Pandora's Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention by Wake Smith
What's It About?
“The first three things to understand about climate change are that it is real, anthropogenic, and dangerous.”According to Wake Smith, author of the just-released Pandora’s Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention (Cambridge University Press), “There is virtually no remaining scientific debate in peer-reviewed journals on the question of whether climate change is happening, and there has not been for at least a decade. Outside the U.S., this may seem too obvious a point to belabor, but particularly with the White House so recently occupied by a brazen climate denier.”
In Pandora’s Toolbox, Smith tells us that reaching net zero emissions will not be the end of the climate struggle, only the end of the beginning. For centuries thereafter, temperatures will remain elevated; climate damages will continue to accrue, and sea levels will continue to rise. Even the urgent and utterly essential task of reaching net zero cannot be achieved rapidly by emissions reductions alone.
To hasten net zero and minimize climate damages thereafter, we will also need massive carbon removal and storage. We may even need to reduce incoming solar radiation in order to lower unacceptably high temperatures. Such unproven and potentially risky climate interventions raise mind-blowing questions of governance and ethics.
“The way to bet (and therefore to plan) is that there is a lot of climate change in our future, and that we will need a variety of tools with which to deal with it,” Smith says. “Emissions reductions? Urgently. Adaptation to extreme weather and sea level rise? Certainly. But in order to preserve the ecosystems and natural environments that have enabled the human population to burgeon over the last few centuries, we will also need climate intervention. For reasons I hope to make clear, I think it is inevitable.”
Pandora’s Toolbox offers readers an accessible and authoritative introduction to both the hopes and hazards of some of humanity’s most controversial technologies, which may nevertheless provide the key to saving our world.
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