Fixing the Sky (43 page)

The possibility of manipulating global climate through planetary-scale engineering is currently being actively debated, although its feasibility and desirability are highly questionable, if not contentious. Most of the debate centers on back-of-the -envelope calculations (which are not good enough) or basic climate models (which are also not good enough). Still, the current crop of geoengineers has yet to acknowledge the checkered history of the subject.

Accounts of the early history of computers in meteorology follow a wellrehearsed script, identifying Vilhelm Bjerknes and Louis Fry Richardson as early pioneers and emphasizing progress after 1946 through the work of a familiar cast of characters and technical breakthroughs. Through the career of Harry Wexler, we can now see that the two histories, the familiar and the (until now) unwritten, are closely interrelated and that climate control is not so much a newcomer in the age of global warming as something that has been up in the air for quite a long time.

The recent history of climate fears, fantasies, and possibilities is positioned firmly between the work of two colleagues, John von Neumann and Harry Wexler. An examination of general climate fears and specific climate fantasies reveals that some were no more than hand-waving proposals, while some were actual field projects. Anchoring this in time were the high hopes that futurists had for new emerging technologies such as digital computers, to provide stunning precision and predictability; nuclear energy, to power continental-scale transformations or violently alter the geophysical status quo; and satellites, to monitor the Earth continuously with eagle eyes and to serve as platforms for active interventions.

Wexler's work on geoengineering in the period 1958 to 1962 applied the results of new computer climate experiments, nuclear tests in near space, and newly available satellite heat budget measurements. His work on ozone destruction, in particular, is notable since it predated the Nobel Prize–winning work of Paul Crutzen, Sherwood Rowland, and Mario Molina by about a decade, although Wexler died before he could publish the results. It is clear that Wexler was well qualified to speak authoritatively about the otherwise “nebulous” subjects of climate, climate change, and climate control. He served on numerous scientific
panels and governmental advisory boards, had access to and helped collect global climate data, understood the theoretical issues and their complexity, and promoted and advanced the latest technologies. He warned then, and we might wisely conclude today, that

Based on the visionary foundation provided by Vladimir Zworykin and John von Neumann, and the much more speculative megaprojects being proposed at the time, Wexler's prescient work “On the Possibilities of Climate Control” clearly reminds us that we are not the first generation to be involved with or concerned about geoengineering and places the current debate in the context of at least half a century of continuous and usable history.

THE CLIMATE ENGINEERS

—RON PRINN, QUOTED IN MORTON, “CLIMATE CHANGE”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DURING
the unusually hot summerof 1988, with a major heat wave in in the American Midwest, Yellowstone National Park in flames, and issues such as ozone depletion in the headlines, climate modeler James Hansen of NASA announced to the world that “global warming has begun.”
¹
Hansen reported that he was “99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere” and that anthropogenic greenhouse warming “is already happening now.” He predicted more-frequent episodes of very high temperatures and drought in the next decade and beyond. Hansen later revised his remarks, but his statement remains the starting point for recent widespread concern about global warming. The question was no longer whether human agency had contributed to global change. That question was answered in the affirmative long ago. The more significant questions involved the magnitude and consequences of the global changes being caused by a combination of natural forces and increasing anthropogenic stresses and what was to be done about it.

That summer, the government of Canada, in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the World Meteorological
Organization (WMO), convened a major conference on the topic “The Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security.” The conference statement captured the tone and urgency first expressed in the 1950s by Roger Revelle and John von Neumann: “Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment, whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.”
²
The conference recommended reductions of carbon dioxide emissions to 20 percent below 1988 levels, to be achieved by 2005. Needless to say, we did not reach this goal, but a process had been put into motion to set new goals and deadlines.

Also in 1988, the WMO and UNEP established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose purpose is to provide periodic assessments of “the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change.”
³
From modest beginnings, the IPCC has emerged as a representative parliamentary body that has gradually acquired status and authority. It has prepared four major assessments to date, the first in 1990 in preparation for the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Here the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) set an ultimate objective of stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at levels that would prevent “dangerous” human interference with the climate system.
⁴

Each of the subsequent IPCC reports (1995, 2001, 2007) has expressed a sense of greater urgency about the climate change problem. The IPCC consensus involves six key points:

It is still not clear what “dangerous human influence” in the climate system actually is or how to avoid it, but mitigation, adaptation, and intervention through climate engineering are now on the table. Deindustrialization will also reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as demonstrated by the political and economic collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ratcheting up the sense of urgency, in 2005 Hansen warned that the Earth's climate is nearing an unprecedented “tipping point”—a point of no return that can be avoided only if the “growth of greenhouse gas emissions is slowed” in the next two decades:

According to Hansen, tipping points occur because of amplifying feedbacks, including loss of sea ice, melting glaciers, release of methane in warming permafrost, and growth of vegetation on previously frozen land. These surface and atmospheric changes increase the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth and amplify the warming effect of carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels. Hansen's brief statement, widely distributed by the press, clearly struck a cultural nerve. It acknowledged undesirable and inadvertent human influence on the climate system and pointed to a possible remedy. In the interest of impact, however, Hansen avoided complexities. For example, it is highly unlikely that merely slowing the growth of emissions would be a very effective policy. Hansen may be right: we may be approaching the physical tipping point of climate, or, as James Lovelock argued in his book
The Revenge of Gaia
, we may already have passed it, with catastrophic consequences for humanity.
⁷
More likely, Hansen, Lovelock, and many others are trying to add the weight of their opinions to a second kind of “tipping point,” a behavioral change in which humanity decides to live with only clean energy and takes concerted action against harming the climate system. There is also a third “tipping point”—one that has been reached by a handful of geoengineers who are so concerned about climate change that they are proposing purposeful, even reckless, intervention.

The following discussion will define geoengineering, review its recent history, and provide a critique of current proposals and practices by revealing their assumptions and values. It is an occasion to reflect on the precedents that brought us to this point and to identify a “middle path” of mitigation and adaptation located between doing too little and doing too much. It is offered in the hope that the study of a checkered past can help us avoid a checkered future and with the conviction that if we are indeed facing unprecedented challenges, it is good to consider historical precedents.

In 1996 Thomas Schelling wrote, “‘Geoengineering' is a new term, still seeking a definition. It seems to imply something global, intentional, and unnatural.”
⁸
More than a decade later, the word remains largely undefined and unpracticed. It is not in the
Oxford English Dictionary
, but it did find its way into the
Urban Dictionary
, where it is loosely defined as “the intentional large-scale manipulation of the global environment; planetary tinkering; a subset of terraforming or planetary engineering... the last gasp of a dying civilization.”
⁹
Lovelock subscribes to this definition, at least the first part, and further claims that “we became geoengineers soon after our species started using fire for cooking,” or perhaps, as geoscientist William Ruddiman has proposed, millennia ago through the practices of extensive deforestation and agriculture.
¹⁰

In the
OED
, an “engineer” is one who contrives, designs, or invents, “a layer of snares”; a constructor of military engines; one whose profession is the designing and constructing of works of public utility.
¹¹
So engineering, by definition, has both military and civilian aspects, elements potentially both nefarious and altruistic (figure 8.1). By analogy, the neologism “geoengineer” refers to one who contrives, designs, or invents at the largest planetary scale possible for either military or civilian purposes—a layer of snares at the global level. Today geoengineering, as an unpracticed art, is still largely “geo-scientific speculation.”