Carlin Economics and Science

Some may have wondered how I reconcile my skepticism about the United Nations hypothesis that emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases have an important effect on global temperatures fits with my interest in stratospheric geoengineering as an attractive alternative to reductions in CO2 emissions? This interest is shown in four of my previous publications in climate science under publications. If there is no real risk of a significant global temperature rise due to CO2, we may not need geoengineering after all. My view is that we still have much to learn about Earth’s climate and that the history of interglacial periods suggest that we could be faced with global cooling within a few thousand years. It would therefore appear prudent to be prepared for the eventuality that significant global warming or cooling could occur.

For reasons explained in my geoengineering papers, CO2 emissions control is unlikely to be effective in controlling global warming and useless for global cooling. For a comparatively modest cost, however, we could acquire the capability to carry out stratospheric geoengineering. Chances are very good that it would not be advisable to actually use it, but acquiring the capability would appear to be a wise precaution. It might also reassure those who believe in the UN hypothesis that possible potential warming could be stopped if there should ever be agreement that something needed to be done.

So in summary, I believe that significant global warming is unlikely this century, particularly as a result of increasing CO2 levels, but if it should start to occur it might be useful to be prepared to deal with such warming or the slightly more likely global cooling if necessary through stratospheric geoengineering. One other advantage of being prepared to use effective geoengineering techniques is that we would no longer have any need to undertake extremely expensive efforts to reduce CO2 emissions on the chance that there might be damaging global temperature increases or other adverse effects until the effects actually started to occur.