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.84 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!”85 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.”86 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)
A Royal Society Smoke Screen
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.”87 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.88
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.”89 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.90 Most recently Lovelock has supported “biochar,” the conversion of massive amounts of agricultural “waste” into non-biodegradable charcoal and its subsequent burial.91 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.”92
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 CO2.” 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).93 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.94
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 CO2 climate” could be made to emulate a perhaps more desirable but presently unattainable low CO2 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.”95
The article in the volume with the greatest integrity, by the most sophisticated team of modelers, and the one that offered a fresh and rather sobering assessment of the consequences of injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere was by Philip Rasch and his colleagues. Their simulations indicated that while the Northern Hemisphere might cool overall after such an intervention, significant and undesirable reductions in precipitation could occur over vulnerable areas such as North Africa and India, possibly leading to drought conditions and damage to agricultural productivity. Such climate engineering would also cause significant changes in the overall spectrum of solar radiation, with more biologically damaging ultraviolet-B radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, with negative consequences likely for human health and biological populations. The worldwide sulfate haze would also reduce direct-beam solar radiation and increase diffuse sky radiation with unwelcome aesthetic effects, interfere with optical astronomy, dramatically reduce the capacity for generation of solar power, and probably cause unwanted stresses on plant ecosystems and crops. Rasch and his colleagues also warned of increased ozone depletion attributable to the presence of additional sulfate particles in the stratosphere. A related article in Science by Simone Tilmes, Rolf Müller, and Ross Salawitch supported this conclusion: “An injection of sulfur large enough to compensate for surface warming caused by the doubling of atmospheric CO2 would strongly increase the extent of Arctic ozone depletion during the present century for cold winters and would cause a considerable delay, between 30 and 70 years, in the expected recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole.”96 So much for Crutzen’s proposal.
In 2009 oceanographer John Shepherd and I were on a panel presenting testimony to the U.S. Congress on the governance of geoengineering. He introduced a recent study that he chaired for the Royal Society of London with the comment “geoengineering is no magic bullet.” I immediately thought, “It is no bullet at all” and we would be better off not shooting our ordnance at the atmosphere.97 The published report recommends, sensibly, that nations make increased efforts toward mitigating and adapting to climate change, but it also supports further research and development of geoengineering, including appropriate observations, development and use of climate models, and (more ominously) “carefully planned and executed experiments,” including small- to medium-scale experiments both in the laboratory and in field trials.98
Field Tests?
In his 2008 testimony to the British House of Commons, Launder spotlighted his recent editorship of the Philosophical Transactions special issue on geoengineering and urged the government to go beyond paper studies and “earmark” a portion of its budget for a program of field tests leading to possible geo-scale deployment. The response of mainstream engineers, however, was lukewarm. In the opinion of Britain’s Royal Academy of Engineering, “All the current proposals have inherent environmental, technical and social risks and none will solve all the problems associated with energy and climate change.” The academy recommended that the government “stay well informed” but treat geoengineering with caution.99 Geographer Dan Lunt, from the University of Bristol, and others pointed out that the missing dimension in all of this was a large-scale program to determine the efficacy, side effects, practicality, economics, and ethical implications of geoengineering, a kind of ethical, legal, social implications (ELSI) approach common in other controversial fields. If American geoengineers are seeking funding, a single agency with deep pockets—for example, the Department of Energy, NASA, or even the Department of Defense or Homeland Security—is not the way to go. Neither is a private company in which commercial goals may overwhelm scientific objectivity. This field needs enhanced public input and open peer review, such as that provided by the National Science Foundation.
Recently, atmospheric scientist William Cotton pointed out the relationship between weather engineering and climate engineering, along with their systematic problems and structural differences. In weather modification experiments, the scientific community requires “proof” that cloud seeding has increased precipitation. Following an intervention, such proof would include “strong physical evidence of appropriate modifications to cloud structures and highly significant statistical evidence”—that is, effects that exceed the natural background variability of the atmosphere. But intervention is not control. In 1946 Kathleen Blodgett at General Electric told Irving Langmuir that intervening in or modifying a cloud was a far cry from controlling its subsequent motion and growth or the characteristics of its precipitation. Having experienced the promise and hype of cloud seeding, and after having worked for fifty years in this field, Cotton admitted, “We cannot point to strong physical and statistical evidence that these early claims have been realized.”100 He went on to note that proof of success in climate engineering would be far harder to establish than in weather engineering. In fact, it would be impossible, for several reasons: climate models are not designed to be predictive, so there is no forecast skill; global climate experiments cannot be randomized or repeated and cannot be done without likely collateral damage; climate variability is very high, so the background-noise-tosignal ratio is overwhelming; and climate change is slow to develop because of built-in thermal lags due to oceans and ice sheets. What all this adds up to is that experimental “results” could not be established even within the experimenters’ life spans. Did I mention the chaotic behavior of the climate system? That alone would overwhelm any attribution of experimental interventions by climate engineers. Cotton warned that in times of drought or climate stress, politicians would emerge with the need to demonstrate that they were doing something, that they were in control of the situation, even if they only enacted what he called political placebos.
The Middle Course
In 1983 Thomas Schelling outlined four basic policy choices for responding to carbon dioxide–induced climate change:
1. Reduce its production.
2. Adapt to increasing carbon dioxide and changing climate.
3. Remove it from the atmosphere.
4. Modify climate, weather, and hydrology.
The first two options, practiced worldwide, with foresight and moderation, constitute the “middle course.” “Mitigation” properly refers to a complex array of initiatives involving primarily decarbonizing and increasing the efficiency of the energy supply, afforestation and the prevention of further deforestation, and other efforts aimed at reducing anthropogenic emissions and concentrations of radiatively active trace gases. “Adaptation,” or climate resilience, involves collective means taken to avoid, cope with, or reduce the adverse impacts of climate change, both on humans and on all living creatures and ecosystems. The first climate migrants in prehistorical times were adapting to the onse
t of an ice age. Ward’s categories of prevention and protection, from 1930, are close matches. Some mitigation efforts, however, involving proposed carbon capture and sequestration can indeed be massive in scale, such as ocean iron fertilization and a worldwide array of Lackner towers, and deserve the same caveats as direct climate intervention schemes.
In a 2008 book, Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King surveyed the problems of global warming and some of the technological and political “solutions,” or at least responses that might arise. They discussed the oft-cited “stabilization wedges” of Princeton professors Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow, which offered the hopeful vision of stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels (but not necessarily the climate system) using existing technologies.101 Pacala and Socolow rightly emphasized efficiency first—in electricity generation, passenger vehicle transport, shipping, and other end-use sectors—followed by new renewable energy sources and as-yet-unproven carbon capture and storage. Walker and King wrote that stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at 450 parts per million would require implementing the following “wedges” immediately:
Double the fuel economy of two billion cars, halve the annual average distance traveled by two billion cars, cut carbon emissions from buildings and appliances by one-quarter, capture and store carbon dioxide from 800 gigawatts of coal power plants and 1600 gigawatts of natural gas power plants, build two million 1-megawatt wind turbines (about 50 times more than exist today), stop all felling of tropical forests and plant 740 million acres of new trees in the tropics, double the current amount of nuclear power, quadruple the amount of natural gas used to generate electricity ..., increase the use of biofuels in vehicles to fifty times today’s level, use low-tillage farming methods on all the world’s cropland, and increase the global area of solar panels by a factor of seven hundred. (92–93)
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