An eye-opening look at climate change
New Gwynne Dyer book explores controversial topics such as geoengineering, solar radiation management
INTERVENTION EARTH: LIFE-SAVINGS IDEAS FROM THE WORLD’S CLIMATE ENGINEERS
By Gwynne Dyer Random House Canada 352 pages, $36.95
When Gwynne Dyer published “Climate Wars” in 2008, the journalist and historian thought he was done with the subject.
But in the interval, “there has been a significant loss of faith in the notion that emission cuts alone can stop us short of reaching the tipping points.” The first book concluded that that discussion around geo-engineering needed to happen relatively soon; this book opens by asserting that the time is now.
This comes from three years of Interviewing 100 climate scientists, questioning and contextualizing their arguments – and they are arguments – about the huge promises and complications of what’s also known as “climate engineering.”
CLEAR AND INFORMED
“Intervention” is organized into four sections: “The Planetary Trajectory”; “All About Emissions”; “Climate Geopolitics”; “Desperate Scientists and Last-ditch Ideas.” (There’s also a “List of Interviewees”, Endnotes and an Index.)
There are lots of abbreviations: CDR (Carbon Dioxide Removal); DAC (Direct Air Capture); Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS); and perhaps most importantly, SRM (Solar Radiation Management).
“There are more and less desirable techniques within each category, but this is increasingly where the battle lines are being drawn: Between CDR on the one hand, and more direct interventions like SRM on the other.” There are many strategies for us to encounter and grasp (indeed this review could be consumed by simply listing all of them), but Dyer’s clear writing and informed voice keep us sorted.
THE HISTORIAN
Dyer is perhaps first and best known as a military historian, with trenchant, expansive, and accessible books about war and warfare.
His perspective shifted and refocused as the nature, equipment, goals, and theatre of conflict changed through the latter half of the 20th and into the 21st century.
But his job is to assess threats, and climate change is the world’s new frontline.
FOUR SECTIONS
In Part One, he “explores the recent research into non-linear effects that has forced scientists to conclude that ‘runaway’ warming is indeed possible, has happened in the past, and could be triggered by far less humancaused heating than we had previously thought.”
Part Two aims “to arrive at a realistic estimate of how much emissions can be cut and how quickly.”
The third section “is about how the political environment will evolve as the climate worsens.”
Then “I hope to have shown that we are likely to run out of time faster than many of these promising ideas can be deployed at scale to save us. At some point very soon, I will argue, we must have the great SRM debate.”
KIND OF A GUIDEBOOK
So it’s a lot, even in such a summation, and it’s an upsetting lot to boot. But this is an author who previously titled a book on Islamic State Terrorism “Don’t Panic.” What he’s put together here is a kind of guidebook. Action must be taken, and it must be quick, but it is still possible.
Complex ideas and concepts – Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, control theory — are explained, paced by mini-interviews and callout quotes. There are a lot of numbers; numbers are what these scientists study and program, pivotally the global warming threshold of +1.5C or +2C per year, in application to global spaces and systems.
For example, SRM, though Dyer cautions it “is not a sleek getaway vehicle that will let us leave the drudgery of emissions cuts and carbon dioxide removal behind. It’s relatively cheap and fast-acting, but it cannot set us free; it can only buy us more time for the long haul and the heavy lifting to happen.”
COLLECTIVE ACTION NEEDED
Individual actions are not the answer now. Collective, political decisions are the way forward, through, and beyond this peril. This requires both facing facts and thinking big.
“Even 10 years ago, few people realized it was going to be like this. Most of those who were aware of climate change at all assumed that the problem would be solved mainly by cutting emissions, and that normal service could be restored once we got that under control. Now our scientists are looking into grinding up mountains and dumping them into the oceans to combat acidification.
"They are learning to take carbon dioxide out of the air and bury it underground. They’re debating ways to prevent our chemical wastes from destroying the ozone layer, to disperse iron-salt aerosols from merchant ships in order to remove methane from the atmosphere, to find microbes that will create artificial foods in bioreactors for animals and people so that we can return agricultural land to the wild. That’s the sort of work that planetary engineers do: ‘the creaseless intricate task of keeping all the global cycles in balance’.”
Does that sound impossibly futuristic? Dyer, who does the research, remains hopeful.
"We have collectively noticed that we have a problem.” Now we need to collectively work on the solution.