Fixing the Sky (45 page)

When contemplating
planetary
-scale engineering, regionally or nationally based technical initiatives are not nearly broad enough. As the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research pointed out, the equity issues are likely to be substantial: “There will be winners and losers associated with geo-engineering (as there will be with climate change itself). Should the losers be compensated, and if so how? Where the losses include non-market goods, which may be irreplaceable, how are they to be valued?”
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The process of discussion and decision making needs to include an interdisciplinary mix of historians, ethicists, policymakers, and a broad and inclusive array of international and intergenerational participants—features that have been sorely lacking in recent meetings, which featured mostly white, Western, scientifically trained, and technocratically oriented males.
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In fact, the field's current lack of diversity indicates that some of the most critical questions have probably not even been posed! For example, how would geoengineering alter fundamental human relationships to nature? Does this or the other questions posed so far have univocal answers ? How do they play out in different cultures ? Has anyone considered this? A large-scale environmental technological fix framed as a response to undesired climate change could be seen as an act imposed on the multitude by the will of the few, for the primary benefit of those already in power. Many would undoubtedly interpret it as a hostile or an aggressive act. Isn't geoengineering in the category of “Western solutions to global problems”? Rather than engaging in speculative large-scale climate engineering, isn't it better to reduce the effects of greenhouse gas emissions—by reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, offered a “rock the boat” analogy to illustrate the point:

In 1930 Harvard geographer and meteorologist Robert DeCourcy Ward sorted climate intervention strategies into three categories: (1) protection, which is “perfectly passive”; (2) prevention, which is more proactive; and (3) production, which is the most active and aggressive of the three.
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Today we might call these approaches adaptation, mitigation, and intervention. Ward pointed out that protection from the elements, which started in cave dwellings and tropical huts, now involved heated buildings and, “more and more in the future,” buildings “artificially cooled during the heat of summer.” As in today's discussions of weather-related natural disasters, Ward cited increasing populations in areas visited by tropical cyclones and the need for “better methods of building,” coastal setbacks “beyond the reach of the storm waves,” and seawalls and breakwaters for coastal cities. For protection against tornadoes, “the most violent disturbances in the atmosphere,” Ward recommended storm cellars and solid steel and concrete buildings. For protection from electrical fields, he touted the Faraday “cage” and the grounded lightning rod. High walls, narrow streets, and covered awnings traditionally provide shady relief in hot climates. Ward noted that in America by 1930, newly built arcades and department stores were providing shelter for shoppers, who tended to frequent them more and perhaps spend more money during periods of inclement weather.

Prevention required more effort and more resources. Planting trees for windbreaks to protect crops and prevent soil erosion was a widespread practice in Ward's day. “Frost-fighting” involved regular observations, forecasts for agricultural regions, and cooperative arrangements among farmers and fruit growers—for example, by flooding the cranberry bogs or lighting smudge pots in orchards. Overall, however, Ward had very few successful examples of prevention on which to draw. Fog dispersal worked on only a very small scale. The electrified sand experiments of L. Francis Warren indicated that clouds could be modified somewhat but not controlled, given the vast scale of the atmosphere.

For Ward the third stage, production, was “the most active and aggressive” and also the least possible. Best known to him was the history of artificial rainmaking—a history of promise and hype. James Espy's theory of lighting
huge fires was theoretically sound and demonstrable on a small scale, yet impossible to implement operationally. Ward called Robert Dyrenforth's experiments a “national disgrace” and thought it “highly important that no such occasion should arise again” (13). He called the production of rain for profit to “hoodwink” desperate farmers the work of “pure fakirs.” He claimed, perhaps too hastily, that “the speculations of former times have been discarded,” and now we know the facts. How could he have known that speculation would
increase
over the next eight decades? Asking “How far can man control his climate?” Ward replied that we can protect against and prevent unwanted weather damage, but “we can not produce rain or change the order of nature.” He saw “no hope ... of our ever being able to bring about any but local modifications of the weather and climate” (18). Citing the opinion of Sir Napier Shaw, Ward concluded, “We are lords of every specimen of air which we can bottle up or imprison in our laboratories [but] in the open air we are practically powerless” (6). These words were written in 1930, before the dawn of cloud physics as a field, before the General Electric Corporation's cloud-seeding experiments, before the fantasies of ultimate control, and before the rise of serious fears of weather and climate warfare in the 1950s and 1960s.

The noted Soviet geoscientist Mikhail Ivanovitch Budyko (1920–2001) was deeply concerned about both the enhanced greenhouse effect and the growing problem of waste heat. At a 1961 conference in Leningrad on “problems of climate control,” he pointed out that at current and projected rates of growth, the waste heat produced by human energy generation could, in two hundred years, rival that of the Earth's radiation balance, rendering life on Earth “impossible.”
³⁰
Cities already generated more than five times more energy than the natural radiation balance, and if thermonuclear power was harnessed, he warned, dangerous temperature levels could be reached within a few decades. The threat of such excessive heat led him to become a strong advocate for learning to control and regulate climate. His colleague, academician M. Ye. Shvets, advanced a proposal to inject 36 million tons of 1-micron dust particles into the stratosphere, which would blanket the Northern Hemisphere within six months. His calculations indicated that such a dust screen would reduce solar radiation by 10 percent and temperatures by 2 to 3°C (3.6 to 5.4°F). Such an intervention was also expected to reduce evaporative losses, increase precipitation, and thus increase water supply.
³¹

Budyko found this scheme preferable to other ideas of the time, such as the one to create thermal mountains. In James Black and Barry Tarmy's article “The Use of Asphalt Coatings to Increase Rainfall” (1963), two workers for the Esso Research and Engineering Company in New Jersey argue that “useful amounts of rainfall might be produced economically in arid regions near seas and lakes” by “coating a large area with asphalt to produce thermal updrafts which increase the sea breeze circulation and promote condensation.”
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One acre of petrochemical paving materials, conveniently supplied by Esso, would be needed for every 2 to 3 acres of enhanced rainfall area. The authors cited the ancient Babylonian practice of burning their fields after harvest, supposedly to create a blackened area that would produce extra rainfall for the next crop (but possibly for other reasons), and the early work of Espy on producing rain by large conflagrations. Turning to the recent literature, they cited papers on “man-made tornadoes” by Jean Dessens, who burned an acre-size pool of fuel oil at the rate of 1 ton a minute to create artificial clouds and even a small tornado, and suggested that the weather could be controlled artificially if an inexpensive means could be developed “
to paint the Earth black
” (emphasis added).
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This sounds very much like the Sherwin Williams paint slogan “Cover the Earth” or perhaps the irreverent bumper sticker “Earth First! We'll Pave the Other Planets Later.”

In 1962 Harry Wexler was the first to use the new methods of computer climate modeling and satellite heat budget measurements to warn of the possibilities, dangers, and excesses of “climate control,” including ways to destroy the ozone layer either inadvertently or with possible harmful intent. The following year, the Conservation Foundation report
Implications of Rising Carbon Dioxide Content of the Atmosphere
, based largely on the work of Charles David Keeling and Gilbert Plass, predicted climate problems ahead and noted: “As long as we continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels for our increasing power needs, atmospheric CO
₂
will continue to rise and the Earth will be changed, more than likely for the worse.”
³⁴

Gordon J. F. MacDonald, professor of geophysics at UCLA, was of the opinion that weather control, even of severe storms such as hurricanes and typhoons, was just the beginning step in an escalating game of environmental and geophysical warfare using climate engineering. He thought that belligerents might, for example, cut a hole in the ozone layer over a target area to let in lethal doses of ultraviolet radiation, manipulate the Arctic ice sheet to cause climatic changes or massive tidal waves, trigger earthquakes from a distance, and in general manipulate or “wreck” the planetary environment and its geophysics on a strategic scale. MacDonald developed his perspective as a high-level government adviser, Pentagon confidant, chair of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Weather and
Climate Modification, and member of the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) in the Johnson administration.
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In 1965 the PSAC issued a report titled
Restoring the Quality of Our Environment
, which contained 104 recommendations about pollution of air, soil, and waters. Appendix Y of this report, the work of a subcommittee on atmospheric carbon dioxide chaired by Roger Revelle, is now widely cited as the first official government statement on global warming. It pointed out that “carbon dioxide is being added to the earth's atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at the rate of 6 billion tons a year. By the year 2000 there will be about 25 percent more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than at present.” Increases in atmospheric CO
₂
resulting from the burning of fossil fuels could modify the Earth's heat balance to such an extent that harmful changes in climate could occur. The subcommittee also explored the possibilities of deliberately bringing about “countervailing climatic changes.” One ill-conceived suggestion involved increasing the Earth's solar reflectivity by dispersing buoyant reflective particles over large areas of the tropical sea at an annual cost of about $500 million. The subcommittee pointed out that this technology, which was not excessively costly, might also inhibit hurricane formation. No one thought to consider the side effects of particles washing up on tropical beaches or choking marine life or the negative consequences of intervening in hurricanes. And no one thought to ask if the local inhabitants would be in favor of such schemes. Another speculation involved modifying high-altitude cirrus clouds to counteract the effects of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. The subcommittee failed to mention the most obvious option: reducing fossil fuel use.
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In 1968 Joseph O. Fletcher (b. 1920) of the RAND Corporation published a review of the known patterns and causes of global climate change. In addition to natural causes, the main influencing factors seemed to be the side effects of industrial civilization: carbon dioxide emissions, smog and dust pollution, and waste heat. As Wexler had argued in 1962, purposeful climate modification was also a theoretical possibility, but Fletcher was beginning to argue that it was now becoming a necessity. He reported on recent activities in the Soviet Union aimed at climate control, none of them very promising, and asked: “What can be done to speed progress” in this field?
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Fletcher's prescription was that climate science must follow what he considered an inevitable four-stage progression: observation, understanding, prediction, and control. Global observations were being conducted or planned at the time using new satellite platforms and large-scale field research campaigns, while theoretical groups were forming around increased computing resources and new mathematical models of atmospheric and oceanic circulation. Fletcher thought that “an inevitable result” of all this
would be “the development of a more sophisticated theory to explain climatic change which, in turn will trigger an avalanche of ‘climatic experiments' testing the predictions of the improved theory of climate” (22). Is scientific progress linear? Can it be managed?