Andrew Parker: Uncertainties and Implications of Geoengineering

In his State of the Union address on January 28, 2014, President Obama told the nation, “The debate is settled, climate change is a fact.”

Faced with this reality, scientists and policymakers continue to look for ways to limit climate change and to counteract it, and some have started to look seriously at technologies like geoengineering.

“It’s more than just a theory,” says Science, Technology, and Public Policy Research Fellow Andy Parker, “we know from natural analogues that geoengineering could work to cool the planet.”

Geoengineering, a deliberate intervention in the planet’s climate, is a technology that could counteract climate change.

“When a large volcano erupts, it blasts sulfates up into the stratosphere and the tiny little reflective aerosols circulate the planet and cool it down for a year or two,” says Parker, explaining the process that scientists are trying to replicate through geoengineering. “The big question is what the political and physical side effects of deployment might be”.

There are two types of geoengineering, solar and carbon. Here, Parker refers to his concentration, solar.

The majority of Parker’s research does not look at how to execute solar geoengineering. Rather, he is trying understand the technology, its implications, and possible political side effects.

Parker was first exposed to geoengineering while at the Royal Society Science Policy Center, where he worked for four years before beginning his fellowship at the Belfer Center.

“The first project I was given at the Royal Society was a report on geoengineering …there really hadn’t been anything of that scope or size before. And I think it’s fair to say it is probably still is the world’s preeminent report on geoengineering,” says Parker.

Published in 2009, Geoengineering the Climate placed the Royal Society, and Parker, at the center of geoengineering policy.

Shortly after, they followed up on the report with the SRM Governance Initiative, a project Parker is still working on. It seeks to increase international cooperation over geoengineering research and governance, in particular by bringing in new voices from developing countries.

“The goal is not to tell people what to think about these technologies but just to say that they’re out there and you’re going to have to start thinking about them and making up your own minds up. You can’t afford to ignore them,” says Parker.

Now, Parker is at the Belfer Center, working with David Keith, a Belfer-based professor who has been researching and writing about geoengineering for over two decades, and who was on the expert working group for Geoengineering the Climate. The Center provides an environment that allows Parker to do his own research and set his own priorities, one of these priorities being the governance of geoengineering research.

Geoengineering research is controversial, however.  “Some people say that if you research the idea that there’s an alternative out there it will draw people’s attention away from what we need to do, which is stop emitting greenhouse gasses,” says Parker.  “It’s important to balance the need to understand more about solar geoengineering with the need to make sure that research itself isn’t dangerous”.

Because of these underlying dangers, Parker says if it were to work, deployment of geoengineering would have to be an international, cooperative project. His research continues into this area, as he studies the international implications of geoengineering.

“It’s been said that it would be so cheap – in the order of a few billion dollars per year – that most countries could deploy this if they wanted to. It’s unclear what the implications of this may be for international climate negotiations, and for traditional power relations’.

Parker continues his research amid skepticism from environmentalists, his peers, and himself.

“A lot of environmentalists’ knee-jerk reaction is to be very concerned about it. I certainly was… because the idea of intervening in a climate’s system that’s so complicated is fairly horrible,” he says, adding that some question whether it should be researched at all.

However, says Parker, the effects of not researching and therefore not knowing what the consequences of geoengineering are could be just as dangerous.

For more about Andrew Parker, see here.