Fixing the Sky (39 page)

An ice-free Arctic Ocean was one of the largest-scale and most widely discussed climate-engineering projects of the time. Jules Verne's story
The Purchase of the North Pole
(1889) may have been inspired by such ideas. Ironically, an ice-free Arctic Ocean is something we may actually see sooner or later through a combination of natural and anthropogenic influences. In 1957 Soviet academician Borisov, alluding to the centuries-old quest of the
Russian people to overcome the northland cold, proposed building a dam across the Bering Strait to melt the Arctic sea ice.
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In numerous articles and then again in his book
Can Man Change the Climate?
(1973), Borisov detailed his vision of a dam 50 miles long and almost 200 feet high with shipping locks and pumping stations. He proposed that the dam be built in 820-foot sections made of prefabricated freeze-resistance ferroconcrete that could be floated to the construction site and anchored to the sea bottom with pilings. He further suggested that the top of the dam be shaped so that ice floes would ride up over the dam and break off on the southern side. An alternative design included an intercontinental highway and railroad. According to Borisov, “What mankind needs is war against cold, rather than a ‘cold war.'”
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To liquidate Arctic sea ice, Borisov wanted to pump cold seawater out of the Arctic Ocean, across the dam, and into the Bering Sea and the North Pacific. This displacement would allow the inflow of warmer water from the North Atlantic, eliminate fresh water in the surface layer in several years, and thus prevent the formation of ice in the Arctic Basin, creating warmer climate conditions:

His goal was to remove a 200-foot layer of cold surface water, which would be replaced by warmer, saltier water that would not freeze. Inspired by Markin's popular book
Soviet Electric Power
, Borisov also assumed that huge amounts of electricity would soon be available to run the pumps, perhaps from hydroelectric generators or nuclear reactors.

The dam was, of course, never built, but if it had been attempted, would the nations of the world have confronted the Russians? The net climatic effect of the project, if it had been carried out, is still highly uncertain. A good argument can be made that the effect would be less than that of naturally occurring variations in the Atlantic influx, but none of the computer models at the time were sophisticated enough to show any robust results.

Other ocean-engineering schemes included installing giant turbines in the Strait of Florida to generate electricity and adding a thin film of alcohol to the northern branch of the Gulf Stream to decrease surface water evaporation and warm the water by several degrees, although the cod might become rather tipsy.
In Japan, engineers imagined that the icy Sea of Okhotsk could be tamed by deflecting the warm Kuroshio Current with a dam or one-way water valve built at the Tatarsk Strait. And in a 1970 geoengineering experiment thought suitable only for testing on a computer model (aren't they all?), the Japanese geoscientific speculator Keiji Higuichi wondered what would happen to the global atmospheric and oceanic circulation and thus the world's climate if the Drake Passage, between the tip of South America and Antarctica, was blocked by an ice dam. One possibility was the onset of a new ice age.
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Russian scientists warned of possible climate disruption from such megaprojects. Borisov admitted that the large-scale climatic and ecological effects of his Bering Strait dam could not be fully predicted, nor could they be confined within the borders of any one national state; rather, they would directly involve the national interests of the Soviet Union, Canada, Denmark, and the United States and indirectly affect many countries in other areas that might experience climate change caused by the project. With such a dam in place, the middlelatitude winters would be milder due to the warming of Arctic and polar air masses. He thought areas such as the Sahara would be much better watered and would perhaps turn into steppe land or savannah. Direct benefits of an ice-free Arctic Ocean would include new, more-direct shipping routes between East Asia and Europe, while, by his overly optimistic calculations, sea-level rise would be modest, even with the melting of the Greenland ice cap. Yet such climatic changes elsewhere were of little concern to the Soviets.

Larisa R. Rakipova noted that a substantial Arctic warming could cool the winters in Africa by 5°C (9°F), “leading to a complete disruption of the living conditions for people, animals, and plants,”
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and Oleg A. Drozdov warned that the warming of the Arctic would lead to a total breakdown of moisture exchange between the oceans and continents with excess rain in the Far East and great aridity in Europe. The resulting drastic changes in the soils, vegetation, water regime, and other natural conditions would have widespread negative ecological, economic, and social consequences (25). As in the fictional case described earlier in
The Evacuation of England
, Rusin and Flit also wondered what might happen if the Americans implemented one of their projects and turned the Gulf Stream toward the shores of America: “In Europe the temperature would drop sharply and glaciers would begin to advance rapidly” (22). In his book
The Gulf Stream
(1973), T. F. Gaskell pointed out, “This is why such natural phenomena as the Gulf Stream have political implications.”
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Geoengineers should realize that the same is true of a wide range of natural phenomena.

In addition to sea ice, the Soviets were also battling the “curse of the Siberians”—permafrost as thick as 1,600 feet in places. One suggestion to remove it
involved applying soot to the snowfields to absorb more sunlight; or perhaps cheaper materials such as ash or peat could do the job. Reminding their readers that “everyone knows what permafrost is,” Rusin and Flit recounted its horrors: “A newly constructed house unexpectedly begins to shift, a Russian stove suddenly begins to sink into the ground, deeply driven piles spring from the ground,” and when it melts and refreezes, the trees of the mysterious “drunken forests” lean akilter, like a Siberian full of vodka.
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In the twenty-first century, permafrost has reemerged not as a local curse but as something to be saved, in part to preserve the migration patterns of the reindeer and caribou, and as a global environmental issue because of its high methane gas content. In 1962 Rusin and Flit opined, “Much has been learned, but it has been impossible to completely eliminate permafrost” (27).

The completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 under the direction of the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps led to a number of mega-engineering proposals for rehydrating Africa. One was proposed by an eccentric British adventurer and entrepreneur, Donald Mackenzie, who proposed flooding the Sahara Desert in Algeria with water from the Mediterranean Sea to improve transportation, benefit commerce, and spread Christianity. The
Daily Telegraph
reported:

A colleague wrote to Mackenzie that the project “would recommend itself to every Christian mind, spreading a net of Christianity over Africa” (274). The French, not to be outdone, appointed geographer François Elie Roudaire to lead a commission that suggested that the French Academy of Sciences explore the idea.
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This discussion raised the possibility that an inland sea might enhance rainfall and thus agricultural production in the Sahara, but also might adversely affect the climate of Europe.

Jules Verne's novel
L'Invasion de la mer
(1905) was based on the premise that French engineers returned to Africa to complete Roudaire's project. The
book raised a number of environmental, cultural, and political concerns, including the possibility of warfare triggered by macro-engineering projects.
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Verne's idea was revived in whole cloth in 1911 by a French scientist named Etchegoyen, who again proposed to convert large portions of the Sahara into an inland sea by digging a 50-mile canal on the north coast of Africa. He touted the ease of construction and the massive benefits: more fertile soil and cropland, a cooler local climate, and a great new colony for France along the “Sea of Sahara.” Critics warned that the massive redistribution of water, up to half the volume of the Mediterranean Sea, might tip the Earth's axis, adversely affect regional precipitation patterns, or even trigger an ice age in northern Europe.
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In the 1930s, the German architect Herman Sörgel's “Atlantropa Project” promoted the idea of lowering the level of the Mediterranean Sea and developing more than 3 million acres of new territory (an area as large as France) for European settlement. According to Sörgel, the construction of gigantic dams at Gibraltar and the Dardanelles to drain much of the Mediterranean and generate massive amounts of power “would assure Europe a utopian future of expanded territory; abundant, clean, and cheap energy; and the revival of its global economic and political might.” Sörgel tried to sell his ideas first to the Nazis and then, during the cold war, to Western governments as a hedge against Soviet expansionism in Africa.

But lowering the Mediterranean Sea was only part of Sörgel's vision. He also wanted to irrigate much of Africa by building a massive system of dams and artificial lakes. Damming the Congo River, Africa's mightiest and the secondmost-voluminous river in the world, near its outlet at Brazzaville, Congo, would create a huge new lake that Sörgel dubbed the “Congo Sea,” basically covering the entire surface area of that nation. A chain of events, including the drowning of natives, wildlife, and ecosystems, would then occur. By his calculations, the Ubangi River would reverse its course, flowing northwest into the Chari River and finally into the greatly enlarged “Chad Sea.” These two new seas would cover about 10 percent of the continent, and the northern outlet could be dubbed the “Second Nile,” flowing north across the Sahara to create an irrigated settlement corridor in Algeria similar to that in Egypt. Sörgel's plan also included a giant hydroelectric plant at Stanley Falls, with sufficient surplus electric power to illuminate and industrialize much of the continent (figure 7.2).
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American and Soviet hydrological engineers, too, dreamed of such macro-scale projects. In the 1950s and 1960s, the North American Water and Power Alliance proposed to channel 100 million acre-feet of water per year from Alaska and Canada for use in the southwestern United States and Mexico. Soviet
engineers dreamed of creating a massive new “Siberian Sea” east of the Ural Mountains by damming the Ob, Yenisei, and Angara rivers, for irrigation of crops and climate modulation. As recently as 1997, Robert Johnson, a retired geoscientist at the University of Minnesota, commandeered the front page of
EOS: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union
, to warn that the Mediterranean Sea was being starved of fresh water because human activities have diverted the outflow of rivers, mainly the Nile. He called for a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar to block the outflow of salt water into the Atlantic Ocean, paradoxically making the Mediterranean even saltier than at present. All of this was for a good cause, however, since his computer models indicated that the mega-dam would stave off a little ice age in northern Europe while preserving the holy grail of climate change, preventing the West Antarctic ice sheet from collapsing, and raising the worldwide sea level by 20 feet. It seems that all current geoengineering schemes should be able to do this, at least.
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7.2 Herman Sörgel's plan for transforming Africa and the Mediterranean. (RUSIN AND FLIT,
MAN VERSUS CLIMATE
)

In July 1945, a classified U.S. Army Air Force memorandum on the subject of German liquid rocket development included speculations on “future possibilities,” including ideas on intercontinental ballistic missiles, Earth-orbiting satellites, space station platforms, and interplanetary travel. Significantly, a section of the memo titled “Weather Control” cited a 1923 proposal by Herman Oberth to launch large mirrors, a mile or so in diameter, into orbit to be used to concentrate the Sun's energy on the Earth's surface “at will,” and in this way influence the weather.
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Time
further popularized Oberth's idea in 1954, describing the space mirror as made of “shiny metal foil reinforced with wire” and spinning slowly around a space station as its hub.
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The space mirror would be positioned in such a way as to illuminate the Earth's nighttime hemisphere. It would bathe cold countries in reflected sunlight, making them productive and habitable. Areas with excess rainfall could be heated and dried with the mirrors. Conversely, rainfall might be generated in an arid region by concentrating the Sun's rays on the nearest lakes to evaporate water and form clouds. Then the rain clouds could be directed toward arid regions by thermal currents and pressure gradients generated by “proper manipulation of the mirrors.”