Cozying Up to the Law of Unintended Consequences
Cozying Up to the Law of Unintended Consequences
A way (maybe) of rating potential accidents
When I was a kid my dad had a bunch of old Mechanix Illustrated and Popular Mechanics magazines dating back to the 1940s and 1950s. Almost before I could read, I was poring over illustrations like the following:
This picture is part of a glorious two-page spread illustrating a serious article written by Wallace W. Ashley and Elmer V. Swan. According to them, ‘Professor Julian Huxley’ proposed using nuclear bombs to melt the polar ice caps. This would moderate our northern climate, eliminating pesky cold snaps and opening up shipping across the top of the world.
My scans don't do justice to this gatefold majesty. On the left we see a full-page image of nukes shattering the ice caps. As the eye pans across the page, the sky becomes filled with a radiant glow (presumably the comforting background radiation that will keep the Arctic warm for its new inhabitants) while basking under it is a new urban Center of Commerce.
These guys had invented terraforming.
Their first intended target: Earth.
This stunning picture was drawn by the legendary A.C. Radebaugh, who did many other amazing illustrations for articles such as Frank Tinsley’s “Flying Saucers For Everybody” (another personal favourite). I can’t recommend Radebaugh and Tinsley’s work enough. They exemplify the particular audacity of the mid-twentieth century that informed much of 1900s science fiction. Think of them as the subconscious archetypes that drive Elon Musk’s ambitions. A malformed audacity, to be sure, but at least an acknowledgment of just how much power the Atomic Age placed in our hands.
Stochastic Geoengineering
It’s useful to think about humanity’s present activities in terms of terraforming. I’m tempted to stop using the terms ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ at all and just go with ‘stochastic geoengineering’ to describe what we’re doing. This is a good framing because it acknowledges that Western civilization is already engaged in terraforming, or geoengineering our world; we’re just doing it in an unplanned way. Such a framing acknowledges our power to take charge of the project or shut it down. This makes it easier for us to adopt the right kind of audacity for dealing with our global problems. Most discourse today focuses on humanity’s responsibility for the climate crisis, but we have to recognize our agency as well—that is, our ability to steer the ‘project.’
Let’s say, then, that we listened to Professor Julian Huxley and for the past eighty years have been engaged in a terraforming effort. The plan is to green the Arctic, using the much-gentler intervention of CO2 rather than nukes.
Then we can ask, how’s the project going? Well, the terraforming is definitely happening, in the sense that it’s changing the world’s climate system. The Arctic is warming at three times the rate of the rest of the planet.
But there have also been some, shall we say, unintended consequences.
During the anomalous heatwaves of the past two years, nearly every region of the planet has suffered destructive wildfires punctuated by once-in-a-century storms and wild flooding. Our world is warming too fast for nonhuman creatures to adapt, so we’re experiencing a mass extinction. Right about now the managers of our imaginary project would be getting fired for not anticipating crazy knock-on effects such as the likely shutdown of the AMOC ocean current. If AMOC dies, winter sea ice could extend as far south as Britain, while continental Europe’s average temperature could drop by 10 C. The Amazon will be replaced by grasslands, while paradoxically, the Sahara may bloom with new forests.
Geoengineering Panic
Are there interventions we can make, possibly on the scale that Huxley proposed, that could halt or even reverse climate change? Many have been proposed, ranging from ocean iron fertilization to stratospheric aerosol injection, accelerated weathering, and even an orbital solar unshade. But how do we compare them? And are the risks of unintended side effects too great for us to try anything? Will any human ‘doing’ just make things worse because technological innovations’ unintended consequences will always be bad?
The American Geophysical Union has been wrestling with these questions and has released a set of ethical guidelines for the study and possible implementation of geoengineering. These are good, and include, for example, not using any geoengineering project as a substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. After all, geoengineering treats the symptoms, whereas emissions are the cause. We can’t treat the first without addressing the second.
The AGU has developed five principles to guide any geoengineering effort: 1. Responsible research, 2. Climate justice, 3. Inclusive public participation, 4. Transparency, and 5. Informed governance. I think these are great; I also think that every single one could still be used to justify delaying action until it’s too late. Based on how the entire world has kicked this problem down the road for more than thirty years so far, I worry: what if we are already out of time? What if while we do thorough and transparent research, ensure public participation, and design a just transition, the world burns?
Given how our ungoverned terraforming ‘project’ is going so far, deep suspicion of any further intervention seems reasonable. In service of inclusive public participation and informed governance, though, I’d like to make a couple of points about the framework.
Firstly, we need to acknowledge that we are already geoengineering. We’re just doing it randomly. Isn’t it a good idea to stop this stochastic terraforming? But if it is, this “stopping” process is also an intervention—a “doing.” Even shutting down CO2 emissions and stepping back to ‘let Nature heal’ (whatever that means) is a kind of geoengineering. In that case, we’re just reversing the goal of our hypothetical terraforming project.
Secondly, as I said above, we may not have the luxury of time to do all the necessary research and public consultation before committing to a geoengineering effort. If extinction rates accelerate, dead zones keep spreading in the oceans, and Arctic permafrost collapses releasing cataclysmic amounts of methane, we’ll have to act even if we don’t understand all the consequences. I’ll suggest a framework below for making that kind of decision.
The Unintended
I agree with the AGU that we have to ‘science the shit’ out of every possible geoengineering response to the crisis. Yet no matter how much studying we do, there will always be uncertainties; we have to face the fact that any action we take on a global scale will have unintended consequences. This includes doing nothing, and it includes ‘letting Nature heal itself.’
It’s fair to say that Julian Huxley wasn’t aware of the unintended consequences that might come from nuking the Arctic. “Can We Atomize the Arctic?” perfectly illustrates the perils of shifting from accidentally to deliberately intervening in geophysical systems. There will be unintended consequences and we obviously want to avoid the kind of fiasco that atomzing the arctic would have created. But at some point, the catastrophes from our current ‘project’ may become intolerable. Then, we will have to choose between the unintended effects of doing nothing, or those of doing something.
People today are skeptical of technology, and “Can We Atomize the Arctic” shows why. It seems natural to assume that the side effects of deliberate technological interventions such as accelerated weathering or solar radiation management will be worse than those from only reducing emissions. The logic here is that by adding yet one more human intervention to the planet’s natural systems, we are adding uncertainty; and this can’t be good.
To be fair, we only have the example of how our current industrial processes can destroy the environment. We’ve never seen a truly Solarpunk society. Based on what our civilization has done so far, it’s easy to conflate technology with environmental destruction. If we assume that these two necessarily go together—that future industries must behave like twentieth-century industries—it can easily seem that no technological intervention can resolve our global environmental crisis.
There truly are no technological ‘quick fixes’ to the causes of global warming. But there may well be fixes to its most destructive symptoms. For the many species who share our planet, these could mean the difference between life and extinction. For me, this is a moral principle that trumps human ethical considerations, even those of the AGU. We have a duty to deploy any method that will reduce our impact on our fellow Earthlings.
But there’s the rub. How can we tell in advance which intervention will have the least disastrous side effects? Without deep and specific research into each option, are we forced into a leap of faith with the fate of the world depending on us?
Thermodynamics as a Foresight Tool
Maybe not. Maybe there is a way to compare options even when we can’t know their unintended consequences.
For global warming driven by greenhouse gases, it starts by remembering that at its core this is a physics-driven problem. Step back and look at climate chaos in thermodynamic terms. If you do, one important principle stands out:
Adding more free energy into a system increases its potential number of states.
The more energy you put into a physical system, the more it’s able to do—the more potential consequences it has. In the logic of geoengineering, as Earth’s temperature increases, so do unanticipated events—heatwaves, floods, the shutdown of AMOC, and so on.
Professor Julian Huxley’s proposal isn’t horrifying just because it uses nukes, but because it adds so much energy into the Arctic that catastrophic chaos is the guaranteed outcome.
The idea that adding free energy increases the potential number of system states is a restatement of the principle of entropy. Hopefully, I’ve not gotten it too wrong; if you’re a physicist, I’m sure you’ll have nits to pick with this oversimplification. In general, though, in the present context, this idea gives us a little heuristic we can apply to proposals to intervene, or not, in the climate.
It’s not about whether we know what we’re doing by ‘tuning the knobs’ of the climate—we don’t, and we won’t. The relevant question is, which introduces more free energy into the planetary system: doing nothing, or a given intervention?
Applying the Heuristic
You can ask this question for any action we might take. For example, does reducing emissions reduce the energy in the system, or increase it? If done right, it will reduce the energy. It could easily increase it, though, if we replaced fossil fuels with something that added heat in other ways. Compare solar power satellites with ground-based solar and wind power, for example. Ground-based renewables take energy already in the global system and transform it into electricity, which is then used to do work, and the residue is returned to the system. After construction and installation, renewables do not add energy to the climate. Solar power satellites do, because they capture energy that would otherwise bypass the Earth. After it’s used to do work, this extra energy has only one place to go: the earthly climate. If we switched from fossil fuels and ground-based renewables to solar power satellites, they would cause some global warming on their own, though much less than the wasteful burning of fossil fuels. The manufacture and maintenance of renewables also require mining and industry, which must be factored in when judging whether they are better for the climate. They are, of course—just consider that 50% of the ships on the ocean at any given time are transporting either coal or oil.
What’s true for solar power satellites is also true for traditional nuclear, fusion, and geothermal sources. Each adds new energy to the climate system. Therefore, from a strictly thermodynamic point of view, solar and wind power will always trump any other energy source at the global level. They redirect energy that’s already in the system while all other sources add energy—and therefore increase the possible states of the climate system.
Of course, nothing’s that simple. Wind turbines can change their local microclimate by dampening airflow, and large solar installations shade the ground, advantaging some plants and pollinators and disadvantaging others. I’m talking here about a global calculation of cost-benefits; in some cases, a ‘small’ local unintended consequence could be catastrophic. So take this approach with a healthy grain of salt and remember—I’m proposing it for decision-making in a crisis, not as a way we’d think if we had the time to study our options.
By this reasoning, the current project is to pump gigatonnes of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere; this increases the energy available to drive hurricanes and floods. Reducing or eliminating these emissions means less free energy. Unfortunately, emission reductions won’t work fast enough to prevent catastrophic human misery and an extinction event. Hence geoengineering; and we can ask the same questions about its techniques.
Whether we can anticipate all the side effects of a given geoengineering effort isn’t the point—because we can’t. The point is, will a particular method add free energy to the global climate system, or reduce it?
For example, would the industrial effort required to sustain the injection of aerosols into the upper atmosphere, plus those aerosols, increase the free energy in the climate system, or reduce it?
Limitations to the Heuristic
This simple calculus doesn’t apply to those interventions we make that directly poison the ecosystem, such as ocean acidification. It also doesn’t apply to direct habitat loss due to deforestation, fires and pollution. In those cases, the analogous question of “should I perturb this system that I don’t understand?” does. For example, if we don’t comprehend the ecosystem that depends on the metal-rich nodules that grow on the ocean floor, then maybe we shouldn’t strip-mine them. In such a case, there is no heuristic—just a precautionary principle based on the history of man-made catastrophes.
Some geoengineering approaches come with the risk of termination shock if they’re discontinued suddenly; this has to be factored in as well.
I may also be completely wrong with this analysis. Maybe it’s irresponsible to think that there is any way to anticipate the impact of intervening with the climate system vs. leaving it alone. Maybe we really should avoid intentional geoengineering. And then, finally, maybe we actually have the time to fully research all our choices. That would be a very good thing.
So. Should we atomize the Arctic? Well, maybe—if doing so reduced the total amount of free energy in the climate system (and could be done without, you know, any of the effects that you generally get from nuking things). So no of course not, but that doesn’t mean that similarly audacious plans for mitigating climate change should be rejected simply because they’d alter the dynamics of the system deliberately rather than through neglect.
In general, less energy=fewer unanticipated consequences.
We are geoengineering already. I think it behooves us to design better interventions that add less chaos to the world; first and foremost, by getting off fossil fuels, but then… what?
What do you think? Should we try to address the monumentally destructive symptoms of global warming—or just the ultimate cause, even if that won’t mitigate the symptoms for generations? Which is worse? I don’t know—but we may need to decide sooner than we expected.
—K