 2′ meeting in late March 2010 split ‘geoengineering’ into Climate Intervention (increasing the Earth’s albedo) and Carbon Remediation (post-emission carbon reduction) (see Kintisch, 2010). The 2015 National Academies’ National Research Council report also recommended rebranding: … the committee believes that these approaches are more accurately described as “climate intervention” strategies—purposeful actions intended to curb the negative impact of climate change—rather than engineering strategies that imply precise control over the climate (2015) Another example is the Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation, a £10 million project funded in late 2015 focusing on enhanced weathering, which notably avoids the term ‘geoengineering’.14 It’s worth reiterating that ‘strategy’ needn’t imply explicit agency. Given the dark cloud hanging over geoengineering, there are incentives rewarding rebranding, so we needn’t postulate specific strategies on scientists’ part (although I’m sure there is some of that). The line between epistemically valid distinctions and mere strategic rebranding is vague. Undoubtedly, intervention and remediation are epistemically very different (indeed, I divided geoengineering along just the same lines in my own treatment above), and of course the control implied by ‘engineering’ is a far cry from what actual geoengineering measures would look like in practice. ‘Rebranding’, then, is not without theoretical and empirical grounds. Further, the term ‘geoengineering’ in many ways plays into attempts to stop it. Employing a coarse umbrella-term in referring to a wide range of different activities allows diverse scientific projects to be tarnished with the same brush. Consider the following from Lin: Geoengineering, a third category of climate policy options, is a catchall term for an array of unconventional, untested and frequently risky proposals (674). How unconventional, untested, and risky geoengineering proposals are varies (as does their potential effectiveness): even if some geoengineering prospects have potentially disastrous effects, others might be more-or-less benign. Further, as Reynolds (2011) has argued, some forms of geoengineering (such as iron fertilization) already fall within existing regulatory structures, while others do not. Putting mirrors in space, shooting aerosol into the atmosphere, and adding silicates to agricultural dusting are very different ideas, and surely lumping them together is problematic. As Clare Heyward has put it,15 Technically, CDR and SRM are quite different and discussing them together under the rubric of geoengineering can give the impression that all the technologies in the two categories of response always raise similar challenges and political issues when this is not necessarily the case. (Heyward, 2013, 21) Having said this, we shouldn’t be so naïve as to think that trying to avoid the dirt which has attached to geoengineering is not playing a role in rebranding recommendations. Regarding the second tension, rebranding appears a sensible move: earlier I argued that one reason that SPICE’s cancellation could be problematic is it making geoengineering a bad bet for scientists and their funders:

“ which dangers we focus on”

Geoengineering, is a catchall term for an array of unconventional, untested an frequently risky proposal

it lands in the ‘too hard’ basket. A successful rebranding could duck these perceptions and make research into (let’s call it) ‘schmeogeneering’ a more attractive prospect. Especially given the more outlandish claims about geoengineering’s dangers, decoupling proposals from the term is often wellmotivated and, perhaps, necessary. However, I think rebranding becomes problematic when we consider the first tension, and in particular the second premise of the arguments I discussed in the last section. Distinguish between perceived and actual risk. Navarro and others have a clear perception that geoengineering being (or being perceived as) a live option will undermine carbon reduction—perhaps due to an intentional strategy on the part of the ‘geoengineers’ (highly unlikely, to my mind), or simply due to the political and economic pressures on governments and other actors to not implement carbon reduction (more likely, to my mind). This involves a set of empirical claims which are extremely tricky to get traction on (although see Moreno-Cruz (2015))—so the actual threat is hard to determine. But the perceived threat is high, and it is this perception which mattered for the public pressure put on SPICE. In the good case, our perception of risk aligns with actual risk.16 However, often these misalign: our perception of risk might outrun, or underrun, the actual risk. Consider the following circumstances. A: our perception of the risks of geoengineering are highly inflated given the actual risk; B: our perception of the risks of geoengineering are either equal to, or underestimate, actual risk. In circumstance A, rebranding is (if perhaps somewhat underhanded) less problematic: given a (mistaken) belief among the public, policy makers, or within scientific communities, rebranding can give the technology a new lease on life. However, in circumstance B rebranding is extremely problematic: here, an underhanded strategy is used to enable dangerous research. Are scientists involved in geoengineering in a good position to decide whether we are in circumstances A or B? In my view, this turns on which dangers we focus on. Regarding some of the unintended consequences of climate interventions scientific understanding is, perhaps, just the thing. Navarro’s worry about ‘dangerous experiments’ springs to mind. For instance, what might count as a ‘safe threshold’ for geoengineering field trials is a question which scientists are likely well-positioned to answer (or at least bestpositioned to answer). However, see Stilgoe (2016 p860), and below, for challenges to the thought that thresholds are a sufficient” governance measure. However, regarding other risks, specifically the opportunity geoengineering could provide to those who wish to avoid the cost and drastic changes of carbon reduction, or whether the right global governance is in place to ensure the ongoing maintenance and possible redress required for geoengineering efforts, I see no reason to think that scientists are in a good position to make judgments. Scientists are right to claim privileged epistemic access to those domains that they are trained to understand; the socio-economic and political costs of their research is not one of them. To put this another way: the arguments above rely on coupling the capacity to deploy geoengineering technologies with car bonemission excuses or bad global governance—but scientists are not experts in moral hazards or global governance. I’ve suggested that for rebranding to be justified, we need good reason to think that the second premise is false. Is it? How would we tell? In particular: it is not clear to me that scientists themselves,

Focusing on moral hazard arguments, we have at least some access to what the social effects the capacity to deploy—or the perception of it—might be. Lin (2013) has argued that many underestimate the moral risk pertaining to geoengineering. His argument depends, on the one hand, on an analogy between the history of climate change adaptation and geoengineering, and on the other hand, psychological research about the various biases which underwrite moral hazard. Regarding the former, he points out that where adaptation measures are potentially disruptive and were perceived as the result of a failure, “… it is more likely that geoengineering proposals will be perceived—at least by some—as a simple solution to climate change” (684), making geoengineering attractive in ways likely to lead to moral hazards. Regarding the latter, Lin summarizes the diverse evidence in favour of risk compensating behaviours, concluding “The increasingly dismissive views regarding the possibility of a geoengineering moral hazard are surprising because the phenomena of moral hazard and risk compensation are undisputed in a variety of other contexts”(692). It’s also worth adding (as Lin does) the role of economic and social incentive structures which make it in the interests of some groups to actively encourage geoengineering as a means of undermining pressure for carbon emission reduction (that is, the explicit reading of ‘excuse’). This discussion has assumed that the epistemic specialities of scientists are stable—and this is far from necessary. One response to the argument of this section (helpfully urged by a referee for this journal) is to retrain scientists— change their role and expected skill sets. That is, demand that scientific training in values goes beyond research ethics, to include considerations of the sociopolitical ramifications of their work. In principle, I could not agree more. In practice I have a few reservations. First, if only a small fraction of scientific research has the potential impact that demands such considerations, it seems overkill to revamp both scientific pedagogy and what we expect of scientists in light of it. Second, if the recommendations were to be more restricted to those researching technologies with such impacts, such actions will likely exacerbate the second tension. Third, I’m inclined to see division of epistemic labour as a strength of our epistemic communities, and am loathe to demand such a broad knowledge base be required of each individual. A solution in light of this, of course, is the development of roles within scientific communities that specifically bridge the gap between traditional scientific knowledge and sociopolitical aspects. Regardless of climate change and geoengineering the project of re-imagining the relationship between science and society is unquestionably important (Douglas, 2009; Kitcher, 2003). In the meantime, however, the Earth’s climate clock is ticking. 5.2. Decoupling There is a common theme among groups seeking to develop responsible frameworks for geoengineering. They insist—loudly, and repeatedly—that the development of such technology cannot replace carbon reduction efforts. These, in a sense, are attempts to decouple the development of geoengineering

a simple solution to climate change

or those involved in discussions with them, are in a good epistemic position to make that judgment (perhaps they ought to be, a point I’ll raise below). As such, the strategy is problematic.

“The increasingly dismissive views regarding the possibility of a geoengineering moral hazard are surprising because the phenomena of moral hazard and risk compensation are undisputed in a variety of other contexts”

technology from efforts to reduce carbon footprints; or an alternative strategy: decouple the development of geoengineering knowledge from geoengineering application. Consider this from the National Research Council: There is no substitute for dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate the negative consequences of climate change. (NRC, 2015) Or this from the Oxford Geoengineering Programme’s summary of the risks motivating the 2011 ‘Oxford principles’: It is important that those working in the field of geoengineering are clear that it is no panacea for climate change and express that clearly in their interactions with the media and society. Emission reductions are essential – geoengineering research is required because, while essential, reductions alone may not be sufficient to avoid dangerous climate change. (OGP, 2011) Here, we attempt to overcome the source of the first tension: the coupling of knowledge of climate change and action to reduce climate emissions. There is another, less overt, strategy which is similar, again from the NRC:… any future decisions about albedo modification will be judged primarily on questions of risk, and there are many opportunities to conduct research that furthers basic understanding of the climate system and its human dimensions—without imposing the risks of large-scale deployment—that would better inform societal considerations. (NRC, 2015) Here the strategy is to decouple geoengineering knowledge from geoengineering deployment. If it were possible to have a good understanding of geoengineering principles, without enabling the indirect risks of deployment, the first tension’s teeth would be surgically removed. Moreover, decoupling research from deployment could make other aspects of geoengineering governance more straightforward. One suggestion for the governance of field experiments, for example, is to suggest safety limits for test interventions (e.g., Parson &vv ”Keith, 2013). However, for this to be an effective solution, decoupling is required: “… appeals to safety are to miss the point that it is broader political, social, and ethical concerns that make the proposals so contentious” (Bellamy, 2016, 154). Stilgoe (2015, 2016) makes this argument forcefully. By conceiving of geoengineering technology as itself an experiment (as opposed to the product of experiments), the concerns of research ethics—informed consent, for example—become applicable to the development of those technologies. Considering the global nature of some proposals, we all might be considered subjects of such ‘experiments’ (see also Szerszynski et al., 2013). Additionally, decoupling strategies plausibly lessen the second tension as well. That tension turned on the nature of geoengineering research— particularly its need for field experiments as well as bountiful oversight from public and policy-makers—clashing with various aspects that make for effective science. If we could decouple scientific research from its deployment, or from political decision-making, then the need for large amounts of oversight— slowing it down, making it unattractive, or otherwise undesirable—would itself decrease. Or at least, that oversight would be much less likely to lead to SPICE-like outcomes. However, let’s consider again the second premise of the argument at hand:

The capacity to deploy geoengineering technologies would decrease carbon reduction. I agree that geoengineering is not a replacement for carbon reduction, and I agree that the capacity to deploy geoengineering techniques should not decrease carbon reduction, as the de-coupling statements claim. However, this is not what is at issue: what matters is whether having the capacity would in fact decrease carbon emissions. Analogous claims could be made about global governance. Scientists simply claiming or demanding that such decoupling occurs is not sufficient. Scientists, and the bodies which regulate scientific research, have insufficient say over how various technologies are deployed for their demands to have much relevance. To the first tension, the concerns driving the indirect risk are not primarily about what scientists will do, but about what governments and other agents will do vis-à-vis their carbon reduction strategies in light of the availability of geoengineering technology. Further, the second tension arises in part from the need to monitor and control geoengineering from (as it were) the outside: this suggests that scientists themselves are just the wrong folk to be driving such decoupling. Here is a good place to discuss an ambiguity in the notion of decoupling research from deployment. On one understanding, carrying out geoengineering’s required research requires provisioning the capacity for deployment. On another—more challenging—understanding, research requires deployment. Regarding this latter version, Stilgoe says, “… the absence of either a hermitically- sealed scalable laboratory or a control run world blur any line between research and deployment” (2016, 859). I suspect the more extreme view is overstated. Any technology, particularly those as powerful as some geoengineering technologies could be, involve uncertainty prior to deployment (this was certainly true of nuclear weaponry). Such uncertainty can be mitigated via limited field trials combined with modelling and so on. There is nothing particular that I can see that sets geoengineering apart from any other powerful, potentially global technology. Having said this, Stilgoe is surely correct that the requirement of field trials is a requirement that geoengineering be deployed on a restricted scale for research purposes. Regardless, the weaker sense of coupling is sufficient to drive my discussion here. Where in my discussion of rebranding I questioned whether scientists are in a good epistemic position to judge the truth or otherwise of claims like premise 2, here I question whether governance measures targeted at scientific research could be effective in allaying these tensions. The locus of the risk is the perception of research, not the research itself (that is, unless full deployment is required for research purposes). And it is unlikely that stage-gating and other processes involving intervening on the path of research will effect that locus. This is not to say that such governance procedures are not important, useful or necessary for a just science. Rather, they are not solutions to the factors underwriting the first tension. And worse, they likely exacerbate the second tension. Ongoing dialogue with stakeholders likely promotes the various features which already make geoengineering research a daunting prospect for scientists trying to make career-making or breaking bets about the success of research directions, and those trying to decide where to best place science funding.

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If it is right that most of the concerns about the development of geoengineering technologies is not about the technology per se, but rather how the availability of that technology plays out in public, political and global spheres, then it is unclear why governance structures suggested for geoengineering research which include various forms of stakeholder involvement are of help. Stakeholder involvement in ongoing research, it strikes me, matters crucially when the social outcome of a technology’s trajectory depends on how that research actually plays out. Ensuring that a diversity of voices are heard during that process, and in part making the research’s continuation dependant on those voices as stage-gating does, are then ways of ensuring that research trajectory tends towards the less harmful, and most beneficial. And surely some of these matters make a difference in the geoengineering case. However, at least given arguments from moral hazard and global cooperation, governing the scientists is besides the point. What we need instead are mechanisms which tie ongoing research to funding of mitigation efforts, on the one hand, and the development of international agreements on the other. In a sense, this suggests less that stakeholder voices be heard in the context of scientific research, and more that scientific voices be heard in national and international governance. It’s not my job here to provide suggestions for what such mechanisms should be but these considerations do suggest that pressure should be put on governments and other more powerful bodies, rather than scientific researchers themselves, if we want to achieve such decoupling (Lin, 2015). Scientific research does not operate in a vacuum from the rest of science; and neither then do attempts to govern it. Interventions on geoengineering have been discussed both at a global level (e.g., Virgoe, 2009) and concerning local research (e.g., Stilgoe et al., 2013); as well as at the level of deployment and the level of research (assuming such things can be decoupled). In their call for a geoengineering code of conduct, Hubert et al. (2016) envision a code providing “flexible governance [which] encourages early cooperation and co-ordination of research, equity and sustainable development [as well as] promote precaution, risk assessment, public participations, and transparency” (537). Macnaughten and Owen claim “For geoengineering to progress, its developers must be mindful of wider impacts from the outset, and it must proceed under robust governance mechanisms” (293). The emphasis is on” “science proceeding justly and safely. I am all for this. But given the high-risk game scientific careers and funding are, the consequences of project failure—and even of making an area of research more difficult than another—can confound research much more than is typically realized. And the arguments for geoengineering are strong enough for this to be a real concern. The upshot of this is not a demand that we stop or reduce ‘red tape’ being added to geoengineering. Rather, if such measures are to be put in place, other policies which mitigate the resultant unattractiveness of the science ought to be put in place too. Concrete suggestions are above my paygrade in this paper but insofar as scientists are credit-driven agents, then the addition of new credit could offset the drag which important governance may add. 6. Conclusion On the 24th of March 2017 group of scientists from Harvard announced a

multi-year project investigating the feasibility of very similar geoengineering technologies as SPICE. Indeed, their plans include the launch of a water-spraying balloon in early 2018.17 Like SPICE, they have also committed to continual monitoring and discussion with stake holders. It is striking, considering the apparent innocuousness of the proposed experiment, that SPICE’s failure could take some of the blame for there being no field experiments in aerosol spraying for over 6 years. It will be interesting to see whether this next attempt fares better. Given the previous discussion, if the possible benefits of geoengineering are to be realized, (1) geoengineering research should be properly incentivised (or at least not de-incentivised) and (2) research should be somehow buffered from the tricky couplings with ‘excuses’ and failures of international governance. However, achieving this appears to be beyond the scope of the scientists themselves: climate scientists/engineers do not have special insight into sociopolitico-economic contexts and regulation of science has limited capacity to influence how that science is used, or its general effects. Measures such as stagegating are a good way of ensuring certain kinds of dialogue occur, but there is very little in it for scientists, and has very little capacity to manage the perceptions of geoengineering, the incentive structures which underwrite moral hazards, and to ensure sufficient global governance is in place. And moreover, too much, or too heavy-handed governance, I think, has the potential to be a real disincentive for scientists to enter into an already unattractive field. What lessons, if any, are there for the governance of emerging technology generally? It is important to note that the tensions between geoengineering research, deployment and safety turn in part on the specific features of the proposed technology: its reliance on international cooperation, the possibility of moral risk, and the large-scale nature of the interventions. Whichever tensions arise for other technologies are likely to be context-specific as well. Having said this, I do think there are a few points worth emphasizing generally. First, the consequences of governance measures should be considered in the context of science’s ‘ecosystem’: the incentives and drivers which shape research. Developing technology safely is crucial, but some measures to do so likely undermine the capacity for the technology being developed at all. Assuming we do want the technology to be developed (and this is no foregone conclusion!) we should then consider how to mitigate the disincentives introduced to keep technological development safe. Second, reflecting on geoengineering makes it clear that technological research is not separate from the social, economic and ecological consequences of its use. As our tech becomes increasingly powerful, it becomes increasingly pressing to re-evaluate both how science is governed, and the role of the ‘scientist’ itself. The late 18th Century successful balloon launch wasn’t only of a balloon, but of a set of fruitful research programs: by capturing the public imagination, scientific research was also pulled to the technology’s possibility. The early 21st Century failure to launch a balloon has potentially had the opposite effect: here, public imagination was turned against the idea of geoengineering, and so too was scientific research pulled away. This needn’t turn out to be the end of the story, of course, but a successful defence and motivation of geoengineering must be sensitive to various tensions. Potentially, the crucial move is to find a way to enforce decoupling in the senses I’ve discussed, and not only within

“ reﬂecting on geoengineering makes it clear that technological research is not separate from the social, economic and ecological consequences of its use. As our tech becomes increasingly powerful, it becomes increasingly pressing to reevaluate both how science is governed, and the role of the ‘scientist’ itself.”

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“ the more we are able to mitigate the effects of climate change, the less urge it will become to meet the likely radic economic, demograph and political changes

Gambling with Global Warming

Lowell Pritchard

‘Gambling with Global Warming’ by Lowell Pritchard focuses

we can mend existing economic interests with the attempts to urgently recover the climate from spiralling into destruction. Pritchard refers to the views of William D.

on the idea that

Nordhaus, particularly regarding his book ‘The Climate Casino’, to discuss ways in which we can tackle the climate crisis. Pritchard discusses some of the ‘economically defensible’ policies that Nordhaus raises in his book, which serve to balance the needs for a functioning economy with the action needed to combat climate change, without limiting either side:

These policy incentives can encourage a turn away from looking towards geoengineering, which Pritchard cap-and-trade schemes and a carbon tax.

believes is an unreliable option as there are too many questions unanswered and holds the risk of the climate spiralling into chaos as a result. Additionally, Pritchard sees geoengineering as an alternative which may encourage us to turn a

eye

to mitigation strategies for climate change.

blind

Modern climate change is the result of the most wide-reaching market failure in history. But the proper response to that failure is not to abandon the market and directly regulate our impact on the climate system. Nor is it to continue to “muddle through” the policy problems arising from the climate change debate, applying a patchwork of responses that end up overlapping, conflicting, and wasting resources. Rather, society and government must create ways to make the market work—allocating scarce resources in a flexible, decentralized manner, allowing self-interest to determine the most efficient way to create social good and minimize social harm. Yale economist William D. Nordhaus has devoted much of his career to studying the human costs implicit in climate predictions and in the policies designed to control them. In his new book The Climate Casino, Nordhaus argues that there are only two economically defensible policies to address the impacts of global warming: cap-and-trade schemes and a carbon tax. But before explaining and defending them, he takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of industrial economics, climate science, modeling and forecasting, impact assessment, and strategy choice. He concludes by reviewing obstacles to enlightened policy. Most books on climate change are penned by journalists and advocates. A few are written by experts in the sciences. Fewer still are by economists, and none come from scholars as central to the study of climate change policy as Nordhaus has been for the last forty years.

“ paying attention to the costs of combating climate change, including the ways that climate policy could harm economic growth. ”

A Balancing Act Nordhaus is mostly in the business of informing rather than persuading. Without being overly technical, he draws the reader into the nuts and bolts of climate policy formation and its precursors, while relegating advanced material to footnotes and references. He is at pains to point out the flaws in climate communication by the right and the left alike—which is part of why he seems to have had trouble making friends on either side. Environmentalists on the left think of him as an appeaser, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, while climate skeptics have their doubts about anyone who accepts the findings of mainstream climate science, as Nordhaus clearly does. But he has earned grudging respect from some climate-change deniers: “not obviously a crackpot” is how one critic of climate science described Nordhaus, to distinguish him from more strident advocates. Indeed, Nordhaus himself is worried that skeptics have mistakenly taken solace in his previous work, and he dedicates part of one chapter of his new book to explaining how he’s been misinterpreted, and why the skeptics are wrong, repeating arguments he originally made in a 2012 article in the New York Review of Books. Environmentalists, meanwhile, consider him a dangerous moderate for advocating a strong yet gradual approach to restricting emissions (a “ramped” policy) and for paying attention to the costs of combating climate change, including the ways that climate policy could harm economic growth. When noted economist Nicholas Stern authored a British government report calling for rapid and drastic climate action, Nordhaus dissented. For example, Nordhaus noted that Stern’s calculations use an almost zero rate of real return on capital—an assumption that Nordhaus calls “a prescriptive approach,” as it is based on an ethical assumption that the interests of future generations should

count as much as the interests of the current generation. Nordhaus argues for a descriptive approach, which values the costs of climate mitigation strategies in terms of lost future wealth, making action on climate change compete with other investments that society could make. In similar fashion, Nordhaus steadfastly maintains that the main number animating climate advocates in recent years—a commitment to avoiding warming the planet by more than two degrees Celsius—is an arbitrary and quixotic obsession, and that economic rationality demands that we tolerate a larger change. Using the tools of cost-benefit analysis, he explains why the twodegree target is likely to be unattainable except at very great cost to society. Realistically, participation in a climate policy regime will be less than global, and even among those who do participate, policies will be implemented imperfectly, making it unlikely that warming can be limited to two degrees. Nordhaus recommends instead a target limit of three degrees. This will frustrate environmentalists who have

rallied around the lower figure. But avoiding ideology, making assumptions explicit, and using all available information are the hallmarks of Nordhaus’s analysis. Nordhaus’s worldview is anthropocentric, his approach utilitarian. He worries not about moral concerns over climate change itself but about its tangible costs to systems and activities that support human well-being. Defending the legitimacy of an economist writing a book on what’s often depicted as a purely scientific issue, he writes, Clearly, we cannot hope to understand the problems of warming without studying the basic findings of earth scientists. But global warming begins and ends with human activities. . . . Our policies must be well grounded scientifically. But the best science in the world will not by itself change the way people spend their incomes or heat their homes. Nordhaus balances costs and benefits to people, not to other creatures. He explains in detail some of the impacts of climate change upon natural systems, but he shows agnosticism about how to value those damages (and therefore how to include them in his analysis). Throughout the book, Nordhaus reminds us that the interplay between the climate system and the economic system is far too complex for mere intuition to be a faithful guide to policy. To understand the world as it is requires the use of models to clarify what is important and what is not. His models and data sets are public, downloadable from his website. With them he assesses the costs and benefits of various warming targets. And the impacts to human welfare he examines are wide-ranging. He usefully separates his analysis into two groups: managed systems, such as agriculture, manufacturing, and health care,

interplay between the climate system and the economic system is far too complex for mere intuition

The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World By William Nordhaus Yale ~ 2013 ~ 378 pp. ~ $30 (cloth)

and unmanaged systems, such as oceans, hurricanes, and wildlife. In managed systems, humans are the drivers, controlling the consumption of resources; in unmanaged systems, we’re more like passengers. In managed systems, climate impacts can be substantially abated or avoided through human intervention, entailing some cost, while unmanaged systems are less responsive to our interventions, and can wreak havoc on economies. Tipping Points Climate models aren’t truth machines or fortune-telling devices. They involve a lot of uncertainty. Some kinds of uncertainty—known unknowns—are built into the models because they’re part of the questions being asked: a range of future trajectories of carbon dioxide emissions from economic activities can be used as input to project a range of climate impacts and suggested responses. Slightly more warming will make these impacts slightly more severe; less warming slightly less. Events may turn out better or worse than we expect, but we can begin to estimate their costs; it’s classic fodder for traditional risk analysis. Nordhaus claims that the most serious concerns are those impacts of which we are most ignorant and which do not lend themselves to classic calculations of risk—those that could lead to runaway changes when they reach a tipping point. A tipping point is a threshold beyond which damage rapidly worsens and becomes far more difficult to reverse. These points are much con- jectured about but little understood. Nordhaus takes them seriously and constantly reminds the reader of their potential. They’re one of the most alarming aspects of reasoning about climate change, not least because they could suddenly render moot the kind of careful analysis Nordhaus is undertaking, based as it is on assumptions of steady marginal benefits and costs. Though he shows how the recognition of tipping points can slightly alter climate targets, he forces us to see the severe information constraints we have to work with. Nordhaus admits the true fear of climate change researchers: not that greenhouse gas emissions slowly warm the planet to dangerous levels—which they will, without intervention—but that the climate system may cross some threshold beyond which it will lose its stability. Tipping points are a grave concern, and studying them requires grappling with immense uncertainties. Anyone who has traveled by canoe knows something about tipping points. A canoe is actually a fairly stable system, within limits. Try to gently tip it and it rights itself. The stability comes from negative feedback: the side that dips down displaces more water and is forced up, and the elevated side is pulled down by gravity. Continue to lean and the canoe tilts, but you can right it by leaning back. It feels tippy, but it doesn’t actually tip, and you can get accustomed to the feel. The reversibility of the system is useful, since you can lean out to paddle around obstacles and make tight turns. But lean too far and you begin to leave the domain of stability and enter the realm of positive feedback: the canoe tips dangerously, your body weight falls in the same direction, tilting the canoe even more, until the gunwale goes under the water. Go past the tipping point, and you’re swamped, maybe sunk. Sadly, a swamped canoe is, technically, more stable than a dry canoe. Once swamped, a canoe tends to stay swamped, which is another way of saying you’ve entered a new, wetter, and less desirable stability domain. Importantly, exceeding the threshold cannot be simply reversed. Scientists call it hysteresis when the return path to the initial

stable state involves different mechanisms than the original tipping. Un-swamping a canoe involves a lot more effort, and very different methods, than keeping it afloat. The earth’s climate system has a mixture of negative feedback and positive feedback mechanisms. Plants grow more rapidly when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are higher, and so soak up some of the extra carbon—a negative feedback. Negative feedbacks give us a discount on our global warming pollution, and quantifying them is a key to global climate models. Positive feedbacks amplify climate change; they’re destabilizing forces. Whereas arctic sea ice reflects most sunlight back into space, open seas absorb solar energy and become warmer. The balance between sea ice and open water determines the portion of solar energy reflected or absorbed over water surfaces. As warming reduces sea ice, more solar energy is absorbed, leading to warmer seas, which melts more sea ice—a vicious cycle. Conversely, if sea ice coverage happened to increase, more solar energy would be reflected, cooling the seas and creating still more ice. Cooling begets cooling, and warming begets warming. Positive feedbacks are more likely to lead to tipping points. As greenhouse gas emissions grow and climate change hastens, which kinds of feedback will predominate? Both will continue to operate, but their relative contributions may change. For example, the fertilization effect of carbon dioxide on plant growth could lessen at higher temperatures, reducing the strength of that stabilizing mechanism. And new positive feedbacks may kick in at higher temperatures. As permafrost melts and begins to decompose, it releases carbon dioxide and methane, both greenhouse gases. A similar process occurs as oceans warm and release frozen methane from deep, cold sediments. Of course, there’s an upper limit to the amount of methane stored in permafrost and the oceans, and eventually its decomposition will slow and halt. Other tipping points that concern Nordhaus are the collapse of large land-based ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica, leading to dramatic sea level rise, and the potential for the collapse of the Gulf Stream, leading to rapid climate change, especially in the North Atlantic region. The science on tipping points is in its infancy, but the possibility of swift, dangerous change has to be considered in policy formation. Two features of tipping points concern Nordhaus the most. First, they have multiple equilibria— points at which they could stabilize—some of which would be damaging to human welfare and difficult to reverse. Second, as with financial tipping points like bank runs, they may “take much longer to arrive than you think, and then they happen much faster than you could imagine.” The task of modelers is to try to understand the balance between these various stabilizing and destabilizing forces. But the problem for Nordhaus is unpredictability: we just don’t know how stable the canoe is. While most of the models Nordhaus uses are mathematical—an encapsulation of empirical relationships on the biophysical side and common sense on the social side— the possibility of tipping points leads him from a quantitative model to a metaphorical one: by adding unmitigated global warming pollutants like carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, we are entering the titular Climate Casino, by which Nordhaus means that “economic growth is producing unintended but perilous changes in the climate and earth systems.” Spinning the climate

“ Unswamping a canoe involves a lot more effort, and very different methods, than keeping it afloat.”

Incentives and Markets Use That Solutions

roulette wheel is a gamble, and there are wins and losses. Based on what we already know, Nordhaus is sure that we should back away from that roulette table—it’s a losing proposition when expected climate impacts are set against the social benefits of burning fossil fuel. Worse yet, lurking on the wheel are a few worrying pockets of low probability but high loss. We don’t know how many there are and how costly it would be to land on them. That uncertainty is enough for Nordhaus to recommend we strongly mitigate greenhouse gases. “We are rolling the climatic dice, the outcome will produce surprises, and some of them are likely to be perilous.” While the findings of climate science, and the policy prescriptions that follow from them, “must be qualified and constantly updated because of the uncertainties involved,” Nordhaus concludes that “the balance of risks indicates that immediate action be taken to slow and eventually halt emissions” of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Solutions That Use Markets and Incentives From the point of view of economic theory, there’s nothing mysterious about global warming pollution. Human-induced climate change is a classic externality—a side effect of productive economic activity that does not enter into the calculus of decision-makers. Since emitting carbon dioxide is free and its impacts fall mostly on third parties, no utility-maximizing individual or profitmaximizing business would try to control its emissions, even if the emissions cause great harm to others. The basic problem, as Nordhaus understands it, “is that those who produce the emissions do not pay for that privilege, and those who are harmed are not compensated.” Because they consider only the costs to themselves and not to society, firms produce too much pollution. The same narrowly rational mindset afflicts nations: what country would impose costly restrictions on its global warming emissions if the benefits of restricting them go mostly to other countries? Only mutual coercion mutually agreed upon, in the phrase of ecologist Garrett Hardin, would cause nations to slow their emissions. But simply showing that carbon emissions constitute an externality is not enough to justify massive government intervention to implement the kind of coercion needed to limit emissions. As Ronald Coase pointed out in his classic 1960 paper “The Problem of Social Cost,” a certain class of externality can be solved without the strong hand of a central state. In his example, a rancher’s cows stray onto a farmer’s field, damaging crops—a clear, straightforward externality. Land and property rights will determine whether the rancher is liable for the damage, and self-interest will determine who would build a fence to prevent future damage and liability, assuming the fence costs less than the likely future damage to crops. If the fence costs more than the damage, other solutions are possible, like one party compensating the other, or one or the other changing its business model. The economic actors, with well-specified property rights, could negotiate a solution, and, assuming the absence of high transaction costs (like legal fees, monitoring, or intimidation), they would arrive at a socially optimal level of damage, compensation, and prevention. The Coase theorem, as it came to be known, showed that economic efficiency could be achieved through private action. The major results of this thought experiment are counterintuitive but

compelling. First, for private actors to find the socially optimal level of an externality, government need only specify property rights well, allow those rights to be traded, and enforce contracts. Heavy-handed and inefficient regulation is unnecessary and unhelpful. Second, the optimal level of a negative externality—such as crop damage or air pollution—is usually not zero. In other words, it’s often better to allow for some limited forms of damage as a cost of doing business, rather than incur the higher costs of preventing that damage completely. Laws that aim to prevent pollution may be economically inefficient, if the impacted parties would be willing to suffer some harm in exchange for compensation. Free-market environmentalists make much of these results, and suggest that many environmental regulations are inefficient. But there’s no straightforward Coasian solution to global warming pollution. The fact that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are global and not local pollutants makes transaction costs high. A polluter would have to strike a deal with every impacted enterprise on the planet. Moreover, greenhouse gases can stay in the atmosphere for decades or even centuries, and it is difficult to make voluntary bargains with future generations. Enforcing contracts would require extensive policing and monitoring, and an enormous court system to adjudicate disputes. The Coasian solution applies most aptly to externalities that are visible, direct, and immediate. Carbon pollution has none of those properties. But might there be other solutions that permit the externalities of greenhouse gas emissions to be dealt with as quantifiable damages? That’s exactly what Nordhaus and his fellow economists attempt to do. They try to consider what would happen if a perfect market existed in which the external costs of pollution were paid by polluters, who were then free to decide how much pollution to emit based on their private calculus. These economists create models of such a market, using available data on the costs and benefits of polluting, to arrive at an educated guess on the optimal price at which greenhouse emissions would be traded, and the optimal level of those emissions. This optimal level reflects the point at which increased reduction in damages is not worth the additional cost of abatements. While this point is hard to establish exactly, it is clear, Nordhaus explains, that “good policies must lie somewhere between wrecking the economy and wrecking the world.” With models of an emission market in place, there are two roughly equivalent directions economic policy could go, as Nordhaus describes. Armed with a prediction of the optimal level of emissions, a government could create a system of permits to distribute the right to pollute among polluters, and then allow emitters to pay for and trade those permits—the “cap-and-trade” system. The freedom to trade the permits creates incentives for companies to reduce their emissions, since they must pay more as they emit more, while they can sell their permits if they reduce their emissions below their permit levels. Having set an optimal quantity of pollution, the government would allow the market to determine the price of pollution permits. In the consumer market, goods made using processes that require more greenhouse emissions will be more expensive, and consumers will begin to prefer goods that require less pollution to make. The result is that actors operating in their private interests arrive at the social good of reducing emissions as cheaply as possible. This system, once promoted by conservative policy wonks, works well in controlling sulfur

“ Pumping into the at to reflec radiati fertili the oc phytopl with iro allow som of global temperat the loca on temp rainfall, a patterns dispara unpredi

g particles tmosphere ct solar ion, or izing cean’s lankton on, may me control l average tures, but al effects perature, and wind s will be ate and ictable.”

dioxide pollution in the United States, and has been proposed for mer- cury pollution as well. An international cap-and-trade system for carbon has been in place in Europe for nearly a decade but is now near collapse, a perfect example of the imperfect execution of policies that Nordhaus warns about. A similar, alternative proposal would have the government impose a tax on greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. This would be an example of a “Pigovian” tax—named for the economist Arthur Pigou, who in 1920 first proposed the idea of fixing missing or broken markets by charging a tax equivalent at the margin to the social costs of an externality. Assuming that the tax level is set appropriately, such a system would force businesses and ultimately consumers to consider all true costs. In the case of a carbon tax, consumers would pay the full social cost of the goods they consume, and would make decisions freely about which goods are worth the extra price. Nordhaus argues that these two systems, cap-and-trade and carbon taxation, “are fundamentally the same.” They are both methods of creaing incentives for consumers and firms to reduce emissions by raising the price of emitting. Both policies call for a central government authority to address a failure of the market. One calls for the government to estimate the socially optimal level of pollution and set a cap; the other calls for the government to estimate the damage and mitigation costs of global warming, and impose those costs on those who are doing the damage. But Nordhaus believes a carbon tax would be more palatable to conservatives, as it would improve economic efficiency by correcting for the fact that without any such tax, producers with high carbon emissions are in effect using a shared good without paying for it. In fact, a carbon tax is “an ideal policy for true conservatives who care about preserving our beautiful planet but want to do so with well-tuned economic incentives and with minimal government intrusion into people’s lives and business decisions.” Technical Solutions and Moral Hazards Besides these economic reforms, another prospect for addressing climate change is geoengineering—the use of technological innovations to combat warming—which could serve either to complement or undermine emission reductions, depending on one’s view. From one perspective, a global agreement on greenhouse emissions, with widespread participation and efficient implementation, is a tall order for the family of nations, so we ought at least to conduct research on geoengineering as a second-best solution, to better understand how to wield that power in case the climate begins to spin out of control. But while reaching a truly global agreement on how to control inadvertent warming is fraught with difficulty, the challenges of managing intentional climate change will be clear to anyone working in an office building with a shared thermostat. Who will control the setting? Not everyone will agree, and almost every geoengineering technology will have global and unexpected impacts. Pumping particles into the atmosphere to reflect solar radiation, or fertilizing the ocean’s phytoplankton with iron, may allow some control of global average temperatures, but the local effects on temperature, rainfall, and wind patterns will be disparate and unpredictable. Moreover, the fact that these schemes could be undertaken with moderate resources could tempt some rogue actor—a nation- state, a corporation, or some other private entity—into

Predictions and Prudent Policy Utopian ideas of restructuring society pervade progressives’ policy discussions about climate change and the need for a “new energy economy.” But social engineering should not be the aim of climate policy. Income and wealth inequalities are troubling side effects of the operation of the free market, but climate policy must be aimed at climate change, not at social leveling. Likewise, climate policy should not be choosing winners and losers in the marketplace for technological innovation; there is too much room for special political interests to intrude in decision-making on which technology to implement. Climate policy need not, indeed must not, devolve into a free-for-all grab for power on the part of environmentalists, population-control advocates, corporate special interests, or government bureaucrats. That’s why a carbon tax policy, as Nordhaus describes it, makes so much sense: it prescribes little except to finally make markets work properly, unleashing human ingenuity and self-interest in the service of human welfare. If there is a flaw in Nordhaus’s thinking, it is believing that the rate of economic growth since the end of the Industrial Revolution is normal and will continue indefinitely. Because he assumes that economic growth will make our descendants vastly more wealthy than us—just as we are vastly more wealthy than our grandparents and great-grandparents—his estimates of the costs of climate damage and mitigation are small as a proportion of economic production. This is a comforting thought, but those with a long view of history know something of its vicissitudes. We want to preserve the engines of growth that brought us modernity’s material blessings, so that our descendants may be even more prosperous than us. But a more robust view of the future must consider the possibility that immiserating forces could prevail, so that future generations will live lives more exposed to the powers of nature than ours. We

“Income and wealth inequalities are troubling side effects of the operation of the free market, but climate policy must be aimed at climate change, not at social leveling. “

taking unilateral action, making the political dimensions of geoengineering difficult and possibly even dangerous. Some critics of geoengineering point out that even basic research in this area is fraught with moral hazard: knowing that we might reverse warming with technology increases the likelihood that we’ll ignore mitigation as a primary strategy. Others, by contrast, respond that more research is just as likely to reveal flaws in the geoengineering approach, thereby taking it off the table and making the moral hazard less likely. Nordhaus argues that the moral hazard is exaggerated, but that even if it exists, it is better to know what kind of rescue operation might be possible than to rely solely on our ability to stave off climate change through mitigation. Technological innovation may also come to the rescue on the energyproduction side of the equation. One of the main reasons Nordhaus cites for putting a price on carbon is to create incentives for private investment in lowcarbon technologies. The efforts to restrain global emissions entail that most of the earth’s remaining stores of oil, gas, and other fossil fuels will have to remain unused underground, forever. Without technological innovation, they will be a constant temptation to future generations hun- gry for cheap energy. Society needs for those fuels to be not just legally but practically undesirable. Our eventual goal must be for new technologies to make fossil fuels obsolete. This imperative will be all the stronger if global emission restrictions fail.

must bequeath to future generations both the economic capital and the natural stability they will need to flourish. Nordhaus’s approach aims to discern the optimal balance between the two, but it is far from clear that he has found it. Russell Kirk, in his book The Politics of Prudence, listed prudence—the ability to judge political actions by their long-term effects—as one of the principles that marks a conservative worldview: “Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.” This principle holds true for policy in response to climate change. Nordhaus’s recommended response to the increasingly urgent impact is not to radically overturn the world order, or slam the brakes on fossil-fuel use, but to apply steady and increasing pressure on carbon emissions by pricing them according to their true costs—avoiding the extremes of “wrecking the economy” by striving to eliminate all damages from carbon emissions and “wrecking the world” by doing nothing to avoid them. What passes for climate conversation in the media and among the chattering classes is rarely elevated above bar talk—ideology sprinkled with factoids and emotion, delivered at high volume. Few admit of uncertainty or the legitimacy of opposing arguments; not many confess to self-doubt or bow to the validity of expertise that does not jibe with pre- existing commitments. The rigor and breadth of Nordhaus’s work should be sobering to those on the right and the left. It reveals that, although much has already been learned, we are still dangerously ignorant of the odds in the climate casino, and the time has come to start placing some smarter bets.

AS A

CONCERN

GEOENGINEERING

geoengineering as a concern of politics

POLITICS

In the past 50 years, particularly since the 1970s when there was a large increase in pressure to address environmental crises globally from activists as well as more formal actions,

climate change has become a subject with concerns on exponential growth in world politics notably in the western world. Subsequently, proposals and tests of geoengineering, both through the more-so “’good’” and “localised” carbon-dioxide removal (CDR) and the “’bad’” “high risk” solar radiation management (SRM), has also been a topic with an exponential growth in importance and consideration in response to the urgency of climate change action in the modern world, particularly in politics. Olaf Corry’s ‘The international politics with geoengineering: The feasibility of a Plan B for tackling climate change’ and Kathryn Yusoff’s ‘The geoengine: geoengineering and the geopolitics of planetary modification’ both discuss some of the similar concerns for geoengineering in the world of politics, but also explore some unique yet still critical and valid concerns. Corry draws particular focus on the security of governments in the circumstance that geoengineering activities are put into action by one government and the issues and concerns this can produce for other governments who may have to suffer the adverse impacts as a result of

there is a potential for geoengineering to ignite conflict between governments, “including, ultimately, war”. the actions of another. Corry goes further, suggesting that Yusoff discusses similar ideas regarding the geopolitics of geoengineering such as the possibility for the unilateralism of governments in geoengineering activities. Yusoff’s report is more broad, discussing features of the geopolitics of geoengineering or “planetary modification” in a more general sense, however, discussing various dimensions and avenues that the geoengineering geopolitics encompasses and concerns. Thus, the articles discuss why and how geoengineering is a matter of politics on top of being an environmental issue.

The international politics of geoengineering: The feasibility of Plan B for tackling climate change Olaf Corry

Olaf Corry looks into the conflicts of geoengineering as a ‘Plan B’ to the current ‘Plan A’ which countries have aimed towards, particularly those a part of the Paris agreement, which is to mitigate climate change which can be achieved through aims such as reductions in carbon emissions. In doing this, Corry discusses that concerns regarding the technologies developed for geoengineering and what their adverse impact may be on the climate as a result of irregular climate modifications is not the only implication and issue that should be given light and consideration. He argues that the security of countries and the international relations between countries is also a critical political topic that should be considered regarding geoengineering. By this, he means that issues like

if one country decides to initiate geoengineering of the climate and there happens to be adverse impacts that affect another country, then this may ignite tensions between countries. Thus, is a tries, fects

geoengineering, Corry argues throughout the text, matter of politics regarding the security of counnot just purely regarding the potential adverse efon the climate, it is a multidimensional issue.

Abstract Geoengineering technologies aim to make large-scale and deliberate interventions in the climate system possible. A typical framing is that researchers are exploring a ‘Plan B’ in case mitigation fails to avert dangerous climate change. Some options are thought to have the potential to alter the politics of climate change dramatically, yet in evaluating whether they might ultimately reduce climate risks, their political and security implications have so far not been given adequate prominence. This article puts forward what it calls the ‘security hazard’ and argues that this could be a crucial factor in determining whether a technology is able, ultimately, to reduce climate risks. Ideas about global governance of geoengineering rely on heroic assumptions about state rationality and a generally pacific international system. Moreover, if in a climate engineered world weather events become something certain states can be made directly responsible for, this may also negatively affect prospects for ‘Plan A’, i.e. an effective global agreement on mitigation. Keywords Climate change, geoengineering, securitization, security, sociotechnical imaginary

Introduction A diverse range of new technologies and methods grouped loosely under the label ‘geoengineering’ (or ‘climate engineering’) aim to make possible a ‘deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system, in order to moderate global warming’ (Shepherd, 2009: ix). Interest in geoengineering has been rising particularly since 2006 and was given added impetus when the Paris climate agreement was struck in 2015. This all stipulates an upper limit of 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius of average surface global warming – a goal that is widely thought to be unachievable without some form of climate engineering (Bawden, 2016). Although some high-leverage methods are thought to have ‘the potential to transform the politics of the climate problem’ (Victor, 2008: 325), the political implications of such technologies have so far not been given the same attention as environmental risks. Possible environmental risks such as disruption to global precipitation patterns or damage to the ozone layer have naturally been the central concern for climate scientists modeling responses to solar geoengineering (Keith, 2013; Polson et al., 2014; Ricke et al., 2010; Rob, 2008). The major political concern to figure in the debate so far has been the risk of a ‘moral hazard’ effect: that having a ‘Plan B’ for tackling climate change might ‘reduce the incentive to take adequate steps to prevent global warming’ (Corner and Pidgeon, 2014; Lin, 2013; Reynolds, 2015). Security issues in particular have remained largely peripheral to the debate about climate engineering and climate risk. Thus for Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, an early advocate of research into solar radiation management (SRM) methods, ‘the main issue with the Albedo modification meth-

“having a ‘Plan B’ for tackling climate change might ‘reduce the incentive to take adequate steps to prevent global warming’”

“there is concern about whose hand should control the thermostat’”

od is whether it is environmentally safe, without significant side effects’ (Crutzen, 2006: 212). Similarly, a recent study asks ‘could solar geoengineering be designed and deployed in such a way that it could substantially and equitably reduce climate risks?’, but expressly excludes risks related to ‘governance’ (Keith and Irvine, 2016; see also, for example, Moreno-Cruz and Keith, 2013). Although there is concern about whose hand should control the thermostat’ (Lin, 2012: 173) and the potential for international conflicts (see, for example, Keith, 2013; Scientific American, 2008; Zürn and Schäfer, 2013), in the main, geophysical risks have eclipsed geopolitical ones. This is hardly the fault of individual climate modelers, whose expertise and models are geared to exploring Earth systems rather than political systems. But the most popular framing of climate engineering – namely, as a ‘Plan B’ in case mitigation fails – has not been conducive to the integration of security issues. To date, only very limited work has been done from inside the discipline of international relations (Horton and Reynolds, 2016). Modeling of climate engineering scenarios typically assumes a ‘central planner framing’ (see, for example, Keith and MacMartin, 2015: 201) that cuts out the central characteristic of the international: that the world is divided into multiple societies (Rosenberg, 2016). Any future climate-engineered world, were it to come about, would of course have to deal with the many and complex consequences of societal multiplicity. This article therefore explores how security politics and climate engineering could affect each other. After a first section setting out climate engineering as a ‘sociotechnical imaginary’, the second section shows how this imaginary and the key idea of ‘Plan B’ have narrowed down the debate about the technologies and framed them in a particular way, obscuring some possible security implications. The third section then provides a more systematic exploration of climate engineering and security, arguing that the problem of international state conflict, while potentially serious, is not the most likely outcome. What in this article I call the ‘security hazard’ is more certain to cause dynamics that will be unconducive to successful implementation of climate engineering but could also negatively affect the prospects for international cooperation around mitigation and adaptation. While not necessarily insurmountable or inevitable, the security hazard should be factored into any assessments of whether climate engineering is likely, ultimately, to reduce climate-related risks.

‘Reluctant Geoengineering’: Climate engineering as Plan B Climate engineering has been rising up the scientific and political agenda for at least a decade, not just in terms of research but occasionally also in policy fora (Bronson et al., 2009; Duarte et al., 2012; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2014). One subcategory involves regulating the amount of energy reaching the Earth from the sun (‘solar radiation management’ (SRM)), for example by injecting aerosols into the stratosphere to increase the Earth’s albedo. Others are designed to capture and store carbon dioxide, effectively reversing carbon emissions (‘carbon dioxide removal’ (CDR)) (Shepherd, 2009). Although still on the margins and far from ready, some forms of geoengineering are gathering support and may be poised to enter the climate research

and policy mainstream (Cho, 2016; National Research Council, 2015a,b). As greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and as concern over climate ‘tipping points’ has gathered momentum (Russill and Nyssa, 2009), calls have intensified for scientists and governments to start preparing alternative strategies besides mitigation and adaptation (Crutzen, 2006; Keith, 2013; Shepherd, 2009). Most methods of climate engineering have yet to be fully designed, let alone tested or implemented, and so it is not possible to examine the security impacts of the technologies as actual, embodied devices. However, understood as a sociotechnical imaginary – a ‘collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed vision of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology’ (Jasanoff, 2015: 4) – climate engineering already exists. As a concept, ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ is part of a wider effort to avoid the notion that technologies can be assessed as discrete contraptions, divorced from wider infrastructures and normative, social, and political visions of the future (Bijker et al., 1987). The concept links technology intimately to ‘not only visions of what is attainable through science and technology but also of how life ought, or ought not, to be lived’ (Jasanoff, 2015: 4). Desired futures are of course correlated with opposite visions of what might go awry. Dystopian visions are thus also part of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2015: 4), and hence security politics is built into technologies of this kind. The main climate engineering imaginary analyzed in this article is here dubbed ‘Reluctant Geoengineering’. It broadly posits the desirability of a research program into climate engineering technologies framed as a ‘Plan B’ – that is, as a fallback option or second-best option rather than as a preferred option or replacement for mitigation (which remains ‘Plan A’). Reluctant Geoengineering depicts, via modeling and scenarios, certain technologies as possible means to avoid or deal with the dystopian vision of rapid or dangerous climate change in a future suffering from increasing climatic instability and continually failing or inadequate global efforts to curb emissions of greenhouse gases. It is ‘reluctant’ in that climate engineering is advanced in a ‘worth a try’ style of argumentation that tends not to hide uncertainties and (environmental) risks. ‘Plan B/insurance’ is the most commonly used metaphor among experts and in the media (Bellamy et al., 2012; Corner et al., 2012; Luokkanen et al., 2014; Nerlich and Jaspal, 2012; Scholte et al., 2013). In a survey of metaphors, Nerlich and Jaspal (2012: 141) report that they

found one master argument, according to which geoengineering is the only option to avoid a planetary catastrophe. This is linked more or less directly to two main metaphors according to which geoengineering is the only Plan B we have and the only insurance policy we have for this planet. The ‘Plan B’ terminology itself appeared prominently in the Foreword to the seminal report by the Royal Society published in 2009. Here, Astronomer Royal Martin Rees endorsed the need for climate engineering research and expressly conditioned his support on it being a ‘plan B’: if efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ‘achieve too little, too late, there will surely be pressure to consider a “plan B” – to seek ways to counteract the climatic effect of greenhouse gas emissions by “geoengineering”’ (Rees, 2009: v). Media reporting of the report also featured ‘Plan B’. Among critics, ‘Plan B’ is also

used often to warn about the risk of moral hazard to the preferred ‘Plan A’ (Hamilton, 2013: 15; House of Commons, 2010: 21). Though climate engineering has a much longer history (Fleming, 2010; Keith, 2000), it becamemore prominent from around 2006 when Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen (2006) argued that a scientific taboo around climate engineering was undesirable and unsustainable. A debate ensued (see Kintisch, 2010), and institutional stabilization of the imaginary moved up a notch further with a series of reports and accelerated research, including the landmark Royal Society report in 2009 (Shepherd, 2009) and the US National Research Council (2015a,b) reports of 2015. The Royal Society explicitly rejected a taboo and recommended more (carefully governed) research into a ‘Plan B’ in case a climate emergency develops that requires rapid action to cool the Earth or bring down greenhouse gas concentrations (Shepherd, 2009). The summary for policy makers of the IPCC’s (2014) latest assessment report reserved its final paragraph for CDR methods, and the US Senate has recently passed a bill recommending funding for research into ‘albedo modification’ (i.e. SRM methods) (Cho, 2016). As the technologies move further up the political agenda, so the imaginary associated with them gains institutional stabilization and research standing.

“the possibility of albedo modification ‘should not be used to justify inadequate climate policies, but merely to create a possibility to combat potentially drastic climate heating’.”

Political implications of ‘Reluctant Geoengineering’ As an imaginary, Reluctant Geoengineering should not be understood as a cohesive narrative, but precisely as a publicly performed vision within which discussions of the relative feasibility and justifications of various methods of climate engineering unfold. Rob Bellamy (2015) identifies five distinct imaginaries around climate engineering, but here I take the imaginary to be the institutionally stabilized backdrop to discussions between diverse positions. While varied in content, Reluctant Geoengineering as a whole nonetheless carries with it some general implications. First, one implication is that Reluctant Geoengineering provides political space and legitimacy for research into climate engineering. It does this by holding up mitigation as the preferred Plan A option in reaction to fears of moral hazard. For Crutzen (2006: 216), the possibility of albedo modification ‘should not be used to justify inadequate climate policies, but merely to create a possibility to combat potentially drastic climate heating’. The Royal Society report authors were at pains to underline that ‘the safest and most predictable method of moderating climate change is to take early and effective action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases’ (Shepherd, 2009: ix). They concluded that empirical research should be carried out, ‘clarifying the existence or extent of any moral hazard associated with geoengineering’ (Shepherd, 2009: 39). This is ongoing (Corner and Pidgeon, 2014; Fairbrother, 2016; Urpelainen, 2012). Less explicitly, the Plan B framing also privileges particular climate engineering options over others by determining that they should be fast-working to be of most interest. This is because, as part of a Plan B, the technologies would only be used once Plan A had already failed – or when it was clear that it was going to fail: ‘Chances are that if countries begin deploying geoengineering systems, it will be because calamitous climate change is near at hand … as a last resort’ (Victor et al., 2009: 70; although see Keith and MacMartin, 2015). For

this reason, high-leverage, fastworking technologies such as stratospheric aerosol injection (continuously spraying reflective particles into the stratosphere to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight and thereby offsetting some or all human-induced global warming) have been closely linked with the Plan B framing (Shepherd, 2009: 49–50). Slower procedures, including many CDR methods, tend to drop out of the running under a Plan B framing. For this reason, and because they are widely considered the leading contenders, the rest of this article focuses mainly on the security implications of high-leverage, fastworking solar geoengineering technologies such as stratospheric aerosol injection.Third, Plan B draws a boundary between two sets of measures grouped into two discrete plans. This encourages a segregation of assessments, ensuring that climate engineering options are not compared systematically to conventional options considered part of Plan A. Thus, climate engineering methods are typically assessed against ‘business as usual’ or in comparison with each other rather than being compared to effective mitigation, adaptation, and renewable energy transition scenarios (Bellamy et al., 2012: 927). The geoengineering imaginary usually posits continued rises in global greenhouse gas emissions rather than at least partial successful mitigation, often assuming a doubling of atmospheric CO2 compared to pre-industrial levels (e.g. Lenton and Vaughan, 2009; Shepherd, 2009; see also Bellamy et al., 2012). Most importantly for questions of international politics and security, however, crucial assumptions about the political feasibility of climate engineering are also built into the Plan B framing. A ‘Plan B’ is by convention a fallback option that can be turned to if and when a Plan A fails or becomes otherwise unavailable.1 Logically a Plan B must be feasible, since if Plan B were viewed as both less desirable and more difficult to realize than Plan A it would not be relevant at all. A Plan B framing therefore establishes climate engineering as overall less desirable, but also less susceptible to the obstacles perceived to be thwarting effective mitigation. Importantly, the Royal Society report lays the blame for the failure of Plan A squarely at the door of political difficulties rather than technical or even economic challenges: the failure of mitigation was deemed to be ‘largely due to social and political inertia’, and climate engineering could therefore ‘provide a useful complement’ (Shepherd, 2009: 57), which implies that it would not suffer from the same deficiency. Crutzen seems, similarly, to point to the ‘grossly disappointing international political response to the required greenhouse gas emissions’ (Crutzen, 2006: 214), declaring that the idea that effective mitigation could be achieved amounts to nothing more than a ‘pious wish’ (Crutzen, 2006: 217). International politics is thus blamed for the failure of Plan A, and in the Reluctant Geoengineering imaginary the relative feasibility of climate engineering – assuming it is studied sufficiently in technical terms – almost becomes a premise rather than a question. This allows attention to focus on technical obstacles, such as those related to delivery mechanisms (Davidson et al., 2012) and unwanted environmental side-effects (Robock, 2008). In turn, this bolsters the case for an accelerated science and engineering research program in a way that sidelines political issues and risks. With modeling of the climate often assuming a singular global actor, particularly risks related to the international problem disappear further out of view. They do not disappear completely, however, and it is to the ways in which international security figures in the imaginary that we now turn.

“A ‘Plan B’ is by convention a fallback option that can be turned to if and when a Plan A fails or becomes otherwise unavailable”

Security hazards of climate engineering

“The security issues most commonly associated with climate engineering include the risk of breakdown of interstate cooperation – including, ultimately, war”

If moral hazard concerns the fear that ‘the prospect of geoengineeering the Earth in response to climate change might exacerbate the very behaviors contributing to climate change’ (Lin, 2013: 674), how can we best conceive of a ‘security hazard’? I propose the security hazard as the following: in an attempt to gain security against future risks, new technologies can create security problems that compromise the original aim of preventing risk. How might this work? It is common in security studies to consider the ‘security dilemma’ – how attempts to gain security through augmenting security measures actually spur on adversaries to do the same and hence ultimately undermine security (Herz, 1950: 157). Of course, it is not that investing in climate engineering spurs the climate on to wreak more havoc (although the scientists are busy checking the climate risks of climate engineering). More akin to ‘blowback’, a security hazard arises if geoengineering creates new security problems that counteract or cancel out the overall aim of the technology, namely, to reduce climate risks. The security issues most commonly associated with climate engineering include the risk of breakdown of interstate cooperation – including, ultimately, war (Horton and Reynolds, 2016). But the following also draws on discursive security theories to ask how stratospheric aerosol injection might change the conditions for climate politics as a whole and thereby affect climate risk politically. In sum, I set out three ways in which the security hazard could arise: (1) by climate engineering becoming an object of interstate conflict; (2) by shortening the causal chain of harm thus facilitating ‘securitization’ of climate politics; and (3) by expanding the scope for security politics to new areas of social life.

Climate engineering and interstate security To the extent that security features as a theme in the geoengineering imaginary, it concerns relations between states, most commonly in the form of the risk of war or conflict (see, for example, Dyer, 2010; Hulme, 2014; Maas and Scheffran, 2012; Roberts, 2011). For the futurologist Jamais Cascio (2009), it is the ‘combination of differential impact and relatively low cost that makes international disputes over geoengineering almost inevitable’, and it is only a matter of time before ‘the world’s militaries learn to wield the planet itself as a weapon’. Climate engineering critics warn: ‘you can imagine the extraordinary risks we would be taking when we turn the global climate system into a theatre of war, but that’s one of the scenarios being mooted by strategic experts’ (Clive Hamilton cited in Boyd, 2013). Even proponents of research, such as David Keith, are clear that stratospheric aerosol injection poses novel international risks that would require governance mechanisms at levels similar to (or better than) those currently governing nuclear weapons: It is so cheap that almost any nation could afford to alter the earth’s climate, a fact that may accelerate the shifting balance of global power, raising security concerns that could, in the worst case, lead to war. If misused, geoengineering could drive extraordinarily rapid climate change, imperiling global food supply. In the long run, stable control of geoengineering may require new

forms of global governance and may prove as disruptive to the political order of the 21st century as nuclear weapons were for the 20th. (Keith, 2013: x–xi) One worry is that two great powers end up in conflict or at war, for example ‘as a result of a dramatic failure, or sequence of failures, in the Indian monsoon’ (Morton, 2015: 364) blamed on solar climate engineering. China’s climatic interests might conflict with India’s, for example, as they share fates in terms of the monsoon rains (Keith, 2013: 115). This raises the risk of climate engineering posing a national security threat to vulnerable states and/or a threat to international stability. Non-climate engineering states could object to or feel threatened by climate interventionist states, and the level or mode of aerosol injections could also be a focus for controversy (shared environments and consent are an old theme in environmental security literatures; Dalby, 2002; Deudney, 1999; O’Neil, 2009: 4). Conflict and instability is also sometimes linked to the ‘termination problem’ – that a solar geoengineering program keeps a lid on temperature rises, and temperatures would rise rapidly if for any reason the program were halted, for example owing to conflict (Zürn and Schäfer, 2013). Although the Reluctant Geoengineering imaginary includes conflict as part of its dystopian vision, it also includes some form of ‘governance’ designed to deal with this. Implementation of stratospheric aerosols in particular is imagined to require procedural legitimation and consultation to stave off potential conflicts. Some imagine formal consent (or acquiescence) from affected parties and agreement between would-be climate engineering states about the timing and scale of climate engineering as a minimum. The Royal Society states that,

it would be highly undesirable for geoengineering methods which involve activities or effects (other than simply the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere) that extend beyond national boundaries to be subject to large scale research or deployment before appropriate governance mechanisms are in place. (Shepherd, 2009: 60) Ideas concerning governance also include plans to manage disagreement and coordinate research (Zürn and Schäfer, 2013), and sometimes ‘normative criteria of global public consent for any decision on SRM’ (Lloyd and Oppenheimer, 2014: 52). How likely are interstate conflicts or cooperation? On this point, the Reluctant Geoengineering imaginary largely follows the contours of the so-called neo– neo debate in international relations, which took shape during the 1980s and 1990s in mainstream US-centered international relations. For both the neorealists and the neoliberal institutionalists who made up the key positions in the debate, states are assumed to be the main actors in an anarchic international system, and the key question is the potential for – and obstacles to – cooperation (Oye, 1986). Both sides argue that with an anarchic international system of self-serving rational states, free-riding and trust are permanent challenges for cooperation. Collectively suboptimal results are likely, but international regimes and institutions could emerge to deal with coordination and cooperation problems. For neorealists, great-power leadership could establish an international regime of rules (Mearsheimer, 2001), whereas for neoliberals rational state behavior could itself lead to cooperation and institutions (Axelrod and Keohane, 1985).

“The key problem is assumed to be the potential divergence and coordination of interests among putative climate engineering nations, as well as between such nations and other affected states.”

When Reluctant Geoengineering invokes visions of conflict and cooperation, it tends to stay within this neo–neo framework. It emphasizes primarily the perspective of rational, self-interested states in terms of both conflict and possible cooperation. The key problem is assumed to be the potential divergence and coordination of interests among putative climate engineering nations, as well as between such nations and other affected states. In the absence of clear international rules or procedures to establish and enforce such rules, climate engineering becomes a case of potential ‘cooperation under anarchy’ between rational states, and the challenge is to design the right institutions that secure stability or incentivize cooperation. Rational states try to pass on costs to each other, but the leading solar climate engineering methods are not thought to have the burdensharing problems that mitigation and infrastructure-intensive CDR methods tend to have (Crutzen, 2006; Keith, 2013: xxi; Snyder-Beattie, 2015). Some early estimates of the cost of stratospheric aerosol injection range from only $1 billion to $8 billion per year to offset global warming (Barrett, 2008). The low price and technical ease of deploying aerosols that is often quoted (see, for example, Keith, 2013; Victor, 2008) is contested, and is based on estimates from a non-peer-reviewed report by a private aerospace consultancy with a potential interest in delivering such a technology (McClellan et al., 2010). But even so, cost is widely assumed not to be a big problem for the international politics of stratospheric aerosols because economic burdensharing directly concerned with the technology would be manageable. However, problems might still arise from distribution of harms, benefits, and compensations linked to solar geoengineering programs, the magnitude of which could be substantial. For neoliberal institutionalists, interdependence (such as that caused by climate change) tends to lead to gradual norm development, and eventually this could be followed by institutionalization of collective rules and ‘governance’. In one scenario, a geoengineering regime begins small with a select group of key states capable of climate engineering who get together to develop methods, common standards and rules (Lloyd and Oppenheimer, 2014). The dilemma faced by regime-builders is how many parties to initially admit to the regime. For Ricke et al. (2013: 2), a nucleus of states might build an initial regime that may later become more comprehensive: ‘Due to the free riding nature of the climate change mitigation game, self-enforced global coalitions are not a likely outcome … but participation in the global coalition can be expanded through side payments or through credible threats of reciprocation.’ This allows for the gradual emergence of stronger and more encompassing regimes with wider participation of affected states (Reynolds, 2014a). In contrast, for those more indebted to neorealist assumptions, ideas about such institutional evolution underestimate cooperation problems, including the ‘free-driver’ (as opposed to the ‘freerider’) problem (Weitzman, 2012): because of the relatively low costs of delivering stratospheric aerosols, preventing unilateral or ‘rogue’ climate engineering is a major worry. The problem is not so much that some states may wish to exclude others from the regime, but ‘that some countries will want to stay out of the agreement in order to geoengineer without restraint’ (Barrett, 2014: 262, emphasis in original). Climate engineering programs may be launched not to tackle a common threat but in order to engineer a climate that aligns with the particular preferences of the state in question. States may well act or campaign

according to their own particular interests. The idea of counteracting or forming balancing coalitions against other states engaged in climate engineering is a possibility from this perspective, since it could be deployed as an instrument of state power (see Horton and Reynolds, 2016: 449). For Joshua Horton (2011: 56–57), the rogue climate engineer scenario is a myth ‘grounded more in unexamined policy assumptions than in reasoned analysis’, since the incentives to cooperate would outweigh the individual benefits to climate engineering alone. But this assumes cooperation is an option and that states rationally optimize. As a tool of state power, climate engineering is unlikely to be viewed simply as a ‘global public good’ provided by those able and willing to do so (Bodansky, 2012), since ‘rather than underprovision, the main threats [of stratospheric aerosols] are of competitive, predatory, parochial, and other unethical forms of provision’ (Gardiner, 2013: 524). Ultimately, whether geopolitical conflict or cooperation is likely as a result of climate engineering depends largely on assumptions about state rationality and the magnitude of risk thought to exist in the international system in the first place. Of course, the risk of a climate engineeringinduced war should not be ruled out, but it seems to depend in the literature mostly on assumptions about the international system in general and on historical conflict levels that could be enflamed by geoengineering. All things being equal, the more uni- or minilateral the eventual imposition of solar climate engineering, the more conflict potential (Zürn and Schäfer, 2013). For example, it is the presence of nuclear weapons and decades of enmity that fuels worries that India and its neighbors might end up at loggerheads over solar climate engineering (Morton, 2015: 366). Were it to spark a major international conflict, this would of course make climate engineering entirely counterproductive in reducing ‘climate risks’. A climate engineering war, although unlikely, would of course be hugely consequential and thus should not be excluded when considering whether climate engineering really would reduce climate risks. The less calamitous but more likely security hazard derives from the difficulties of managing ‘cooperation under anarchy’. Even under the neoliberal institutionalist assumptions, building a comprehensive regime would be time-consuming, and prone to setbacks and incessant ‘gaming’. Optimists envisage that the best case is minilateral, in which just a small select group begins the process. Consultation processes and compensation schemes and side payments for groups who lose out (or are able to leverage claims for payments) would of course be costly both in political transaction costs and potentially in economic terms, allowing the dreaded ‘burden sharing’ problem to reappear. For the neorealists cooperation is even less likely, and the political costs, time, and sheer trickiness/impossibility of implementing climate engineering in a way that deals safely and consultatively with the risk of conflicts make it an altogether unpalatable option (among other unpalatable options, of course). This international security hazard detracts from the main selling points of aerosol injection and other high-leverage methods: fast implementation and light political burden. Global agreements are, as climate politics observers know, hard to achieve – and inclusive ones that give all interested parties a relevant say, especially so (a ‘pious wish’, to echo Crutzen). Any idea that climate engineering can be used to cut through the Gordian knot of global politics ignores this or imagines ungoverned or imposed climate engineering, which would in itself carry in-

“All things being equal, the more uni- or minilateral the eventual imposition of solar climate engineering, the more conflict potential”

creased risk of conflict – and contravene the ‘governance’ assumption of the Reluctant Geoengineering imaginary. Either way, the security hazard rears its head and suggests climate engineering may not necessarily be politically easier to implement than a global deal on mitigation and adaptation - even when assuming heroically that rational states are the only significant actors.

Securitization and climate engineering

“The subject of climate change as a threat has been picked up on by security institutions, including the Pentagon”

In another related perspective on the security hazard, climate engineering can be seen as a potential security issue – not because states tend to compete or get into conflict over it, but because it might change the logic of climate politics more generally. In short, climate engineering risks ‘securitizing’ climate politics. According to securitization theory, rather than being synonymous with an absence of threats, ‘security’ is a specific pattern of political actions and way of doing politics involving a logic of necessity and extraordinary measures. For the Copenhagen School, issues become ‘securitized’ through speech acts that lead an audience to be convinced and accept that an existential threat to a particular valued referent object (e.g. the state or the climate) legitimizes extraordinary measures of some kind (Buzan et al., 1998; Wæver, 1995). Importantly, this implies that more security is not necessarily better. Setting aside normal procedures can be tempting if the threat is existential and the political system needs to force through measures come what may. Security measures include undesirable means that are normally forbidden, such as violence, secrecy, or suppression of public debate. For Ole Wæver (1995: 56), ‘security and insecurity do not constitute a binary opposition’, since ‘when there is not a security problem we do not conceptualize our situation in terms of security’. The opposite of securitization is rather desecuritization: removing an issue from the logic of existential threats that legitimate exceptional measures and moving an issue back into ‘normal’ politics of debate, negotiation, and compromise – or whatever else constitutes ‘normality’. Exhortations to act decisively and in an extraordinary fashion in the face of potentially disastrous global warming are common (Brzoska, 2009), but so far efforts to securitize climate change have arguably been unsuccessful. Armed conflicts and strains on cooperation and international organizations are sometimes envisaged to follow from climate change and its effects (e.g. mass migration and food price spikes) (Burke et al., 2009; Podesta and Ogden, 2008), although this thesis has been challenged vigorously (Selby, 2014). The subject of climate change as a threat has been picked up on by security institutions, including the Pentagon, which in a recent directive instructs US military leaders to ‘address climate change-related risks and opportunities across the full range of military operations, including steady-state campaign planning and operations and contingency planning’ (Scarborough, 2016). However, the climate is not the threat that the Pentagon is gearing up to combat. Rather, the climate is deemed to be a facilitator of things that threaten more traditional referent objects such as state sovereignty and international stability: insurgency, conflict, instability, and migration are the existential threats, merely compounded by climate change (Busby, 2013; CNA Corporation, 2007). In any case, climate change remains

a patch concern in military planning and scenario-building (Depledge, 2010). Moreover, climate engineering notwithstanding, there appears to be an absence of extraordinary measures in climate politics. Even think-tanks or environmental campaigners such as Al Gore, who in his Nobel lecture drew parallels to the urgency of the Allied efforts during World War II, tend in the end to draw back from recommending exceptional measures. The measures most commonly justified range from better governance, to multilateral negotiations, to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and more resilient infrastructure. While there is some urgency and dramatic language around the problem of climate change, rather than closing down debate, imposing secrecy, and legitimating the use of force as securitizations tend to, ‘climate threat’ speech acts have tended to advocate more discussion, more extensive governance, less enmity, and more cooperation (Corry, 2012). Although security professionals are now also using climate technologies and modeling – for example, to map likely conflict hot spots – and, conversely, climate experts deploy security methods such as scenario-planning (Oels 2012), there is no(t yet a) threatening ‘other’ or enemy in climate politics. Climate security, while a common trope, has hitherto been largely ‘all dressed up with nowhere to go’ (Wæver, 2009: 1). With Reluctant Geoengineering, however, a securitization of climate change becomes more likely. While it would be technological essentialism to claim that climate engineering determines political developments (Heyward and Rayner, 2013), securitization theory does allow that there are ‘facilitating conditions’ for securitization. ‘Facilitating conditions’ (Wæver, 2000: 253) refers to the social, technical, and political ‘conditions historically associated with a threat’ – explaining why tanks, for example, are easier to fit into a securitizing speech act than other things (Hayes, 2013: 19). Chinese tanks are easier to securitize than Chinese coal-fired power stations (although the latter may in the end wreak much more havoc), partly because tanks can be directly linked to intentional harm and damage. Similarly, whereas climate change is currently the unintended result of myriad actions over decadal time spans, fast and high-impact interventions would shorten the causal chain of harm and introduce intentionality. The weather would suddenly be attributable to somebody. With climate change, emissions are known to be harmful, particularly to countries vulnerable to global warming, but the chain of harm is long and complex and there is no intended harm. In contrast, solar climate engineering would introduce conditions that could more easily be articulated as acts of aggression – or at least as willful – since, with such technologies, political choices are linked directly and intentionally. Stratospheric aerosols would not have to be deployed explicitly for the purpose of harming another party in order for them to be taken as ‘hostile’. As Victor et al. (2009: 71) put it, ‘the side effects of geoengineering projects could be readily pinned on the geoengineers themselves’. Relatedly, dual use (i.e. military applicability) of ‘many geoengineering techniques’ (ETC Group, 2009: 51) has been posed as a threat to security and stability, although hostile use of weather-modification technologies is currently prohibited by the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (see Blackstock and Ghosh, 2011), and there are probably cheaper and more precise military methods available in most cases (Nightingale and Cairns, 2014). More im-

“solar climate engineering would introduce conditions that could more easily be articulated as acts of aggression”

portantly, the distinction between dual-use technologies and single-use civilian technologies blurs if harm is politically attributable. As numerous climate engineering skeptics (and David Keith) have asked, if climate engineering were implemented and adverse weather conditions ensued (which they inevitably would), how would affected nations react? Even if it were difficult to prove that harms caused by changed weather patterns or disasters were directly caused by climate engineering, the facilitating conditions would have been created to place political blame at one particular door. Relating to international security hazards and the necessity for broad cooperation, the narrower the group (perceived to be) responsible for the intervention, the stronger this mechanism might become. These features of climate engineering risk infusing wider climate politics with antagonisms and an us–them logic that it is currently largely free from; although climate negotiations are rancorous, and loss and damage are increasingly salient, the parties do not tend to view each other as enemies. At the very least, liability for climatic disasters would become more politically charged and ‘uncertainty about causation could fuel accusations of responsibility’ (Blackstock and Long, 2010: 527). If the climate becomes something somebody has done to somebody else, this changes climate politics quite radically. If climate politics were to become securitized, climate engineering might end up pushing global agreements on mitigation even further into the future. Securitization would shift climate politics into the category of politics in which exceptional means are legitimately used, undermining multilateral and cooperative efforts necessary for an effective global mitigation regime. At the same time securitization could also inject urgency, in effect acting as an adrenaline shot to climate politics. Those who have assumed responsibility by attempting to manipulate the climate might end up not just shouldering blame but also feeling more responsible. If solar geoengineering led to antagonisms between those perceived to be imposing ‘natural’ disasters and those experiencing them, climate politics might be elevated to the status of ‘high politics’ and given more urgency and attention. However, this could also work against climate engineering if the technologies themselves are securitized. Opponents depict them as a threat to the global environment (e.g. the ozone layer), human security (e.g. populations dependent upon the Indian Monsoon; see Robock, 2008), international security (threatened by ‘sky wars’; see Hulme, 2014: 53), or democracy (Hulme, 2014: 25; Szerszynski et al., 2013). This kind of securitizing move activates a security logic to oppose or limit research into climate engineering. There are simultaneously attempts to desecuritize climate engineering in order to take it out of the ‘special measures’ category. Crutzen’s original attack on a scientific taboo on climate engineering relied in part on a claimed moral equivalence between deliberate and inadvertent human intervention in the climate (for a critique, see Morrow, 2014). Jesse Reynolds (2014a: 273) concludes that, in terms of international law, climate engineering is not necessarily a pariah: ‘those agreements whose substance is most closely related to climate engineering are best interpreted as being favourable to it’, although some specific technologies are prohibited. Climate engineering is thus a theatre of both securitizing and desecuritizing moves, which potentially make for a less-than-smooth ride for climate engineers hop-

ing to research and eventually progress to deployment of their technologies.

Climate engineering and expanding security politics A third notion of security posits it neither as state policy nor as a ‘discourse of drama and emergency’ (Buzan and Hansen, 2009: 217) but as a tool for the routine governance or refashioning of societies. Approaches like securitization theory that emphasize exceptionality as the core of security politics have been challenged by accounts that focus on the mundane and everyday institutionalization of security. Security politics is in this optic not an exceptional case or confined to a discrete policy area, but a general mode of governing and exercising control over societies (Bigo, 2002; Huysmans, 2006). The field of security is thought to be increasingly concerned with systemic sources of vulnerability and ‘different practices that arise from the construction, interpretation and management of contingency’ (Aradau et al., 2008: 148). Security has also been infused with logics of risk: security is not limited to dealing with existential threats, but also includes smaller-scale, lower-level, and hypothetical dangers. Risk-based security focuses not on direct causes of harm (threats), but on risks understood as ‘conditions of possibility or constitutive causes of harm’ (Corry, 2012: 235). This mode of security politics is arguably more readily recognizable in the climate policy domain than the modes of either international conflict or securitization. Climate change as an ‘emergency’ is in a way a curious idea given the slow and long-term nature of the issue. Risk management involving reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses tackles the root cause of climate change, while adaptation tackles vulnerabilities. Mitigation is a risk-security policy since it seeks to alter the conditions that facilitate what is considered directly dangerous, such as extreme weather events. Adaptation limits underlying exposure to danger through ‘enhanced preparedness and resilience’ (Oels, 2013: 25). This means that climate politics reaches into myriad fora and in some ways changes or expands the scope of governance of societies. For Foucauldian scholars, climate politics has even fostered a form of carbon ‘governmentality’: the regimenting and cataloguing of activities, people, and substances for climate purposes bringing a new dimension of life under governmental control and generating new subjectivities and units such as carbon footprints (see, for example, Stripple and Bulkeley, 2013). The very emergence of climate change as a space amenable to governance was in turn dependent upon the emergence of earth systems sciences (Lövbrand et al., 2009) and the gradual development of a ‘vast machine’ of climate measurement and calculation in the form of ice-core drills, satellites, indexes, models, academic disciplines, and national and global institutions (Corry, 2014; Edwards, 2010). Seen through this lens, climate engineering technologies create yet more political zones out of previously natural ones, making sunlight and the climate system itself a target of regulation and governmental operations. Risk management logics and security politics are extended to the climate system proper. The very term ‘solar radiation management’ hints at a governmental approach and draws in a new planetary dimension of global life, even beyond carbon, into the realm of politics and security. Climate scientists

“climate engineering technologies create yet more political zones out of previously natural ones, making sunlight and the climate system itself a target of regulation and governmental operations.”

investigating and modeling climate engineering are in doing so (inadvertently) creating conditions for the governance of the skies – or, in the case of marine cloud brightening or ocean fertilization, the clouds and the seas. In an interesting shift away from the emergency framing of the Plan B imaginary and towards a more governmental approach, some leading climate engineering researchers have recently argued in favor of a ‘temporary, moderate and responsive scenario for solar geoengineering’ (Keith and MacMartin, 2015: 201). In this scenario, SRM would be started not as an emergency measure but rather as a precaution while the jury remains out on the ultimate success or failure of mitigation and adaptation. Stratospheric aerosols would be introduced early but gradually to offset only up to half of anthropogenic climate forcing and only for as long as ‘acceptable’. For Keith, the threat of climate change is not existential, and he in effect makes a desecuritizing move, stressing that ‘the claim that climate change threatens an imminent catastrophe is an attempt to play a trump card of (seemingly) objective science in order to avoid debate about the trade-offs at the heart of climate policy’ (Keith, 2013: 24). In this version, SRM is a provider of a ‘breathing space’ (Morton, 2015: 162). If the breather is used to simultaneously reduce emissions and then eventually to bring down greenhouse gas concentrations until stratospheric aerosols can be phased out again, this also ‘smoothes over the PlanA/ PlanB dichotomy’ (Morton, 2015: 163). This would require routine rather than emergency governance mechanisms. Morton (p. 163) imagines that ‘exploring the potential of geoengineering could spur and shape the development of a new way of making planetary decisions’. In other words, used as a tool of risk control and optimization (rather than emergency), climate engineering becomes a potential midwife to new institutions and instruments of global governance: ‘Much better, rather than treating geoengineering as a technocratic way of avoiding politics, to use it as a way of reinventing politics’ (p. 164). The security hazard element here is that climate engineering generates more, not less, security politics, potentially giving birth not just to new consultative bodies, but also to undemocratic practices or – for the skeptics – contributing to creating an authoritarian global state. Mike Hulme (2014: 56) declared the technology ‘ungovernable’ on account of its indiscriminate effects, inherent uncertainty, and politically explosiveness, with global agreement about its deployment ‘improbable’. Others argue it may be governable, but only by way of centralized implementation – that is, only via basically undemocratic means and if imposed by a central actor (Hamilton, 2013; Macnaghten and Szerszynski, 2013: 472). It is owing to such worries that to develop the technology and then do a risk calculus may not be sufficient to avoid the security hazard, since the politics and the technology co-evolve: ‘the argument about whether to pursue a global thermostat has to be political before it can be scientific’ (Hulme, 2014: 135). Citing James Lovelock’s conclusion that climate change means that it may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while, Hulme (2014: 136) argues that SRM ‘is indeed a project which runs the risk of putting democracy on hold – or of presenting it with a challenge to which democracy is unable to respond, which is equally concerning’. The insurance metaphor in Reluctant Geoengineering invokes the possibility of future calamity and emergency to justify climate engineering (for a critique, see Markusson et al., 2014). For Reluctant Geoengineering, stratospheric aerosol injection is justified in

terms of averting a catastrophe preemptively. Particularly since the advent of the War on Terror, the appeal of preemptory measures has expanded the remit of security politics to potentialities and catastrophic scenarios (Neal, 2009; Prozorov, 2005). The ‘politics of catastrophe’ draws on imagination and sensorial experience as well as statistical forms of calculating risk (Aradau and Van Munster, 2011: 2). Viewed as an instance of the politics of catastrophe, like the fear of nihilistic terrorism or nuclear calamity, climate change promises a potential rupture or interruption to a way of life. Like nuclear weapons or 9/11, it signifies a potential new social order (Aradau and Van Munster, 2013: 5), marking ‘an exception to some form of already existing state of affairs’ (Anderson and Adey, 2012: 26). According to some, this favors precisely interventionism, including military operations, geoengineering, and other ‘large-scale transformational measures’ to ‘reorganize physical and ecological systems, land use, and human behavior on a planetary scale’ (Mayer, 2012: 178). The security hazard here is thus that Reluctant Geoengineering, by activating the politics of catastrophe, attunes societies to radical security politics. This could in turn affect the pursuit of ‘Plan A’ that demands more cooperative, long-term and considered mitigation efforts.

Conclusion: Why climate engineering is not necessarily the politically easy option As a sociotechnical imaginary, climate engineering is more than a set of technological devices. It has been cast as a ‘Plan B’: only to be used in the event of the failure of the preferred option of effective mitigation against the backdrop of damaging global warming. This has led some to suppose that climate engineering would not be subject to the same political obstacles and could be made available as long as it turned out to be technically feasible. Although it is envisaged that climate engineering could ‘buy time’ for effective mitigation, in the three ways described above, it could also involve a security hazard that might delay mitigation. Whether climate engineering is less of a ‘pious wish’ than effective global mitigation depends not just on whether the technologies can be invented and scaled up, but also on some momentous assumptions about international relations and the scope for cooperation. Effective climate mitigation could be made more difficult by high-leverage climate engineering technologies that introduce intentionality and shorter chains of causation to climate politics. And dynamics of risk and catastrophe that underlie Reluctant Geoengineering and more recent precautionary approaches could promote new forms of security politics. This could complicate ongoing efforts to mitigate and adapt, not least by promoting adversarial friend–enemy logics that sour international relations and make collective action on mitigation (and other collective global problems) more difficult, as well as making climate engineering solutions themselves more costly and difficult to implement. This points to a wider set of neglected issues around how climate engineering might interact politically with other forms of climate policy beyond the moral hazard problem. Deployment of stratospheric aerosols is likely to include a complex mix of interventions and compensatory measures rather than the straightforward models put forward in simulations. Stratospher-

“Deployment of stratospheric aerosols is likely to include a complex mix of interventions and compensatory measures rather than the straightforward models put forward in simulations.”

“Even without security conflicts currently dogging climate negotiations, few observers are optimistic enough to envisage a comprehensive system of global governance of SRM with high legitimacy.”

ic aerosol injection will most likely necessitate some means of offsetting unwanted regional effects of stratospheric aerosol injection, for example. This adds to political and institutional demands in scenarios that make use of climate engineering, adding reasons for skepticism about political feasibility. Conceivably, security dynamics could also turn out to assist the development of climate engineering by fostering research and deployment through the urgency and purpose of the invocation of security, crisis, and catastrophe. Securitization might allow exceptional means, including drastic mitigation. But such scenarios of security-driven policy would most likely challenge another of the assumptions behind Reluctant Geoengineering: that these technologies would only be implemented with some form of broad consent and/or governance. Even without security conflicts currently dogging climate negotiations, few observers are optimistic enough to envisage a comprehensive system of global governance of SRM with high legitimacy. Relatively optimistic scenarios involving heroic assumptions of rationality on the part of states suppose that a small group of states with climate engineering capabilities would proceed alone and with weak legalization, at least at first, perhaps with a qualified majority voting on deployment among a self-appointed group of insiders at a later stage (Weitzman, 2012). Banerjee (2011: 31–32) concludes that climate engineering with cross-border effects (referring to stratospheric aerosols) ‘does not look too different from the current, patchy approach to regulating CO2 emissions’ and that ‘the same justice, equity, and competitive advantage concerns that plague the climate negotiations’ will dog negotiations about rules for how to distinguish hostile from peaceful climate modification. If by drawing on a politics of existential threat and emergency measures there is a risk that climate technologies may also be taken out of the realm of normal political discourse and debate and into the realm of ‘necessity’ and urgency, and the rest of climate change therefore becomes subject to security logics, these issues of cooperation and agreement would become more, not less, acute. At the very least, despite the initially much lower economic costs, the security hazard described in this article makes the politics of climate engineering look more costly and decidedly unlike an ‘easy option’ politically. This does not mean that climate engineering should not be pursued and explored further. But awareness of such risks might help guard against them – and may also help abate any moral hazard arising from an unrealistic assumption about the political feasibility of ‘Plan B’. Assessments of whether a technology can reduce climate risks should weigh risks of inaction, on the one hand, against the environmental but also the political risks of geoengineering, on the other.

Acknowledgements An earlier version of this argument was presented at Climate Engineering Conference 2014: Critical Global Discussions, Berlin, 18th-21st August 2014. I am grateful for feedback from participants in that and later geoengineering conferences, and especially Duncan McLaren who commented also on later drafts. All faults and weaknesses are my own responsibility. I am also grateful for critical comments

from Duncan McLaren and three anonymous reviewers at Security Dialogue.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Note 1. For the Merriam-Webster dictionary, ‘plan B’ is ‘an alternative plan of action for use if the original plan should fail’; see http://www.merriam-webster. com/dictionary/planb (accessed 26 January 2017).

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The geoengine: geoengineering and the geopolitics of planetary modification Kathryn Yusoff

Kathryn Yusoff’s ‘The geoengine: geoengineering and the geopolitics of planetary modification’ explores the geopolitics of geoengineering and how modifications of the planet become not just an environmental issue but also one of geopolitics. Yusoff presents discussion and thinking “with and against geoengineering” as a way to manage the planet throughout her article. Yusoff discusses issues such as in particular how

geoengineering becomes a problem of geopolitics with the possibility for the “unequal modification of climate” as a result of governments engaging in unilateral geoengineering. Additionally, Yusoff argues this prompts thinking of both bio and geopolitics. Solar Radiation Management (SRM) is a method of geoengineering also explored in Yusoff’s text where she uses her research to argue that SRM “is being constituted as a technology-in-the-making in ways that are not consistent with the democratic processes”.

Abstract: As an introduction to a theme issue on the politics and practices of geoengineering, this paper outlines a framework for thinking about the ‘geoengine’ that underpins concepts of planetary modification. It reviews some of the ways in which geoengineering has been framed as a technological, governance, and promissory discourse and examines the contradictions inherent within some of these framings. Questioning some of the motivations and forms of participation that are evident in the governance of geoengineering, and its current challenge to existing forms of global democracy, the paper speculates on the wider geopolitical implications of operating at the scale of the planet, and what this means for how we currently understand the ‘geo’ in geopolitics. While there is a big mismatch between the restricted decision-making processes around geoengineering and the potential scope and impact of those decisions, there are also opportunities for geographers to make incisive contributions to this debate to change what geoengineering is and becomes as a material–discursive practice. This paper suggests that only by attending to the geo-ontological formations inherent in the fabrication of an engineerable earth, can a new geopolitics be accommodated within political thought that takes account of a much more active ‘geoengine’ that is being opened to political and material modification. Keywords: geoengineering, climate change, geopolitics, geophilosophy, weather modification, Anthropocene

“geoengineering... remains, “largely speculative and unproven” (IPPC, 2007)”

In 1981 The Guardian ran a front-page April Fools’ day article entitled “A new climate for science”, parodying a British scientist who had discovered a way to manage the weather, that “may make control—as opposed to mere prediction— of meteorological conditions a reality.” The major breakthrough was said to have involved a joint Ministry of Defence and Meteorological Office initiative that “discovered the elusive key to the creation of a variable density electrostatic screen in the troposphere” (Creel, 1981, page 1). From the farce of weather modification in the 1980s to the new politics of geoengineering, where a diverse range of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM) techniques are under consideration as viable modes of experimentation, there has been a rapid shift in the scientific and cultural discourses of geoengineering. At present, geoengineering— the intentional modification and/or management of the earth’s climate system—remains, “largely speculative and unproven” (IPPC, 2007), with limited real-world experimentation. Of the two main geoengineering techniques, CDR is often portrayed as ‘good’ geoengineering because it is localised and incorporates many tested bio-geoengineering practices such as afforestation, peatland restoration, biochar, dark earths, and ocean nourishment through iron fertilisation. Whereas, SRM, which includes surface-based (land or ocean albedo modification), troposphere-based (cloud whitening), upper atmosphere (injection of stratospheric aerosols), and space-based practices (space mirrors and sunshades), are often seen as ‘bad’ geoengineering because of their high-risk, top-down, technological-dependent techniques. Moreover, the effects of SRM on biodiversity and

other earth processes remain largely uncertain. The criteria for evaluation of both these techniques are synthesised through the calculation and perception of risk. While geoengineering was once presented as a hoax—a fool’s project—it is now under serious consideration as a potential plan B, in lieu of the perceived failure of the plan A(1) of climate governance to reduce emissions and mitigate the anticipated effects of abrupt climate change. At the same time, adaptation has all but replaced mitigation in climate governance. But, what kind of a shift in planetary discourses has produced a milieu in which proposals to block out the sun or seed the oceans can sensibly manifest as preemptive interventions in ameliorating the worse effects of climate change? And, more broadly, what kinds of technics are at stake in the anticipatory geologics of making new geophysical worlds? Working with the exploratory quality of geoengineering to produce ‘new climates’, these three short papers in this theme issue employ a speculative approach to thinking with and against geoengineering as a form of planetary management. Cutting across the papers is an investigation into the forms of ‘geo’ circulating in the knowledge economies and practices of geoengineering; in its ‘making’ through deliberate process (Szerszynski and Galarraga, 2013); in the conceptualisation of a new geophysics (Clark, 2013); and, in relation to the possibility of democracy (Szerszynski et al, 2013). Rather than attempt a systematic examination of the field of geoengineering, these papers situate geoengineering in its wider social context in order to open questions about how geoengineering might represents a distinctly new type of geopolitical formation, informed by a reconceptualisation of geophysical processes rather than distinct geographical territories. In parallel, this introduction examines some of the logics that underpin geoengineering, specifically the reconstituted of the ‘geo’ as a territorialising force within environments. This reimagination of the possibilities of planetary modification happens within a broader geohistoric moment of the consideration of humans as geologic agents within the Anthropocene. As such, the possibility of unilateral, yet regionally unequal modification of climate prompts the need to think about biopolitics and geopolitics together; that is, a bio-geopolitics that does not just address power in relation to forms of subjectification and modes of political agency, but extends its consideration to the biosphere, in order to think through forms of collaboration within earth processes rather than outside of them (Szerszynski, 2010; Yusoff, 2013).

Geologics Geoengineering encompasses a diverse field of scientific practices, even as it seems to be represented by a rather small scientific clique of practitioners. Despite the relative size of the field, the contested and speculative nature of geoengineering has generated an expanded set of discourses in both popular and scientific domains. As both a practice and a concept of planetary change, geoengineering brings together new issues to do with world risk (Beck, 2008), anticipatory governance of futures (Anderson and Adey, 2012), atmospheric securitisation (Whitehead, 2009), innovation and new technologies, and the

“The framing of geoengineering as overt rather than inadvertent anthropogenic climate change makes the distinction a question of semantics, a difference of degree rather than kind.”

ethics and politics of “earth systems governmentality” (Lövbrand et al, 2009). Such an aspirational model of ‘whole Earth’ governance follows in the wake of a decade of climate governance that has been characterised by global climate modelling, technological and market-led solutions, failure of international agreements on mitigation, and arguably a lack of democratic and devolved decision making. This shift from the governance of earth surfaces to earth systems can be contextualised within a broader marketisation and management of geophysical and biochemical flows in ecosystems and the atmosphere. Like the climate sciences, geoengineering has generated new epistemological and ontological models of thinking about the earth—or geontologies—which simultaneously engender both the imaginaries and operative spaces that calibrate notions of agency and control in earth processes. As an emergent and heterogeneous set of practices and anticipated technological interventions, what geoengineering is and what it may become are contested questions. What the authors of this theme issue raise in their papers are a set of questions about geoengineering—the geologics and geopolitics of its formation—in the context of both its actuality and its future promises to transform the climate. What these papers have in common is the examination of the underlying motivations and imaginaries of geoengineering as practice (Szerszynski and Galarraga, 2013), a form of governance (Szerszynski et al, 2013), and mode of apprehending and interacting with inhuman earth processes (Clark, 2013). While notions of a machinic earth have their genealogical origins in James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1788, page 3), it may be that this metaphorical association that immediately gives rise to the figure of the geoengineer as the agent of control is unhelpful in capturing the diverse set of material practices that characterise the scope of geoengineering’s current oeuvre. However, as political decision making takes on materialist dimensions through the development and testing of these technologies, new geopolitical approaches may be required that depart from classical or critical geopolitics foci on mostly ‘flat earth’ political relations to conceptualise the interactions and thresholds of earth systems (Gabrys and Yusoff, 2012), biochemical flows, and the forces of deep-time processes, in concert with political decision making. This would require the conceptualisation of a geopolitics that considers inhuman forces (anthropogenic and otherwise) alongside more traditional political actors in the making of geopolitical worlds. The ambition of earth-system governance to make global interventions in the evolution and revolutions of the earth requires an arguably new formation of the relation between geography and power. The logic used to defend geoengineering to its critics bucks this enlargement of the geopolitical sphere, suggesting that there is little distinction between inadvertent geoengineering (anthropogenic climate change) and overt climate engineering, just one of intent. However, there is a definite change in the scale and quality of governance and thus the modes of territoriality that are imagined. The shift is from the generation of predictive climate scenarios to predictive interventions in climate actualities. The framing of geoengineering as overt rather than inadvertent anthropogenic climate change makes the distinction a question of semantics, a difference of degree rather than kind. Yet, while such a distinction of intentionality helps to distinguish geoengineering in specific ways from other human–earth interactions, it puts the emphasis on deliberative action as the guarantor of outcome. Thus, the “governance of geoengineer-

ing necessarily involves the ‘governance of intent’ ” (Owen et al, 2012; Stilgoe et al, 2011). As Szerszynski et al (2013) argue, the formation of geoengineering as a practice of intent raises questions about how technologies are constituted through intended rather than actual effects. But, what does it mean when the intent that is at stake is the intent to govern whole geophysical systems and earth processes, with the express purpose of the global modification of climate? Does operating at the scale of the planet represent a difference in degree or kind in human–environment interactions? The geologics of geoengineering entail both ontological and material shifts in the scope and scale of human agency in biophysical earth forces.

Geohistories While geoengineering is often framed as a mindful response to anthropogenic climate change, the terminology of the Royal Society report (2009) makes a distinction between what should be considered as geoengineering, and what should not: weather modification and anthropogenic experimentation that have inscribed geophysical ‘signatures’ into earth (ballistic missiles, combustion engines, atomic testing, acid rain, fire regimes, biomass burnings, industrial revolutions, and deforestation). Part of this ‘distinction’ is no doubt pragmatic, to set the terms of reference, but it also enacts an erasure of Cold War histories of weather modification—weather as war machine and geopolitical strategy— that generated highly speculative (and nearly always unsuccessful) experiments. This historical amnesia distances geoengineering from the rationalist fantasies of modernist control that permeated Cold War projects (Fleming, 2010; Fleming et al, 2006), while reinstating the ambition for global reach or technological transformation that sustained their promise. While scientific research on geoengineering is at pains to highlight its cautious and evaluative approach to large-scale technological interventions, such modesty inadvertently champions defeatism towards democratic process. This is tantamount to saying we have not the political will, imaginative largess, or democratic process to respond to climate change in democratic (and just) ways. What geoengineering gains in loosening its historical ties to weather modification projects of the 1950s is an ability to claim its precedence, as a ‘new’ solution to climate change. What it perhaps fails to recognise in its Cold War genealogy is how the promise of former technological innovations already mark how politics are made in the gap between intention and actuality. The geologic of innovation (located within a broader field of ecoinnovation) is underpinned by a temporal metaphor—geoengineering will buy a little time—for adaptation in the wake of abrupt climate change. Yet, with SRM this is no quick fix. What is not often discussed in the public domain is the level of commitment involved in some technological interventions, while in private, geoengineers discuss issues of ‘fidelity’ to different solutions. SRM technologies such as SPI (sulphur particle injection) have detrimental termination—it is a technological fix that needs to keep on fixing. Fidelity is configured through the promise of technological innovation, despite the potential for abrupt social transformations that might be sparked by rapid changes in climate, which

“While scientific research on geoengineering is at pains to highlight its cautious and evaluative approach to large-scale technological interventions, such modesty inadvertently champions defeatism towards democratic process”

make such long-term commitments dubious. Modelling of interventions suggests that the rebound effect of not continuing along a geoengineering trajectory once started would be catastrophic: “In the case of inconsistent or erratic deployment (either because of shifting public opinions or unilateral action by individual nations), there would be the potential for large and rapid temperature oscillations between cold and warm climate states” (Matthews and Caldeira 2007, page 9952). This raises questions about what exactly is the worst case scenario when geoengineering is unidirectional in its deployment, and commits societies to a continued technology intervention into the far-flung future. Matthews and Caldeira estimate from their model runs that abrupt failure or deliberate termination of geoengineering projects in the future would weaken climate sinks and climate-carbon cycle feedbacks and likely result in an acceleration of CO2, leading to extremely high rates of temperature rise, between 2°C–4°C per decade. Like nuclear waste, geoengineering has a technological shelf life that far exceeds the intent and foresight of its contemporary engineers. So, any formation of governance needs to consider how its practices may ‘live on’ beyond their milieu. Such a contingent futurity, which may be characterised by abrupt geophysical and social change, raises questions about intergenerational justice (Svoboda et al, 2011) and the intensification of risk in the context of uncertain futures. The temporal quality of commitment to geoengineering technologies in some instances is irreversible, and yet this commitment is undertaken under the temporal conditions of a state of emergency to establish the validity of its claims.

Geosphere In the embrace of the emergency conditions (‘considering the unthinkable’) there is not just a commitment to the continuance of geoengineered futures— the earth as anthropogenic entity— but to a potentially antidemocratic and unethical (Gardiner, 2011) passage through climate change. As Szerszynski et al (2013) argue in their manifesto for democracy, the political challenge provided by SRM is not a question of feasibility, economics, or risk management. It is about how SRM is being constituted as a technology-in-the-making in ways that are not consistent with democratic processes. The argument goes, in its most basic form: societies are unable to effectively regulate climate change and so global technological solutions must be found (see IPCC, 2011; Royal Society, 2009). Rather than recognising the ways in which climate governance has exacerbated efforts to democratise climate change decision making and adaptation implementation, and its failure to build democratic governance and institutions into its knowledge-making practices, geoengineering proponents mobilise this inaction to argue for interventionist policies; rather than finding ways to rethink how climate science policy could and should be done differently. When this elision of democratic process is framed as a “knowledge–action gap” (Giddens, 2009), the talk swiftly turns to extrademocratic or exceptional solutions. The advocacy group ETC (action on Erosion, Technology and Concentration), which advocates a moratorium on real-world geoengineering experimentation,

suggests that defining geoengineering is a political act (ETC, 2010, page 4). When the politics of description involved in defining what geoengineering is gets reimagined in the context of entrepreneurial business solutions to climate change (the main funder of geoengineering technologies to date), the language becomes decidedly militaristic (the “geoengineering battlefield” is part of Richard Branson’s “Carbon War Room”) and muscular (Shell calls geoengineering a “Game Changer” and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation calls it a “Grand Challenge” and has funded geoengineering projects with $4.5 million over three years and plans to invest a further $10 billion). Such framings of geoengineering within an entrepreneurial context of innovation, whether inside or outside the academy, implicitly shape (in Szerszynski and Galarraga’s words) “how problems are framed, how resources are allocated, how research unfolds, and which future trajectories are thereby made more likely” (page 2818). At the moment, they argue, “geoengineering research is characterised by an ‘organised epistemological irresponsibility’, in which such dynamics are not being reflexively addressed and managed” (Szerszynski and Galarraga, 2013).

Geoclique Following the money around geoengineering experiments, proposals, and reviews reveals a small pool of experts—dubbed the “geoclique” by Eli Kintisch (2010)—that are both involved in assessing geoengineering proposals and receiving funding from private foundations interested in the patenting of geoengineering solutions. For example, Ken Caldeira from Carnegie Institute for Science, Stanford and David Keith, from Harvard University have received $4.6 million from the Gates Foundation to run the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (Ficer), and Caldeira personally receives $375 000 a year to undertake geoengineering research. Both Caldeira and Keith have a number of registered patents for geoengineering technologies: Caldeira is named on a patent (US20090173386A1) with Bill Gates for “Water alteration structure applications and Methods” (2009), patent (US6890497) for “Extracting and sequestering of carbon dioxide from a gas stream” (2005), and David Keith is named on a patent (WO2009155539A2) for “Carbon dioxide capture method for generating carbon credits” (2009) and a patent (US20100064890A1) for “Carbon dioxide capture facility” (2010). What these patents make clear is the intersection of carbon and biotech markets with the technological and scientific development of geoengineering. Philip Rasch (from Northwest Laboratory who received $600 000 from Ficer), Caldeira, and Keith all participated in the Royal Society Report (2009), as well testifying to the US Congress about the need for government funding of large-scale geoengineering (Vidal, 2012) and Keith gave oral evidence to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on The Regulation of Geoengineering (2010), thereby using private money to lobby for public funding. While these experts legitimately argue for public financing of geoengineering research so that it can be more openly scrutinised, there are significant conflicts of interest that suggest that this is not disinterested governance of science or structurally able to provide independent evaluations. Such a concentration of ‘expertise’ in geoengineering research and

““geoengineering research is characterised by an ‘organised epistemological irresponsibility’, in which such dynamics are not being reflexively addressed and managed” (Szerszynski and Galarraga, 2013).”

governance raises questions addressed by Szerszynski et al (2013) about intent to govern. In lieu of what is deemed to be political failure to reduce emissions by either social change or technological (energy) innovation, scientists involved in geoengineering claim it is “only responsible to think what we would do in face of a climate emergency” (Caldeira, 2010, unpaginated). Yet, this ‘emergency’ looks decidedly like the same business-asusual approach to expand and generate new market economies of carbon management. The example in October 2012 of a ‘rogue’ geoengineering project off the coast of Canada, when the geoengineering firm Planktos Inc. dumped 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean, exemplifies the proprietary drive towards the patenting of technologies and the emergence of a heterogeneous geoengineering market. This includes venture capital, governments, national funding bodies, private enterprise and a small pool of “expertise” that is distinctly lacking in gender, geographical or societal diversity (see ETC, 2010, page 39). This limited breadth of societal engagement and involvement with geoengineering shapes both the knowledge production process and intensifies antagonisms towards geoengineering as an acceptable practice. The international Convention on Biological Diversity (2010) is the only international governance body to declare a moratorium on geoengineering, highlighting the unknown effects of geoengineering on biological life. SRM projects, such as solar dimming, raise ethical questions about the biopolitical impact of geoengineering on nonhuman life, and demonstrate how these geotechnics are becoming central to the governance of life beyond the human. The Convention concluded that the only permissible experiments were “small scale” and should have no impacts beyond national jurisdiction. Currently, international jurisdiction is governed by the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, which states that “the term ‘environmental modification techniques’ refers to any technique for changing—through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes—the dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space” (United Nations, 1997, Article II). But it further qualifies this by stating, “the provisions of this Convention shall not hinder the use of environmental modification techniques for peaceful purposes” (Article III), which suggests that geoengineering has to be proved to be warlike or geopolitical in intent to counter the Convention. However, what is to be defined as small scale and how the limits of the experiment are to be conceived if the experiment is in the world is unclear. Real-world experimentation raises questions about what it means to move from lab to world, and from model to actuality, and how the sensibility of an engineered planet enables understandings of human agency that has ambitions to act as an earth force. In a rapidly growing knowledge economy, what possibilities exist for a more democratic engagement with geoengineering, which highlights not just the ethics of geoengineering, but also engages with the processes and practices of problem formation, including its inclusions and exclusions? While the Natural Environment Research Council is one of the few institutions to have undertaken a public dialogue exercise in relation to geoengineering, as documented in Experiment Earth?: Report on Public Dialogue on Geoengineering

(2010), could we imagine a more diverse set of governance practices and earth interventions, where publics are not just involved in giving dissent or consent to geoengineering projects, but can interrupt, experiment, and intervene in problem formation? What modes of participative engagement would be necessary to establish a dialogue rather than a monologue with publics? Szerszynski and Galarraga suggest that, within geoengineering research, disciplinary assumptions have shaped the problem formation and failed to take a properly interdisciplinary approach, and so subordinate the social in addressing what geoengineering could be. The authors ask how an interdisciplinary approach might change the questions that are asked, the practices that are imagined, and the modes of governance that are engaged with. To counter this situation, they propose a model of knowledge making that is more creative in its exploration of the norms and structures of knowledge-making practices in geoengineering research. The humanities may well offer particular critical investigations into these technologies. Artists, writers, and theorists in the Cold War period, working between the spectre of nuclear catastrophe and utopian architectures for planetary survival (Gabrys and Yusoff, 2008; Yusoff and Gabrys, 2011), offered both playful and critical geopolitical accounts of imaginaries of atmospheric control (such as Buckminister Fullers’s 1960s “Dome over New York”). Geoengineering, too, needs its promissory and geopolitical intent creatively explored if we are to move from exceptionalism to more participative forms of governance (Last, 2012). In the first exhibition on geoengineering in Austria, Cooling Station: Worldwide Geoengineering and Local Weather Making (2012), creative practitioners and researchers explored proposals for interventions in the climate, and questioned modes of decision making and participation in this planetary experiment. By engaging publics with the processes, technics, and imaginaries of geoengineering, the exhibition opened up questions about the making of models and worlds. As Galarraga and Szerszynski (2012) suggest, new climates may involve new forms of ontological responsibility for ‘making’: “the very idea of making the climate has to draw on particular models of fabrication….These models do not necessarily by themselves lead to specific moral positions ….But they force us to think about what it is to be a being that makes things, and what it might mean to bring the climate into the orbit of human making.” The praxis of climate making in geoengineering might be characterised by what Mike Fortun (2005) calls in relation to the Human Genome Project, “promissory technologies”. These are technologies that are characterised by the promise to be transformative in the future in ways yet to be known, but are often subject to “overpromising” in terms of their potential. In a revisiting of the ethics of promising, Fortun suggests that his initial attempt to critique such promises by biotech companies was limited, because he did not remain open to the promise. He says: “Promising cannot be reduced to either empty hype, or to formal contract, but occupies the uncertain, difficult space in between” (Fortun, 2005, page 158). Fortun reminds us that, in trying to understand the discourses that emerge with the geoengineering technologies, it is not necessary to proceed from a place of judgment on the technologies themselves, but rather it may be better to find ways of understanding the discursive and geopolitical affects that the promises of those technologies mobilise to transform

understanding of what these things are or could be. That is not to abandon critique, but to ask, as Szerszynski and Galarraga (2013) do, how geoengineering is transformed as an object of concern and praxis of understanding through modes of participation. Or, not to foreclose on what geoengineering might throw up in terms of rethinking the human and inhuman dimensions of geophysical relations (Clark, 2013). If, for example, we began to relish the debate that has been instigated by the spectre of geoengineering, it forces us to reconsider the kinds of geologics that underpin both our conceptualisation of climate change and the kinds of critical physical geography needed to make sense of these imbrications in earth systems (see also Demeritt, 2008; Tadaki et al, 2012; Wainwright, 2010). Considering the new geosocial formations (Clark, 2013) of a broad range of geophysical interventions in earth processes might challenge both our conceptualisation of geoengineering and help us rethink the material ‘ground’ of planetary geopolitics.

Geophysical turn

“This is not about creating new worlds per se (although geoengineers do now talk about ‘ideal climates’), but about a shift from the earth as a given to the earth as characterised by ideal forms of output, such as climate.”

We might see geoengineering as part of a wider anthropogenic intervention in earth processes or as part of a ‘geophysical turn’ that demands a new kind of geopolitics altogether; a politics that considers not just what happens on the earth, but a politics of geophysical acts within the emergence of earth processes. In this sense, geoengineering involves a form of geontologising: that is, the reconstitution of the earth as a dynamic world object. This is not just the imagination of earth-as-artefact, as in the Apollo images from space or the future-orientated earth objects of climate modelling (Edwards, 2010), but it involves an understanding of the earth as a geoengine that can be altered, modified, and engineered on a global scale. The engineering, then, is not metaphorical, so much as bio-geophysical; it involves the conceptualisation of an abstract, nonlinear biodynamic model of the earth in which atmospheres and earth systems, and even the sun, are imagined as ‘engines’ (albeit organic) open to forms of making. This is not about creating new worlds per se (although geoengineers do now talk about ‘ideal climates’), but about a shift from the earth as a given to the earth as characterised by ideal forms of output, such as climate. If geoengineering is a governance issue, it is also a geontological issue that requires sustained focus on the geologics that sustain and subtend these engineering strategies, and on the modalities of the earth that construct an a priori engineer-able entity. This is the imaginary of a machinic earth. Yet, this is no ordinary machine, in the mechanical sense, it is one that is bio-geophysical in character. And, so the geoengine, if it is to be conceived as such, needs to be understood more like a Deleuzian machine that regulates and captures flows to generate operative spaces, rather than as a technology that has fixed inputs and outcomes. This raises questions about the inadvertent characterisation of geophysical systems as rational; that is, a geophysics that is coterminous with the rationale of a technological ‘solution’. Similar to the difficulties in modelling nonlinear and dynamic earth processes in climate change, there is a tendency to overdetermine the possibilities of ‘ends’ through the means of production, that are based on constitutive exclusions of radical uncertainties (Yusoff, 2009).

While geoengineering is often framed predominantly as a governance issue—a way of managing science in society—the fundamental geophysical nature of interventions into the geoengine are somewhat obscured. Nigel Clark addresses the geopolitics and speculative geophysics that might be necessary in order to think at the scale of the planet. While geographers might assume a certain priority in thinking the earth, Clark contends, actually the focus on the politics of space, have left the bio-geological aspects of earth systems woefully underthought in human geography. What Clark proposes instead is to take up the opportunity that geoengineering presents to human geographers (geoengineering as provocation) to work at the edges of political possibility, and in the speculative spaces of a new geopolitics of earth processes. Like Fortun, Clark suggests a fidelity to the full promise of geoengineering— opening a space for thinking about geologic agency within earth forces—in order to forge a new geopolitics that includes the actual geophysical earth as constitutive of its world view.

References Anderson B, Adey P, 2012, “Guest editorial. Future geographies” Environment and Planning A 44 1529– 1535 Beck U, 2008 World at Risk (Polity Press, Cambridge) Caldeira K, 2010, “Issues in science and technology”, http://www.issues.org/27.1/caldeira.html Clark N, 2013, “Geoengineering and geologic politics” Environment and Planning A 45 2825–2832 Convention on Biological Diversity, 2011 Report of the Liaison Group Meeting on Climate-related Engineering as it Relates to the Convention on Biological Diversity Creel L, 1981, “A new climate for science” The Guardian http://archive.guardian.co.uk/Repository/ml.asp? Demeritt D, 2008, “From externality to inputs and interference: framing environmental research in geography” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 34 3–11 Edwards P, 2010 A Vast Machine (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) ETC, 2010 Geopiracy: The Case Against Geoengineering action on Erosion, Technology and Concentration, Ottawa Fleming J R, 2010 Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (Columbia University Press, New York) Fleming J R, Jankovic V, Cohen D (Ed.), 2006 Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in Weather and Climate History (Science History Publications/USA, Sagamore Beach, MA) Fortun M, 2005, “For an Ethics of Promising, or, a few kind Words about James Watson” New Genetics and Society 24(2)157–173 Gabrys J, Yusoff K, 2008, “Forecast factory: snow globes and weather makers”, in Bipolar Ed. K Yusoff (Arts Catalyst, London) pp 62–66 Gabrys J, Yusoff K, 2012, “Arts, sciences and climate change: practices and politics at the threshold” Science as Culture 21(1) 1–24 Galarraga M, Szerszynski B, 2012, “Making climates: solar radiation management and the ethics of fabrication”, in Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management Ed. C Preston (Lexington Books, Lanham, MD) pp 221–235 Gardiner S, 2011 A Perfect Moral Storm (Oxford University Press, Oxford) Giddens A, 2009 The Politics of Climate Change (Polity Press, Cambridge) House of Commons Science

and Technology Committee, 2010 The Regulation of Geoengineering (House of Commons, London) Hutton J, 1788 Theory of the Earth; Or An Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh IPCC, 2007 Summary for Policymakers Climate Change 2007: Mitigation. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC, 2011 Expert Meeting on Geoengineering IPCC Working Group III Technical Support Unit, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research Kintisch E, 2010 Hack the Planet (John Wiley, Hoboken, NJ) Last A, 2012, “Experimental geographies” Geography Compass 6 706–724 Lövbrand E, Stripple B Wiman J, 2009, “Earth system governmentality: reflections on science in the Anthropocene” Global Environmental Change 19(1) 7–13 Matthews H D, Caldeira K, 2007, “Transient climate—carbon simulations of planetary geoengineering Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 104 9949–9954 Natural Environment Research Council, 2010 Experiment Earth? Report on a Public Dialogue on Geoengineering Swindon Owen R, Macnaghten P M, Stilgoe J, 2012, “Responsible research and innovation: from science in society to science for society, with society” Science and Public Policy 39 751–60 Royal Society, 2009 Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance, and Uncertainty (The Royal Society, London) Stilgoe J, 2011, “A question of intent” Nature Climate Change 1 325–326 Svoboda T, Keller K, Goes M, Tuana N, 2011, “Sulfate aerosol geoengineering: the question of justice” Public Affairs Quarterly 25(3) 157–180 Szerszynski B, 2010, “Reading and writing the weather” Theory, Culture and Society 27(2–3) 9–30 Szerszynski B, Galarraga M, 2013, “Geoengineering knowledge: interdisciplinarity and the shaping of climate engineering research” Environment and Planning A 45 2817–2824 Szerszynski B, Kearnes M, Macnaghten P, Owen R, Stilgoe J, 2013, “Why solar radiation management geoengineering and democracy won’t mix” Environment and Planning A 45 2809–2816 Tadaki M, Salmond J, Le Heron R, Brierley G, 2012, “Nature, culture, and the work of physical geography” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 37 547–562 United Nations, 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, http://www.un-documents.net/enmod.htm Vidal J, 2012, “Bill Gates backs climate scientists lobbying for large-scale geoengineering” The Guardian 6 February Wainwright J, 2010, “Climate change, capitalism, and the challenge of transdisciplinarity” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100 983–991 Whitehead M, 2009 State, Science and the Skies (Blackwell, Chichester, Sussex) Yusoff K, 2009, “Excess, catastrophe, and climate change” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 1010–1029 Yusoff K, 2013, “ ‘Geologic life’: prehistory, climate, futures in the Anthropocene” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31 779–795 Yusoff K, Gabrys J, 2011, “Climate change and the imagination” WIREs Climate Change 2 516–534

AND

INTERPRETATIONS

ART

art and interpretations of the anthropocene

OF THE

“The answer is yes. The first and most obvious reason why art will have agency is that everything is in play, positive futures are possible, and many artists care passionately, almost painfully, about the living world.” JM Ledgard via TATE As the climate issue reaches catastrophic angst in the contemporary world, modern industrialised geoengineering has become the potential key to ‘hacking’ the environment. But a large number of these practices are discussed through a scientific and academic lens with little to no emotional relevance, even when ethics is entangled in its essence. This is due to the fact that consciousness and morality can become an obstruction to technological progress, therefore the true human emotional response to such innovations can be seen as provocative or illogical. Quantitive methods of deliberation typically omit ethical considerations such as; justice, fairness, autonomy and legitimacy. However, we argue that

emotions play an important role in decision making when examining proposed geoegineering strategies, understanding that these procedures will be implemented on a global basis. Emotional reflection through ‘techno-art’ can evoke a different perspective on possible technological developments and its implications for society, highlighting what is morally imperative. More artists have become involved with investigating risk technologies and such artworks can be fundamental to emotional-moral cogitation, instigating societal query regarding climate engineering, they help to shape cultural values, challenge human imagination and materialise theoretical unease. Art, pertaining to the current technological evolution should not be overlooked, as it can emerge as an important gateway to values and critical reflection of contemporary societies, urging forethought to their future scenarios through the interconnection of modern technical endeavours to its dire ramifications.

Coded Nature, Drifter Studio Drift

“Art is a movement of the Anthropcene”, if technology is the lifeblood of the Anthropocene, then humanism is essentially caught up in an artist interpretations of tech. Studio Drift’s 10 year working of Coded Nature highlights the bounded relationship between man made and man, their exhibition epitomises the connection between natural, the built environment and personal-emotional realms. Viewers are urged to reflect on their place in the contemporary world and their responsibility as a human collective or single individual to frame nature through a different discourse. Their 12 minute film called Drifters, takes place in the Scottish Highlands, in which the entities represent the basic element of our built environment. The work can be seen from the perspective of whether the individual can escape from the collective.

Studio Drift: Coded Nature

Studio Drift: Drifter

Glacial rock flower garden Olafur Eliasson

Known for art installations in response to the climate discourse, Eliasson’s glacial rock flower garden brings forth a level of interconnectivity between visitors and their impact in globalisation and environmentalism, a way for a “king to exercise his power” concreting the dominance humans hold over natural, non-human agencies.

Olafur Eliasson: Glacial rock flower garden

anthropoScene III : Hellisheiði Adam Sebire

This investigative short film by Adam Sebire anticipates the inevitable homeostasis of Earth after geoegineering, suggesting Earth as an actor in the planetary system and she does not conform to extrinsic intervention. Deep time temporalities are cast aside in the pursuit of a quick fix but Sabire compels his viewers to recognise the blind faith Humans have in technology, likely allowing the automated to become a dictator in society if ethics are ignored.

Adam Sebire: anthropoScene III : Hellisheiði

The oldest living things in the world Rachel Sussman

Sussman’s serious of researched and curated photographs of organisms 2,000 years or older challenges the audience to pry at their significance and belonging on Earth. Coming to the realisation that deep time is impervious to human knowing, but the Anthropocene is not and human time has impacted some of the oldest beings in the environmentexplicitly emphasised in ‘Underground forest’, where the plant’s age has been crossed out and labeled DECEASED.

Rachel Sussman: The oldest living things in the world

The planet after geoengineering Design Earth

The planet after Geoengineering debuted at the 2021 Biennale by Design Earth, powerfully communicating the potential consequences of human meddling with the non-human agencies. Through art and design: Rania Ghosn & El Hadi Jazairy have made the ethical entanglements tangible, visual and absolute to a point where cultural cannot ignore.

Design Earth: The planet after geoengineering

Design Earth: The planet after geoengineering - 17th Venice Architecture Biennale Video

ECOLOGICAL

DESIGN

ENVIRONMENTAL

ecological environmental design

Is this an incredible opportunity for humans to fix what has been created or an opportunity to avoid responsibility and for large corporations to continue business as usual. Considering the knowledge humans have compiled about our environment and factors which are vital to environmental health. Climate engineering practices are largely framed from an infrastructural level, agencies rely heavily on modern technological perceptions of Earth systems and the discourse is focused on what human discoveries can offer to nonhuman factors, due to this modern augmentation, traditional mitigation methods have been overlooked, even ignored. Taking into account the many ethical issues which can arise from ‘hacking’ our environment, there are various projects which have proven to offset the effects of climate change and have little to no unknown environmental consequences. Landscape projects and designs are undoubtedly valuable in their contribution to current global mitigation attempts for climate change. Projects such as the ‘Winslow Farm Conservancy, Hammonton, NJ, USA’ by Martha Schwartz Partners and ‘Ningbo Eco-Corridor: Resurrects Former Brownfield’ by HuiLi Lee and her team of landscape architects demonstrate how previously disused industrial landscapes can be resurrected into admirable landscapes. Both are beneficial to climate change mitigation in two main ways: trees and plants absorb CO2 as they grow when planted, and the aesthetics of the landscapes attract visitors, encouraging them to develop an emotional connection to the landscape which may incline them to become more sustainable. The bodies of work in this chapter explore and exemplify that landscape architects are assigned the role by the Earth to contribute towards mitigating and preventing climate change as much as possible through landscape designs.

With more attention and encouragement drawn towards climate change mitigation through landscape designs, attention can be detracted from geoengineering being perceived as an easy way out, or with an attitude of ‘there’s an easy fix to climate change’’. However, the chapter also suggests that geoengineering is not an entirely bad alternative as we seek to find a more effective alternative to mitigation since time is running out. The chapter highlights that there are eco-friendly geoengineering solutions which do not require the injection of additional substances into the atmosphere or any perhaps artificial processes. Furthermore, it suggests that forms of geoengineering can be conducted entirely with what already exists and can in fact minimize any potential catastrophes as a result.

Sustaining beauty. The performance of appearance Elizabeth K. Meyer

Elizabeth K. Meyers manifesto provides discourse into common misconceptions that landscape designs are intended for either the purpose of being sustainable or beautiful. Through this, she frames arguments that

landscape designs can evoke a desire to become more sustainable through their beauty and aesthetics, and that sustainability and aesthetic beauty influence each other. Thus, the role of landscape architects in designing landscapes to evoke desires to become more sustainable through an interconnectivity between human and morethan-human agencies suggests a mitigation alternative through landscape design to geoengineering.

Abstract Sustainable landscape design is generally understood in relation to three principles - ecological health, social justice and economic prosperity. Rarely do aesthetics factor into sustainability discourse, except in negative asides conflating the visible with the aesthetic and rendering both superfluous. This article examines the role of beauty and aesthetics in a sustainability agenda. It argues that it will take more than ecologically regenerative designs for culture to be sustainable, that what is needed are designed landscapes that provoke those who experience them to become more aware of how their actions affect the environment, and to care enough to make changes. This involves considering the role of aesthetic environmental experiences, such as beauty, in re-centering human consciousness from an egocentric to a more bio-centric perspective. This argument in the form of a manifesto is inspired by American landscape architects whose work is not usually understood as contributing to sustainable design.

" it will take more than ecologically regenerative designs for culture to be sustainable"

"what is needed are designed landscapes that provoke those who experience them Aesthetics / Beauty / Ethics / Performance / Sustainability to become more aware of how their actions affect the environment, Part one: Introduction and to care enough to Landscape design practitioners and theorists understandably focus on the eco- make changes" logical aspects of sustainability; this seems reasonable given that the site and medium of our work is landscape – the actual topography, soil, water, plants, and space – and imperative given the growing consensus about the impact of human action on the global environment. Beauty is rarely discussed in the discourse of landscape design sustainability and, if it is, dismissed as a superficial concern. What is the value of the visual and formal when human, regional and global health are at stake? Doesn’t the discussion of the beautiful trivialize landscape architecture as ornamentation, as the superficial practice of gardening? I find American landscape architecture’s limited discussion of sustainability curious, especially given the profession’s history. In the nineteenth century one of its leading practitioners, Frederick Law Olmsted – a former farmer, journalist, and director of the US Sanitary Commission during our Civil War – came to make urban public parks and landscapes because of their perceived agency as spaces of urban social and environmental reform. For Olmsted, parks performed in two ways: they were environmental cleaning machines, open spaces of healthy sunlight, well-drained soils, and shady groves of trees reducing temperatures, absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. Landscape architectural works such as urban parks, promenades and boulevards, public gardens, parkways and suburban residential enclaves were cultural products that responded to and then altered the processes of modernization and urbanization. In Olmsted’s estimation this urban environmental function was equaled, if not exceeded, by the function – or in contemporary theoretical terms, performance – of the designed landscape’s appearance.[1] He cared about what those

"the experience of that [a landscape's] appearance - the combination of physical characteristics and sensory qualities - altered one’s mental and psychological state"

landscapes looked like as well as how they worked. Based on his readings of psychologists, art critics, and philosophers, Olmsted believed that the experience of that appearance - the combination of physical characteristics and sensory qualities - altered one’s mental and psychological state. In other words, a particular form of appearance, the character known as beauty, performed. There are numerous examples of his belief in the recuperative, transformative power of aesthetic experiences in nature. Olmsted’s theories on the psychological effects of landscapes were evident as early as the 1850s, before he had started to design according to the historian most closely associated with Olmsted’s archives (Beveridge 1995: 35). During his career as a landscape architect, these theories

Figures 1-3 A hybrid program: wildlife habitat / marsh and human habitat / promenade are juxtaposed at Crissy Field park, San Francisco, CA, USA (George Hargreaves Associates). The natural rhythms of wildlife mating and nesting alter the sequences through the park; gates to the bridge across the marsh are not always open, signaling periods when human presence would be disruptive. Yet, the wildlife area constructed on the site of a former military base is not ‘buffered’ or removed from the promenade experience. Its changing textures, colors, and water levels are witnessed over time, through daily or weekly visits to this neighborhood park. The dynamic cycles of human and nonhuman life are intertwined, increasing one’s aesthetic and environmental appreciation of the marsh.

were embedded in the firm’s annual or official reports for park boards or clients of projects such as Prospect Park, Brooklyn (Beveridge 1997: 10), the Parks and Parkways of Boston (Sutton 1979: 244-245), and Mount Royal Park, Montreal (Sutton 1979: 214-215). We find Olmsted’s ideas most concisely summarized when he was asked to lecture on parks, as in the conclusion to his 1868 address to the Prospect Park Scientific Association: “A park is a work of art, designed to produce certain effects upon the mind of men.” (Beveridge 1997: 147-157). For nineteenth-century American landscape architects like Olmsted, urban landscapes were experiences as well as environments, sustaining civilization and culture as much as the bio-physical environment. And yet, contemporary theory and practice of sustainable landscape design have little regard for the performance of appearance, particularly beauty. Instead, the literature describes and analyses eco-technologies for constructing rain gardens and green roofs or day-lighting streams according to quantifiable ecological and hydrological processes. Sustainability stands on three pillars, we are told: ecology, social equity and economy. and the ecological operates in relationship to social justice and capitalist profit, but not aesthetics. Here, I will make a claim for reinserting the aesthetic into discussions of sustainability. I will make a case for the appearance of the designed landscape as more than a visual, stylistic or ornamental issue, as more than a rear-garde interest in form. I will attempt to rescue the visual, by connecting it to the body and poly-sensual experience. I will try to explain how immersive, aesthetic experience can lead to recognition, empathy, love, respect and care for the environment.

"immersive, aesthetic experience can lead to recognition, empathy, love, respect and care for the environment."

Figure 4 A new, hybrid language of description and aesthetic appreciation is required to capture the strange, toxic beauty of rainbowcolored water polluted by acidic mine drainage at a coal mine, the site of AMD Park in Vintondale, PA, USA.

The discourse on aesthetics and beauty in landscape architecture precedes Olmsted’s beliefs, of course, and continues to the present. An aesthetic appreciation of the designed landscape emerged in the eighteenth century with the explorations of somatic experiences moving through picturesque landscape gardens. Criticism of the landscape shifted from a focus on the creator to the audience, from theories of construction to theories of reception. This period heard considerable debates concerning the basis for aesthetic criticism, and whether beauty was intrinsic to a specific form, or associated with particular emotional responses. But intrinsic to many theories was the belief that the appreciation of beauty was not purely optical or visual. Rather, beauty was

"the act of experiencing designed landscapes poly-sensually, over time, through and with the body, is not simply an act of pleasure, but possibly, one of transformation"

“that quality or combination of qualities which affords keen pleasure to the other senses (e.g. hearing) or which charms the intellectual or moral faculties, through inherent grace, or fitness to a desired end.” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2008). While some earlytwenty- first century readers, this author included, might find accounts of grace a bit odd, I do find the idea that the sensuous perception of beauty could charm, as in influence or persuade, one’s intellectual and moral position intriguing. Can landscape appearance perform in this way? Can landscape form and space indirectly, but more effectively, increase the sustainability of the bio-physical environment through the experiences it affords? Both Catherine Howett and Anne Whiston Spirn wrote of these issues twenty years ago in short essays that have the ring of a manifesto. I have written elsewhere of the significance of these key articles for providing conceptual bridges between aesthetics and ecological design. (Meyer 2000:187-244). Two brief excerpts, one from each author, ground my understanding of how appearance differs from aesthetics, how performance can include ecological function and emotional or ethical revelation, and how a concern for beauty and aesthetics is necessary for sustainable design if it is to have a significant cultural impact. “The domain of aesthetics,” wrote Howett, “must come to be seen as coextensive with the ecosphere, rather than narrowed to its traditional applications in art criticism, so that aesthetic values may no longer be isolatedfrom ecological ones. Thus every work of landscape architecture, whatever its scale, ought first of all to be responsive to the whole range of interactive systems – soils and geology, climate and hydrology, vegetation and wildlife, and the human community - that will come into play on a given site and will be affected by its design. In the measure that the forms of the designed landscape artfully express and celebrate that responsiveness, their beauty will be discovered.” (Howett 1987:7). Spirn adds, “This is an aesthetic that celebrates motion and change, that encompasses dynamic processes, rather than static objects, and that embraces multiple, rather than singular, visions. This is not a timeless aesthetic, but one that recognizes both the flow of passing time and the singularity of the moment in time, that demands both continuity and revolution. This aesthetic engages all the senses, not just sight, but sound, smell, touch and taste, as well. This aesthetic includes both the making of things and places and the sensing, using, and contemplating of them.” (Spirn 1988: 108). From the writings of landscape architects such as Howett and Spirn that predate the United Nations’ Brundtland Commission’s popularization of the term sustainability, we can already see how crucial beauty and aesthetics are to an ecological design agenda. They argue that the act of experiencing designed landscapes poly-sensually, over time, through and with the body, is not simply an act of pleasure, but possibly, one of transformation. Through their writings we can infer that new forms of beauty will be discovered, as new techniques and approaches for reclaiming, remaking and reforming a site’s natural processes are invented. These new types of beauty will be found through the experience, as well as the making, of landscape.[2] They promise to expand the public’s, and many designers’, conceptions of sustainability beyond the ecological health realm, and into social practice and the cultural sphere.

NELSON BYRD WALTZ

WI L L K E RNE R NELSON BYRD WALTZ NELSON BYRD WALTZ

Figures 5-8 When walking in the University of Virginia Dell, Charlottesville, VA, USA (Nelson Byrd Woltz; Biohabitats), one crosses a small bridge where a stream flows into a stone rill. That moment is accompanied by the sound of water falling from the rill’s scupper into a pond with a clearly constructed geometry. That fall aerates and cleans the stream water as it moves into a fore bay – a settling basin – and then falls a second time through a weir into the pond which is part of a larger campus storm water management system. There, the stream’s path moves out of sight, underground, for several city blocks. While the waterway does not look natural, the hydrological processes of this disturbed urban stream are regenerated through human agency – the design and construction of natural processes over natural forms.

This is not to say that my argument is a widely-held one. [3] Beauty is not a word that was used in my design education, or at least not used in a positive sense. This is not a discipline-specific problem; it extends to other visual arts as well. One has only to think of the response to art critic Dave Hickey’s writings on beauty, or the fact that the Washington, D.C. Hirshhorn Museum’s 1999 exhibition, Regarding Beauty, self-consciously reflected on this rarely discussed topic (Benezra 1999). In fact, at a recent endof- semester studio review at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, I felt compelled to correct a younger (and otherwise quite talented and articulate) colleague’s dismissive use of the terms beauty and aesthetics. Like many landscape architects, he equated beauty and aesthetics with the visual and the formal, and in doing so rendered them inconsequential. His fascination for the performative blinded him to the distinctions between beauty and beautification or ornamentation. He did not think that beauty mattered, or realize that appearance could perform.

"beauty is a key component in developing an environmental ethic"

Yet, I have come to believe that the experience of certain kinds of beauty – granted new forms of strange beauty – is a necessary component of fostering a sustainable community, and that beauty is a key component in developing an environmental ethic. This realization has evolved over the past decade, partially in response to the limitations of mainstream sustainability discourse, partially through exposure to writings on beauty such as Anita Berrizbeitia’s interpretation of Robert Burle Marx [Berrizbeitia 2005: 90-95], and partially through my knowledge of designed landscapes by companies as disparate as Julie Bargmann’s DIRT Studio in the United States, Peter Latz and Partners in Germany, and Kongjian Yu’s Turenscape in China. It has been extended and enriched by reading eco-critic Lawrence Buell, geographer Denis Cosgrove, philosopher Elaine Scarry, and sociologist Ulrich Beck. Buell’s book Writing for an Endangered World is instructive in this regard. He suggests that American environmental policy is missing “a coherent vision of the common environmental good that is sufficiently

Figures 9-14 Allegheny River Park, Pittsburgh, PA, USA by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and artists Ann Hamilton and Michael Mercil is a dynamic, resilient landscape constructed to create habitat for riparian plants and humans within a narrow, 10-15 meter wide space between the river and city streets. The plant palette includes species that are tolerant of floods and regenerate after disturbances. These trees, grasses and vines are as enduring as the chain link fence and cantilevered concrete walks; their beauty is perceived in relation to their resilience, to their ability to regenerate.

compelling to generate sustained public support.” Drawing on the writing of Ulrich Beck, he argues that what is needed is not more policies or technologies, but more “attitudes, feelings, images, narratives.” [5] I believe that works of landscape architecture are more than designed ecosystems, more than strategies for open-ended processes. They are cultural products with distinct forms and experiences that evoke attitudes and feelings through space, sequence and form. Like literature and art, images and narratives, landscape architecture can play a role in building sustained public support for the environment. Geographer Denis Cosgrove underscores this in his book, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, when he argues that cultural products such as works of landscape architecture can change human consciousness as well as modes of production like the neo-liberal capitalism that characterizes late 20th and early 21st century American society and that is so at odds with human, regional and global health. So while I do not believe that design can change society, I do believe it can alter an individual’s consciousness and perhaps assist in restructuring her priorities and values. I could make this case in many forms, but have chosen to do so through a personal and rhetorical form, a design manifesto. [6] I will introduce the manifesto with a brief account of the current state of thinking about and action on sustainability in the United States. The manifesto is a work in progress, delivered for the first time in London and Beijing in 2007. [7] I have included a few illustrations to emphasize key points in my manifesto, while realizing that it is impossible to capture aesthetic experience – versus the look or appearance of things – in images. These selections depict projects designed by colleagues who might not have used the term ‘sustainability’ in a description of their work, but who do care about conserving ecosystems, revealing site processes, regenerative ecological systems, and remediating sites through design. [8] I could refer to other projects designed by these landscape architects as well as by others, so the projects illustrated here are intended to be suggestive of this manifesto’s tenets rather than exclusive examples.

ANNIE O’NEILL

SAM MCMAHON

Part two Context: sustainability in North American landscape architecture What does sustainability mean within the American culture of landscape architecture? The United States government’s resistance, if not outright opposition, to environmental initiatives adopted by most of the devel-

"design can... alter an individual’s consciousness and perhaps assist in restructuring her priorities and values."

MICHAEL VAN VALKENBURGH ASSOCIATES

oped world, and increasingly the developing world, over the past two decades, demonstrates that sustainability is perceived to be outside the mainstream and at odds with predominant American conceptions (neoliberal, free-market) of capitalism. It is not surprising that landscape architects have not differed much from the population as a whole. Granted, some understood sustainability as an extension and broadening of Ian McHarg’s environmental agenda codified in his manifesto, Design with Nature. But others perceived it as a threat to their service-oriented practice of doing whatever a developer wanted on a site, of deploying the McHargian method as a tool for maximizing a site’s capacity. Still others considered it as yet another attack on design “with a capital D.” Given such ambivalence, it is not surprising that the first article about sustainability in Landscape Architecture, the United States’ professional journal, was published in 1994, eleven years after the United Nations’ Brundtland Commission convened. So, we have to remind ourselves that sustainability’s current meaning and usage is relatively new, having evolved over two decades, often in tandem with significant global convocations.[9] Many American landscape architects link the term sustainable development to the 1983 UN’s World Commission on Environment and Development chaired by Norway’s Prime Minister Gro Brundtland, and their 1987 report, published in book form as Our Common Future. The Commission offered the definition that continues to be the most frequently quoted and hotly debated:“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” [10] But, like many Americans, landscape architects perceived sustainability as entering popular usage, if not mainstream acceptance, when Vice-President Al Gore attended the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro. Its Declaration on the Environment and Development contained 27 principles

Figures 15-18 Teardrop Park, Lower Manhattan, NYC, USA by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and artists Ann Hamilton and Michael Mercil, a small neighborhood park and playground located inside a city block, epitomizes the effectiveness of ‘hypernature’, a distilled and amplified sense of nature, in engaging one’s body and emotions in the construction of an aesthetic and environmental experience. The sublime, uncanny mass of the more than eight meter high, fiftyone meter long stone wall is a threshold between the lawn and a children’s playground. It is clearly out of place in terms of the city, but of its place in terms of the region. Its particular yet unexpected beauty is challenging and re-centering, momentarily shifting one’s attentions and affiliations towards the unseen, underground natural world.

MICHAEL VAN VALKENBURGH ASSOCIATES

"Human beings are at the center of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.”

ELIZABETH FELICELLA

ALEX MACLEAN

intended to guide sustainable development. These are broad in scope, covering topics from the role of women and indigenous peoples to the negative impact of war on global sustainability. Several of the principles tie directly to the activities of a landscape architect. “Principle 1: Human beings are at the center of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.” “Principle 3: The right to development must be fulfilled so as to equitably meet developmental and environmental needs of the present and future generations.” “Principle 4: In order to achieve sustainable development, environmental protection shall constitute an integral part of the development process and cannot be considered in isolation from it.” (United Nations 1992). The following year, the American Society of Landscape Architects Board of Trustees adopted their own version of a ‘Declaration on Environment and Development’. It endures, deeply embedded in the ASLA website, and consists of five objectives and five strategies, none of which addresses the form or appearance of a designed landscape. Many focus on specific construction technologies or lofty ethical values (ASLA 1993). In their introduction to Landscape and Sustainability, John Benson and Maggie Roe speak of an odd silence in landscape architecture literature since the ASLA Declaration on the Environment. They note that few books about landscape architecture and sustainability were published in English between 1992-2000 that are not primarily technical manuals (Benson and Rowe 2000: 2). Two were published in 1994, on the heels of the Rio Summit: John Lyle’s Regenerative Design and Sustainable Development, and Robert

"sustainability is one of many concerns evident in contemporary practice"

Thayer’s Green World Grey Heart. Technology, Nature and the Sustainable Landscape. They are key texts for landscape architects interested in ecological design and sustainable development. Of the two, Thayer speaks most directly on the appearance of sustainable landscapes by calling for aesthetic legibility through the direct revelation of ecological processes at work on a site. (Thayer 1994: 313-317). Lyle’s book introduces the concept ‘regenerative’ into landscape design theory. [11] This shift in language is pivotal to changing cultural conceptions of beauty, and I will return to it in the second tenet of my manifesto. Outside the scholarly literature, the evidence of interest is mixed: what is one to make of finding 729,000 Google hits for ‘landscape architecture’ and ‘sustainability’ in the same month that Bill Thompson, editor of the professional journal, Landscape Architecture, wrote an editorial entitled ‘How Green is your magazine?’ in which he asked “Is it time for a green issue of Landscape Architecture?” (Thompson 2007: 11). Perhaps all I can say is that sustainability is one of many concerns evident in contemporary practice, but not all members of the ASLA or landscape architecture practitioners would say they are committed to increasing the knowledge base for sustainable landscape design, or to creating new forms of sustainable landscapes. Based on my review of the literature and knowledge of the field, and realizing the traps of characterizing a profession of unique individuals, I would categorize current American attitudes towards sustainability as follows: 1. Yawn: acknowledge + continue on Sustainable design is what we do, so what is the big deal? Sustainability is considered as nothing new by many in the profession. A concern for social and environmental urban reform practices was at the basis of landscape architecture emerging as a profession in rapidly urbanizing nineteenth-century North America and Europe. This perspective sees sustainability as a new name for an enduring set of values and practices. While not antithetical to sustainability, they are suspicious of this term being used as a form of greenwash or opportunistic marketing on the part of other design and planning professionals who just a decade or two ago were dismissive of landscape design and constructed nature as feminine, informal, soft, unstructured, anti-progressive and nostalgic. The ASLA Declaration falls into this camp, as it states that the concepts behind sustainability are not new to the profession, and that they “reflect the fundamental and long-established values of the ASLA.” They are right, of course. These values are embedded in key texts and projects such as Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace in Boston, an 1880s constructed urban wetland and park system. They can be found in 1950s-60s works and texts by Larry Halprin, and by Ian McHarg, whose manifesto Design with Nature was seminal in enhancing the visibility and growth of the profession of landscape architecture during the post-First Earth Day decade. Since that time, the number of American graduate programs in landscape architecture has increased from around a half-dozen to over three dozen. That mid-twentieth concern for environmental issues, evident in the work of a design and a planner, was continued and synthesized through research by

PAUL WARHOL

two of McHarg’s students. Michael Hough’s City Form and Natural Process, and Anne Spirn’s Granite Garden, both published in 1984, expanded environmentalism into the realm of urban landscape design at the site scale. And while there were intense debates in our profession about the relationship between environmentalism and design, these were integrated by the late 1980s and early 1990s through mediating theories and/or practices of phenomenology and earth art, as documented in my article, ‘The Post Earth Day Conundrum’. I might note that these explorations into the space between, and beyond, environmentalism and formalism in American landscape architecture occurred when most architects were entrenched in historicist postmodernism, arguing about what type of historicist façade to add to their highly unsustainable buildings. In many ways, this group of Yawners has every right to do so. 2. Embrace: adapt + proselytize Sustainability = eco-technologies For this, the largest group of landscape architects, sustainability is a technical challenge. How can ecological processes be constructed? What are the best management practices for reducing rainwater runoff, for increasing rainwater percolation and filtration, for paving roads, for reducing construction waste and so on? These are admirable practices, as they have updated construction techniques for planting and earthwork, paving, and material selection that often depleted natural resources and polluted offsite ecosystems. I would place the invaluable applied research of James Urban or Meg Calkins published in Landscape Architecture, and the admirable work of the Sustainable Sites Initiative in this category. And yet I would argue that this type of work is not enough, especially if a designer’s hand is not legible, if our contributions are invisible infrastructure. We are different from restoration ecologists and civil engineers.

3. Dismiss: avoid + denigrate Sustainability = no design

"Sustainability is so concerned with ecology, process and environment that there is no room for design, form or expression"

Sustainability is so concerned with ecology, process and environment that there is no room for design, form or expression. This group believes that form and appearance are more important than ecological performance. Landscape Architecture is an art. Twenty-five years ago, when American Landscape Architecture had strong, opposing camps: the environmentalists – those who admired Ian McHarg – and the artists – those who admired Dan Kiley and Peter Walker - this would have been a large group. As I argued elsewhere, this has not been the case since the generation of designers and educators that gained prominence in the 1980s, such as Catherine Howett, Michael Hough, Anne W. Spirn, Michael Van Valkenburgh and George Hargreaves have sought to bridge the divide between art and science, aesthetics and environmentalism (Meyer 2000: 187-244). Today, the fact that most students of landscape architecture cannot imagine such debates shows the extent of this cultural shift within the profession and those attracted to study it.

Figures 19-22 The particular beauty of Urban Outfitters CorporateHeadquarters, Philadelphia, PA, USA by DIRT Studio and Meyer Scherer Rockcastle, Architects, is found in the re-use of tons of on-sitedemolition rubble for a new site materials palette Sustainabilit started with integrating the waste that would conventionally have been hauled out of the former US Navy shipyard and taken to landfill. Instead, the concrete pavement slabs were broken up and arranged with crushed stone and trees to create a pervious field where ground water could infiltrate and people could walk. Its beauty is particular to the former site conditions and material resources found there, and not dependent on an a priori sense of form.

4. Distain: adopt in private + distance in public Sustainability is not to be spoken; it is a form of reductive ecological functionalism. Many in this group are ‘big name’ designers who speak of performativity, process, and the operations of ecology as a base for their work, or who refer to process as a metaphor and analog. They might adopt and deploy ecological processes in their work, but they distance themselves from sustainable

task forces and advocates. There are many reasons for this, including those mentioned already in the first group, the Yawners. But I suspect there are two others: part of this group finds content and method in contemporary theories of ecology, in comparison with some advocates of sustainable design who are tied to pre-1980s conceptions of environmental ethics and ecological theory (I will return to this later), and second, unlike the Adapters + Proselytizers, many in this group do not reduce sustainability to technical metrics. American landscape architects such as George Hargreaves, Julie Bargmann, and Michael Van Valkenburgh, and especially the self-identified landscape urbanists such as James Corner, Charles Waldheim, and Chris Reed, would fall into this category. The Distainers were well represented in the 2005 Groundswell. Constructing the Contemporary Landscape exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). This was a seminal event, the first collective exhibition on landscape architecture since MOMA opened over 75 years ago. The critical essay written by Curator of Architecture and Design Peter Reed that accompanied the exhibition was full of talk about ecology, process and temporality, but the text does not mention sustainability. This is typical of the ambivalence about the term within the elite of the profession, and within design criticism in America. Serious design, powerful form and sustainability are seldom mentioned in the same breath. And there is definitely no place in MOMA for the “fuzzy, ‘milktoast,’ easy, comforting, and homogeneous beauty of sustainable, nondescript landscapes.” (Berrizbeitia 2005: 91). Is there an alternative to these four sensibilities and practices? Yes, it already exists, but it has not been described as such. Nevertheless, I have experienced it in certain sensibilities and projects, like Hargreaves and Associates’ Crissy Field in San Francisco where a hybrid program of bird habitat and human recreation results in the formal and functional juxtaposition of two landscape types, marsh habitat and recreation promenade. This close juxtaposition of human and wildlife program space without the in-between buffering or visual separation that would be the norm offers another approach. The city residents, like my brother and nephews, who frequent the park on bicycles notice the extreme contrast between the accessible playfields of grass, and the sometimes inaccessible, constantly changing tidal wetland marsh. Just as the habitat for park visitors features sculptura landforms that channel prevailing winds away from picnic and gathering areas, so the habitat for birds and other wetland species features the seasonal closing of gates to the marsh during mating and breeding periods. Through this simple act of juxtaposition, and the combination of adjacency without access, even children as young as my nephews figured out that the park was not just for them, that it was designed for all forms of wildlife, two- and four-legged, mammal, amphibian, and avian. They did not need interpretive signs to tell them this. These lessons were revealed through their experience of moving through the park and through the seasons. This fifth approach, Sustaining Beauty, exploits the aesthetic experience of landscape as a tool in the sustainable design toolbox. Here, I refer to more than pictorial landscapes and pleasant, idealized pastoral scenes. Instead, I am recalling somatic, sensory experiences of places that lead to new awareness of the rhythms and cycles necessary to sustain and regenerate life. These depend on the immediate apprehension of new, unexpected forms, spaces and sequences, and the simultaneous memory of former experiences, and conceptions, of

"“Beauty is at the intersection of sensuousness and truth.” (Danto 1999: 195)."

landscape space and form. Between these two ways of experiencing and processing, cognition occurs, and a new understanding and empathy towards species and niches around us may be possible. Arthur Danto refers to this role for beauty when he wrote, “Beauty is at the intersection of sensuousness and truth.” (Danto 1999: 195). This approach already exists, but it has not been recognized for its potential agency within the range of practices contributing to a sustainable city. It is found in many projects and across regions. I believe that it has currency and should be added to the many tactics used by those who care about sustaining our cities, regions, and planet through landscape design. And I hope it can be given credence by designers who are seeking sustainability in metrics and criteria, as well as by social scientists and natural scientists who discount the ethical agency of a designed landscape’s aesthetics. [12]

Part Three: Manifesto Sustaining beauty. The performance of appearance 1. Sustaining culture through landscapes Sustainable landscape design is not the same as sustainable development or ecological design or restoration ecology or conservation biology. Sustainable development requires more than designed landscapes that are created using sustainable technologies. Design is a cultural act, a product of culture made with the materials of nature, and embedded within and inflected by a particular social formation; it often employs principles of ecology, but it does more than that. It enables social routines and spatial practices, from daily promenades to commuting to work. It translates cultural values into memorable landscape forms and spaces that often challenge, expand, and alter our conceptions of beauty. 2. Cultivating hybrids: language of landscape Conceptualizing sustainable landscapes requires new words as well as new technologies, new languages as well as new technique. Sustainable landscape design flourishes when fixed categories are transgressed and their limits and overlaps explored. This is a familiar trope in post-structuralist theory; it is a pragmatic imperative in landscape architecture design. Our profession is still hampered by the limited language of formal and informal, cultural and natural, man-made and natural. How does such language

allow us to capture the strange beauty and horror of a forest polluted by acidic drainage from coal mining that has been transformed through bio-remediation into a park? Is that natural? Man-made? Its toxic

Figures 23-26 Stoss Landscape Urbanism and Taylor & Burns Architects conceived of an abandoned system of nineteenth century drinking water reservoirs on Mount Tabor, Portland, OR, as a new public park. They outlined a framework for catalyzing new ecological and social occupations for the site through the re-use and regeneration of existing infrastructure and woodlands. A particular, sustaining beauty is imagined to evolve through the strategic insertions within the waterworks that recharge ground water, create wildlife habitat, and allow for recreational swimming.

beauty, a phrase I borrow from Julie Bargmann of DIRT Studio, is a hybrid. Through hybridization, these and other paired terms have the potential to open up new conceptual design approaches between and across the categories that restrict our thinking: social and ecological, urban and wild, aesthetic and ethical, appearance and performance, beauty and disturbance, aesthetics and sustainability. These conceptual and experiential hybrids can occur within designed landscapes on disturbed sites across geographies – whether in the coal fields of Pennsylvania in the eastern United States, in the vague terrain of swooping highway interchanges in Barcelona, or among coal and steel processing plants in the Ruhr Valley in Germany. 3. Beyond ecological performance Sustainable landscape design must do more than function or perform eclogically; it must perform socially and culturally. Sustainable landscape design can reveal natural cycles such as seasonal floods, and regenerate natural processes – by cleaning and filtering rainwater or replenishing soils through arrested erosion and deposition - and do so while intersecting with social routines and spatial practices. This intermingling of ecological and social temporal cycles – seasonal floods and human activities such as holiday festivals or sports – links the activities of everyday life and the unique events of a particular city to the experience of the dynamic bio-physical aspects of the environment. Nature is not out there but in here, interwoven

"Sustainable landscape design must do more than function or perform eclogically; it must perform socially and culturally."

in the human urban condition. Hydrology, ecology and human life are intertwined.

ALL ILLUSTRATIONS: CHRIS REED, STOSS LANDSCAPE URBANISM

4. Natural process over natural form Ecological mimicry is a component of sustainable landscape design, but the mimicry of natural processes is more important than the mimicry of natural forms. Natural-looking landscapes are not the only genre to perform ecologically. This is especially true in constructed urban conditions when there are no longer spaces of the scale that might support a natural-looking landscape. In these extreme conditions – in narrow, remnant strips between city streets and rivers, on compacted sites with no organic matter or topsoil, along abandoned post-industrial infrastructure such as railroad track beds and factory sites – nature must be constructed in new ways, in different configurations, deploying technological and ecological knowledge. Where space and soil are limited, plants can be opportunistically inserted between and along the ramps flanked by chain link scrims and cantilevered walks; hardy species can act as hosts and create habitat for other species of plants and wildlife; spontaneous vegetation can be facilitated with soil trenches and mounds; wetland grasses can be planted in floating planters instead of on terra firma. This is an example of what Joan Nassauer has described as framing messy landscapes — another form of hybrid — so that ecological design aesthetics can be recognized as art. These types of projects — part technological construction, part ecological process – won’t be mistaken for natural landscapes. This may contribute to their longevity. Natural-looking landscapes may not be sustainable in the long term, as they are often overlooked in metropolitan areas. They are assumed to be found, wild conditions not needing care. Most constructed nature in the city, especially constructed wetland, needs care, cultivation, and gardening. In

my experience, natural-looking designed landscapes quickly become invisible landscapes and neglected landscapes. 5. Hypernature: the recognition of art The recognition of art is fundamental to, and a precondition of, landscape design. This is not a new idea; nineteenth-century landscape design theorists J.C. Loudon, A.J. Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted advocated as much when making the case for the inclusion of landscape design or landscape architecture as one of the Fine Arts. More recently, Michael Van Valkenburgh and his partners, Laura Solano and Matthew Urbanksi, expressed their interest in exaggerated, concentrated hypernature — an exaggerated version of constructed nature. Creating hypernature was prompted by pragmatic acknowledgements of the constrictions of building on tough urban sites and the recognition that designed landscapes are usually experienced while distracted, in the course of everyday urban life. Attenuation of forms, densification of elements, juxtaposition of materials, intentional discontinuities, formal incongruities – tactics associated with montage or collage – are deployed for several reasons: to make a courtyard, a park, a campus more capable of appearing, of being noticed, and of performing more robustly, more resiliently. [13] Sustainable landscape design should be form-full, evident and palpable, so that it draws the attention of an urban audience distracted by daily concerns of work and family, or the over-stimulation of the digital world. This requires a keen understanding of the medium of landscape, and the deployment of design tactics such as exaggeration, amplification, distillation, condensation, juxtaposition, or transposition/displacement. 6. The performance of beauty The experience of hypernature-designed landscapes that reveal and rege erate natural processes /structures through the amplification and exaggeration of experience, and that artistically exploit the medium of nature – is restorative. A beautiful landscape works on our psyche, affording the chance to ponder on a world outside ourselves. Through this experience, we are decentered, restored, renewed and reconnected to the biophysical world. The haptic, somatic experience of beauty can inculcate environmental values. As Elaine Scarry wrote, “Beauty invites replication. […] it is lifesaving. Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living, worth living.” Furthermore, Scarry suggests that when we experience beauty, it chang-

"beauty... is discovered through a process of mediation between the mind and body, between seeing and touching/ smelling/hearing, between reason and the senses, between what is known through past experiences and what is expected in the here and now."

es our relationship to that object or scene or person. She continues, “At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering. Beauty, according to Weil, requires us ‘to give up our imaginary position as the center […] A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions.’ […] we find we are standing in a different relationship to the world than we were the moment before. It is not that we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the center of our own world. We willingly cede ground to the thing that stands before us.” (Scarry 1999: 3, 24, 111-112). Scarry’s account of the experience of beauty resonates with that of art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto. He argues that beauty is not found or discovered, immediately, through the eye and in relationship to known tropes. Rather, it is discovered through a process of mediation between the mind and body, between seeing and touching/smelling/hearing, between reason and the senses, between what is known through past experiences and what is expected in the here and now. As Danto, drawing on Hegel and Hume, writes, “We arrive at the judgment of beauty only after critical analysis - which means that it is finally not subjective at all, since it depends on the kind of reasoning in which criticism at its best consists […] Doubtless the critic should look. But seeing is inseparable from reasoning, and response to a work of art is mediated by a discourse of reasons parallel entirely to what takes place with moral questions.” (Danto 1999: 192-193). The experience of beauty, a process between the senses and reason, an unfolding of awareness, is restorative. By extension, the aesthetic experience of constructed hyper-nature is transformative, not simply in the nineteenth-cen-

tury terms or practices known to Olmsted. Rather, aesthetic experience can result in the appreciation of new forms of beauty that are discovered, in Howett’s terms, because they reveal previously unrealized relationships between human and non-human life processes. 7. Sustainable design = constructing experiences Beautiful sustainable landscape design involves the design of experiences as much as the design of form and the design of ecosystems. These experiences are vehicles for connecting with, and caring for, the world around us. Through the experience of different types of beauty we come to notice, to care, to deliberate about our place in the world. In the phenomenological thought of scholars such as Merleau-Ponty and Berleant, these participatory environmental experiences not only break down the barriers between subject and object; they change us and, at times, have the capacity to challenge us, to provoke us to act. Many environmentalists cite their early experiences in the wilderness or the countryside – some nearby woodlot or creek where they learned to revel in the exuberance of successional plant growth in unlikely places, the adaptive shelters of insects, birds and animals – as the reason they became environmentalists. Designed landscapes, too, can provide such experiences if they afford experience of the wild, when the abundance, the excessiveness, and the tenacious persistence of plants, wildlife, and water are uncovered in the

"Beautiful sustainable landscape design involves the design of experiences as much as the design of form and the design of ecosystems."

Figure 27-33 The Silresim Chemical plant, Lowell, MA, USA, landscape framework plan, by Stoss Landscape Urbanism, is a form of ‘performance practice’ that envisions the remediation and re-use of a pollutedindustrial site over time. The biophysical processes of ground waterremediation and soil|plant regeneration occur in the public realm and are facilitated or witnessed by the neighbors. These transitional landscapes afford spaces for the routines of everyday life, sustaining culture as well as ecology. Their beauty unfolds over time, reminding neighbors that regeneration is slow, and uncertain. The representation of this dynamic is a key aspect in educating the public about the temporal aspect of the process. This project goes beyond ecological performance, also catalyzing social processes and new aesthetic experiences.

most unexpected places: city drainage ways, urban plazas and gardens, above and below elevated rail lines and highways. [14] 8. Sustainable beauty is particular, not generic. There will be as many forms of sustainability as there are places/cities/ regions. These beauties will not emulate their physical context but act as a magnifying glass, increasing our ability to see and appreciate the context. Sustainable landscape beauty can find the particular in the productive as well as the toxic, the transposed as well as the transgressive, the found and the made, the regenerative as well as the resilient. Sustainable beauty may be strange and surreal. It may be intimate and immense. It will be of its place whether an abandoned brownfield site, an obsolete navy shipyard, or a lumbered forest. And yet it will not simulate its place. It will be recognized as site-specific design, emerging out of its context but differentiated from it. 9. Sustainable beauty is dynamic, not static. The intrinsic beauty of landscape resides in its change over time. Landscape architecture’s medium shares many characteristics with architecture, dance and sculpture. Our medium is material and tactile; it is spatial. But more than its related fields, the landscape medium is temporal. Not only do we move through landscape, the landscape moves, changes, grows, declines. Beauty is ephemeral; it can be a fleeting event, captured once a year in the mix of a specific light angle, a particular slope of the ground, and a short-lived drop of a carpet of brilliant yellow leaves. Or it can be created by the long processes of stump and log decay, and of regeneration, in a forest garden. These changes are multiple and overlapping, operating at numerous scales and tempos: the spontaneous, successional vegetation growth on slag heaps, the tidal rhythms of water ebbing and flowing in a rocky channel next to a smooth, constant, gently tilting lawn, or the seasonal changes of temperature and plant growth. J.B. Jackson, the landscape historin, wrote that the act of designing landscape is a process of manipulating time (Jackson 1984:8). Since sustainable landscapes reveal, enable, repair and regenerate ecological processes, they are temporal and dynamic. Sustainable beauty arrests time, delays time, intensifies time; it opens up daily experience to what Michael Van Valkenburgh calls “psychological intimate immensity,” the wonder of urban social and natural ecologies made palpable through the landscape medium [15]. 10. Enduring beauty is resilient and regenerative. Antiquated conceptions of landscape beauty as generic, balanced, smooth, bounded, charming, pleasing and harmonious persist and must be reexamined through the lens of new paradigms of ecology. Projects that are dynamic rather than static can be designed for disturbance and resilience. Floods that are anticipated are not disasters but natural events, part of a regular disturbance regime. Plants that can sustain extreme spring high water are planted. Knowing that ice flows damage tree trunks, we specify species that regenerate with numerous new stems when damaged. The beauty of this type of landscape lies in the knowledge of its tenacity, its toughness, its resilience.

This sense of beauty, not as a set, unchanging concept but one that evolves over time in response to different needs or contexts, is accepted in many fields outside landscape architecture. This changing conception of beauty, based on the resilience of a designed landscape’s materials and not on an a priori set of forms or types, resonates with contemporary concerns as well as the early theoretical foundations of our profession. In a post-September 11th context where American urban space is subject to increasing standardization and surveillance due to a culture of fear and security, the adaptation and resilience of plants and paved surfaces to the disturbances of extreme weather, flooding, pollution, low light levels, evokes hope and inspires alternative models for coping with the uncertain. In one of his prescient articles that outlined many of the conundrums to be faced by American landscape architecture as it emerged as a discipline, Charles Eliot, Jr. established a position within the formal and informal debates of the 1890s by arguing that beauty was not intrinsic to either formal type. “The fact may not be explicable, but it is one of the commonplaces of science that the form which every vital product takes has been shaped for it by natural selection through a million ages, with a view to its use, advantage or convenience, and that beauty has resulted from that evolution. […] Whoever, regardless of circumstances, insists upon any particular style or mode of arranging land and its accompanying landscape, is most certainly a quack. He has overlooked the important basal fact that, although beauty does not consist in fitness, nevertheless all that would be fair must first be fit. True art is expressive before it is beautiful.” (Eliot, 1896: 133). Eliot recognized that changes in need, in society, and in the sciences, would alter cultural conceptions of beauty. Closer to our times, paradigm shifts in the ecological sciences have influenced cultural conceptions of what is fitting and beautiful in the natural world. Since the publication of Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature in 1969, scientific theories about ecosystem dynamics have changed considerably [16]. Resilience, adaptation and disturbance have replaced stability, harmony, equilibrium and balance as the operative words in ecosystem studies. Conceptions of stable, climax plant and animal communities have given way to an understanding of disturbance regimes, emergent and resilient properties, and chaotic self-organizing systems. These theories have enormous implications for landscape design, and yet twenty years after their general adoption in the sciences, many landscape architects and their clients operate on outdated, even romantic, conceptions of nature and its beauty. Just how beautiful is a green residential lawn maintained by pesticides and herbicides that are harmful to children, pets and songbirds? Recent ASLA conference themes are a case in point. During the 2006 conference there was little talk of brownfield sites; instead, ‘Green (not brown and gray) solutions only for a Blue Planet’. This past year’s theme was ‘Designing with Nature: The Art of Balance’. That sounded like a retrospective glance at landscape ecology and design from the 1950s-70s. As a professional organization, the ASLA needs to be more cognizant of contemporary ecological theory, especially given the recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report’s findings on global climate change and its implications for the future form of cities and settlements. Our adaptive designs must be part of resilient, adaptive, and regenerative urban form. [17]

"paradigm shifts in the ecological sciences have influenced cultural conceptions of what is fitting and beautiful in the natural world."

Twenty-first-century associations of resilience are as much cultural as ecological. Three American landscape architects, each committed to the concepts if not the rhetoric of sustainability, have recognized the limitations of the word ‘sustainable’, and the potential of conceiving landscape architecture as regenerative and resilient: John Lyle, Julie Bargmann and Randy Hester. [18] In Design for Ecological Democracy, Hester’s account of the principles that support enduring settlements, underscores the importance of replacing stability or balance with resilience: “[…] design of nature or mimicry of nature that allows human habitation to maintain itself efficiently and compatibly with its surrounding environment through often dramatic changes that threaten survival. Such design is the basis of resilient form that is fundamental to sustainable urban ecology […]. This ability to endure is based on, among other things, having an urban form that continually provides what a community needs, even in times of temporary crises. Resilient urbanity has the internal ability to persist - to recover easily without significant loss from illness, misfortune, attack, natural or social disaster, or other dramatic disturbance. And it can readily absorb change. A resilient city is able to retain the essence of its form even after it has been deformed. In this way, resilience seems a better word than sustainability for design goals for the city. Resilient form maintains itself efficiently and seamlessly with both the landscape and the cultural networks of which it is a part.” (Hester 2006: 138-139). 11. Landscape agency: from experiences to sustainable praxis

"The experience of designed landscape can be a spatial practice of noticing, wandering and wondering in, and caring about the environment."

The experience of designed landscape can be a spatial practice of noticing, wandering and wondering in, and caring about the environment. The experience of landscape can be a mode of learning and inculcating values. The final tenet of this manifesto underscores the multiple discourses and practices where sustainability resides. Sustainability is a position within environmental ethics, as well as techniques or tactics grounded in the natural sciences. Sustainability as an ethic is decidedly a middle-ground position between an egocentric and ecocentric worldview. It straddles the human and non-human, attempting a hybridity that see the interconnections between and across a homocentric and biocentric worldview [19]. I believe that the designed landscape can be built through various tactics, using sustainable ecotechnologies, but it can also be an aesthetic experience that changes people’s environmental ethics. And from my perspective the latter is the most important reason to care about sustainable landscape design. The apprehension and experience of beauty, especially new, challenging forms of beauty, can lead to attentiveness, empathy, love, respect, care, concern and action on the part of those who visit and experience designed landscapes. It will take more than the estimated 15,000 registered landscape architects or 30,000 members of the American Society of Landscape Architects to make the United States – the most energy consuming, waste producing, environmentally challenged developed country in the world – a sustainable culture. But multiply those numbers by the number of people who are our clients, who visit and frequent the streets, public spaces, parks, gardens and communities we design, and whose understanding of the connections between human consumption, waste, and habits and eco-system health might be altered because of an aesthetic experience they have. Not all change will, or has to be, based on ed-

ucation, guilt, or a sense of sacrifice. Sometimes, in the best of situations, persuasion takes place unknowingly, gradually, but convincingly, until the change is perceived to be internal and an act of personal will, not collective guilt. Sustaining beauty / sustaining culture The mass media is saturated with images and discussions of sustainability, green politics, and global climate change. During the past year around the annual celebration of Earth Day, a parka-wearing Leonardo DiCaprio shared the cover of Vanity Fair magazine with a small polar bear (May 2007), the Republican Governor of the State of California twirled a small globe on his finger like it was a basketball on the cover of Newsweek’s Leadership and the Environment issue (16 April 2007), Time magazine published a Special Double Issue entitled ‘The Global Warming Survival Guide: 51 Things you can do to make a difference’ (9 April 2007), and a New York Times Sunday Magazine cover adorned with an American flag made of green flower blossoms, moss, seed heads and leaves examined ‘The Greening of Global Geopolitics’ (15 April 2007). Design and shelter magazines run regular columns and issues on the greening of the design fields. Even Dwell. At Home in the Modern World magazine, dedicated to perpetuating modernist design, has run an article on sustainability in every issue since 2000. In a recent issue, ‘A New Shade of Green. Sustainability is here to Stay’, editor Sam Grawe captured the culture’s reaction to a year of green journalism in the wake of the unexpected popularity of Al Gore’s 2006 documentary film and book, An Inconvenient Truth, and his 2007 Nobel Peace Prize award (shared with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, for its analysis and synthesis of global research findings). “I have to be honest with you. I am getting tired of sustainability.” (Grawe 2007: 41). Are these forums the only effective ways to change values and practices? I think not. For as Grawe’s editorial attests, media saturation can as easily lead to cynicism as to environmentalism. Especially when it appears that every product and industry is now eco-friendly or environmentallyfriendly, from oversized SUV automobiles and ‘McMansion’ houses to oil companies; when the sustainability-obsessed become eco-bloggers monitoring their daily impact on the globe, and patrons of eco-chic night clubs who party in a space made of recycled, renewable, sustainable, and safe materials; and when the bio-physical world is depicted in ads for Home Depot hardware store as if were a toy or pet to be befriended and hugged. We need multiple forms and forums for caring and learning about the impact of our actions on the planet: some visual, some textual, and some experiential. As Lawrence Buell noted in Writing for an Endangered World, we need more than reports and data, we also need products of culture, narratives, images, and places to move us to act. In this regard, design matters and beauty matters. It moves something in our psyche, as the experience of a winter snowfall on the imprinted concrete waterfront promenade at Allegheny River Park, Pittsburgh, PA., demonstrates. In the absence of vegetation, in the linear marks left by imprinting native grasses in the concrete, water settles and freezes, icy shadows form, reminding us of what is absent. These ground marks intermingle in mysterious ways with the

"Designed landscapes need to be constructed human experiences as much as ecosystems."

motion of river water and the light from nearby streetlights. Where is man and nature there? Formal and informal? Ecology and technology? Aesthetics and sustainability? All superseded by the fleeting, yet memorable, recognition of and experience of a place known in, and over, time. It is not enough to design landscapes that incorporate best management practices, follow LEED (USGBC’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) criteria, and look as if they were not designed. It is not enough to emulate the admirable design forms or practices of our colleagues from afar. Designed landscapes need to be constructed human experiences as much as ecosystems. They need to move citizens to action. The designed landscapes of the world take up a small amount of the globe’s surface. Yet they are visited and inhabited by people who have a great impact on the environment in everything they do - where they live and how they commute, what they consume, and whom they elect to public office. The influence of designed landscapes might be much larger than their immediate influence on a local ecosystem or watershed, as worthwhile as designing a rain garden or a green roof that reduces storm water runoff may be. Many professions and disciplines will contribute to our understanding of sustainability. Landscape architects who are designers do so by making places that are constructed performing ecosystems and constructed aesthetic experiences. We are sustained by reducing, editing, doing less bad. But we are also sustained, and regenerated, through abundance, wonder, and beauty. The performance of a landscape’s appearance, and the experience of beauty, should have as much currency in debates about what a sustainable landscape might, and should, be as the performance of its ecological systems. I think, I hope, that such a shift might be one of the tools that jolts our clients and neighbors out of their complacency and inaction, transforming them into a new generation of environmentalist-citizens.

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Unintentional climate control. A greenhouse effect has cooled the climate of Almeria

A sea of plastic is not what most imagine sustainable agricultural practices to be, but amidst the negative impacts of plastic especially to ocean inhabitants there has been a number of favourable outcomes, such as higher food production rates whilst limiting agricultural land use, water and energy requirements. Additionally,

due to the reflectivity of white greenhouse tops, Almeria’s agricultural landscape underwent a cooling trend of 0.80C compared to its surroundings. Almeria’s farming methods have revealed itself not only as agriculturally effective, but also resulting in unintentional geoengineering effects. With further developments to find sustainable and effective alternatives in place of plastic, this could be a potential useful method of climate engineering where increasing food demand and global warming can be addressed collectively.

Almeira: The Sea of Plastic

Unintentional climate control. A greenhouse effect has cooled the climate of Almeria

Winslow Farm Conservancy, Hammonton, NJ, USA Martha Schwartz Partners

The Winslow Farm Conservancy serves as a model for potential land reclamation, transforming abandoned industrial landscape to a site where natural ecosystems were allowed to flourish but with the overarching theme of form and function. Not only is the conservancy home to the largest organic farm east of Mississippi it also operates as the training field for numerous champion retrievers, Schwartz transformed 600 acres of open space into a haven for wildlife and practicality as well as cutting down costs of construction by keeping a surplus of industrial material out of landfill. This project captures how form and function can impact the community’s perception of nature, remodelling what previously was an ‘eyesore’ to local residents into a model of innovative landscape design.

Winslow Farm Conservancy, Hammonton, NJ, USA by Martha Schwartz Partners

Le Petit Chalet Matthew Cunningham Landscape Design LLC

The site sits within Arcadia National Park surrounded by a number of state and federal conservations. The goal was to develop a design with various management strategies interwoven to assist the site’s regeneration all the while crafting a purposeful outdoor space which reflect Arcadia’s essence.

Le Petit Chalet emphasises the emotional connection between human and nature, carefully narrating visitors on a journey from domestic to wild spaces which correspond seamlessly with its charismatic surroundings.

Matthew Cunningham Landscape Design LLC: Le Petit Chalet

Ningbo Eco-Corridor: Resurrects Former Brownfield Hui-Li Lee, ASLA (lead designer)

A previously degraded post industrial landscape, the Ecological Corridor was reconstructed to benefit the overall ecosystem health of Ningbo city’s canals simultaneously providing a retreat for surrounding communities. Topography was designed in order to improve hydro-ecological processes, allowing water bodies to be purified by plants and in the process allow them to absorb essential nutrients, a process of intended symbiosis. This is a project which fulfils the needs of the community in addition to improving the interconnected ecosystem beyond its site boundaries.

Hui-Li Lee, ASLA (lead designer): Ningbo Eco-Corridor: Resurrects Former Brownfield

Framing Terrain and Water: Quzhou Luming Park Turenscape design

A “multifunctional green space that provides recreational opportunities for people in the city” and functions as a holistic ecosystem in the hopes of recovering cultural identity and a sense of belonging. The most notable aspect of Luming Park is the preservation of its natural processes and mosaic patterned landscape, little to no grading was performed, instead the raw preserved landscape provided a perfect canvas for the exploration of texture and meanings by the architect.

It is through design interpretations of the site’s natural and cultural stories whereby local communities are inspired to appreciate non-human agencies beyond its confines.

Turensccape design: Framing Terrain and Water: Quzhou Luming Park

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AMBIO, 36(8), 614–621. https://doi.org/10.1579/0044-7447(2007) 36[614:TAAHNO]2.0.CO;2 Trenberth, K. E., & Dai, A. (2007). Effects of Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption on the hydrological cycle as an analog of geoengineering. Geophysical Research Letters, 34(15), L15702–n/a. https:// doi.org/10.1029/2007GL030524 Yusoff, K. (2013). The Geoengine: Geoengineering and the Geopolitics of Planetary Modification. Environment and Planning. A, 45(12), 2799–2808. https://doi.org/10.1068/a45645

Art and Precedents: Adam Sebire., anthropoScene III : Hellisheiði. (2021) Bratton, B., Buck, H. J., & Yusoff, K. (2021). The planet after geoengineering: Design Earth (Rania Ghosn & El Hadi Jazairy). New York: Actar D. Hui-Li Lee, ASLA., Ningbo Eco-Corridor: Resurrects Former Brownfield Martha Schwartz Partners., Winslow Farm Conservancy, Hammonton, NJ, USA Matthew Cunningham Landscape Design LLC., Le Petit Chalet Olafur Eliasson., Glacial rock flower garden. (2016) Rachel Sussman., The oldest living things in the world. (2014) Studio Drift., Coded Nature, Drifter. (2018) Turenscape design., Framing Terrain and Water: Quzhou Luming Park