#40 Unpacking the climate geo-engineering controversy with Gwynne Dyer

Today on the podcast, we speak to Dr. Gwynne Dyer. Gwynne is a British-Canadian military historian, author, professor, journalist, broadcaster, and retired naval officer. Gwynne received his PhD in 1973 from King’s College London, and went on to create several popular television documentaries, including the miniseries “War”, which received an Academy Award nomination. Gwynne is now a syndicated columnist, writing about Middle Eastern affairs and global politics, including environmental issues. In 2008, he published “Climate Wars: the fight for survival as the world overheats”, and has recently come back to this topic in his writing with the publishing of his new book “Intervention Earth: life-saving ideas from the world’s climate engineers”. We spoke to Gynne about his research into climate geo-engineering for his new book, focusing on emerging technologies and the uncertainty surrounding them.

Intervention Earth emphasizes the urgency of addressing the climate crisis by discussing potential tipping points in the climate system. In the early part of the interview, Gwynne refers to these as feedbacks and states that we cannot simulate these in climate models. Here, I want to distinguish between feedbacks that we can simulate and feedbacks that are not well represented or missing in models. Climate models include many important feedbacks and would not credibly simulate historical climate change if they did not. However, longer-time scale carbon cycle processes, such as permafrost thaw and the associated methane release, are not well-simulated and processes associated with ice sheets are not included in most global climate models. With respect to these under-represented or missing processes in models, uncertainties are large.

As hosts of this podcast, we are not endorsing or dismissing solar radiation management, but awareness of this topic is extremely important as both research and private sector investment in solar radiation management grow.

The bottom line is that more needs to be done faster to mitigate climate change. The Earth has just experienced the 12th-consecutive hottest month on record and based on current international greenhouse gas emissions, the global average temperature will likely surpass the Paris Agreement target of 2C within 10-30 years.