Fixing the Sky

by James Rodger Fleming

  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.

  What Is Geoengineering?

  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.”

  “Ecohacking,” another term for geoengineering, made the short list for the Oxford Word of the Year 2008. It is loosely defined as “the use of science in very large-scale [planetary scale] projects to change the environment for the better/stop global warming (e.g., by using mirrors in space to deflect sunlight away from Earth).”12 A recent report issued by the Royal Society of London defines geoengineering as “the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change.”13 But there are significant problems with such definitions. First of all, an engineering practice defined by its scale (geo) need not be constrained by its stated purpose (environmental improvement), by one of its currently proposed techniques (space mirrors), or by one of perhaps many stated goals (to counteract anthropogenic climate change). Nuclear engineers, for example, are capable of building both power plants and bombs; mechanical engineers can design components for both ambulances and tanks; my father, a precision machinist during World War II, milled both aluminum ice cream scoops and one-of-a-kind components for top-secret military projects. So to constrain the essence of something that does not exist by its stated purpose, techniques, or goals is misleading at best.

  8.1 A climate engineer. (FLEMING, “THE CLIMATE ENGINEERS”)

  “Ecohacking” sounds both too small and too electronic to cover the field of geoengineering. We are all ecohackers, as was the first person to cut down a tree with an axe. In traditional English, hackers are literally those who chop up the Earth, or figuratively those who mangle words or sense. In the computer age, “hacker” is slang for an enthusiast who considers programming an end in itself or, more subversively, who seeks to gain unauthorized access to computer files or networks. Hackers typically have “big projects” about which they obsess. One project of the computer climate engineers is to cut off the sunbeams in a simple climate model to “prove” that the Earth will cool and sea ice will grow. Much more sophisticated modelers have shown that the unknown consequences of doing this may be very, very serious. When people propose to cool the Earth by 2°C (3.6°F) using a technical fix, they are overlooking the fact that Earth has not yet warmed 2°C in the past century. So we are really dealing with dangerous speculation about speculation. A more apt term might be “geohacking,” which is hopefully harmless enough if the practice is restricted to tinkering with computer models and never “sees the light of day” in the form of potentially dangerous outdoor demonstration projects or planetary-scale tinkering.

  Placing his faith firmly in progress, engineer and policy analyst David Keith is of the opinion that scientific understanding grants us increased Archimedean leverage and an “ever greater capability to deliberately engineer environmental processes on a planetary scale.”14 Echoing William Suddards Franklin and his grasshopper of long ago or Ross Hoffman and his misunderstanding of the butterfly effect, Keith maintains that “accurate knowledge of the atmospheric state and its stability could permit leverage of small, targeted perturbations to effect proportionately larger alterations of the atmospheric dynamics.”15 But no matter how great the scientific wizardry, the modern Archimedes still has no place to stand, no acceptable lever or fulcrum, and no way to predict where the Earth will roll if tipped. Failing ultimate control, geoengineering may indeed have the potential to enrage the chaotic “climate beast” of the influential geochemist and oceanographer Wallace Broecker.16

  Terraforming and Beyond

  Geoengineering is a subset of “terraforming ,” or the engineering of planetary environments. Martyn J. Fogg reviewed the history and some of the technical aspects of “orchestrated planetary change” in his book on this subject, published, curiously, by the Society of Automotive Engineers, a group that one might expect would be most familiar with automobile air-conditioning.17 He defined “planetary engineering” as “the application of technology for the purpose of influencing the global properties of a planet” and “terraforming” as the process of “enhancing the capacity of an extraterrestrial planetary environment to support life. The ultimate in terraforming would be to create an uncontained planetary biosphere emulating all the functions of the biosphere of the Earth—one that would be fully habitable for human beings.”18

  Fogg described how ecological-engineering techniques might be used someday to implant life on other planets and how geoengineering might be used to ameliorate (or perhaps exacerbate) the currently “corrosive process” of global change on the Earth. He presented order-of-magnitude calculations and the results of some simple computer modeling to assess the plausibility of various planetary-engineering scenarios. He deemed it “rash to proclaim” impossible any scheme that does not “obviously violate the laws of physics.” Yet Fogg focused only on possibilities, not on unintended consequences, and left unaddressed questions of whether the schemes are desirable, or even ethical. According to Fogg, geoengineering is not simply, or even primarily, a technical problem because people, their politics, and their infrastructures get in the way. That is, it involves the implications and dangers of attempting to tamper with an immensely complex biosphere on an inhabited planet.

  The epigraph of Fogg’s book cites Hungarian-born engineer and physicist Theodore von Kármán to the effect that “scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been.” This quote has an ominous ring, however, when it comes to terraforming, since some “worlds” perhaps should never be. Fogg traced inspiration for the field to Olaf Stapleton’s Last and First Men (1930), Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky (1950), and James Lovelock and Michael Allaby’s The Greening of Mars (1984). In his “concise history of terraforming,” Fogg mentioned the work of naturalists John Ray (English, seventeenth century) and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (French, eighteenth century), who looked on the Earth as unfinished, with man taking the role of a junior partner in creation, taming the wilderness as part of a historical progression toward “perfection.”19 From there, Fogg dropped the names of George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882), an American
diplomat and naturalist who wrote about replanting forests, channeling rivers, and reclaiming deserts in Man and Nature (1864); Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1945), the Russian mineralogist and geochemist who popularized the notion of the interconnectedness of the “biosphere”; and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), the French cleric and philosopher who placed the “noosphere,” the realm of human thought, in evolutionary succession to the geosphere and the biosphere.

  Such expansive antecedents belie recent attempts to restrict the definition of geoengineering to the purposeful and large-scale alteration of the shortwave side of the Earth’s energy budget with the intent of affecting climate. In the literature of planetary terraformation, geoengineering is much, much more than that. It comprises macro-scale projects to control not only the supposed relatively simple and straightforward interaction of albedo and temperature but also much more complex and potentially unknowable interactions of Earth system science—involving the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, the biosphere, and, perhaps most important, society. After all, engineering deals with the technical side of human affairs, and the prefix “geo” potentially involves all aspects of the planet, perhaps also its most prominent companions, the Sun and the Moon. Fogg ventured into hyper-speculative territory when he discussed “astroengineering,” or modifying the properties of the Sun, by intervening in its opacity, nuclear reactions, mass loss, chemical mixing, and even “accretion into a central black hole.” Tellingly, Fogg admitted that “technical difficulties associated with astroengineering will be immense” (457–458).

  Ethical Consequences

  Most studies have ignored, minimized, or barely mentioned important ethical issues regarding geoengineering.20 The report of a 2009 study group, composed of prominently placed geoengineering advocates, candidly admits that the most important sociopolitical and ethical constraints on implementing climate engineering were largely outside the expertise of the technically oriented participants and thus beyond the scope of their study.21 Every engineer has to seek a building permit for every project, to engage the community and the local authorities in discussion, and to obsess (a lot) about design, safety, and cost. A well-engineered project, especially at the “geo” scale, must be based on ethical principles and practices, sound science, technologies and testing methods, economics (not just immediate costs), politics (including legal and diplomatic aspects), and attention to social, cultural, medical, and environmental concerns. However, if it ever comes down to it, who has the right to issue a permit for the intentional manipulation of the global environment? Who does cost-benefit and safety analysis for the planet? Who is liable for any engineering shortcomings or failures? Would climate engineering, by counteracting the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, create moral traps—for example, by reducing incentives to mitigate or by burdening future generations with expensive and unwieldy projects? Where would the global thermostat be located, and who would control it? Could designer geoengineering be practiced at regional levels to address the greatest problems while seeking to avoid a one-size-fits-all planetary fix? What if some group or nation decided, unilaterally, to intervene in a heavy-handed way in planetary processes and the results were viewed as detrimental to a region or even to the globe? Could today’s climate control engineering fantasies, if acted out, lead to undesirable consequences and exacerbate international tensions?22

  In this vein, atmospheric scientist Alan Robock, a leader in modeling efforts to evaluate climate-engineering schemes, recently wrote,

  The reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea are manifold, though a moderate investment in theoretical geoengineering research might help scientists to determine whether or not it is a bad idea. Small-scale deployments are out of the question until we are sure that known adverse consequences can be avoided. Then there are the [Donald Rumsfeld–like] multiple unknown unknowns that argue against ever undertaking a large-scale deployment.23

  His list of twenty reasons (subsequently pared down to seventeen) why geoengineering (especially solar radiation attenuation by sulfates) may be a bad idea includes:

  (1) Potentially devastating effects on regional climate, including drought in Africa and Asia, (2) Accelerated stratospheric ozone depletion, (3) Unknown environmental impacts of implementation, (4) Rapid warming if deployment ever stops, (5) Inability to reverse the effects quickly, (6) Continued ocean acidification, (7) Whitening of the sky, with no more blue skies, but nice sunsets, (8) The end of terrestrial optical astronomy, (9) Greatly reduced direct beam solar power, (10) Human error, (11) The moral hazard of undermining emissions mitigation, (12) Commercialization of the technology, (13) Militarization of the technology, (14) Conflicts with current treaties, (15) Who controls the thermostat? (16) Who has the moral right to do this? (17) Unexpected consequences.24

  Some of these results (1–5) are derived from general circulation model simulations and others (6–9) from back-of-the-envelope calculations; most, however, (10–17) stem from historical, ethical, legal, and social considerations. Robock admits that geoengineering would have certain benefits, including cooling the planet, possibly reducing or reversing sea ice and ice sheet melting and sea level rise, and increasing plant productivity and thus the terrestrial carbon sink.

  Most enthusiasts for solar radiation management have overlooked, however, its “dark” side: the scattering of starlight as well as sunlight, which would further degrade seeing conditions for both ground-based optical astronomy and general night sky gazing. A recent article by astronomers Christian Luginbuhl, Constance Walker, and Richard Wainscoat discusses the rapid growth of light pollution from ground-based sources but does not consider aerosol scattering effects that reduce nighttime seeing.25 Imagine the outcry from professional astronomers and the general public if the geoengineers pollute the stratosphere with a global sulfate cloud; imagine a night sky in which sixth-magnitude stars are invisible, with a barely discernible Milky Way and fewer visible star clusters or galaxies. This would be worse than Project West Ford. It would constitute a worldwide cultural catastrophe.

  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?”26 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.27 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:

  Think of the climate as a small boat on a rather choppy ocean. Under normal circumstances the boat will rock to and fro, and there is a finite risk that the boat could be overturned by a rogue wav
e. But now one of the passengers has decided to stand up and is deliberately rocking the boat ever more violently. Someone suggests that this is likely to increase the chances of the boat capsizing. Another passenger then proposes that with his knowledge of chaotic dynamics he can counterbalance the first passenger and, indeed, counter the natural rocking caused by the waves. But to do so he needs a huge array of sensors and enormous computational resources to be ready to react efficiently but still wouldn’t be able to guarantee absolute stability, and indeed, since the system is untested, it might make things worse. So is the answer to a known and increasing human influence on climate an ever more elaborate system to control the climate? Or should the person rocking the boat just sit down?28

  Protection, Prevention, and Production

  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.29 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.