by Naomi Klein
Here too is Ken Caldeira, a prominent atmospheric scientist from the Carnegie Institution for Science, and one of the first serious climate scientists to run computer models examining the impact of deliberately dimming the sun. In addition to his academic work, Caldeira has an ongoing relationship with Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures as a “Senior Inventor.”17 Another player present is Phil Rasch, a climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state, who has been preparing to launch perhaps the first cloud-brightening field experiment.
Bill Gates isn’t here, but he provided much of the cash for the gathering, allocated through a fund administered by Keith and Caldeira. Gates has given the scientists at least $4.6 million specifically for climate-related research that wasn’t getting funding elsewhere. Most of it has gone to geoengineering themes, with Keith, Caldeira, and Rasch all receiving large shares. Gates is also an investor in Keith’s carbon capture company, as well as in Intellectual Ventures, where his name appears on several geoengineering patents (alongside Caldeira’s), while Nathan Myhrvold serves as vice chairman at TerraPower, Gates’s nuclear energy start-up. Branson’s Carbon War Room has sent a delegate and is supporting this work in various ways.18 If that all sounds confusing and uncomfortably clubby, especially for so global and high stakes a venture, well, that’s the Geoclique for you.
Because governing geoengineering, as opposed to just testing it, is the focus of this retreat, the usual club has been temporarily expanded to include several climate scientists from Africa and Asia, as well as legal ethicists, experts in international treaties and conventions, and staffers from several green NGOs, including Greenpeace and WWF-UK (Greenpeace does not support geoengineering, but WWF-UK has come out in cautious support of “research into geo-engineering approaches in order to find out what is possible”).19
The organizers have also invited a couple of outspoken critics. Alan Robock, a famously gruff white-bearded climatologist from Rutgers University, is here. When I last saw him in action, he was presenting a slide show titled “20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea,” ranging from “Whitening of the sky” (#7) to “Rapid warming if deployment stops” (#10). Most provocative is Australian climate expert Clive Hamilton, who has wondered aloud whether “the geoengineers [are] modern-day Phaetons, who dare to regulate the sun, and who must be struck down by Zeus before they destroy the earth?”20
In the end, the conference manages to agree on nothing of substance—not even the need for small-scale field trials to take place. But throwing this group of people together in a country mansion for three days does make for some interesting intellectual fireworks.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
After a night’s sleep, the guests at Chicheley Hall are ready to dive into the debates. In a sleek slate-and-glass lecture hall located in the old coach house, the organizers separate the group into breakout sessions. Everyone receives a sheet of paper with a triangle on it, and on each point is a different word: “Promote,” “Prohibit,” “Regulate.” The instructions say “Mark where you feel your current perspective best fits on the triangle.” Do you want further research into sun-shielding banned? Aggressively promoted? Promoted with some measure of regulation?
I spend the morning eavesdropping on the different breakouts and before long a pattern emerges. The scientists already engaged in geoengineering research tend to categorize their positions somewhere between “regulate” and “promote,” while most everyone else leans toward “prohibit” and “regulate.” Several of the participants express a desire to promote more research, but only to establish that geoengineering isn’t a viable option that we can bank on to save the day. “We particularly need to know if it’s not going to work,” one environmentalist pleads to the scientists in his session. “Right now we’re struggling in the dark.”
But in one breakout group, things have gone off the rails. A participant flatly refuses to place his views on the triangle and instead, helps himself to a large piece of poster paper. On it he writes three questions in blue marker:
• Is the human that gave us the climate crisis capable of properly/safely regulating SRM?
• In considering SRM regulation, are we not in danger of perpetuating the view that the earth can be manipulated in our interests?
• Don’t we have to engage with these questions before we place ourselves in the triangle?
When the groups come back together to discuss their triangular mind maps, these questions are never acknowledged, let alone answered. They just hang on the wall of the lecture hall as a sort of silent rebuke. It’s too bad, because the Royal Society, with its long and storied history of helping to both launch the Scientific Revolution and the age of fossil fuels, offers a unique vantage point from which to ponder these matters.
The Royal Society was founded in 1660 as an homage to Francis Bacon. Not only is the organization’s motto—Nullius in verba—“take nothing on authority”—inspired by Bacon but, somewhat bizarrely, much of the society’s basic structure was modeled on the fictional scientific society portrayed in Bacon’s proto-sci-fi/utopian novel New Atlantis, published in 1627. The institution was at the forefront of Britain’s colonial project, sponsoring voyages by Captain James Cook (including the one in which he laid claim to New Zealand), and for over forty years the Royal Society was led by one of Cook’s fellow explorers, the wealthy botanist Joseph Banks, described by a British colonial official as “the staunchest imperialist of the day.”21 During his tenure, the society counted among its fellows James Watt, the steam engine pioneer, and his business partner, Matthew Boulton—the two men most responsible for launching the age of coal.
As the questions hanging on the wall imply, these are the tools and the logic that created the crisis geoengineering is attempting to solve—not just the coal-burning factories and colonial steam ships, but Bacon’s twisted vision of the Earth as a prone woman and Watt’s triumphalism at having found her “weak side.” Given this, does it really make sense to behave as if, with big enough brains and powerful enough computers, humans can master and control the climate crisis just as humans have been imagining they could master the natural world since the dawn of industrialization—digging, damming, drilling, dyking. Is it really as simple as adding a new tool to our nature-taming arsenal: dimming?
This is the strange paradox of geoengineering. Yes, it is exponentially more ambitious and more dangerous than any engineering project humans have ever attempted before. But it is also very familiar, nearly a cliché, as if the past five hundred years of human history have been leading us, ineluctably, to precisely this place. Unlike cutting our emissions in line with the scientific consensus, succumbing to the logic of geoengineering does not require any change from us; it just requires that we keep doing what we have done for centuries, only much more so.
Wandering the perfectly manicured gardens at Chicheley Hall—through the trees sculpted into lollipops, through the hedges chiseled into daggers—I realize that what scares me most is not the prospect of living on a “designer planet,” to use a phrase I heard at an earlier geoengineering conference. My fear is that the real-world results will be nothing like this garden, or even like anything we saw in that technical briefing, but rather something far, far worse. If we respond to a global crisis caused by our pollution with more pollution—by trying to fix the crud in our lower atmosphere by pumping a different kind of crud into the stratosphere—then geoengineering might do something far more dangerous than tame the last vestiges of “wild” nature. It may cause the earth to go wild in ways we cannot imagine, making geoengineering not the final engineering frontier, another triumph to commemorate on the walls of the Royal Society, but the last tragic act in this centuries-long fairy tale of control.
A great many of our most brilliant scientists have taken the lessons of past engineering failures to heart, including the failure of foresight represented by climate change itself, which is one of the primary reasons there is still so mu
ch resistance to geoengineering among biologists and climate scientists. To quote Sallie Chisholm, a world-renowned expert on marine microbes at MIT, “Proponents of research on geoengineering simply keep ignoring the fact that the biosphere is a player (not just a responder) in whatever we do, and its trajectory cannot be predicted. It is a living breathing collection of organisms (mostly microorganisms) that are evolving every second—a ‘self-organizing, complex, adaptive system’ (the strict term). These types of systems have emergent properties that simply cannot be predicted. We all know this! Yet proponents of geoengineering research leave that out of the discussion.”22
Indeed in my time spent among the would-be geoengineers, I have been repeatedly struck by how the hard-won lessons about humility before nature that have reshaped modern science, particularly the fields of chaos and complexity theory, do not appear to have penetrated this particular bubble. On the contrary, the Geoclique is crammed with overconfident men prone to complimenting each other on their fearsome brainpower. At one end you have Bill Gates, the movement’s sugar daddy, who once remarked that it was difficult for him to decide which was more important, his work on computer software or inoculations, because they both rank “right up there with the printing press and fire.” At the other end is Russ George, the U.S. entrepreneur who has been labeled a “rogue geoengineer” for dumping some one hundred tons of iron sulphate off the coast of British Columbia in 2012. “I am the champion of this on the planet,” he declared after the experiment was exposed, the only one with the guts to “step forward to save the oceans.” In the middle are scientists like David Keith, who often comes off as deeply conflicted about “opening up Pandora’s Box”—but once said of the threat of weakened monsoons from Solar Radiation Management that “hydrological stresses” can be managed “a little bit by irrigation.”23
The ancients called this hubris; the great American philosopher, farmer and poet Wendell Berry calls it “arrogant ignorance,” adding, “We identify arrogant ignorance by its willingness to work on too big a scale, and thus to put too much at risk.”II24
It doesn’t provide much reassurance that just two weeks before we all gathered at Chicheley Hall, three nuclear reactors at Fukushima melted down in the wake of a powerful tsunami. The story was still leading the news the entire time we met. And yet the extent to which the would-be geoengineers acknowledged the disaster was only to worry that opponents of nuclear energy would seize upon the crisis to block new reactors. They never entertained the idea that Fukushima might serve as a cautionary tale for their own high-risk engineering ambitions.
Which brings us back to that slide showing parts of Africa lit up red that caused such a stir on opening night: is it possible that geoengineering, far from a quick emergency fix, could make the impacts of climate change even worse for a great many people? And if so, who is most at risk and who gets to decide to take those risks?
Like Climate Change, Volcanoes Do Discriminate
Boosters of Solar Radiation Management tend to speak obliquely about the “distributional consequences” of injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, and of the “spatial heterogeneity” of the impacts. Petra Tschakert, a geographer at Penn State University, calls this jargon “a beautiful way of saying that some countries are going to get screwed.”25 But which countries? And screwed precisely how?
Having reliable answers to those key questions would seem like a prerequisite for considering deployment of such a world-altering technology. But it’s not at all clear that obtaining those answers is even possible. Keith and Myhrvold can test whether a hose or an airplane is a better way to get sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Others can spray saltwater from boats or towers and see if it brightens clouds. But you’d have to deploy these methods on a scale large enough to impact the global climate system to be certain about how, for instance, spraying sulfur in the Arctic or the tropics will impact rainfall in the Sahara or southern India. But that wouldn’t be a test of geoengineering; it would actually be conducting geoengineering.26
Nor could the necessary answers be found from a brief geoengineering stint—pumping sulfur for, say, one year. Because of the huge variations in global weather patterns from one year to the next (some monsoon seasons are naturally weaker than others, for instance), as well as the havoc already being wreaked by global warming, it would be impossible to connect a particular storm or drought to an act of geoengineering. Sulfur injections would need to be maintained long enough for a clear pattern to be isolated from both natural fluctuations and the growing impacts of greenhouse gases. That likely means keeping the project running for a decade or more.III27
As Martin Bunzl, a Rutgers philosopher and climate change expert, points out, these facts alone present an enormous, perhaps insurmountable ethical problem for geoengineering. In medicine, he writes, “You can test a vaccine on one person, putting that person at risk, without putting everyone else at risk.” But with geoengineering, “You can’t build a scale model of the atmosphere or tent off part of the atmosphere. As such you are stuck going directly from a model to full scale planetary-wide implementation.” In short, you could not conduct meaningful tests of these technologies without enlisting billions of people as guinea pigs—for years. Which is why science historian James Fleming calls geoengineering schemes “untested and untestable, and dangerous beyond belief.”28
Computer models can help, to be sure. That’s how we get our best estimates of how earth systems will be impacted by the emission of greenhouse gases. And it’s straightforward enough to add a different kind of emission—sulfur in the stratosphere—to those models and see how the results change. Several research teams have done just that, with some very disturbing results. Alan Robock, for instance, has run different SRM scenarios through supercomputers. The findings of a 2008 paper he coauthored in the Journal of Geophysical Research were blunt: sulfur dioxide injections “would disrupt the Asian and African summer monsoons, reducing precipitation to the food supply for billions of people.” Those monsoons provide precious freshwater to an enormous share of the world’s population. India alone receives between 70 and 90 percent of its total annual rainfall during its June through September monsoon season.29
Robock and his colleagues aren’t the only ones coming up with these alarming projections. Several research teams have produced models that show significant losses of rainfall as a result of SRM and other sunlight-reflecting geoengineering methods. One 2012 study shows a 20 percent reduction in rainfall in some areas of the Amazon after a particularly extreme use of SRM. When another team modeled spraying sulfur from points in the Northern Hemisphere for a 2013 study, the results projected a staggering 60–100 percent drop in a key measure of plant productivity in the African countries of the Sahel (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Sudan)—that means, potentially, a complete crop collapse in some areas.30
This is not some minor side effect or “unintended consequence.” If only some of these projections were to come true, that would transform a process being billed as an emergency escape from catastrophic climate change into a mass killer in its own right.
One might think all of this alarming research would be enough to put a serious damper on the upbeat chatter surrounding the Pinatubo Option. The problem is that—though computer models have proven remarkably accurate at predicting the broad patterns of climate change—they are not infallible. As we have seen from the failure to anticipate the severity of summer sea ice loss in the Arctic as well as the rate of global sea level rise in recent decades, computer models have tended to underestimate certain risks, and overstate others.31 Most significantly, climate models are at their weakest when predicting specific regional impacts—how much more southern Somalia will warm than the central United States, say, or the precise extent to which drought will impact crop production in India or Australia. This uncertainty has allowed some would-be geoengineers to scoff at findings that make SRM look like a potential humanitarian disaster, insisting that regional climate m
odels are inherently unreliable, while simultaneously pointing to other models that show more reassuring results. And if the controversy were just a matter of dueling computer models, perhaps we could call it a draw. But that is not the case.
History as Teacher—and Warning
Without being able to rely on either models or field tests, only one tool remains to help forecast the risks of sun blocking, and it is distinctly low-tech. That tool is history, specifically the historical record of weather patterns following major volcanic eruptions. The relevance of history is something all sides of the debate appear to agree on. Ken Caldeira has described the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo “as a natural test of some of the concepts underlying solar radiation management” since it sent so much sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. And David Keith assured me, “It’s pretty clear that just putting a lot of sulfur in the stratosphere isn’t terrible. After all, volcanoes do it.” Likewise, Lowell Wood, Myhrvold’s partner in the invention of the StratoShield, has argued that because his hose-to-the-sky would attempt to imitate a natural volcano, there is “a proof of harmlessness.”32