Using Science to Fight Climate Change
To the Editor:
Re “Chemo for the Planet” (column, May 19):
The biggest obstacle to policies that would reduce carbon use and forestall climate change is that people don’t think clearly about long-term risks. This is seen in many spheres. While everyone knows that exercise and better diet could prevent many diseases, this is not a sufficient motivation for many of us. Humans are just not good at making inconvenient choices now for a benefit decades in the future, and we grasp at any straw that suggests the choice can be put off.
Joe Nocera provides such a straw. While giving a few vague mentions of the risks of geoengineering, the overall thrust of the column is that technology could solve this problem for us. Don’t worry, smart scientists are figuring it out. Go ahead, buy that gas guzzler, and “drill, baby, drill!”
As a 20-year-old cigarette smoker, I told myself that medical research was likely to cure lung cancer by the time I was old enough to get sick; it took me two decades to quit. We are as addicted to carbon use as I was to cigarettes, and elevating geoengineering as “part of a ‘portfolio’ ” invites us to delay hard choices as the planet approaches the point of no return. WILLIAM S. KESSLER
Seattle
To the Editor:
Implementing geoengineering to counteract the effects of greenhouse gas-induced global warming adds new experimental uncertainty to our planet’s already changing climate. Our first planetary experiment has been the emission of these gases for some 150 years. Its harms are only recently beginning to be felt worldwide. The second experiment, geoengineering such as injecting sulfur-based aerosols into the atmosphere, adds further unknowns to the complexities created by the first.
International agreement must govern the second experiment, but the world’s nations only now may finally be reaching agreement on the first, limiting emissions. Currently any nation with high emissions, unilaterally harming all nations’ economies, could just as easily single-handedly start a geoengineering project, potentially affecting other nations’ well-being with impunity.
The solution to global warming must be meaningful emissions reduction by all, not gambling with chemo for the planet. HENRY E. AUER
New Haven
To the Editor:
Joe Nocera’s otherwise helpful column suggests that we turn to geoengineering instead of “hoping that humans will start reducing their carbon use.” It’s dead wrong to suggest that geoengineering should be used to get us out of the need to cut emissions. If we want a stable climate, we will need to stop using the atmosphere as a dump for our waste carbon. Moreover, we can make deep cuts in emissions with tools available today such as solar and nuclear power.
Mr. Nocera cites me as “perhaps the foremost proponent of geoengineering.” I am not a proponent of geoengineering; I’m a proponent of reality, and thus a proponent of research that could teach us more about the efficacy and risks of geoengineering. DAVID KEITH
Calgary, Alberta
The writer is a professor of applied physics and of public policy at Harvard and executive chairman of Carbon Engineering, which develops technology to capture carbon from the atmosphere.
To the Editor:
The vagaries associated with artificially reducing sunlight to cool the planet are sufficiently frightening alone to dismiss “solar radiation management” as a solution to warming. But if this unnatural darkening of the skies were tried and there also occurred one of the unpredictable, but occasionally huge, natural volcanic eruptions such as Krakatoa that have caused “volcanic winters,” the combination could be catastrophic. In fact, the cure might be far worse than the malady. JOHN WALDMAN
Sea Cliff, N.Y.
The writer is a professor of biology at Queens College.
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