While working on our report on Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks, one of my favourite SciFi authors, Neal Stephenson, popped up with an essay on Innovation Starvation.

It echoes Tyler Cowen‘s arguments that all the easy big stuff has been done,  and that all we have left to look forward to are incremental improvements rather than world changing technologies.

Stephenson, being a science fiction writer, looks at space as an example where a culture of risk avoidance, cost cutting and politics combine to stifle innovation. As he points out, even China’s space program is merely copying what the USA and Soviet Union were doing 50 years ago rather than doing anything innovative.

It is undoubtedly a problem that plagues the world.  Whether it is large ambitious space programs, or providing a government stimulus for technology companies, the emphasis is always on avoiding failure, which involves avoiding anything innovative.  The million lost by a failed company always generates more headlines for governments than the hundred million successfully leveraged as we can see with the furore over Solyndra – although governments have a poor track record of picking winners.

So how can we kick start global innovation? As I argue in Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks we need to focus on the big issues that we can all agree on. Water might be a good start.

Over the past five years I have come across numerous innovative approaches to water scarcity, from desalination plants that double as greenhouses to nanostructured membranes that dramatically cut the energy needed for desalination, but I cant remember a single one of them attracting significant investment. That wasn’t because the technology is poor, it is simply because of the costs involved in getting it to market put it outside the risk which any early stage investor would be comfortable with. Raising $50 million for social networking is relatively simple, but for water remediation it is a stretch too far. Development times in excess of 3 years and uncertainty about who will pay for the technology combine to make it almost unfundable.

For a small fraction of the current cost of dealing with drought – something that will only increase in the future – we could develop a suite of technologies to mitigate the shortage of potable water. But we won’t.

I’m not convinced by the innovation starvation argument, I think we have plenty of innovation but we lack the political will to deploy them.  The challenge isn’t so much stimulating innovation as effectively making the case for governments and international institutions to use it.

(Foreword to Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks , October 2011)

This is a question that often comes up in our dealings with global policy makers who spend huge sums on scientific research while simultaneously being fearful of its consequences. Many believe that it is somehow important for the economy in an undefined and non-quantifiable manner, or that it is some kind of logical next step along the path that starts with scientific curiosity. Perhaps a better way of viewing technology would be as a mechanism through which science is applied to meet the needs of society, and that holds true whether the needs of society are getting rich quick, curing cancer, or both.

But there is another less beneficial view of technology. The idea that technology is responsible for environmental degradation, especially when coupled with population growth, is a powerful one that has held true since the industrial revolution. It is human nature to fondly imagine an agrarian pre-industrial utopia, while forgetting the regular plagues and famines that resulted in an average life expectancy of 35 years in pre-industrial Britain.  The idea that technology is a bad thing is a situation that has existed for much of the 20th century and persists into the 21st, partly as a result of confusion between technology itself and those individuals and corporations who control and exploit it.

But it is time for a change. In fact a change is inevitable. Human history is littered with technological advances that have changed everything, and much faster than anyone could have imagined.  The agricultural, industrial and information revolutions have resulted in massive changes to the economy, society and the way in which we interact with the environment.

Since the second world war, science and technology have moved faster and had a more profound impact on human society than at any other point in human history. We have moved from black and white television exploding onto the market in the early 1950s to more than 800 million people using Facebook within 60 years. While television took 3 decades to diffuse around the world, Facebook did it in 3 years. Technology has driven economic growth around the world and led to vast improvements in the quality of life for much of the global population, but it has come at a price: the rise of consumerism has resulted in environmental degradation on an unprecedented scale.

It is time to reappraise our relationship with technology and take control of its direction. With an increasing global population becoming ever more affluent, the pressure on resources coupled with climate change will inevitably lead to more wars, water shortages, famines and mass migration. Or will it?

If profound economic, societal and environmental changes are inevitable then why do we still address them in the same way we have for millennia, by being helplessly reactive? In the 21st century, science and technology has advanced to a stage where we can start taking control of the fruits of scientific progress rather than being powerless in the face of their development and exploitation.

We already have many of the technologies we need to address major global problems such as water shortages and disease, and there is no reason why inevitable environmental disasters such as oil spills still have to be tackled using antiquated technology when a hundred million dollars could give us the technologies to reduce the impact of oil spills to almost zero. Many other emerging technologies are being developed that would allow the world to support 10 billion people without compromising the tremendous growth in quality of life that has taken place over the last century.

At Cientifica we establish  how we can harness technologies for the global good. While we still lack the political will and necessary international institutions, we now have the knowledge and the tools to make the transition from being mere consumers of, and in some respect slaves to technology, to making use of  the new scientific revolution to mitigate and minimise global risks.

While it would be foolish to claim that the wise use of science and technology will usher in a utopian age, there is little doubt that we now have the tools to create a sustainable and responsible world where human suffering and environmental degradation can be alleviated while maintaining economic growth.

The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, which is not a biker gang but “a diverse organization engaged in research, advocacy and grassroots organizing to promote human health and environmental justice in response to the rapid growth of the high-tech industry”  has released a report looking at “Nanotechnology in Electronics: The Risk to Human Health and the Environment”

It doesn’t really add much to the debate, other than pointing out that nanomaterials (along with many other toxic materials) are used in the electronics industry, and there may be a risk of exposure during manufacturing, or more probably disposal and recycling.

The groups main beef is that products containing engineered nanoparticles are not labelled which “hinders the consumer’s ability to make informed decisions about the products that they purchase, how they interact with the product, as well as how they dispose of the product at the end of its life” although the group concedes that

As an electronics consumer, there does not appear to be a great risk of exposure to nanomaterials since ENPs are generally embedded in a matrix housed inside the product. Alternatively, the risk for exposure is different for nanomaterials coated on the outside of products. For example, nanosilver is an anti-microbial agent that is often used as a coating on the outside surface of computer keyboards and mouse devices, as well as cell phones. Such coatings could potentially be absorbed through the skin by the user, and consequently induce toxic effects.

Overall it is a neat summary for newcomers to the subject and mostly avoids the usual NGO hype of calling for all manner of things to be labelled, banned and regulated on the basis of both known and unknown unknowns.

Two and a half years ago I was invited to join the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on nanotechnologies, as part of “the worlds largest brainstorming”. The chief reason for having a nanotechnology council at all was that nanotech had been identified as a global risk in a WEF report (thank you Prince Charles), so we found ourselves among many luminaries for the worlds of business and governance, although shoved into a corner with little interaction with the rest of the meeting.

Part of the outcome of that first meeting was the realisation that from most points of view, such as innovation, regulation, funding or governance, most emerging technologies faced similar problems. As a result we changed the name of our council to Emerging Technologies and at the second meeting in 2009 actually attracted some brief attention as a result of some rather intense lobbying to promote the idea that Emerging Technologies can be part of the solution rather than simply a risk.

While we discussed Emerging Technologies in terms of nanotechnolgies, synthetic biology and geoenginering, we still lacked a real sense of how Emerging Technologies could be defined. To some the phrase meant Twitter, while to others it meant computational chemistry.

At this years meeting we finally assembled enough brain power to come up with a draft definition saying that  Emerging Technologies are ones that:

• arise from new knowledge, or the innovative application of existing knowledge;
• lead to the rapid development of new capabilities;
• are projected to have significant systemic and long-lasting economic, social and political impacts;
• create new opportunities for and challenges to addressing global issues; and
• have the potential to disrupt or create entire industries.

Although the definition is still a little wordy, it does capture the essence of the discussion.

For technologies to be ‘emerging’ there needs to be some kind of acceleration taking place, or some huge government funding effort, massive market pull, or some other factor that sets them apart from all of the other technologies that are chugging along quite nicely but not going anywhere fast. It’s not perfect, but it is a start.

I’ll leave the professional report readers such as 2020Science to wade through the Friends of the Earth’s latest broadside against nanotechnology which claims that it “isn’t green enough.”

This brief report in “The Australian” neatly sums up the argument, which is that although nanotechnology has been spoken of as a solution to some aspects of climate change, it is is less green than other alternative approaches such as sitting still and waiting for the world to end, and therefore it shouldn’t be funded.

Some of the arguments are clearly rather silly and selective. Claiming for example that “the energy conversion efficiency of nano solar panels was 10 per cent less than conventional silicon panels” is rather unfair given the stage of the development of the technology and ignores the amount of R&D going into areas such as organic photovoltaics. Similarly claims that “processing may also involve the use toxic chemicals and solvents, and the release greenhouse gases such as methane” could be applied to almost every area of human activity, or indeed inactivity.

Technology always needs to be seen over time, and the fact that Stephenson’s Rocket wasn’t as fast as a galloping horse in its first trial probably led to similar calls for the technology to be abandoned.

Perhaps the most depressing thing is that in order to make the argument that nanotech isn’t green enough, Friends of the Earth has to waste its (and our) time shooting down some of the wilder claims about nanotechnologies, while ignoring much of the rational scientific work that going on.

What I’d love to hear from an environmental group is a rational argument about nanotechnology. How do we encourage applications that could limit climate change and protect the environment while monitoring and averting any unintended risks and consequences? Carping from the sidelines may create a few sound bites, but it won’t change government policy and nor will it stymie human creativity when it comes to applying technology.

To have a real impact, environmental groups need to make themselves part of the debate rather than sitting in the corner sulking with their backs to the everyone.

I spent some time in the ever fascinating city of Geneva this week for some meetings with the World Economic Forum where, as always, we are trying to figure out what to do about the world right now while trying to understand how the future will look – hopefully better than the present is the short answer!

One of the problems with predicting the future is that it is very easy to be horribly wrong. Predictions tend to fall into two camps, the incremental and the disruptive. The incremental view is that everything will continue along the current path while getting marginally better.  Following this path mobile phones were predicted to gradually shrink in size until they could be worn as wristwatches, but no one foresaw either the iPod/iPhone or text messaging.

On the disruptive side predictions involve huge shifts and changes, with for example manufacturing being replaced with nanotech and biotech, or, as every investor gets told by every entrepreneur, new products emerge which blow away all competition and disrupt the entire market.

While the first approach shows a lack of imagination, the second perhaps indicates a rather over active imagination, and the true path of the future lies somewhere in between – but not, I should caution, at some midway point.

This becomes important when I work with organisations on corporate technology strategies – how to keep an eye on the future and an option on potential disruptive technologies while maintaining growth in the current business and of course being able to respond to emerging opportunities? For many corporate people, the constraints of their organisation means that while they really do understand their business and markets inside out, they often end up either overspecialised, or over sensitive to internal business drivers that cause the bigger picture, and with it sometimes the bigger opportunities to be missed.

This became apparent when discussing the issues facing the chemical industry. Many resources are in increasingly short supply, and this may be political, such as rare earths, or structural, such as most metal ores where all the high quality ore has long been mined out. While there is a lot of discussion about how to manage resources, one of my major themes recently has been whether we can replace them?

This becomes crucial when you look at our dependence on resources. Lithium, for example, is a very abundant element, but only in a few areas such as Bolivia and Chile does it occur in sufficiently high concentrations to make the mining and processing of it for the lithium ion batteries that power the world economic. It only takes a bit of political instability or an earthquake to bring the world to a very sudden halt, as we saw with oil process in the 1970’s.

Nanotechnology and industrial biotechnology both have huge potential for replacing scarce resources, in the case of biofuels by moving to a second generation where the feedstock doesn’t require the replacement of food crops (or rainforest) with fuel crops, and in nanotechnology by creating entirely new materials. But in both cases, this is something we have to start doing now, rather than waiting for a crisis and expecting to be able to respond quickly enough.

So why were we discussing issues like this with the World Economic Forum? Simple, we’re in a bit of a mess at the moment, and with an extra 3 billion people on the way, all requiring food, land, houses, cars, healthcare, phones, laptops, energy and jobs we have a good idea what the problems will be. What we have to do now is start to imagine how we can stave off the worst effects of this huge and mounting pressure on resources without triggering waves of migration and war.

While the World Economic Forum is trying to create a Global Risk Response Mechanism, I argue that we need to create a system that will allow is to be proactive about risks. While technology cannot mitigate the effects of another banking crisis, and may indeed have contributed to it, we can make some large steps forward in addressing resources, health and climate change.

While accurately predicting the future is difficult, one of the biggest risks that we face, and one with implications far larger than the credit crunch, is not being ready for the future. In an increasing number of businesses and organisations that I work with are getting that message, but the real question is whether governments and policy makers will listen?

I spent last weekend in a rather hot Doha (Qatar), surrounded by Emirs, Queens, Princes and Prime Ministers at the World Economic Forums Global Redesign Initiative meeting. It’s an organization I have been involved with for the past six years, through both the Technology Pioneers program and the Global Redesign Initiative.

As the world changes at an ever increasing pace, with new challenges from the financial, technology and natural worlds coming thick and fast, there have been questions over whether international institutions, from the United Nationals to the International Monetary Fund are able to cope.

“Today’s institutions are organized to solve yesterday’s problems” – Mark Malloch Brown, World Economic Forum Global Redesign Meeting, Doha, May 2010

A large part of the change, from the time when most institutions were set up in the aftermath of the second word war has been the explosive growth in communication. When the UN was founded television was only available to a very few people, whereas in 2010 almost five billion people have access to the Internet. The proliferation of Internet enabled devices from iPhones to sensors and the expanding use of social networking such as Twitter and Facebook would have been unimaginable even thirty years ago when the Internet was still an emerging technology.

But technology can present a hazard as well as a risk. While presenting many opportunities that benefit the planet such as raising awareness of global issues and encouraging international cooperation, the Internet can also be used for identity theft and spreading pornography, or even challenging the legitimacy and authority of governments.

With all emerging technologies to date, from the Internet to genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the understanding of the implications by governments and international institutions has lagged way behind the deployment of the technology.

The same is true for the emerging technologies of the 21^st Century. Nanotechnologies, synthetic biology and geoengineering have undoubted potential for good, especially in proactively addressing the issues which will inevitably arise in a world where nine billion people face increasing competition for resources, from food and water to power and natural resources. But equally inevitable is the potential for misuse, from home brew bioterrorism to environmental pollution, and in the case of geoengineering the potential for global disaster even though technologies may have been deployed with the best of intentions.

These emerging technologies, and their inter-linkages with civil society have the potential to shape and reshape our world even more profoundly than the Internet, and the ease of access to information and computing power means that in the 21^st century world changing breakthroughs are as likely to come from the mind of student as from a large multinational corporation.

The reactive nature of institutions is inherent in their nature, and we are proposing the creation of a mechanism to support faster, more fact based decision-making, and to provide the knowledge which would enable a proactive approach to be taken to both the risks and the opportunities arising from 21^st Century emerging technologies.

The full proposal for the Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence is contained in the WEFs Global Redesign Initiative report, and you can also download a copy here.

I’m happy to say that the idea is receiving increasingly strong support from both Governments and companies who are increasingly realizing that in today’s world, taking a passive and reactive approach to global issues will be always more expensive than developing risk avoidance technologies in advance.

You can see (and hear) more about the WEF Global Redesign Initiative below

As I head towards Doha where through the World Economic Forum I will be continuing the battle to encourage governments and policy makers to be proactive about technology rather than reactive, Andrew Maynard’s excellent posting on the kerfuffle over using ‘nano’ dispersants to clear up oil is more grist to the mill.

I often despair when policy on environment and health issues seems to be made without any recourse to science, whether on MMR vaccines, GMO’s or the Louisiana clean up. For a background on the alleged dangerous nanotech you can take a look at Andrews blog. But the big issue here is a ridiculous system which often results in us to be unable to make use of technology.

Making wise choices on the dispersants used in the Gulf of Mexico is vitally important, and bad choices could have lasting consequences.  And it is right and proper that questions should be asked over the use of one product over another.  But if the spill is to be dealt with effectively, these choices must be science-informed – otherwise no-ones interests are served in the long run.

The real question I’ll be looking at in Doha is much longer are we going to have to wade through obfuscation from all sides while the planet dies?

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but shouldn’t governments have a little more foresight when it comes to predictable disasters?

With operations underway to cap the leaking Deepwater Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, economists are already totting up the bill. So far we have somewhere around $3.5 billion of insured losses, $15 billion losses at BP (although the damage to the share price may be only temporary unless BP gets hit with additional fines under the US Clean Water act), $700 million a year for the local economy and probably a lot more won’t see the bill for until much later. Putting all of this together we are looking at a bill of up to $20 billion dollars.

The real tragedy of this disaster is not the size of the bill, the economic or ecological damage, but the fact that it could, and should have been manageable. After all, we can be reasonably sure that given the amount of oil being produced and transported around the world every day a major spillage is inevitable, and history shows us that major oils spill occur every twenty years with smaller ones happening on a far more regular basis.

While it is as difficult to prevent these type of accidents occurring as it is to prevent new strains of infection diseases emerging, i.e. impossible we are forewarned but oddly not forearmed, even though the economic cost of preparedness far outweighs the cost of disaster mitigation. Politicians seem to ‘get it’ as far as climate change is concerned, and are taking action now to avoid much bigger clean up bills in the future, but why don’t we do this in other areas?

As I prepare for another round of discussions about risk management and mitigation with the World Economic Forum in Doha this weekend, I have to wonder whether we are making the best use of our five thousand years of accumulated scientific and technological knowledge. While it is possible to hedge against corporate losses through insurance – in fact without insurance companies wouldn’t be able to take any risks at all – there is still no way we can insure the rest of the population against the outcomes of major disasters.

Or perhaps there is, and that is why we do science. If we were to instigate a global program tomorrow to tackle a major potential disaster, what would it cost? With assets of some $35 billion the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is tackling global health, poverty and education, and making some great strides forward as a result of its focussed initiatives. But this is a huge project tackling a wide range of issues across a very broad front, mitigating an oil spill or a global pandemic should be much cheaper.

I have looked at a number rapid screening technologies for pandemic control recently, costing between two and twenty million dollars to get to market. That’s small change compared with the estimated $70-166 billion dollar cost to the United States of an influenza pandemic.

Similarly the cost of developing technologies to mitigate oils spills is negligible in comparison to doing nothing, and much of this cost can be offset by piggy backing on existing academic research, and could be well funded by diverting only a tiny proportion of oil profits.

So when it comes to global catastophes, it can be argued that science is our only real and tangible insurance policy.

Prophets, priests, scientists and environmentalists have been gleefully predicting the end of the world for several millennia but it wont happen. One of the reasons that the human species has been so successful has been our ability to adapt to changing environments, enabling us, like viruses, to colonise almost every part of the planet, and make use of every available resource.

But there is a problem – we have made use of every available resource, and while some, like silicon make up 25.7% of the Earth’s crust by weight and are to all intents and purposes inexhaustible, many others such as indium are not. The problem is compounded by many of the scarcer elements being a small cog in a large wheel, so while materials such as aluminium, steel and many plastics can and are recycled, recovering the small amounts of indium from broken touch screens is neither feasible or cost effective.

So what can we do with increasingly scarce resources? The problems with elements, as opposed to compounds, is that as fundamental building blocks we cannot create more material, and nor is there an abundant source of material containing the elements in question. If we need hydrogen or oxygen they can be simply made from water, but there are few abundant compounds containing rare earths. As a result we need to find a new solution, and quickly.

Download Sustainable Technologies For The Next Decade (1.5Mb)

Canada has become the latest country following the UK and Australia to ban nanotechnology in organic food. Dag Falck, organic program manager at Nature’s Path Foods explains:

“Genetic engineering is a definable science: splicing genes into crops. With nanotechnology there are at least 1000 different applications, all unregulated with unknown risks.”

As the Canadian organic folks don’t seem to have got around to actually defining what nanotechnology is yet, one suspects that they are rather jumping the gun. It is rather confusing though as FoE, to their credit admit.

Homogenizing milk and grain milling create nanosized particles—milk molecules and wheat flour dust—but would not be considered products of nanotechnology….Nano Green Sciences, Inc. sells a nano-pesticide that they claim is “organic.” Other natural pesticides, such as pyrethrin and copper, could contain nanoparticles and nanosilver could be used to clean vegetables of bacteria.

I wouldn’t claim to be an expert on organic food regulation, but I was rather under the impression that ‘organic’ simply meant free from anything ‘artificial,’ as we discussed  when the UK Soil Association also banned all things nano. It would seem that the natural/man made division would catch all engineered nanomaterials anyway, so explicitly banning them is as much a waste of time as banning cloned sheep from being in organic pigeons or grasshoppers from dancing on the moon.

Twenty Four hours ago my colleague Dexter Johnson asked my opinion about what nanotechnology could do to help clean up the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and I reluctantly said “not much.”

But this doesn’t have to be the answer, we probably have access to most of the technologies that we would need to make a big dent in the environmental mess that is unfolding, but why haven’t they been used?

The answer, as Andrew Maynard and I found out through our work with the World Economic Forum, is that most governments are reactive rather than proactive. The emphasis is on regulating risk rather than developing technologies that would help us deal more effectively with risk, and this disaster illustrates how, when something goes wrong, governments want to be able to pluck fully formed technologies from a tree. Unfortunately the branches are bare.

So what should we be doing to help us deal with inevitable disasters? Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but with a bill estimated at $15 billion for this incident alone, shouldn’t we be spending a few hundred million on making sure that we have the right technologies?

Between nanotechnology, industrial biotech and perhaps even synthetic biology, and not forgetting traditional chemistry I’d bet that we already have 90% of the technology we need. Light, strong, resistant materials for plugging leaks and corralling slicks, enzymes to transform oil into something more manageable, and dispersants to break up the slicks.

It is a certainty that somewhere in the world we will have another oil spill. What is less certain that by then we will have developed the technologies to stop an accident becoming a catastrophe.

The Guardian follows up on the Nature article last week which indicated that most applications of GM crops have been successful.

It’s sad to see the the first reaction of many of the anti GM side of the debate is to attempt to portray the writer of he Guardian article as biased or beholden to big GM business in some way. If that’s not sufficient then another commenter raises the oft cited ‘ethical’ objections along the lines of

- Agro-chemical companies work for profit
- That profit has to come out of someone’s pocket
- That someone is first and foremost the farmer, and always has been.

I’m often shocked by the naivety of the anti technology arguments, especially that if someone makes a profit it then the technology must automatically be bad. Profits means that people are employed and taxes get paid which pays for all the wonderful services we take for granted. If there wasn’t any money in it, then we wouldn’t have most modern crops, drugs, electricity. computes, mobile phones…

Unless the farmer has a lower IQ than the seeds he is planting, it will be simple economics which determine whether he uses GM or non GM seed. Feed your familay and sell your surplus.

That’s all there is to technology diffusion, whether GM, nanotech or anything else. It is the ultimate form of democracy, because it is us, the people, who eventually get to choose whether a technology is used or not, not politicians, companies or single issue campaign groups.

Abolish Science Now!

As an adjunct to my previous post, Science today reports on a new report from the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies (The Impact of Genetically Engineered Crops on Farm Sustainability in the United States) which seems to conclude that biotech crops are good for farmers and the environment, with the usual caveats and uncertainties of course.

So fourteen years after the press and environmental groups declared GMOs to be bad, we now find that they are, in general, quite good in both environmental and economic terms. It’s a reasonable time lag, and I think we’ll see something similar for nanotech, synthetic biology and most other emerging technologies. However the meme that GMO’s are bad is so well entrenched that it may take another ten years and a lot more science to reverse it.

And this gets to the nub of the issue between science and society. Any anti technology movement, from smashing up Spinning Jennies to ripping up GMO crops or disrupting nanotechnology meetings takes as long for scientific evidence to overcome as it does to win the peace in the Malay Peninsula or Iraq.

In the meantime, how many people have to die from preventable diseases such as vitamin deficiencies or malnutrition that science could have cured?

The ash cloud heads south east....

While the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland is bad news for some people, it is actually quite interesting from an emerging technologies point of view, and bordering on fascinating if, like me, you somehow managed to shoehorn a big chunk of geology and geomorphology into you education (It’s a frightening thought, but I could have ended up as a geographer!) as well as spending time working at the European Space Agency.

One of the more frequently proposed geoengineering solutions to climate change is to eject large amounts of aerosols into the upper atmosphere which then cut down the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo and the twenty million tons of sulphur dioxide it blasted into the stratosphere was thought to have caused a global cooling of half a degree centigrade, more than offsetting human induced climate change.

One of the key arguments against geoengineering is that we don’t know what the effects would be – and it is also a good idea to know how much the earth is warming by and what is causing it before you start to try to reverse it – but in this case we are learning fast, and collecting huge amounts of data from dozens of earth observation satellites, many of which were launched in response to concerns about climate change and designed specifically to measure it.  So this particular eruption may be the one which helps us make that (hopefully) rational and evidence backed decision to use geoengineering should if ever become necessary.

While Eyjafjallajokull is estimated to be spewing ten thousand times less sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere than Pinatubo, the highly sophisticated earth observation satellites launched since Pinatubo’s 1991 eruption means that we are far better placed to study the effects of the eruption, both on the planet as a whole, and as a result of the particular composition of material ejected.

Ash sweeps across Europe, as seen from Envisat

This animation from the European Space Agency shows both the spread of the cloud, and its concentrations of sulphur dioxide, and ESA already has a project named Globvolcano which will “define, implement and validate information services to support volcanological observatories in their daily work by integration of Earth Observation data, with emphasis on observation and early warning.”

The other interesting bit of science we can do this week is investigate the effect of aircraft vapour trails. The water vapour emitted by jet engines has a similar effect to high altitude cud, reducing the amount if radiation reaching the earth during the day and acting as an insulating layer during the night. Work carried outwhen all aircraft were grounded in the US after the September 11th attacks concluded that “Sept. 11-14, 2001, had the biggest diurnal temperature range of any three-day period in the past 30 years.” As with all science, taking a single data point doesn’t prove anything, so having another crack at it might help us understand the effect of aircraft on the climate.

All in all, it’s pretty exciting stuff, and armed with half a dozen earth observation satellites like Envisat bristling with spectrometers there is the opportunity to do some great science.