ISMAEL MARINERO
@ismarmed
Madrid
Updated on Wednesday, 16June2021-01: 35
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Climate crisis Extreme weather takes its toll
When Attenborough met Greta Thunberg "We must tell the truth about the weather. It is very worrying but there is hope."
"We live in a world where darkening the fucking sun might be less of a risk than not." The phrase belongs to Andy Parker, director of the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative Project, which aims to place geoengineering at the center of the debate on how to combat global warming. And what is geoengineering? In projecting tiny reflective particles into the stratosphere (be it diamond dust, sulfur dioxide, or calcium carbonate), filtering the sun's energy to mimic the cooling effect of volcanoes. It sounds crazy and it can be counterproductive, but it may be one of the few options left for us to combat climate change on a global scale.
Elizabeth Kolbert, journalist and author of
The Sixth Extinction
, an essay on the human contribution to the loss of biodiversity with which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015, addresses in
Under a White Sky
(Critical Ed.) This and other technologies that seek to modify and controlling nature to keep warming at bay, not always with positive consequences. "It is important not to use the word 'solution,'" he warns by videoconference from his home in western Massachusetts, with a chorus of birds as the morning soundtrack.
"Climate change is not reversible, even if we take really dramatic actions.
To minimize it as much as possible, there is a broad scientific consensus on the need to reduce CO2 emissions. But the question also arises: will it be Enough with that? Right now the most common answer among the leading experts in the field is that it is probably not enough, because we have already passed the threshold that condemns us to very drastic changes in all ecosystems. It is a somewhat daunting prospect, "he explains. slowly, specifying and qualifying each of her statements, with the care of a seasoned researcher.
In
Under a White Sky
, a title that refers to one of the unwanted effects that geoengineering could have, Kolbert offers a dazzling amalgam of history, scientific theories and practices and pure journalistic observation, which at times illuminates and at times horrifies.
Yes to write
The Sixth Extinction
Kolbert traveled to Costa Rica to document the disappearance of the golden frog or to Peru to see in the first person how tropical forests were adapting to such accelerated losses of biodiversity, here his travels have taken him to places as disparate and remote as the canals and swamps of New Orleans, the Devil's Hole pool in the Mojave desert, a pioneering initiative in Iceland that turns CO2 into stone or the Australian Animal Health Laboratory.
'Assisted evolution'
In the latter place, Kolbert points out, the book began to take shape: "I went there in 2016 and that is where it all began, researching what is known as the super coral project. If we want coral reefs to survive, since they are fundamental for the balance of marine ecosystems, we have to use genetic engineering with the corals themselves, crossing them to obtain varieties that are more resistant to heating. It seemed to me a very interesting idea and I began to see a certain pattern, a way of thinking that could be applied to different areas ". In Australia, the geneticist and microbiologist Madeleine Van Oppen works on what she has called assisted evolution, experiments and crosses with corals to enhance the reproduction of the Great Barrier Reef,exposed to bleaching produced by heat waves that are killing her at a devastating rate.
Elizabeth Kolbert, ED.
REVIEW
But efforts to control and dominate nature, even with the goal of preserving it, do not always have a happy ending.
This is the case with the Chinese carp that the US Fish and Wildlife Service imported in 1963 to keep the aquatic plants that threatened the Mississippi's biodiversity at bay.
They had been carried away by the allegations of
Silent Spring
, the influential work of Rachel Carson, one of the pioneering scientists of environmental awareness.
Now, to contain the unstoppable expansion of an invasive species such as carp, the US Army Corps of Engineers has installed electrical barriers in the river itself and is considering spending billions of dollars annually to develop methods to contain, divert or eliminate China's "four famous domestic fish". "I'm a huge Carson fan," Kolbert acknowledges, "but it's true that
Silent Spring
ended with a very blatant exhortation about what the world should do and that had some unwanted effects. Still, I still think she was a hero. Her The work had a huge impact, in most cases in a very positive way, but in others, which she could not foresee, it also caused some problems. "
Techno optimism versus techno fatalism
Faced with the
techno optimism
of Silicon Valley, Kolbert offers a kind of
techno fatalism,
although he maintains a studied ambivalence about the appropriateness of each of the techniques, initiatives and projects that he analyzes in each of the book's chapters.
Precisely, to avoid repeating Carson's mistakes, Kolbert argues that "I am deliberately very ambiguous about which of these techniques should succeed. I am basically a skeptic and I don't want to say anything that I may regret later."
What is clear is that our current attitude
"is as if we are sleepwalking towards unprecedented disasters.
People do not realize the scale or speed of climate change and by that I am not only referring to global warming, but to deep transformations that are happening all over the planet and that have no analogies throughout our history. To find similar effects we would have to go to the Cretaceous period, when the asteroid impacted and killed, among other things, the dinosaurs. " Now we are the meteorite and we do not know for sure how to stop the impact.
Faced with such a black panorama, is there any room for hope? Kolbert sighs deeply and puts his glasses on, holding his hair before answering. Jim Hanson, often called the father of global warming as the NASA scientist who raised the alarm in the first place about rising temperatures and has proven himself right time and time again, often says: 'I hope you are listening.' And I think that is the best possible answer. The question is not whether people are hopeful or not, but whether they are taking the necessary steps to remedy all this. " Meanwhile, the birds of western Massachusetts continue to chirp, oblivious to geoengineering, super corals, negative emissions technologies and the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. For how long? Who knows...
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