One of the courses when I taught at the University of Hawaii was Environmental Engineering. I've been involved with a variety of global climate change efforts, and hosted an international summit in Honolulu on how best to remediate global warming. The group decided to put together a pre-proposal, with an appeal for less than 1% of the future scientific research funds to be allocated.
As chairman and principal investigator, I visited with Bob Corell, who in the 1990's headed the National Science Foundation program on this field. However, almost everyone in leadership was a scientist, and Bob I knew when he was on the ocean engineering faculty at the University of New Hampshire. His Wikipedia info indicates he was also an oceanographer. I rather doubt that. He was closely linked to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was co-awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize
A little more than a quarter century ago he used my Manoa Campus Office to head a national effort to gain an engineering center related to ocean resources. At that time I was director of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute and was focused on the Blue Revolution and that international team to initiate remediation. So when Bob soon thereafter joined NSF to head their global warming administration I went to see him with that remediation proposal. Yes, he agreed that the amount we were seeking was minimal, but his recommendation was to hold back a few years and first see what the scientists learn. There has since then been NO comprehensive program to develop potential technological solutions to global warming. Funding for this field remains miniscule. We've lost almost 40 years of time.
Eight years ago the Huffington Post published my article on the Geoengineering of Climate Change. To quote:
There are those who feel that there is no cause for concern at this time about the increasing amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and if you trace who they are — as for example by perusing through the comments of postings like this — organizations like the Advancement of Sound Science Center or the Heartland Institute seem to regularly pop up. Searching further, you see that companies like Exxon Mobil provide supporting funds. Our White House provides encouragement and Republicans more than Democrats side with these detractors.
For all I know, they might actually be right. However, let’s, for the sake of discussion, say that global heating is real and our world leaders are unable to agree on a workable solution in time. What if the situation gets so bad that virtually instant solutions will be required to save our civilization? I provide a wide variety of answers in SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth (seen in the box on the right), but for the purpose of this article, let us look at something called global geoengineering.
Already, a decade ago, I was promoting the Blue Revolution as a possible solution:
One I favor (see the chapter on the Blue Revolution in the book mentioned above) has to do with an Apollo Project equivalent of building an armada of open ocean grazing platforms powered by ocean thermal energy conversion to suck up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while providing new habitats, green materials, next generation fisheries and sustainable fuels. Alas, such an effort will take decades and, horrors, maybe result in a United Nations of a thousand members.
Appropriately enough, soon following that paper, HuffPo published Blue Revolution. Here is a list of current thinking on warming solutions from The Guardian. Hint: researchers are afraid to bring this option to the attention of President Donald Trump mostly because they fear he will then say, aha, then we really don't today need to do anything about it.
The problem with ideas like pumping the sky full of chemicals is that this will be expensive, and worse, could have side effects that could be truly troublesome. Let's take reforestation as another example. This is just an expensive delay bridge because these trees will eventually die, and in addition to, in time, releasing all the carbon dioxide it sucked up, return it back into the atmosphere, plus unknown amounts of methane, which is 25 times worse.
Froma Harrop recently had an op-ed entitled, We must ask: Would Climate Engineering be playing God? It's a worthy read summarizing the field. To quote, she says:
There are basically two approaches to climate engineering. One is to capture greenhouse gas emissions and bury them. The other, more controversial idea, is to reflect the energy from sunlight back into space. This could be done through ginormous mirrors or by spraying aerosols into the atmosphere to make the Earth shinier (and, therefore, more reflective).
There are other ideas floating around, but all of them cost money. Not one turns a profit. Except for the Blue Revolution. Read what I wrote last month.
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