AMHERST — Two UMass scientists have joined 42 other international polar experts to warn against the inefficiencies and dangers of engineering in extreme cold environments as a way to slow global warming in lieu of reducing reliance on fossil fuels.
“The expense, uncertainty and potentially dangerous consequences are just making it very clear that ideas like this are not a climate change panacea,” said Robert DeConto, director of UMass School of Earth & Sustainability, explaining why he co-authored an article in the journal Frontiers in Science, a publication that specializes in advances accelerating solutions to global challenges.
“The public should not think that we are going to be able to engineer a way out of this,” said DeConto, who was joined in authoring the article by UMass colleague Julie Brigham-Grette, head of UMass Department of Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences.
Geoengineering, which is defined as technology that manipulates the natural world to mitigate impacts of greenhouse gases, has gained significant attention in the scientific and public sphere. However, these engineering proposals, like technology that can capture carbon from the atmosphere, remain highly controversial even as public and private entities continue to researching and funding them.
Leading experts in the glacial and polar sciences critically analyze five of these popular geoengineering projects in a journal article, entitled “Safeguarding the Polar Regions from Dangerous Geoengineering.”
Some proposals artificially increase the Earth’s ability to reflect solar rays by releasing airborne particles into the atmosphere or glass microbeads on sea-ice. Others attempt to divert warming waters from interacting with ice and glaciers by either drilling drain holes in glaciers, or deploying a flexible barrier between warming water and melting sea ice. One proposal also suggests that humans can artificially thicken glaciers by spraying thousands of gallons of sea water over the ice during winter.
In each case, the experts conclude that these projects disrupt the natural ecosystem, and that the cost and governance required to manage them are not compatible with global socioeconomics.
Instead, the scientists argue, resources used for these purposes should go to united efforts to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and install renewable energy.
“Big point that we really try to make in the paper again and again is that transferring to renewable energy is so much cheaper than going through these other routes and these other techniques,” Brigham-Grette said. “These five that we cover in the paper in particular, are just band-aids. They’re not going to solve the problem.”
The article goes so far as to claim that these proposals “distract” from effective climate change solutions.
“The root of the problem is the unmitigated use of fossil fuels, and we need to get a handle on that using technologies we understand and know can work,” DeConto said.
Since many of these geoengineering proposals are in the early-to-middle stages of development, the journal paper explains, the unintended consequences of them remain poorly understood. Brigham-Gette and DeConto warn it’s highly possible that impacts will trickle down to Massachusetts. Dimming sunlight with airborne particles could impact local agriculture production, for instance.
These five [technologies] that we cover in the paper in particular are just band aids. They’re not going to solve the problem.
Julie Brigham-Grette, Umass Polar Scientist
“Ice sheet-scale engineering interventions are not only largely unproven, the required financial resources would be monumental, even relative to the projected costs of protecting an entire city like Boston from sea level rise and flooding using more realistic, local, and proven adaptation methods,” DeConto said in a statement.
None of the proposals address rising acidity of ocean waters as carbon dioxide absorbs into the sea, Brigham-Gette said. Ocean acidification hinders mollusk’s ability to create shells, posing issues for local aquaculture in Cape Cod.
Brigham-Gette adds that these projects require indefinite resources to maintain with little proven payoff. Reducing ice melt from glaciers can lower the rate of sea-level rise and protect coastal communities, even in Massachusetts. But drilling into a glacier over a mile thick and larger than the continental United States consume a plethora of resources on an unproven solution.
“The problem is always that we can’t scale it fast enough,” she said. “It would be great if we could just, like filtering the air in my office, I could just filter the air of the entire world for CO2. That would be simple. But we cannot, at the present time scale it to make a difference.”
Instead, experts urge scientists, policymakers and the public to put resources earmarked for geoengineering into decarbonization. Reducing reliance on fossil fuels and increasing capacity for solar and wind energy are not only proven ways to combat climate change, Brigham-Gette said, but can scale globally in a short timeline.
“This united, intensified effort needs to be focused on the mitigation and just keeping the fossil fuel in the ground in the first place rather than trying to think up some fanciful ideas that might solve the problems after the fact,” DeConto said.