The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

Oliver Morton

Nov 2015 · Princeton University Press

About this ebook

A fascinating look at the perils and promise of geoengineering and our potential future on a warming planet

The risks of global warming are pressing and potentially vast. The difficulty of doing without fossil fuels is daunting, possibly even insurmountable. So there is an urgent need to rethink our responses to the crisis. To meet that need, a small but increasingly influential group of scientists is exploring proposals for planned human intervention in the climate system: a stratospheric veil against the sun, the cultivation of photosynthetic plankton, fleets of unmanned ships seeding the clouds. These are the technologies of geoengineering—and as Oliver Morton argues in this visionary book, it would be as irresponsible to ignore them as it would be foolish to see them as a simple solution to the problem.

The Planet Remade explores the history, politics, and cutting-edge science of geoengineering. Morton weighs both the promise and perils of these controversial strategies and puts them in the broadest possible context. The past century’s changes to the planet—to the clouds and the soils, to the winds and the seas, to the great cycles of nitrogen and carbon—have been far more profound than most of us realize. Appreciating those changes clarifies not just the scale of what needs to be done about global warming, but also our relationship to nature.

Climate change is not just one of the twenty-first century’s defining political challenges. Morton untangles the implications of our failure to meet the challenge of climate change and reintroduces the hope that we might. He addresses the deep fear that comes with seeing humans as a force of nature, and asks what it might mean—and what it might require of us—to try and use that force for good.

Ratings and reviews

In a quote, I would describe "The Planet Remade" as "hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror." Morton has two theses. One he makes clear at the beginning of the book, to great effect. He asks two questions. 1. "Do you believe the risks of climate change merit serious action aimed at lessening them?" 2. "Do you think that reducing an industrial economy's carbon dioxide emissions to near zero is very hard?" He takes a "yes" to the first question as a given -- there are many better resources to consult if one has any doubt -- and he argues that that the answer to the second is also "yes". From this he concludes that we should consider using geoengineering to mitigate some risks of climate change, because it's the only plausible alternative to an unrealistically-swift decarbonization. The main form of geoengineering he considers is the stratospheric veil, basically using airplanes to spray an aerosol (e.g. sulfur dioxide) high into the atmosphere to reflect a small fraction of the sun's energy. He lays out known risks and gaps in our knowledge about the effect of engaging in this kind of geoengineering in great detail. For example, SO2 may catalyze the breakdown of ozone, which wouldn't be great. Or maybe not, we're not sure. As another example, cooling the planet is not the same thing as removing CO2 from the atmosphere, so a veil would still have non-negligible climate effects. He covers lots more objections and concludes that with the information we have today, a veil is our best bet to give ourselves some "breathing room" while we decarbonize the world economy. Without this breathing room, he persuasively argues, we're cooked. That was the part of the book that I liked -- mostly concentrated at the beginning and end. The middle section, which is most of the book, is devoted to his second thesis, which is never explicitly stated. As best I can figure out, the argument is, we shouldn't be terrified of geoengineering a stratospheric veil, because we're already engaged in another massive geoengineering project, namely taking over Earth's nitrogen cycle. Earth's 7.5 billion humans are fed by plants grown with human-made fertilizers. These fertilizers consist primarily of "fixed" nitrogen, i.e. nitrogen in a more reactive state (higher chemical potential energy) than the N2 that makes up the majority of the atmosphere. (He also notes that this life-giving process of fixing nitrogen is also used to make explosives which have been the cause of 150M deaths, cumulatively 200x the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs.) Without humanity's prodigious production of fertilizer, Earth would be able to support only about 40% of the people alive today. But all of this comes at a cost. The addition of huge amounts of fixed nitrogen into the ecosystem dramatically effects oceans (e.g. 15,000 kM^2 dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico every year due to algae, fed by fertilizer runoff in the Mississippi, crowding out other life) and land-based life (e.g. increased atmospheric NOx levels causing all sorts of problems). Is it worth it? Morton never comes out and says, "I would rather do this damage to the planet than allow three billion souls to starve." Maybe he's asking you to make that leap yourself. Or maybe he doesn't need you to judge whether it's acceptable to you, just to acknowledge that this sort of large-scale change has been done before, and we've all survived, more or less. Frustratingly, the section on nitrogen, and also the sections on atmospheric science, volcano-atmospheric science, geological-carbon science, and atomic science (still don't understand why this one is in the book) are all presented from a detailed historical perspective. If you're going to write a hundred pages of tangentially relevant scientific history in a book about climate change, at least please say why we're doing this exercise. I am still not sure. Despite all of this, I found the book thought-provoking and persuasive. Worth reading for the beginning and end, and maybe skimming some of the history.

About the author

Oliver Morton is briefings editor at the Economist, and his writing has appeared in the New Yorker and other publications. He is the author of Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet.