Fixing the Sky (47 page)

In 1989 James Early, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, revisited the issue of space mirrors and linked space manufacturing fantasies with environmental issues in his wild speculations on the construction of a solar shield “to offset the greenhouse effect.”
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His back-of-the-envelope calculations indicated that a massive shield some 1,250 miles in diameter would be needed to reduce incoming sunlight by 2 percent. He estimated that an ultrathin shield, possibly manufactured from lunar materials using nano-fabrication techniques, might cost “from one to ten trillion dollars.” Launched from the Moon by an unspecified “mass driver,” the shield would reach a “semi-stable” orbit at the L
₁
point 1 million miles from the Earth along a direct line toward the Sun, where it would perch “like a barely balanced cart atop a steep hill, a hair's-width away from falling down one side or the other.”
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Here it would be subjected to the solar wind, harsh radiation, cosmic rays, and the buildup of electrostatic forces. It would have to remain functional for “several centuries,” which would entail repair missions. It would also require an active positioning system to keep it from falling back to the Earth or into the Sun. In other words, it was not feasible. Early did not indicate what a guidance system might look like for a 5-million-square-mile sheet of material possibly thinner than kitchen plastic wrap, with a mass close to 1 billion kilograms (2.2 billion pounds in Earth gravity). He alluded to the enormous scale and costs of this project and its “major undefined systems,” while disingenuously declaring it to be a simpler project, “much smaller in size and scale,” than controlling the temperatures on
other
planets of the solar system. By this “logic,” even controlling the temperature of the entire solar system would be “simple” compared with galacticscale engineering!

The publication of the National Academy of Sciences report
Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming: Mitigation, Adaptation, and the Science Base
(1992) is well within the memory of the current generation of climate engineers. The massive report, whose synthesis panel was chaired by Daniel J. Evans, former governor and U.S. senator from Washington State, examined what was known about greenhouse gases and their climatic effects and then presented geoengineering
as one of the cheapest mitigation options, at least in its direct costs. One of the controversial aspects was the report's conclusion that “assumed gradual changes in climate” would produce impacts “that will be no more severe, and adapting to them will be no more difficult, than for the range of climates already on the

Earth and no more difficult than for other changes humanity faces.”
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Another problem was the report's narrow focus on cost-effectiveness and the assumed ease of implementing remedial policies. These include fantastic geoengineering schemes conflated with energy-switching and efficiency options under the catchall category “mitigation.”

Here are the National Academy's geoengineering options, notable for their impracticability:

Washington insider Robert A. Frosch—a vice president of General Motors Research Labs, former deputy director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, former assistant secretary of the navy for research and development, and former administrator of NASA—spearheaded the geoengineering aspects of the study. His enthusiastic promotion of climate engineering was seen as a rationale for GM and other corporations to argue against cutting carbon dioxide emissions. At the time, Frosch said,

Yale economist William Nordhaus, also a contributor to the National Academy study, used geoengineering scenarios in his dynamic integrated climate economy (DICE) model to calculate the balance between economic growth (or decline) and climate change. Defining geoengineering as “a hypothetical technology that provides
costless
mitigation of climate change” (emphasis added), he came to the controversial conclusion that “geoengineering produces major benefits, whereas emissions stabilization and climate stabilization are projected to be worse than inaction.”
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At one point, he referred to the scale of his global economic projections as “mind-numbing,” but he could well have applied this description to his overall conclusions regarding the potential for a geoengineering solution. Stephen Schneider later wrote: “As a member of that panel, I can report that the very idea of including a chapter on geoengineering led to serious internal and external debates. Many participants (including myself) were worried that even the thought that we could offset some aspects of inadvertent climate modification by deliberate modification schemes could be used as an excuse to continue polluting.”
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In fact, it was precisely in this way—as an alternative to reducing emissions—that geoengineering discussions found their way into the twenty-first century.

Such sentiments echoed the dismal opinions of economists at the time on pollution solutions. In 1991, for example, World Bank economist Lawrence Summers (who later resigned as president of Harvard University following a no-confidence vote of the faculty and now directs the White House's National Economic Council) wrote, in what he assumed would remain a private, and what he later deemed a sarcastic, memo: “Shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries].... I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to the fact that ... under populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted.”
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The outrage generated when this memo became public in 1992, just before the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, motivated José Lutzenberger, Brazil's secretary of the environment, to respond to Summers:

“Insane,” “reductionist,” “ruthless,” “arrogant”—such modifiers suit most geoengineering proposals quite well. Nordhaus wrote in 2007 that geoengineering is, at present, “the only economically competitive technology to offset global warming.”
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Frosch called his proposal to bombard the stratosphere using an array of 350 naval guns “designer volcanic dust put up with Jules Verne methods” (figure 8.2).
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He envisioned each $1 million, 16-inch gun being able to fire 1 ton of sulfate or aluminum oxide into the stratosphere about every ten minutes. Each barrel would need replacement after 1,000 to 1,500 shots. Thus a single cannon would have a useful life of less than two weeks, and a total of 300,000 cannon would be needed for a forty-year program! The naval guns had been designed in 1939 and were first put into service in 1943, so they would have to be updated. The cost of ammunition for 400 million shots was estimated at $4 trillion, the barrels would be $300 billion, the firing stations $200 billion, and the personnel costs $100 billion—for a total of $5 trillion over forty years. This system could deliver dust to the stratosphere for about $14 a pound, and each pound was expected to mitigate 45 tons of carbon emissions.
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Balloon delivery systems were estimated to cost $36 a pound and sounding rockets, $45.

Frosch was aware that damaging side effects could result, such as stratospheric ozone destruction, widespread drought, or unacceptable atmospheric haze, but he did not emphasize that. Instead, he reassured his readers that “the rifle system appears to be inexpensive, to be relatively easily managed, and to require few launch sites” (460). He concluded that “the rifles could be deployed at sea or in military reservations where the noise of the shots and the fallback of expended shells could be managed” (817–819). What Frosch forgot to take into account was the lower tropospheric air pollution generated by the bombardments. If, for example, each 650-pound explosive charge contained pure
nitroglycerine (C
₃
H
₅
N
₃
O
₉
), it would generate about 380 pounds of carbon dioxide when fired, so 400 million cannon shots would produce about 76 million tons of carbon dioxide. This calculation does not take into account other gaseous by-products, such as smoke or nitrous oxide, nor does it consider the carbon emissions involved in manufacturing or transporting 300,000 cannon barrels,
each of which is over 65 feet long and weighs over 130 tons.
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Could such a long-term and violent bombardment be sustained without any accidents or other side effects? Is declaring war on the stratosphere the best mitigation strategy? The authors of the 2009 Novim Group report on geoengineering seem to think so and discuss, apparently without a sense of irony, the possibility of opening fire on the ozone layer with M1 tank guns loaded with aerosols.
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8.2 Shooting dust into the stratosphere to offset global warming, one proposal by the National Academy of Sciences in its report published in 1992. Nobel laureate Paul J. Crutzen revived the idea in 2006. (CARTOON BY JOHN IRELAND, IN
GEOGRAPHICAL MAGAZINE
, MAY 1992)

The other scheme hatched at the time was ocean iron fertilization (OIF). “Give me half a tanker of iron, and I'll give you an ice age,” biogeochemist John Martin (a Colby College graduate) reportedly quipped in a Dr. Strangelove accent at a conference at Woods Hole in 1988.
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Martin and his colleagues at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories proposed that iron was a limiting nutrient in certain ocean waters and that adding it stimulated explosive and widespread phytoplankton growth. They tested their iron deficiency, or “Geritol,” hypothesis in bottles of ocean water, and subsequently experimenters added iron to the oceans in a dozen or so ship-borne “patch” experiments extending over hundreds of square miles. OIF worked, just like pouring Miracle-Gro on your tomatoes. Was it possible that the blooming and die-off of phytoplankton, fertilized by the iron in natural dust, was the key factor in regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations during glacial–interglacial cycles? Dust bands in ancient ice cores encouraged this idea, as did the detection of natural plankton blooms by satellites.
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Enter the geoengineers. Could OIF speed up the biological carbon pump to sequester carbon dioxide, and was it a solution to global warming? Because of this possibility, Martin's hypothesis received widespread public attention. What if entrepreneurs or governments could turn patches of ocean soupy green and claim that the carbonaceous carcasses of the dead plankton sinking below the waves constituted biological “sequestration” of undesired atmospheric carbon? Or could plankton blooms increase the production of dimethyl sulfate (DMS) and cool the Earth by making marine clouds slightly more reflective? Several companies—Climos, Planktos (now out of the business), the aptly named GreenSea Ventures, and the Ocean Nourishment Corporation—have proposed entering the carbon-trading market by dumping either iron or urea into the oceans to stimulate both plankton blooms and ocean fishing. The scientific consensus, however, supported by diplomatic negotiations, held that more research was needed to evaluate risks and benefits before anyone should even think of selling carbon offsets from ocean iron fertilization. Some of the key questions
that are as yet unanswered include the amount and fate of carbon from a bloom, how long it would remain sequestered, and, most important, how all this could be verified. If the commercial companies are going to try to sell an artificial and beneficial “rain” of ocean phytoplankton, then all the caveats and all the verification and attribution challenges of artificial rainmaking apply. It is similar to the relationship between cloud physics and commercial cloud seeding; as Kenneth Coale, director of Moss Landing, pointed out, “iron experiments are about how nature works; commercial ocean seeding is about getting nature to work for us.”
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