Suffolk Closeup - Geoengineering And Global Warming

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Geoengineering 

It’s a word created to describe altering the Earth and has mostly been applied to the climate crisis. The Royal Society of Great Britain, the oldest national scientific organization in the world (its roots go back to 1660) defines geoengineering as “the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system, in order to moderate global warming.”

Geoengineering is being proposed widely these days.

For Suffolk, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has urged a massive steel and concrete structure which would close the mouth of Fire Island Inlet to prevent hurricane storm surges from inundating its south shore. 

The Corps has also proposed a six-mile long barrier between New Jersey and Breezy Point in Queens with swinging steel gates to protect Manhattan from a hurricane surge. But in February, the Trump administration—as The New York Times reported—“unexpectedly halted” that $119 billion, yes $119 billion, plan. President Trump called it “foolish,” said The Times. A City Hall spokesperson termed the cancellation “unacceptable” and “dangerous” calling on the federal government to “reverse course immediately.” The “Corps official in charge of the project” said “it is highly unusual for a Corps project to lose funding after more than three years of work at a cost of several million dollars.”

There’s the Venice geoengineering project.

In and near Venice, because of the climate crisis, waters have risen higher and higher. So, in 1966 engineers began to “draw up plans to build a barrier at sea to defend one of the world’s most picturesque yet fragile cities from the constant threat of high tides,” Reuters has noted. “But the project, known as Mose [for Moses and the parting of the Red Sea] has been plagued by the sort of problems that have come to characterize many Italian construction programs—corruption, cost overruns and prolonged delay.” There was a threefold increase in  cost to $6.1 billion.

“Floodgates in Venice Work in First Major Test,” was the headline last month in The Times. The Mose undertaking involves 78 steel barriers at three inlets. They had just been raised in the face of a particularly menacing tide. “Everything dry here,” tweeted Luigi Brugnaro, mayor of Venice. 

But the Moses scheme remains contested. In The Times article “Christiano Gasparetto, an architect and former provincial official who has long opposed the project” said, “With climate change, there’s a chance that the floodgates could be employed 150-180 days a year, becoming an almost fixed barrier and severing the [Venice] lagoon’s relations to the sea. If the lagoon is cut off from the sea for long periods, it dies, because the natural exchange of water stops, and all of its organic life risks decaying.” 

Last week, the PBS “Nova” series devoted an hour to many ambitious geoengineering concepts in a program titled “Can We Cool The Planet?”

Is a focus on trying to deal with the effects of global warming overshadowing getting at its cause? The climate crisis is largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels—oil, gas and coal—and the release of carbon dioxide that leads to a heat-up of the planet? Its causing glaciers to melt and seas to rise. This has resulted in unusually powerful hurricanes and in high numbers. Last week came Zeta, the World Meteorological Organization needing to reach to the Greek alphabet for the 27^th named storm of the hurricane season. The warming of seas has increased the heat in them on which hurricanes feed. And the climate crisis is also seen as being behind the massive wildfires of recent times. It has thrown nature out of whack world-wide. 

A full transition to energy sources led by solar and wind which don’t produce greenhouse gasses is required to challenge global warming—and the technology is here today to do that. 

We on Long Island with our many miles of coastline are especially vulnerable to the climate crisis and rising waters. There are the calls here—appeals that must be heeded—for “relocation” of structures in the most exposed, most vulnerable areas. But Long Island should also be a leader in challenging the cause—to be in the forefront of a transition from burning fossil fuels in cars and trucks and in the generation of electricity.

Some geoengineering schemes may work, at a massive cost, or they may not. But the cause of the climate crisis must be fully tackled. Otherwise, waters will continue to rise and other effects persist and worsen, and the Earth will move past a point of no return. Challenging the cause of global warming is an existential necessity.    

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.