Global warming has preoccupied public policy debate in the developed countries for more than 20 years. The UN established its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the pre-eminent global authority on the subject in 1988. In the ensuing two decades, this advisory agency - part science, part government - has published a number of climate alarms, each more disturbing than the last.
In its fourth and most recent report, published in 2007, the IPCC warned that greenhouse gas emissions would confound the world (with heat waves, droughts and rising seas) for centuries. For this scare, it shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, the former vice-president of the United States who surpasses even the IPCC in cataclysmic concern.
So what have we done to lessen the destructive consequences of this impending and certain environmental disaster? In a paper released earlier this month, two climate change authorities reckon that we - meaning the world - have achieved zilch.
J. Eric Bickel is an assistant professor in the graduate program of engineering research at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. Lee Lane is co-director of the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute's non-partisan Geoengineering Project. In their paper ("An Analysis of Climate Engineering as a Response to Climate Change"), the two base a bleak assessment of future achievement - which will probably be not much - on past achievement.
"On this score, the historical record is clear," they say. They note that 2008 marked the 20th anniversary of the first meeting of the IPCC, whose mission was to devise the solution to global warming. Yet in 2008, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that global emissions of carbon dioxide were more than one-third higher than they were in 1988 - and that the rate of increase had accelerated. In fact, Prof. Bickel and Mr. Lane say, emissions grew four times more quickly between 2000 and 2007 than they did between 1990 and 1999.
"Thus, 20 years of protracted diplomatic talk and laborious scientific study," they say, "have so far failed to move the needle on emission rates." As for the countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol, "most signatories are failing to reduce emissions, much less meet their targets." The trend lines remain clear. Essentially, the authors suggest, there is no reason to think that anything will be done, notwithstanding the increase in rhetoric.
Prof. Bickel and Mr. Lane are not skeptics of man-made global warming ("It is equally clear that human activities can add to the [greenhouse gas] stocks in the Earth's atmosphere.") They simply think that there must be a better way to deal with it. They could very well be right. As long as global-warming strategies require that countries compete for progressively more highly taxed fossil fuels, an international consensus will remain elusive, and action will remain improbable.
Thus Prof. Bickel and Mr. Lane advocate a radically different greenhouse gas strategy. Based on the alternative solution they suggest, we can largely forget the various methods now promoted to ration fossil fuels. Instead, they say, go with the technologies that could enable a few advanced and wealthy countries to regulate the amount of solar radiation that reaches Earth.
This is solar radiation management (SRM), the introduction of reflective particles into the stratosphere to deflect the sun's rays and thereby offset increases in greenhouse gas emissions - or, more simply, the introduction of salt water mist into ocean clouds.
Prof. Bickel and Mr. Lane suggest that the reflection of a small amount of the sunlight that strikes Earth, perhaps 1 or 2 per cent, would cool the planet by an amount equal to the warming that can be attributed to a doubling of pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases.
Past volcanic eruptions, they note, have proved that small amounts of matter in the upper atmosphere can significantly cool the planet.
The economics of this alternative are encouraging. Prof. Bickel and Mr. Lane conclude from a review of the scientific literature that the cost of SRM would be a fraction of the cost of rationing fossil fuel. "[S]ome of the SRM concepts," they say, "appear to have very low deployment costs." One technology - the salt water mist - appears to have a benefit-cost ratio of 5,000-to-1. With this technology, cooling the planet might cost millions or billions, rather than trillions.
Prof. Bickel and Mr. Lane are the first experts to report back in this year's Copenhagen Consensus program directed by Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish academic and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. As he does annually, Prof. Lomborg asked 24 scientists (including Nobel winners) to answer a question that forces them to make benefit-cost policy choices. The 2009 question: "If the global community wants to spend, say, $250-billion (U.S.) per year for the next 10 years to diminish the adverse effects of climate changes, and to do the most good for the world, which solutions would yield the greatest net benefits?"
Prof. Bickel and Mr. Lane say a mere 0.3 per cent of this money ($800-million a year), along with 10 years of research, could produce the science required to deploy a fleet of automated, wind-driven sailing ships capable of spraying ocean clouds with a salt water mist - which, in turn, would reflect enough sunshine to cool the world.
