AgroParisTech

Here's the English text for next week's lessons (Monday and Thursday). I'll try to post the French text today or tomorrow.

New Climate Battle Commences

US group promotes geoengineering

International pressure stops British tests

A global battle over geoengineering – dramatic environmental measures to cool the planet – was looming this week after a powerful US lobby group called for more research just as British scientists were forced by international resistance to indefinitely postpone a government-funded study into the use of sulphates to reflect sunlight away from the Earth.

According to an 18-member panel convened by the Bipartisan Policy Centre in Washington, geoengineering – or “climate remediation”, as they seek to call it – is no substitute for cutting emissions but could offer the quickest and cheapest way to reduce temperatures and help the world’s poorest people, who are affected most by climate change.

The centre is part-funded by oil, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and appears to represent the most powerful US academic, military, scientific and corporate interests. It also lobbies for free trade, US military supremacy and corporate power.

Its two-year study involved atmospheric scientists, former government officials, leading engineers and representatives from industry and the military. The drastic geoengineering measures that the centre argues should be considered include blasting thousands of tonnes of dust particles into space to reflect sunlight, imitating artificial volcanoes, fertilising the ocean with iron nanoparticles to increase levels of phytoplankton, genetically engineering to be paler in colour to reflect sunlight back to space, and vacuuming carbon from the atmosphere.

It urged like-minded countries to work together to conduct radical large-scale experiments, and governments to provide high-level backing.

“The primary and single most important recommendation of our committee is that the government start doing research,” said Jane Long, a director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “It’s very critical that we not proceed in ignorance.”

The report said it was too early to deploy these technologies, but argued that co-ordinated research was needed in case “the climate system reaches a ‘tipping point’ and swift remedial action is required”.

But the panel was condemned as biased after it was found to include no scientific critics of the technologies but many leading geoengineers, some of whom stand to gain financially from patents and research grants.

Stephen Gardiner, a philosophy professor at Washington University in Seattle, resigned from the panel earlier this year. “There has been a spate of reports over the past few years where the participants have been either strongly overlapping or drawn from a very small group, especially on the science side. This creates an appearance of national and international consensus that may only be skin deep,” he said.

Panellists included atmosphere scientist Kim Caldeira, from Stanford University, and David Keith, a researcher at the University of Calgary in Canada, who manage Bill Gates’s geoengineering research budget. Both scientists have patents pending and were members of a Royal Society working group on geoengineering that recommended more research.

Also on the panel was David Whelan, chief scientist with Boeing, who used to work in the US defence department and leads a group working on “ways to find new solutions to the world’s most challenging problems”.

Guardian Weekly, 14.10.11