The Best Australian Science Writing 2013

by Jane McCredie

  The first virtue drew him in, fascinated by barnacles, and other perplexing problems. The other virtues stopped him from solving these problems too soon, or denying the solutions he discovered.

  In this, Darwin was not a super-genius, blessed with perfect logic and an easy mastery of all sciences. He was a well-educated English gentleman, raised in a wealthy, free-thinking family, who combined ardour with persistence and scepticism. In so doing, he never let enthusiasm become zealotry, or speculation become doctrine.

  This remains an important lesson today. The Darwinian revolution did not begin with hatred of religion, or with hubris and arrogance. It was a cautious love of truth, not a flaming hatred of superstition or myth – they are not necessarily the same urge.

  And just as importantly, with training and drive, we are all able to observe carefully, analyse precisely, and speculate boldly; we can exercise our minds, instead of taking up church dogma or ideology. We can all say, with Darwin, ‘I think’ – and genuinely do so.

  Creationism

  Modest, not!

  Earthmasters: Playing God with the climate

  Clive Hamilton

  As the effects of global warming begin to frighten us, geoengineering will come to dominate global politics. Scientists and engineers are now investigating methods to manipulate the Earth’s cloud cover, change the oceans’ chemical composition and blanket the planet with a layer of sunlight-reflecting particles. Geoengineering – deliberate, large-scale intervention in the climate system designed to counter global warming or offset some of its effects – is commonly divided into two broad classes. Carbon dioxide removal technologies aim to extract excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it somewhere less dangerous. This approach is a kind of clean-up operation after we have dumped our waste into the sky. Solar radiation management technologies seek to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the planet, thereby reducing the amount of energy trapped in the atmosphere of ‘greenhouse Earth’. This is not a clean-up but an attempt to mask one of the effects of dumping waste into the sky, a warming globe.

  Diligent contributors to Wikipedia have listed some 45 proposed geoengineering schemes or variations on schemes. Eight or ten of them are receiving serious attention. Some are grand in conception, some are prosaic; some are purely speculative, some are all too feasible; yet all of them tell us something interesting about how the Earth system works. Taken together they reveal a community of scientists who think about the planet on which we live in a way that is alien to the popular understanding. Let me give a few examples.

  It is well known that, as the sea ice in the Arctic melts, the Earth loses some of its albedo or reflectivity – white ice is replaced by dark seawater which absorbs more heat. If a large area of the Earth’s surface could be whitened then more of the Sun’s warmth would be reflected back into space rather than absorbed. A number of schemes have been proposed, including painting roofs white, which is unlikely to make any significant difference globally. What might be helpful would be to cut down all of the forests in Siberia and Canada. While it is generally believed that more forests are a good thing because trees absorb carbon, boreal (northern) forests have a downside. Compared to the snow-covered forest floor beneath, the trees are dark and absorb more solar radiation. If they were felled the exposed ground would reflect a significantly greater proportion of incoming solar radiation and the Earth would therefore be cooler. If such a suggestion appears outrageous it is in part because matters are never so simple in the Earth system. Warming would cause the snow on the denuded lands to melt, and the situation would be worse than before the forests were cleared.

  More promisingly perhaps, at least at a local scale, is the attempt to rescue Peruvian glaciers, whose disappearance is depriving the adjacent grasslands and their livestock of their water supply. Painting the newly dark mountains with a white slurry of water, sand and lime keeps them cooler and allows ice to form; at least that is the hope. The World Bank is funding research.

  Another idea is to create a particle cloud between the Earth and the Sun from dust mined on the moon and scattered in the optimal place. This is reminiscent of the US military’s ‘black cloud experiment’ of 1973, which simulated the effect on the Earth’s climate of reducing incoming solar radiation by a few per cent. Consistent with the long history of military interest in climate control, the study was commissioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s technology research arm, and carried out by the RAND Corporation, the secretive think tank described as ‘a key institutional building block of the Cold War American empire’. I summon up the black cloud experiment here to flag the nascent military and strategic interest being stirred by geoengineering. The attention of the RAND Corporation has recently returned to climate engineering.

  In 1993 the esteemed journal Climatic Change published a novel scheme to counter global warming by the Indian physicist PC Jain. Professor Jain began by reminding us that the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth varies in inverse square to the distance of the Earth from the Sun. He therefore proposed that the effects of global warming could be countered by increasing the radius of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. An orbital expansion of 1–2 per cent would do it, although one of the side effects would be to add 5.5 days to each year. He then calculated how much energy would be needed to bring about such a shift in the Earth’s celestial orbit. The answer is around 1031 joules. How much is that? According to Professor Jain’s calculations, at the current annual rate of consumption, it is more than the amount of energy humans would consume over 1020 years, or 100 billion billion years (the age of the universe is around 14 billion years). This seems like a lot, yet he reminds us that ‘in many areas of science, seemingly impossible things at one time have become possible later’. Perhaps, he speculates, nuclear fusion will enable us to harness enough energy to expand the Earth’s orbit. He nevertheless counsels caution: ‘The whole galactic system is naturally and delicately balanced, and any tinkering with it can bring havoc by bringing alterations in orbits of other planets also.’

  The caution is well taken, although the intricate network of orbital dependence has stimulated another geoengineering suggestion. The thought is to send nuclear-armed rockets to the asteroid belt beyond the planets of our solar system so as to ‘nudge’ one or more into orbits that would pass closer to the Earth. Properly calibrated, the sling-shot effect from the asteroid’s gravity would shift the Earth’s orbit out a bit. Of course, if the calibration were a little out, the planet could be sent careening off into a cold, dark universe, or suffer a drastic planet-scale freezing from the dust thrown up by an asteroid strike.

  Some of these schemes seem properly to belong in an HG Wells novel or a geeks’ discussion group, and too much emphasis on them for the delights of ridicule would give a very unbalanced impression of the research program into climate engineering now under way. Serious work is being conducted on schemes to regulate the Earth system by changing the chemical composition of the world’s oceans, modifying the layer of clouds that covers a large portion of the oceans and installing a ‘solar shield’, a layer of sulphate particles in the upper atmosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the planet. There are some who believe that we will have no choice but to resort to these radical interventions. How did we get to this point? The simple answer is that the scientists who understand climate change most deeply have become afraid.

  Promethean dreams

  Everyone is looking for an easy way out. The easiest way out is to refuse to accept there is a predicament. Another is to hope that the problem is not as bad as it seems and that something will come along. The technofix of geoengineering is a third way out and an emerging lobby group of scientists, investors and political actors is giving it momentum. Yet the appeal of climate engineering runs deeper, for as an answer to global warming it dovetails perfectly with the modernist urge to exert control over nature by techno logical means.

  Scientists, entrepreneurs
and generals have long dreamed of controlling the weather. The development of computers and the accumulation of weather data using satellites have prompted a new and higher phase of dreaming. In 2002 the American Meteorological Society published a NASA-funded study titled ‘Controlling the global weather’. The author, Ross Hoffman, foresees the creation of an international weather control agency within the next three to four decades. ‘Just imagine,’ he enthused, ‘no droughts, no tornadoes, no snowstorms during rush hour etc.’ Control would be possible, the argument goes, precisely because weather systems are chaotic. Chaotic systems are very sensitive to small perturbations, so, if we can identify and then control those perturbations, then we can control the weather: ‘since small differences in initial conditions can grow exponentially, small but correctly chosen perturbations induce large changes in the evolution of the simulated weather’. He did not dwell on the implications of small but incorrectly chosen perturbations.

  Controlling one country’s weather is not possible without affecting that of others, so the only way forward would be a global weather control system. Without close collaboration, Hoffman warns, there may be ‘weather wars’. Among the perturbations that could serve as control mechanisms for global weather he identifies the timing and location of aircraft contrails, solar reflectors that regulate the amount of sunlight and an enormous grid of fans that could redirect atmospheric momentum. A more recent scientific paper explores the possibility of a control strategy for El Niño, the periodic warming of central and eastern Pacific currents that causes drought in Australia and floods in South America. It too looks for leverage in small disturbances with large effects, the most promising lever being alteration of sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific through cloud brightening.

  Stephen Salter, an engineer and principal researcher in marine cloud brightening (an approach that involves enhancing the reflectivity of the low-lying clouds that cover up to a third of the oceans), is convinced that we will soon know everything there is to know: ‘Noise is only a signal which you have not learned to decode yet.’ He is excited by the prospect of total control of the Earth’s climate, and entertains plans of domination that would do Dr Strangelove proud. He defends further research with the claim that:

  We might discover that to get more rain at Timbuktu in August but less rain during Wimbledon you should spray to the west of Cape Verde island from mid April to mid May and stop all spraying south of Kerguelen during January and February. However spraying south of Tasmania from June to December never affects anywhere north of Hong Kong. By linking the strength of the beneficial effects with observations of the weather patterns and spray planning we may eventually develop sufficient understanding to allow tactical or closed-loop control which could respond to other more random perturbing influences and make everyone happier with their weather.

  This kind of technological hubris, although not often expressed so brazenly in public, colours the advice governments are beginning to receive from geoengineering researchers. The idea is taking root that geoengineering could be used not just to counter some of the effects of global warming, but to manipulate permanently the planet’s weather system to suit our desires, or at least the desires of those who turn the knobs. To this end, climate engineers are beginning to talk about employing not one but a suite of interventions designed to tailor the climate. So stratospheric aerosol spraying might be used to cool the globe overall, while cloud seeding may be undertaken to finetune other environmental goals, such as preserving coral reefs, ‘hurricane emasculation’ and restoring polar ice caps. Engineering the global climate thus becomes an optimisation problem.

  No two researchers are more prone to the special kind of scientific excitement that can possess geoengineers than Stanford climate scientist Ken Caldeira and Pentagon ‘weaponeer’ Lowell Wood. Damage to the ozone layer is likely to be one of the side effects of sulphate aerosol spraying, which involves coating the earth with a layer of tiny sulphate particles to block some incoming radiation. This would allow more ultraviolet light to reach the surface, so risking more skin cancer. Caldeira and Wood have an answer. They argue that some kinds of ultraviolet light that cannot be seen ‘may be largely superfluous … for biospheric purposes, and thus portions of these spectra may be attractive candidates for being scattered back into space by an engineered scattering system’. This light is invisible to us, so why do we need it? Particles could be specially engineered to allow through more of some kinds of light than others. They argue that such a scheme could save us US $10 billion a year from avoided skin cancers. An additional benefit of scattering redundant bands of the light spectrum is that the sky could be rendered discernibly bluer.

  It is a strange kind of thinking that believes it can identify basic properties of the solar system that are surplus to requirements and may be dispensed with. A different kind of thinking assumes that things are there for a purpose and that the structure of life on Earth as a whole has evolved to fit the environment in which it finds itself. So on closer inspection ‘junk DNA’ turns out to be genetic material whose functions we had not yet worked out. Many insects rely on ultraviolet light for their vision, reptiles need it to bask in and it is essential to production of vitamin D. The multitudes of species on Earth have evolved to manage the potential damage from ultraviolet light. Yet Caldeira and Wood suggest that we can filter out this superfluous form of light, so that we regulate not only the quantity of light reaching the planet but its quality. There is no bridge to cross to engage with this type of thinking. There is only an abyss of incomprehension.

  The Promethean plan for ultimate control has been set out explicitly by Brad Allenby, now an engineering professor at Arizona State University, in a strategy he calls earth system engineering and management. He begins with the observation that humans have not merely transformed the landscape but have imprinted themselves on every cubic metre of air and water, to the point where the Earth has become a human artefact. There is no more ‘natural’ so we must cast off all romantic notions and take responsibility for conscious planetary management. In a definition whose training manual phraseology says as much about its meaning as the words themselves, Allenby writes:

  Earth systems engineering and management may be defined as the capability to rationally engineer and manage human technology systems and related elements of natural systems in such a way as to provide the requisite functionality while facilitating the active management of strongly coupled natural systems.

  In case it might be thought that such a vision excludes all that is essentially human, Dr Allenby (who for some years in the 1990s was director for Energy and Environmental Systems at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, of which more later) assures us that ethics can be incorporated into his system. It can even encompass ‘religion’, while still maintaining the requisite functionality, thereby granting space for a system-compatible God. To reassure those who fear that managing the Earth system must entail ‘centralized control’ or ‘universal mandates’, Allenby is certain that engineering an artificial world can be carried out by the free market. Moreover, he writes, Earth system engineering will embody ‘inclusive dialog among all stakeholders’ and ‘democratic governance’, while at the same time being modelled on ‘highly reliable organizations’ such as a well-run nuclear power plant or an aircraft carrier.

  It’s hard to know what to make of this kind of utopian techno-enthusiasm, except to note that it is very prevalent in the geoengineering community, especially in the USA. It drives Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Nathan Myhrvold and a hundred other techno-entrepreneurs whose understanding of the world has been shaped by the peculiar culture of Silicon Valley. Brad Allenby has more recently shifted his position, tempering his dream of Promethean mastery with a strong dose of political conservatism. Now he argues that climate science is disputable (there is a ‘real controversy’ over whether warming is caused by human-induced emissions or changes in solar energy) and that climate scientists do not have the same authority
as other scientists. He believes, following standard denialist tropes, that contrarians have been unfairly ‘demonized’ and political polarisation is due, not to the efforts of the merchants of doubt such as ExxonMobil and the Tea Party, but to the ‘strident tone’ of environmentalists. International collaboration won’t work, he believes, but there is little need for it because the prevailing social and economic systems are adapting to climate change (such as it is) ‘remarkably quickly’. No major policy interventions are needed, and that goes for geoengineering too. In short, the system is flexible and its components can adapt to whatever the climate throws at us; the real danger lies in overreacting to the apparent threat. Allenby has joined the small but influential group of ‘luke-warmists’, those who cannot be accused of denying climate science but consistently emphasise the uncertainties, downplay the risks and defend the prevailing order against policies that seem to threaten it.

  Other experts with a more clear-eyed view of climate science and its implications are turning their attention to the kind of engineering system that would be needed for managing the solar filter. The Novim Group, a non-profit scientific corporation, identifies five core control variables available for the solar filter or ‘short-wave climate engineering’ (SWCE): the material composition of the aerosol particles, their size and shape, the amount dispersed, the location of dispersal into the stratosphere and the sequencing over time of the injections.

  The development of a dynamic multivariate control system – incorporating robust monitoring of climate parameters, maximum intervention flexibility and intervention stability – is therefore an important component of SWCE research. Control-system design should pay particular attention to the likelihood of various climate parameter responses including delays, feedbacks, nonlinearities and instabilities across widely ranging temporal and spatial scales.