Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
This leads to a cautionary note about the strategic aspects of geoen-
gineering. It has potentially destructive as well as constructive uses. If
it can be used benignly to cool the earth, it can be used maliciously to
wreck another country's harvest. This prospect of climatic warfare was
emphasized by the founder of game theory, John von Neumann:
The most constructive schemes of climate control would have to be
based on insights and techniques that would also lend themselves
to forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined. . . . Useful and
harmful techniques lie everywhere so close together that it is never
possible to separate the lions from the lambs. This is known to all
who have so laboriously tried to separate secret, classifi ed science or
technology (military) from the open kind; success is never more
nor intended to be more than transient, lasting perhaps half a de-
cade. Similarly, a separation into useful and harmful subjects in
any technological sphere would probably diffuse into nothing in a
decade.
5
To me, geoengineering resembles what the doctors call “salvage
therapy”—a potentially dangerous treatment to be used when all else
fails. Doctors prescribe salvage therapy for people who are very ill and
when less dangerous treatments are not available. No responsible doctor
would prescribe salvage therapy for a patient who has just been diag-
nosed with the early stage of a treatable illness. Similarly, no responsible
country should undertake geoengineering as the fi rst line of defense
against global warming.
Geoengineering is particularly valuable exactly because it is salvage
therapy—it can be used in situations where it is most needed. In this
respect, it is like a fi re truck rather than fi re insurance. The fi re truck of
geoengineering can come to the rescue to slow or reverse rapid and po-
tentially dangerous warming. But this is no panacea. When a fi re truck
puts out a fi re, many of our prized possessions are wrecked by water
damage, and much cleanup is necessary. So fi re trucks and geoengi-
neering are useful for the worst emergencies but not as the fi rst line of
defense.
