Fixing the Sky (50 page)

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 CO
₂
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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.

In 1983 Thomas Schelling outlined four basic policy choices for responding to carbon dioxide–induced climate change:

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 onset 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.
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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:

Note that all these wedges involve large geometric factors: 2-, 50-, even 700-fold increases (or decreases) in current practices, with unspecified costs or other considerations. The global back-of-the-envelope nature of these suggestions, the sheer scale of the challenge, and the lack of fine-grained analysis regarding local and regional implementation strategies had led some, geoengineers included, to wonder if it can be done efficiently—or at all. At the 2007 American Academy meeting on geoengineering, Socolow was musing aloud about adding a geoengineering wedge to his portfolio; I suggested that this was probably a premature move.

The middle course is Phaethon's ideal path, as advised by his father, Helios, to spare the whip, hold tight the reins, and “keep within the limit of the middle zone,” neither too far south or north, nor too high or low: “the middle course is safest and best.”
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Inviting people from different cultures and diverse walks of life to take action on climate change involves defining a middle course, not a path of least resistance but one between doing too little about climate change (which has been the case recently with much of U.S. policy) and doing too much (which would most certainly be the case if the climate engineers have free rein to turn the planet into a machine). For that matter, it is also possible for well-meaning social engineers to attempt to do too much, by promoting overly aggressive or one-size-fits-all approaches to energy-climate-environment issues. We have yet to demonstrate that economic prosperity can exist or that development can proceed without the use of fossil fuels, although it seems we must indeed do so in the interest of long-term sustainability. Many minds are currently working on plans for expanding the middle course, but these should not include taking up Phaethon's reins and repeating his mistake.

Paper, even that provided by the Patent Office, lies still for anything to be written on it. Recall the 1880 patent of Daniel Ruggles “for producing rain fall by conveying and exploding explosive agents within the cloud realm”; the 1887 patent of J. B. Atwater “to destroy or disrupt tornadoes”; the 1892 patent of Laurice Leroy Brown for a tower to transport and detonate explosives automatically for “aiding rainfall”; and the patent awarded in 1918 to John Graeme Balsillie for ionizing a volume of air and switching the electrical polarity of clouds, “by means of suitable ray emanations.” Not to slight the modern era, recall also the 2003 promise by Earthwise Technologies to clear the air and enhance rainfall in Laredo,
Texas, using patented “ionization towers.” Now, are you ready for the “Welsbach Patent” to offset global warming? It was granted in 1991 to inventors David B. Chang and I-Fu Shih of Hughes Aircraft Company. Chemtrail conspiracy theorists, suspicious of the U.S. government, are certain that the military is using this technique to seed the lower stratosphere with microscopic particles of aluminum and barium oxide emitted in jet aircraft exhaust.
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Climate engineers may point out that the early patents were just fantasies, while Welsbach seeding would actually “work.” This depends on what you mean by making something “work” in more than a narrow technical sense.

Earlier modification plans always were couched in the context of the pressing issues and available technologies of their eras: James Espy wanted to purify the air and make rain for the East Coast, General Robert Dyrenforth set out to solve the problem of drought in the West, and L. Francis Warren hoped to clear airports in the 1920s, while the Russians and Americans vied over militarizing weather and climate control throughout the cold war. In 1971 climatologist Hubert Lamb wrote that the greatest pending climate emergency might be the overuse of the natural water supply in Central Asia and elsewhere. In 1991 Michael MacCracken at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory turned his attention to geoengineering the climate as a response to global warming; that same year, Ralph Cicerone and his colleagues proposed injecting alcane gases (ethane and propane) into the ozone layer as a possible way to heal the damage being caused by chlorine compounds.
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Each generation, it seemed, has had its own leading issues for investing in technologies of control.