Fixing the Sky (49 page)

Geoengineering does not have a widespread following. In 2006 Ralph Cicerone wrote: “Ideas on how to engineer the Earth's climate, or to modify the environment on large scales ... do not enjoy broad support from scientists. Refereed publications that deal with such ideas are not numerous nor are they cited widely.”
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The situation has not changed substantially since then. According to a 2008 report by the Tyndall Centre, geoengineering proposals have not advanced beyond the outline/concept stage and are best confined to computer model simulations, since small-scale field experiments would be inconclusive and global experiments would be far too risky and socially unacceptable. Recently, atmospheric scientist Richard Turco, founding director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and one of the authors of “Nuclear Winter” (1983), called many geoengineering plans “preposterous” and “mind-boggling.” He saw “no evidence” that technological quick fixes to the climate system would be as cheap or as easy as their proponents claim, and he said that many of them “wouldn't work at all” and could not be field-tested without unacceptable, even unpredictable, risks. Embarking on such projects, he said, “could be foolhardy.”
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Late in 2009, Izrael and his colleagues reported on what they called a geoengineering field experiment in Russia to study solar radiation passing through aerosol layers. Citing Crutzen's 2006 editorial, they made the dubious and selfreferential claim that “injection of reflecting aerosol submicron particles into the stratosphere can be an
optimal
option to compensate warming” (emphasis added).
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The experimenters then proceeded to experiment, not in the stratosphere but near the ground. In several tests, a military helicopter burning “metal-chloride pyrotechnic” flares and a military truck spraying an “overheated vapor-gas mixture of individual fractions of petroleum products” generated
thick toxic clouds of smoke (266). The petroleum device was not unlike Irving Langmuir and Vincent Schaefer's smoke screen generator of World War II. Ground-based solar radiation measurements then showed what everyone already knows—a thick cloud obscures the Sun: “Possible changes in the irradiance are estimated in this case rather approximately. The irradiance reduction in this case was about 28%” (269). Note the experimenters' use of the terms “possible” and “approximately”; a reduction of sunlight of 28 percent, sustained globally, would devastate life on Earth. Another experimental trial also yielded inconclusive results. Cloudy weather with sky clearing made it difficult for the researchers to detect a “possible change in the solar radiation caused by the artificial aerosol sample passing over the instrument complex against the background of natural changes” (269). Nevertheless, for this team, inconclusive small-scale experiments near the ground were seemingly a sufficient proof of concept: “Based on the experimental results obtained in our work, it is shown how it is principally possible to
control
solar radiation passing through artificially created aerosol formations in the atmosphere with different optical thickness” (272). We can only hope these Russian experimenters are not in charge of managing solar radiation for the globe.

An editorial cartoonist for the
New York Times
captured the essence (and the absurdity) of one of the proposed techniques (figure 8.3). Two overheated polar bears are feverishly trying to pump sulfur into the air, but they seem to be having trouble keeping their hose erect, especially if their ice floe shrinks any further. And whose warships are those in the distance? Do they carry Frosch/Crutzen sulfate cannons, or are they trying to stop the geoengineering? Russian opinion has long favored an open Arctic Ocean, and some scientists, including Budyko, believe that the beneficial effects of global warming might “pep up” cold regions and allow more grain and potatoes to be grown, making the country wealthier.
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Better check with Vladimir Putin before we screw (with) the Arctic.

Naval artillery is only one of the many “manly” ways to declare “war” on global warming by using military equipment. The cartoon alludes to a proposal by Edward Teller's protégé Lowell Wood to attach a long hose to a nonexistent but futuristic military High Altitude Airship (a Lockheed-Martin–Defense Department stratospheric super blimp now on the drawing board with some twenty-five times the volume of the Goodyear blimp) to “pump” reflective particles into the stratosphere. According to Wood, “Pipe it up; spray it out!”
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Wood has worked out many of the details—except for high winds, icing, and accidents, since the HAAs are likely to wander as much as 100 miles from
their assigned stations. If the geoengineers cannot keep it up, however, imagine a 25-mile phallic “snake” filled with 10 tons of sulfuric acid ripping loose, writhing wildly, and falling out of the sky. Carol Cohn said it best in her classic article “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”: “The dominant voice of militarized masculinity and decontextualized rationality speaks so loudly in our culture, it will remain difficult for any other voices to be heard ... until that voice is delegitimated.”
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The geoengineers have been playing such games with the planet since computerized general circulation models were first developed. While this kind of research will undoubtedly continue, it should remain indoors between consenting adults. What must be aired are the underlying assumptions.

8.3 “Screwing (with) the Planet,” as interpreted by Henning Wagenbreth. (©
NEW YORK TIMES
, OCTOBER 24, 2007)

The Royal Society of London recently dedicated a special issue of its venerable
Philosophical Transactions
to the topic “Geoscale Engineering to Avert Dangerous Climate Change.”
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The journal bills itself as “essential reading for mathematicians, physicists, engineers and other physical scientists,” which is noteworthy, since climate engineering is not solely or even essentially a technical problem and none of the eleven papers in the special issue were written by historians, ethicists, or other humanists or social scientists. Editors Brian Launder, an engineer, and Michael Thompson, an applied mathematician/solar physicist, began by blaming China and India for their soaring greenhouse gas emissions, praising the developed world (at least the European Union) for struggling to meet its carbonreduction targets, and wondering if the day may come when geoengineering solutions are “
universally
perceived to be less risky than doing nothing” (emphasis added). Only a few of the articles did what the editors promised: subject macro-engineering options to “critical appraisal by acknowledged experts in the field.” Most of the articles had been recycled from the 2004 Tyndall Centre meeting on climate engineering and were written by advocates standing to benefit directly from any increase in funding.

Survey articles by Stephen Schneider and James Lovelock questioned, in broad brushstrokes, the validity and overall viability of the geoengineering enterprise. Schneider briefly reviewed the fifty-year history of schemes to modify large-scale environmental systems or control climate. He pointed out that schemes are typically presented as cost-effective alternatives or as ways to buy time for mitigation, but he expressed doubts that they would work as planned or that they would be socially feasible, given the potential for transboundary conflicts if negative climatic events occur during geoengineering activities.
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Lovelock, invoking a metaphor he has long used, posed as a “geophysiologist,” or planetary physician, and diagnosed the Earth as having a fever induced by the parasite
Disseminated primatemia
(the superabundance of humans). As treatment, he recommended a low-carbon diet combined with nuclear medicine. He likened geoengineering to crude planetary surgery, as practiced by the butcher/ barber surgeons of old. While the patient would definitely survive, the parasites had a much lower probability: “Our ignorance of the Earth system is overwhelming. ... Planetary scale engineering might be able to combat global warming, but as with nineteenth century medicine, the best option may simply be kind words and letting Nature take its course.”
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Lovelock is a freethinker who advocates nuclear power, imagines dystopian futures caused by climate change, and has had Michael Mann's “hockey stick” graph pinned on the wall above his
desk for a number of years. He and Chris Rapley have recently proposed their own geoengineering fix for the “pathology of global warming,” specifically, a vast array of vertical pipes placed in the oceans to bring colder, nutrient-rich water to the surface to spur the growth of carbon dioxide–absorbing plankton. But many worry that the idea might interfere with fishing, disrupt whale populations, and release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it captures.
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Most recently Lovelock has supported “biochar,” the conversion of massive amounts of agricultural “waste” into non-biodegradable charcoal and its subsequent burial.
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This surely qualifies for Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hall of Fantasy, since it would mark the end of composting and would generate massive amounts of the known carcinogen benzo[a]pyrene. Its practitioners risk the fate of Hawthorne's Dr. Cacaphodel, “who had wilted and dried himself into a mummy by continually stooping over charcoal furnaces and inhaling unwholesome fumes during his researches.”
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In the
Philosophical Transactions
special issue on geoengineering, two teams of oceanographers examined ocean iron fertilization field experiments and model studies to gauge whether this technique can “become a viable option to sequester CO
₂
.” Victor Smetacek and S. W. A. Naqvi impugned the current “apparent consensus against OIF [as] premature.” They praised vague but possibly positive side effects of the widespread use and commercialization of this technique (more krill may mean more whales), while they minimized discussion of any negative side effects, such as disruption of the ocean food chain or the creation of anoxic dead zones. Without providing any details, they offered the hollow reassurance that “negative effects of possible commercialization of OIF could be controlled by the establishment of an international body headed by
scientists
to supervise and monitor its implementation” (emphasis added).
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Scientists typically have little or no training in history, ethics, or public policy, while global climate change is a human problem, not merely a scientific issue.

The article by John Latham and colleagues rehearsed the idea of seeding marine stratus clouds with seawater to increase their albedo and possibly make them more persistent. They concluded, to no one's surprise, that it might—just might—work. A companion piece by Steven Salter and colleagues pointed out that an armada of robotic spray ships plying the high seas would be needed and that their spray would make the clouds brighter by introducing so many cloud condensation nuclei that the cloud droplets would be much smaller and more numerous. This “overseeding” technique was attempted using silver iodide in the 1950s as a means to prevent rain. Thus the worldwide array of brighter clouds proposed by Latham and Salter might produce less rain than unaltered clouds, with unknown environmental consequences. It looks like the
international body of scientists mentioned by the oceanographers will be busy monitoring this technique too.
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Ken Caldeira and Lowell Wood offered perhaps the most disingenuous paper by using an “idealized” (read: relatively simple) climate model in which they turned down the sunlight at the top of the atmosphere by using various aerosols. They did not specify where this magic knob might actually be located, but every undergraduate student in atmospheric science knows that the “knob” is built into the models as an indication of the climate's sensitivity to solar insolation. Wonder of wonders, when the sunlight is turned down, the planet cools; and when the sunlight is turned down over the Arctic Circle, the Arctic cools and parameterized sea ice grows. By focusing on physics rather than on the complexities of atmospheric science or ecology, and by tuning their model assumptions, they concluded that their “engineered high CO
₂
climate” could be made to emulate a perhaps more desirable but presently unattainable low CO
₂
climate. Caldeira and Wood used back-of-the-envelope calculations to push forward their case for military hardware with unspecified failure rates delivering unspecified aerosols into the stratosphere with unknown environmental consequences. They ignored the recent, more sophisticated modeling work of Alan Robock, Luke Oman, and Georgiy Stenchikov indicating that stratospheric aerosols injected at high latitudes would soon be carried by the winds as far south as 30°N, interfering with the Asian summer monsoon. Since stratospheric aerosols would not stay confined above the Arctic Circle, the “yarmulke plan” of Caldeira and Wood is physically impossible. Their non-sequitur conclusion: “Implementing insolation modulation appears to be feasible.” Their most honest admission: “Modeling of climate engineering is in its infancy.”
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