Page 42 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

2 AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL E. MANN … 25

MM: The title of our book is Geoengineering, or “What Could Possibly Go
Wrong?” And it really raises the issue of unintended consequences.
Experiments that have been done show that iron fertilisation doesn’t work
very well. That it causes a more rapid cycling of carbon through the
atmosphere and the upper ocean, it doesn’t bury it permanently in the deep
ocean, which is what you need if you’re going to take the carbon out of the
system. Moreover, the iron fertilisation of the ocean appears to preferen-
tially favour some of the more dangerous algae—like the algae that cause
red tides, so it’s really an excellent example of how we can end up doing far
more damage than if we had not engaged in those interventions at all. So
I’m very wary of the vast majority of geoengineering schemes.
There’s one that’s relatively safe—it’s called direct air capture and
basically it’s trying to suck the CO 2 back out of the atmosphere, so you’re
not really tampering with the climate system in a way that these other
schemes are. But it turns out it’s really expensive to do that energetically
and economically and so probably the only situation in which it might
make sense would be if we find ourselves in a situation where we’re going
to go past one of those dangerous limits and there’s nothing we can do—
it’s too late. Then some argue we need to look for a so-called ‘stop gap’—
some immediate intervention that we can pull out of a hat and maybe
something like direct air capture could be that. But these other geoengi-
neering schemes could lead to far more dangerous impacts on the climate
and on our environment and they’re more likely to do harm than do good.
So my view is that scientists have the same ethical responsibility as doctors
—first we should do no harm, that should be our pledge—and geoengi-
neering violates that.

SCIENTISTS AS PUBLIC COMMUNICATORS
BB: What should be the role of scientists in society?
MM: I think it’s important to have individuals within scientific commu-
nities who are committed to communicating science and its applications.
That doesn’t mean that all scientists should talk to the media. I know quite
a few who would probably never talk to the media. But we do need to
provide incentives and support at an institutional level for scientists who
want to engage in what I consider to be a very noble undertaking of
communicating science to the public. If they don’t do that, if there aren’t
scientists who are willing to play that role, we create a vacuum that