Climate change: time for plan B?

This year, the world's governments will meet in Copenhagen to hopefully agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. But according to the Independent, half of leading climate change scientists think that they will not curb emissions sufficiently, and that we should be looking at radical geoengineering solutions as a backup plan.

What has worried many of the experts, who include recognised authorities from the world's leading universities and research institutes, as well as a Nobel Laureate, is the failure to curb global greenhouse gas emissions through international agreements, namely the Kyoto Treaty, and recent studies indicating that the Earth's natural carbon "sinks" are becoming less efficient at absorbing man-made CO2 from the atmosphere.

Levels of CO2 have continued to increase during the past decade since the treaty was agreed and they are now rising faster than even the worst-case scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body. In the meantime the natural absorption of CO2 by the world's forests and oceans has decreased significantly. Most of the scientists we polled agreed that the failure to curb emissions of CO2, which are increasing at a rate of 1 per cent a year, has created the need for an emergency "plan B" involving research, development and possible implementation of a worldwide geoengineering strategy.

It's a massive vote of no-confidence in our governments. But given their penchant for serving business rather than the people who elected them, it's probably entirely justified.

As for geoengineering itself, of course we should be looking at it - we need to be looking at everything. But there's a real danger of it providing a convenient excuse for politicians to delay action and continue to do nothing, in the belief that a future technological fix will save them (this is also a problem with CCS - and the hope that politicians will do exactly that is precisely why the coal industry is pushing it so hard). And of course while these solutions will address temperature rise (hopefully) they won't solve the other problems of excess carbon, such as ocean acidification, which threatens the entire marine food chain. Finally, its worth pointing out that we already have a relatively cheap technology to suck carbon out of the atmosphere and store it safely: it's called "trees". If our politicians won't use the tools we already have to help solve the problem, then I'm not sure we can rely on them to use a non-existent one.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that the problem is primarily political, not technological. We already have the technology to decarbonise our energy supply. We already have the technology to massively reduce our transport emissions. We already have the technology to remove carbon from our atmosphere. Our politicians refuse to use those technologies. Which means we must either persuade them to do so - or de-elect them and replace them with people who will.