Temporarily forgetting just why they are detailing Plan B, the authors add that ‘strategic management’ of greenhouse gas emissions ‘must be considered a central component’ in managing the solar shield. Good luck with that.
The engineers are alert to the fact that installing a planetary thermal control system is not merely a technical problem. They are concerned that unspecified ‘socio-political system failures’ – perhaps climate wars, terrorist attacks, changes of government in the USA and social unrest in China – may lead to ‘unintentional disengagement’ giving rise to ‘transient oscillations in the climate system’. Transient oscillations in the climate system may refer to monsoon failure, but the climate engineers are not too worried because ‘disruptions of varying character and scale are common in comparably large and complex technical and socio-political systems’. What were they thinking of when referring to disruptions to comparably large and complex socio-political systems – the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the Black Death? Who knows? Even so, any control-system blueprint, they advise, should keep these possibilities firmly in mind.
The Novim experts then canvass the dystopian prospect of ‘counter-climate engineering’ – geoengineering deployed by one nation to undo the effects of geoengineering by another. ‘For example, the deliberate injection of short-lived fluorocarbon greenhouse gases might rapidly offset the regional or global cooling effects of a SWCE intervention.’ (In the case of marine cloud brightening, the fleet of unmanned ships roaming the oceans would be sitting ducks for a disgruntled state.) Any such contest over global weather could be ‘disastrous’, so international governance arrangements should be carefully considered. They finish on an optimistic note, suggesting that ‘once engaged, the maintenance of a SWCE system becomes a permanent bequest to future generations’. A bequest to future generations. Words sometimes fail.
Some of those environmentalists and scientists most acutely aware of the dangers of global warming support geoengineering. Humans have caused such a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, they argue, that even radical cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions will not be enough. To render the climate tolerably safe we will need to reduce atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million or below from their expected peak at 450 ppm (an extremely optimistic target), 550 ppm (optimistic) or 650 ppm (likely on current trends), remembering that the long-term pre-industrial level was 280 ppm. It’s a powerful argument with the best motives. By endorsing geoengineering their objective is not to find a way of defending the political and economic systems from the threat of climate change, but simply to protect us from calamity.
With their high level of understanding of the complexities of the climate system and the risks of global warming, those who take this position tend to favour early deployment of geoengineering because, even with radical abatement measures, carbon dioxide ‘drawdown’ will be necessary. So the sooner we start deployment of carbon dioxide removal methods the better. They tend to prefer more natural and local kinds of climate engineering such as reforestation and biochar rather than system-altering approaches such as ocean fertilisation (adding nutrients to the oceans to stimulate algal blooms that can suck up carbon dioxide) or a solar filter. The former are slow-acting methods that would require decades to take full effect and would therefore be of no use as a response to a climate emergency.
The grander climate engineering proposals operate on a scale far larger than previous interventions by humans in environmental systems. Nevertheless, some lessons can be learned from prior attempts to manipulate environmental systems. The history of human interventions in complex ecosystems shows that they frequently trigger a burst of unintended effects. In one case, a freshwater shrimp was introduced into a Montana lake in order to augment the food supply of salmon. However, it was not understood that shrimp feed at night, while salmon feed during the day, so instead of the salmon eating the shrimp, the two species competed for the same zooplankton food source. Instead of salmon numbers multiplying they fell, and so did those of the local eagle population that depended on them for food, undoubtedly with flow-on effects elsewhere. The intervention was a kind of ‘ecological roulette’ – spin the wheel and see what happens.
Human interventions have had many successes, but it’s the disasters that we should heed when considering schemes as audacious as some of those proposed by geoengineers. Success depends above all on minimising the chances of unintended consequences, which in turn depends in large measure on limiting the effects to a bounded geographical area. A disaster following an attempt to manipulate the Earth as a whole would render trivial those resulting from the introduction of the beetle-eating cane toad in Queensland and the rat-eating mongoose in Hawaii. In their review of the lessons of biological control, Damon Matthews and Sarah Turner write that this kind of miscalculation would be unlikely today because of our greater understanding of ecological processes, although they recognise that humans are entirely capable of repeating errors even when knowledge of the consequences is readily available. The assumption that humans learn from their blunders is rarely a safe one.
In trying to get a sense of the likelihood of unintended consequences from system-altering geoengineering schemes, the primary lesson from the study of biological interventions is that the risks increase with both the degree of system complexity and the limits to our understanding of those systems. To date, biological interventions have been confined to ecosystems that are bounded in various ways, so the damage is limited. In the case of system-altering climate engineering schemes the local is the global: every major and minor ecosystem process would be changed by sulphate aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening or ocean fertilisation (just as it is by global warming). The complexity of the Earth system is almost inconceivably deep. Even with leaps in understanding over the next decades, a cascade of unanticipated consequences from intervention seems inevitable. And we return to the disconcerting fact that, despite the enormous advances in climate science over the last two to three decades, each advance opens up new areas of uncertainty. While advances in climate science ought to be teaching us to be more humble, advocates of schemes aimed at regulating sunlight or interfering in Earthsystem processes seem to draw the opposite conclusion.
We know that ecosystems behave eccentrically, even ones artificially created for their simplicity. They change rapidly over short time-frames, and often develop over long time-frames in ways we barely understand. While Lowell Wood bullishly proclaims: ‘We’ve engineered every other environment we live in – why not the planet?’, a more humble scientist, Ron Prinn, has asked: ‘How can you engineer a system you don’t understand?’
The Livermore taint
It is striking to realise how many scientists working on geoengineering have either worked at or collaborated with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Cold War nuclear weapons facility outside San Franscisco. The Laboratory was at the centre of the US program to design a range of nuclear warheads and earned a ‘near-mythological status as the dark heart of weapons research’. It was co-founded by Ernest Lawrence, who had received the Nobel Prize for physics, and Edward Teller, soon to become known as a major architect of the Cold War and the most vigorous advocate of the hydrogen bomb.
Weapons researchers came to believe that their technical expertise gave them a privileged role in advising government on nuclear policy. Washington concurred, going so far as to include Livermore scientists in the identification of nuclear targets in the Soviet Union, which is perhaps why the Russians called Livermore ‘the City of Death’. They also had a large role in deciding on the types of weapons to build. One said: ‘If you don’t understand the technology and physical effects of the weapons, then in my view you don’t have the right to an opinion on nuclear policy’.
Among weapons scientists the conviction grew that understanding and exercising control of the technologies was sufficient to render them safe, as if mastery of the technical sphere carried over into the
political sphere. Confidence in the technology spilled over into the structures that determined how and when it might be used, reflecting the modern predilection to elevate technical truths over other kinds of truths, so that those who could articulate the former acquired authority to speak.
In the emerging geoengineering field, scientists have assumed a privileged place in advising not merely on technical questions but on governance arrangements, ethical concerns and international negotiations, despite their lack of expertise. There is a view that if you are clever enough to understand atmospheric physics then you are clever enough to grasp the nuances of politics, social change and ethics. As in the nuclear arms race, the allocation of authority to those with scientific expertise reflects the continued privileging of the hyper-rationality of physical science over the kinds of reasoning and knowledge valid in other spheres where the weaknesses of humans and their institutions are recognised and the lessons of history absorbed.
In his study of the Livermore laboratory, sociologist Hugh Gusterson found, contrary to expectations, that weapons scientists at Livermore held a variety of political views, with as many identifying as liberal as conservative. They traversed a range of religious orientations; three even identified as Buddhists. The emerging divide over geoengineering is not principally along a left–right fault-line, or even a pro-environment versus proeconomy split. The divide is between Prometheans and Soterians (named here after the Greek goddess of safety, preservation and deliverance from harm): a technocratic rationalist worldview confident of humanity’s ability to control nature, against a more humble outlook suspicious of unnatural technological solutions and the hubris of mastery projects.
Livermore scientists were not opposed to nuclear arms control treaties, but they were ‘almost unanimously hostile’ towards test bans. There is a similarly strong resistance among geoengineers of the Promethean persuasion to any regulation of research and testing, especially from ‘the UN’. At Livermore, antipathy to test bans was not merely pragmatic. Gusterson divined deeper cultural meaning in testing. The ‘display of the secret knowledge’s power’ imparted a keen sense of community among participants. He read weapons tests as ‘powerful rituals celebrating human command over the secrets of life and death’. Tests were proof that human mastery of dangerous powers could be attained. In the same way we might expect that tests of geoengineering technologies, if they succeed, will persuade those carrying them out that technologies of planetary control can be mastered.
Impossible scale
Nature re-engineered
Science is more than freaks and circuses
Paul Livingston
I hate the Big Bang Theory. It’s not that I have a problem with 13.7-billion-year-old singularities expanding out of nothing in order to produce something like myself. What I’m referring to is the American sitcom named after this creation event. A series that perpetuates and promotes the myth of the scientist as socially awkward, erotically disenfranchised, and one who lives a sad, companionless, blinkered existence.
These ubiquitous representations of universally male, whitecoated, bespectacled geeks portray scientists as beings neither to be admired nor emulated. It should come as no surprise that science literacy has declined in Australian schools. For most students, a climate change model is Miranda Kerr in a swimsuit.
The majority of scientists have never put on a white lab coat. What are they going to do? Spill some think all over themselves? Cogitation is not messy. The Einstein who cogitated the theories that would shake the scientific world was a young patent clerk, not the sockless wild-haired celebrity he would later become.
Not that I’m advocating sexing up science (personally I’m parthenogenetic, I have no need to be fertilised, but that’s another story), but science educators do nothing to help their cause by perpetuating the myths themselves.
Much of science education takes the form of magic shows designed to impress and astound the students. Yet no matter how hard a hyperactive, lab-coated science educator might try, using sodium acetate to create an exothermic crystallisation in the shape of a pagoda is no match for a professional conjuror sawing a woman in half or converting a silk hanky into a Bengal tiger.
Entertainment beats science hands down. So how else to lure young minds into a life of cognitive enquiry?
The answer is not in ‘educational games’. Children can sniff out subliminal science in a second. They really couldn’t care less if their balloon-powered race car proves Newton’s three laws of motion eloquently. The fact that a body continues to maintain its state of rest unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force does nothing to stem the tears if your balloon car comes last.
Dogma insertion is not the answer. Religious educators have adapted this ploy in the hope of tempting young minds to their cause with startlingly incongruous results. Look no further than the Text Message Bible:
Wrk hard at wateva u do. U will soon go 2 da wrld of da dead, where no 1 wrks or thinks or reasons or knws NEting (Ecclesiastes 9:10)
How cool is that? Mostly un.
I was disappointed to hear a discussion on ABC Radio ridiculing the idea of a transit of Venus app, which allowed you to track the 2012 transit on your mobile phone. The app connected to a live webcast of the transit. When Venus touched the edge of the sun, the app recorded the moment and the user’s location before sending the data to a global database.
Why demean this initiative? Surely observing a major oncein-a-lifetime cosmological event in real time is preferable to numbing the mind with Angry Birds, or DeathSpank, or And Yet It Moves? (actually, And Yet It Moves is pretty cool).
Even the extraordinary subjects of science are themselves demeaned. In a bid to draw children to the Deep Oceans exhibition at the Australian Museum in Sydney, children were encouraged to ‘follow Mr Blobby on Facebook’. Mr Blobby was described as ‘a jolly little psychrolutid’. Admittedly, Mr Blobby does resemble Peter Sterling after a sauna, but this does not give one the right to belittle any member of the order Scorpaeniformes.
Would Stephen Hawking have caught the public eye with such voracity had he not suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis? Are freaks and circuses all science can offer?
Changing ingrained attitudes will not be easy. Perhaps science could emulate the arts when it comes to enhancing its image; artists are renowned for their liaisons with various partners and muses. Yet Toulouse-Lautrec was no George Clooney, and that Mona Lisa, she’s no oil painting.
There is no doubt science can be intimidating to the novice. So a softly-softly approach is advised. Here are a few points to keep in mind when teaching science to the uninitiated:
Thorium is not a character from World of Warcraft III.
Parallax will not cure a headache.
A brown dwarf is not funny.
Solar flares were not worn in the seventies.
Igneous rock is not something you can dance to.
A charged particle usually gets off scot-free.
A Kuiper belt will not keep your pants up.
Kelvin is not the first name of a former prime minister.
Rectinol will not cure asteroids.
Shoemaker-Levy is not a Jewish cobbler.
Niels Bohr was actually quite engaging.
And a Van Der Graaf generator is not a machine for producing Swedish backpacker clones.
Circuses
Quantum cats
Animals on drugs
Rhianna Boyle
From the 1940s until the 1960s, a pregnancy-test kit did not consist of a sterile white stick bought from the chemist, but of a fat, spotted amphibian called the South African clawed frog. As with the modern test kits that superseded them, the frogs were used to test women’s urine. Thankfully, this did not involve holding a frog midstream in the toilet bowl.
Instead, these ‘pharmaceutical frogs’ were kept in hospital laboratories and pharmacies. The test involved injecting the urine into the frog’s lymph sacs. If the frog laid eggs within 12–18 hours,
this meant that the woman was pregnant. Frogs’ eggs are externally fertilised, so without a male around to do the honours, the female frog would never see her eggs hatch. Presumably, the whole experience left her feeling quite pissed-off, as well as pissed on.
This procedure was called the Hogben test, after Lancelot Hogben, the biologist who invented it. Testing facilities were required to either breed their own frogs, or have them crated in from Africa, where they were readily harvested from the wild. Most chose the latter, which led to a substantial pregnancy-testfrog export industry in southern Africa. In 2004, the global frog trade was identified as the probable transmitter of the chytrid fungus, a skin-eating organism that had been mysteriously killing off native frog species all over the world. But that’s another story.
The tale of the Hogben test is interesting because it shows how, despite the vastly different ways that animals’ bodies have evolved from those of their common ancestors, when it comes to our hormones, evolution has taken the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach. Hormones work like a lock and key, where the hormone molecule physically fits into its receptor in the body, triggering a reaction. In the Hobgen test, our human hormone ‘key’ fits into the frogs’ receptor ‘lock’, triggering ovulation.
Therapeutic hormone treatments work on the same principle. The similarity of hormones produced across the animal kingdom is the reason diabetics could at one time inject themselves with insulin extracted from the pancreases of cattle and pigs, and also why the contraceptive pill once contained hormones harvested from horse urine.
Not all hormones are the same across species. This is why growth hormones, before they could be produced artificially, were not sourced from animals but from human cadavers. In general, though, the hormones that affect our bodies are close cousins to those that affect the bodies of other animals, right down to creatures as different from us as shellfish and crustaceans.
The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 Page 7
