Fixing the Sky (2 page)

Special thanks are due to Ralph Cicerone and Lee Hamilton and their staffs; British Broadcasting Corporation filmmakers Fiona Scott and Weini Tesfu; 4th Row Films producers and directors Robert Greene and Greta Wink; Wilson Center Environmental Change and Security director Geof Dabelko,
Wilson Quarterly
editor Steve Lagerfeld and assistant editor Rebecca Rosen, Wilson Center press director Joe Brinley, and Wilson Center librarian Janet Spikes; National Academy of Science archivists Dan Barbiero and Janice Goldblum; Colby College librarians Susan Cole, Margaret Menchen, Darylyne Provost, and Alisia Wygant Rizett; Len Bruno and the staffs of the Library of Congress, the
Smithsonian Institution Libraries, and the NOAA Central Library; and a host of other archivists and librarians.

The following individuals provided extremely helpful perspectives and welcome encouragement: Stephen Cole, NASA Goddard; Lindsay Collins, Brooke Larson, and Theda Perdue, Woodrow Wilson Center; Matthew Connelly, Columbia University; Bill Frank and Charles Hosler, Pennsylvania State University; Justin Grubich and Alexey Voinov, AAAS Policy Fellows; Vladimir Jankovic, Manchester University; D. Whitney King, Ursula Reidel-Schrewe, and Thomas Shattuck, Colby College; Roger Launius, David DeVorkin, Martin Collins, and Michael Neufeld, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; Milton Leitenberg, University of Maryland; Michael MacCracken and John Topping, Climate Institute; Alan Robock, Rutgers University; Richard Somerville, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; and Roger Turner, University of Pennsylvania.

Gregory Cushman and students in his graduate seminar at the University of Kansas read and commented on an early draft of the manuscript; so, too, did Roger Launus, Alan Robock, and several unnamed reviewers. Research assistants Noah B. Bonnheim, Alice W. Evans, Amie R. Fleming, Ashley J. Oliver, Mette Fog Olwig, Mandy Reynolds, and James S. Westhafer made essential contributions to the process. My editor, Anne Routon, greatly facilitated production of the book.

INTRODUCTION

AS
alarm over global warming spreads, some climate engineers are engaging in wild speculation and are advancing increasingly urgent proposals about how to “control” the Earth's climate. They are stalking the hallways of power, hyping their proposals, and seeking support for their ideas about fixing the sky. The figures they scribble on the backs of envelopes and the results of their simple (yet somehow portrayed as complex) climate models have convinced them, but very few others, that they are planetary saviors, lifeboat builders on a sinking
Titanic
, visionaries who are taking action in the face of a looming crisis. They present themselves as insurance salesmen for the planet, with policies that may or may not pay benefits. In response to the question of what to do about climate change, they are prepared to take ultimate actions to intervene, even to do too much if others, in their estimation, are doing too little.

These climate engineers share a growing concern that something is terribly wrong with the sky. They are convinced that the climate system is headed into uncharted territory, carbon mitigation will fail or at least move too slowly to avert an environmental disaster, and adaptation will be too little, too late. Some simply place more faith in engineering solutions than in human agreements.
They have come to the conclusion that the twenty-first century will be “geotechnic”—that the atmosphere is humanity's aerial sewer, sorely in need of treatment, and the Earth needs a thermostat or perhaps global air-conditioning. They seek a technological fix through geoengineering, which they loosely define as the intentional large-scale manipulation of the global environment. Some have called it the “ultimate technological fix”; critics say it has unlimited potential for planetary mischief. Shade the planet by launching a solar shield into orbit. Shoot sulfates or reflective nanoparticles into the upper atmosphere, turning the blue sky milky white. Make the clouds thicker and brighter. Fertilize the oceans to stimulate massive algae blooms that turn the blue seas soupy green. Suck carbon dioxide (CO
₂
) out of the air with hundreds of thousands of giant artificial trees. Flood the Sahara and the Australian outback to plant mega-forests of eucalyptus trees. Surround the Arctic sea ice with a white plastic flotilla. While all this may sound like science fiction, it is actually just the latest set of installments in the perennial story of weather and climate control. For more than a century, scientists, soldiers, and charlatans have hatched schemes to manipulate the weather and climate. Like them, today's aspiring climate engineers wildly exaggerate what is possible, while scarcely considering the political, military, and ethical implications of attempting to manage the world's climate. This is not, in essence, a heroic saga about new scientific discoveries that can save the planet, as many of the participants claim, but a tragicomedy of overreaching, hubris, and self-delusion. At a National Academy of Sciences meeting in June 2009 on geoengineering, planetary scientist Brian Toon told the audience that we do not have the technology to engineer the planet. We do not have the wisdom either.
¹
Global climate engineering is untested and untestable, and dangerous beyond belief.

The latest resurgence of interest in geoengineering dates to an editorial written in 2006 by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, “Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?”
²
The question mark is well placed, for far from solving a policy dilemma, he actually opened a can of worms, albeit from a historical pantry filled with such cans. Crutzen's basic message, that “research on the feasibility and environmental consequences of climate engineering... should not be tabooed,” was but the latest round in an ancient quest for ultimate control of the atmosphere—a quest with very deep roots in traditional cultures, practices, myth, fiction, and history.

Ever since Archimedes, engineers have been excited about technological leverage, but they have never had the “standing” or the ability to predict all or even most of the consequences of their actions. This is a perennial issue. Yet today's geoengineers exude a false confidence when they proclaim that their tools and techniques have now matured to the extent that fixing the sky—cooling
the planet, saving humanity, and minimizing unwanted side effects, whether physical or moral—is now both possible and desirable. How did we arrive at this situation?
³

This book examines historical and current ways of thinking about weather and climate control. It includes stories from a long and checkered history and a dizzying array of contemporary ideas—most of them wildly impractical. It examines the proposals and actual practices of a large number of dreamers, militarists, and outright charlatans, of rain kings and queens, of weather warriors and climate engineers, both ancient and modern. It provides scholars and the general public with new perspectives that are missing from the technically oriented or policy-oriented conversations about control. This book is based on research in original manuscript and document collections; it also contains fresh interpretations of existing work. It is an extended essay arguing for the relevance of history, the foolishness of quick fixes, and the need to follow a “middle course” of expedited moderation in aerial matters, seeking neither to control the sky nor to diminish the importance of environmental problems we face.

This history is located within a long tradition of imaginative and speculative literature involving the “control” of nature. Early efforts to exercise some form of control over the environment included seeking shelter from the elements, using fire for warmth, herding animals, cultivating plants, and moving and storing fresh water. Yet control of the heavens remains far beyond the ability of mortals. Our ancestors either bowed or cowered before the ancient sky gods, while the mythological figures of classical antiquity met with tragedy when they sought to exceed mortal limits. Many societies, seeking a measure of influence over the vagaries of the sky, invested their rulers or shamans with the title “rain king” or “rain queen” and charged them with ceremonial duties of vast significance not only for upholding the physical well-being and prosperity of the tribe but also for maintaining the proper relationships between heaven and Earth.

Since the seventeenth century, the Baconian expectation that increasing knowledge would lead to new technologies “for the common good” has been widely applied to all scientific fields, including, notably, meteorology and climatology. For several centuries now, planners, politicians, scientists, and soldiers have proposed schemes for the purposeful manipulation of weather and climate, usually for commercial or military purposes. Their stories have tragic, comedic, and heroic aspects. Control of weather and climate is a perennial issue rooted in hubris and tragedy; it is a pathological issue, illustrating what can go wrong in science; and it is a pressing public policy issue with widespread social implications.

Enlightenment philosophers supposed that the climate of Europe had moderated since Roman times in response to human activity. Thomas Jefferson thought
that clearing the forests, draining the marshes, and cultivating the land would improve the American climate.
⁴
In the 1840s, James Espy, the first meteorologist in U.S. government service, proposed rainmaking by lighting huge fires to stimulate convective updrafts.
⁵
The following era in rainmaking was dominated by artillerists and “rain fakers,” the so-called pluviculturalists.
⁶

Nineteenth-century climatologists could find no trends in the weather records beyond variability and temporarily quashed the notion that humans can influence climate. Yet by mid-century, geologists had discovered great changes, ice ages and interglacial epochs, in the record of the rocks. The two timescales (the human historical and the geological) and the two agencies (anthropogenic forces and natural forces) were reunited in a new form at the dawn of the twentieth century by the Swedish meteorologist Nils Gustaf Ekholm (1848–1923), who wrote about “the climate of the geological and historical past.” Ekholm regarded variations in carbon dioxide concentration as the principal cause of climatic variations, citing the “elaborate inquiry on this complicated phenomenon” made by his colleague Svante Arrhenius. He explained that carbon dioxide is a key player in the greenhouse effect and that this conclusion is based on the earlier work of Joseph Fourier, John Tyndall, and others. By his estimates, an increase in carbon dioxide would heat high latitudes more than the tropics and would create a warmer, more uniform climate over the entire Earth; a tripling of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would raise global temperatures by 7 to 9°C (12 to 16 °F).

According to Ekholm, the secular cooling of the originally hot Earth was the principal cause of variation in the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As the Earth cooled, the oceans sequestered great amounts of carbon into limestone and other calcium carbonate deposits, reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. This caused temperatures to fall, triggering a chain reaction of feedback mechanisms that lowered carbon dioxide levels even further. Other processes added carbon dioxide to the air. Volcanic emissions, mountain uplift, and changes in sea level and plant cover produced the periodical variations evident in the geological record.

Ekholm pointed out that humanity was now playing a role in these geological processes. He held that over the course of a millennium the accumulation in the atmosphere of CO
₂
from the burning of pit coal would “undoubtedly cause a very obvious rise of the mean temperature of the Earth.” He also thought this effect could be accelerated by burning coal exposed in shallow seams or perhaps decreased “by protecting the weathering layers of silicates from the influence of the air and by ruling the growth of plants.” Ekholm pointed to the grand possibility that by such means it might someday be possible “to regulate the future climate of the Earth and consequently prevent the arrival of a new Ice
Age.” In this scenario, climate warming by enhanced coal burning would be pitted against the natural changes in the Earth's orbital elements, recently identified by James Croll, or the secular cooling of the Sun, as pointed out by Lord Kelvin (William Thomson). Ekholm concluded, “It is too early to judge of how far Man might be capable of thus regulating the future climate. But already the view of such a possibility seems to me so grand that I cannot help thinking that it will afford Mankind hitherto unforeseen means of evolution.”
⁷

Arrhenius popularized Ekholm's observations in his book
Worlds in the Making,
noting that “the slight percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere may by the advances of industry be changed to a noticeable degree in the course of a few centuries.” Arrhenius considered it likely that in future geological ages, the Earth would be “visited by a new ice period that will drive us from our temperate countries into the hotter climates of Africa.” On the timescale of hundreds to thousands of years, however, Arrhenius agreed with Ekholm that a “virtuous circle” could be defined in which the burning of fossil fuels could help prevent a rapid return to the conditions of an ice age and could perhaps inaugurate a new carboniferous age of enormous plant growth.