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Climate Engineering in the Anthropocene - YouTube
Clive Hamilton
Price: £20.00
This book goes to the heart of the unfolding reality of the twenty-first century: international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have all failed and before the end of the century Earth is projected to be warmer than it has been for 15 million years. The question, "can the crisis be avoided?" has been superseded by a more frightening one, "what can be done to prevent the devastation of the living world?". And the disturbing answer, now under wide discussion both within and outside the scientific community, is to seize control of the very climate of the Earth itself. Clive Hamilton begins by exploring the range of technologies now being developed in the field of geoengineering - the intentional, enduring, large-scale manipulation of Earth's climate system. He lays out the arguments for and against climate engineering, and reveals the extent of vested interests linking researchers, venture capitalists, and corporations. He then examines what it means for human beings to be making plans to control the planet's atmosphere, probes the uneasiness we feel with the notion of exercising technological mastery over nature, and challenges the ways we think about ourselves and our place in the natural world.
Clive Hamilton is Vice-Chancellor's Chair and professor of public ethics, Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University, Canberra. His previous books include three volumes devoted to climate change. He lives in Canberra, Australia.
http://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?K=9780300186673
Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering by Clive Hamilton
28 March 2013
Steve Yearley assesses a timely critique of controversial plans to manage climate change
Most activists and commentators feel glumly pessimistic because of the lack of progress in climate change negotiations. In the meantime, global carbon emissions continue and even rise, atmospheric carbon dioxide builds up, and deadlines for action go whooshing past unheeded. If we can’t agree a way to cut emissions and divide up the responsibility for doing so, then perhaps it is better to try to fix the problem directly by engineering the world. In this Plan B, we could, for example, spray gas high in the atmosphere to filter incoming sunlight or squirt water droplets to make the stratocumulus clouds that hang over huge sections of the oceans more reflective so that the sun’s rays are bounced back into space.
There is now quite a large body of literature on so-called geo- engineering, but Clive Hamilton’s book stands out because he emphasises that we are nearer than most of us realise to implementing climate engineering; we stand on the brink of appointing ourselves managers of the global climate. He is deeply troubled by this both because he thinks it a sad defeat for humankind to go for this option when Plan A is so much better, and because he reckons - given how badly we’ve overseen the environment to date - that we are likely to be pretty poor at managing Plan B.
Hamilton highlights how large corporations that dragged their feet in acknowledging the reality of climate change are suddenly keen to sign up to engineering solutions to a problem they used to deny
Earthmasters starts with a good overview of the main ideas for engineering solutions to the climate problem. Hamilton reviews proposals both for getting the carbon out of the atmosphere and for keeping the temperature down even without removing carbon. The technical coverage is good, although he does not always highlight the extent to which judgements about technical issues are inevitably entangled with philosophical and political commitments.
Hamilton, a philosopher by background, offers arguments that benefit in places from the steely analytical rigour of his discipline. He is, for example, clear on the moral hazard of developments in geo-engineering, noting that research in this area is “virtually certain to reduce incentives to pursue emission reductions”. He is also sharp on the folly of overconfident enthusiasts eager to take on the role of Earth-manager despite a limited understanding of the ecological complexity of planetary systems.
Elsewhere his arguments are less strong, less steely. For example, he is correct to point out that many possible geo-engineering interventions relate to bits of the planet that are not yet well regulated in legal terms: remote oceans or slices of the atmosphere. But he does not give enough attention to analysing possible legal structures and to thinking about how they could be implemented. Hamilton highlights how large corporations that dragged their feet in acknowledging the reality of climate change are suddenly keen to sign up to engineering solutions to a problem they used to deny. Their lack of logic comes through clearly, but there is much less detailed information on how firms, investors and innovators are responding to the multiple opportunities for geo- engineering projects. Furthermore, the large section that deals with the politics of climate-change denialism is familiar from his earlier work and does not engage entirely with the specifics of climate engineering.
In all, Hamilton has put together a smart, timely book. In places it has a philosophical detachment but overall it is more an activist’s work, a kind of soft polemic. I doubt that he will win over many of geo-engineering’s adherents because he gives his own arguments the benefit of the doubt rather more than theirs. It would be a good book for politicians to read ahead of voting on geo-engineering proposals, although sadly it ends without a compelling restatement of Plan A.
By Clive Hamilton
Yale University Press, 288pp, £20.00
ISBN 9780300186673
Published 22 February 2013
Steve Yearley is professor of the sociology of scientific knowledge and director of the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, University of Edinburgh.
by Clive Hamilton
The following is an extract from Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering a new book by Professor Clive Hamilton.
Converging Histories
Climate change is destabilizing the modern conception of the Earth as a complex system whose secrets can be known and whose course can be foreseen. Science itself is pointing towards the inherent inscrutability of the natural world. We have seen how global warming is affecting the biosphere, the hydrosphere and the cryosphere. Scientists are now beginning to grasp the way in which human-induced climate change can affect the lithosphere (the outer crust of the Earth) and the geosphere (the deeper structures of the planet). It is now emerging that by shifting the distribution of ice and water over the surface of the Earth, human-induced global
warming is likely to provoke geological and geomorphological responses, including seismic, volcanic and landslide activity. Changes in the seasonal snow-load, for example, affect seismic activity in Japan by changing the compression on active faults. According to a recent scientific review of the field, in Iceland and Alaska ‘melting of ice in volcanic and tectonically active terrains may herald a rise in the frequency of volcanic activity and earthquakes’. Volcanoes can cool the planet, but a warming planet can also trigger volcanoes. When glaciers melt, the earth ‘rebounds’. With a decline in ice load of 1 kilometre, the Earth’s crust may rise by hundreds of metres. Moreover, although effects on the climate and biosphere are far more important impacts, the melting of polar ice due to global warming and the consequent redistribution of the weight of the Earth’s water can be expected to alter slightly the Earth’s rotation speed and its orientation in the solar system.24 In the words of Bill McGuire, the geophysicist who wrote the book on the geological implications of climate change, our knowledge reveals:
"the all-encompassing and all-pervasive nature of rapid and severe climate change. So complex and entangled is the Earth System that, looking to the future, nothing can be regarded as immune to the influence of anthropogenic warming . . . we are already seeing the first signs of the geosphere responding to changes wrought by rising temperatures."
The point of all this is that the effects of human-induced warming go far beyond changes in the weather; everything is now in play, and not only scientifically. So let us now make a leap from the land of science to the grounds of the humanities, because the astounding new facts uncovered by Earth system science force us to rethink our understanding of history.
The idea that humanity makes its own history and does so against the backdrop of the Earth’s slow unconscious evolution is deeply implicated in modernity. We are accustomed to thinking of humans, having emerged from the primordial darkness, as independent entities living and acting on a separate physical world, a world we plough up, mine, build on and move over but which nevertheless has an independent existence and destiny. This understanding of the autonomy of humans from nature runs deep in modern thinking; we believe we are rational creatures, arisen from nature, but independent of its great unfolding processes. To be sure, human exceptionalism has an ancient lineage; but before the Enlightenment the special place humans occupied was contained in a unified cosmos and it was God who blessed humans with uniqueness. The mark of the modern world was that humans designated themselves the unique species. The theory of evolution was implicated in this view of human distinctiveness, but the modern idea of human exceptionalism emerged only with the science of geology. It was geology that gave the Earth a history and it was only after nature acquired its own history that humans could acquire theirs.
Before the Enlightenment the historical process was understood to be identical with the unfolding of God’s purpose. In 1605 Francis Bacon famously argued the doctrine of the ‘two books’, the book of Nature and the book of Scripture, successfully splitting off the natural world for a new and different mode of understanding, eruditio as distinct from divinatio, which would later that century evolve into the scientific method. Bacon argued that we should apply our understanding of things in nature in order to interpret the words of the Scripture, rather than drawing on Scripture to interpret nature – just as Galileo had argued that we should use physics for scriptural exegesis, to reveal ‘the true senses of the Bible’.
Since in Genesis the origins of the Earth and the origins of the cosmos were seen to be concurrent, a vital stage in the emergence of a distinct human history was the separation of the history of the Earth from the history of the cosmos, a task initiated by Giordano Bruno and taken up by René Descartes, who suggested a scheme in which the Earth had its own origin. Moves like this allowed the development of cosmogenic stories that combined geological knowledge with Scripture in what became known in the eighteenth century as ‘theories of the earth’.
The emerging discipline of geology – marked by the new scientific emotions of sobriety and detachment – adopted Bacon’s compromise so that the history of the Earth could be separated out from the biblical narrative. Freed from fealty to Genesis, natural scientists could pursue their own method of inquiry, and use their results, if they were so inclined, to explicate and fill gaps in the scriptural story.
One consequence was that human history, which had been enfolded with natural history into the comprehensive account of the cosmos found in Genesis, began to be more clearly distinguished too. The narrative of Genesis, wrote Martin Rudwick, made it ‘plausible to regard human history as virtually coextensive with earth history; without mankind the earth and the cosmos would have seemed to lack meaning and purpose’, so before the emergence of modern geology the ‘history of the earth was seen only as a stage for the drama of human history, the drama of the creation, fall, and redemption of a unique set of rational beings’.29 In the seventeenth century Sir Thomas Browne could unselfconsciously remark: ‘Time we may comprehend, ’tis but five days elder than ourselves.’
In Britain, Bacon’s ‘two books’ compromise lasted into the nineteenth century, at which stage scriptural loyalists found that, as new and persuasive chapters were added to the book of science, the authority of the Bible could be bolstered only by more subtle exegesis or a new revelation, which proved elusive. Reconciling biblical accounts with newer discoveries in astronomy and the fossil record became increasingly awkward. The fossil evidence could no longer be accounted for by the Flood, and accumulating proof for the antiquity of man suggested a human history that pre-dated Adam. The discovery that beneath the ‘secondary’ rock strata that contained fossils there were ‘primary’ rock strata devoid of fossils, including human ones, implied an earth history prior to humans, and one of very long duration. Earth had a history before the arrival of humans; indeed, before the arrival of life.
It was these discoveries that eventually led Charles Lyell in 1830 to declare that his aim was to ‘free the science from Moses’. It was still possible for those so inclined to argue that all stages of the Earth, including the pre-human ones, were the result of divine providence, and thus part of God’s design. Nevertheless, such a view seemed to rely more on faith than evidence, and evidence now mattered more. Darwin’s theory on the origin of species told a story of life developing against the backdrop of an Earth history following its own course. Darwin’s ideas were built on geology and it was the palaeontologists, combining biology with geology, who gave the Earth a history that could encompass evolution. The prising of Earth history away from a larger religious cosmology allowed the flourishing of a new human history too, driven not by divine purpose but by mundane forces like states, empires, technological change, class conflict and economic growth.
In this sketch of geology’s emergence we can see that Earth history and human history have taken separate courses for not much more than two centuries. The bifurcation was an essential moment in the evolution of the modern subject, the autonomous agent acting on the external world. The autonomous subject, taken collectively,must have an autonomous history. Moreover, human history acquired the quality of progress, while that of the Earth lost its telos. Darwin was to supply it with an unconscious evolutionary dynamic. Even so, the evolution of humans has nothing to do with history but lies in the province of ‘deep history’. In 1964 E. H. Carr expressed the universal modern view when he wrote: ‘History begins when men begin to think of the passage of time in terms not of natural processes – the cycle of the seasons, the human lifespan – but of a series of specific events in which men are consciously involved and which they can consciously influence.' It is true that in more recent times environmental historians have emphasized how nature and natural events have always shaped human affairs, so that human history can never float entirely free of the Earth’s constraints. Nevertheless, those ideas have not yet dented the essential modernist belief, expressed in the nineteenth century by Jacob Burckhardt, that history is ‘the break with nature caused by the awakening of consciousness’.
In an important observation, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out that the distinction we have drawn between natural history – slow processes that occur on a scale of millions of years – and human history – a series of events that occur on the scale of years, decades and centuries – has now collapsed. With the Anthropocene, humans have become a geological force so that the two kinds of history have converged and it is no longer true that ‘all history properly so called is the history of human affairs’. Our future has become entangled with that of the Earth’s geological evolution. Anthropogenic climate change affects not just the atmosphere but the chemical composition of the oceans (acidification), the biosphere (species extinctions and shifting habitats), the cryosphere (melting ice masses) and the lithosphere itself.
The force of this is redoubled when we remember that the long-lasting effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide mean that human activity is likely to suppress the next ice age, so that the two histories are inseparable for at least that time. It turns out that the ‘clever animal’ who managed to separate itself from nature so completely that it could acquire its own history has so transformed the Earth that it now peers nervously into a future of unaccustomed instability and danger. Contrary to the modernist faith, it can no longer be maintained that humans make their own history, for the stage on which we make it has now entered into the play as a dynamic and largely uncontrollable force.
Clive Hamilton is Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. He is the author of Requiem For A Species among other works.
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/back_to_nature
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