Fixing the Sky

by James Rodger Fleming

  In 1974 William Kellogg and Stephen Schneider published an article in Science titled “Climate Stabilization: For Better or Worse?” One of their major concerns was food and water shortages ravaging Africa and whether climatologists could do anything to alleviate this situation while simultaneously cooling the planet. Noting that human activities were increasingly pushing on certain “leverage points” that control the heat balance of the system, they admitted that, as yet, there was no comprehensive theory that could explain—much less predict—temperature trends or rainfall patterns. They drove this point home by listing as a “cause” of climate change the behavior of the climate system as described by Edward Lorenz: “An interactive system as complex as the oceans and atmosphere can have long-period self-fluctuations, even with fixed external inputs.”42 According to Lorenz, chaotically forced internal fluctuations with timescales longer than the thirty- to forty-year interval used to define a climatological average might easily be misinterpreted or confused with climatic changes forced by external variations. This fundamental property of complex systems has vexed those seeking to attribute climate change to any one factor.43

  Nevertheless, imagining a future in which climate changes could be forecast, Kellogg and Schneider laid out three basic (but not morally equivalent) options: (1) do nothing, (2) alter our patterns of land and sea use in order to lessen the impact of climate change, or (3) anticipate climate change and implement schemes to control it. As they noted, the third option would be extremely contentious and would inevitably generate conflict, for the atmosphere is a highly complex and interactive resource common to all nations. The second option is related to the “middle path.”

  What if one nation developed the skills to predict climate? This would dramatically change international economic market strategies and might lead to pressure for climate control. What if, after purposeful manipulation, climatic cause-and-effect linkages could be traced? Accusations would abound, and nations might use perceived damages as an excuse for hostility. Given the immense costs of miscalculation (or perception of miscalculation), who then would decide and who would implement climate modification and control schemes? Kellogg and Schneider noted with some irony, but prophetically, “We have the impression that more schemes will be proposed for climate control than for control of the climate controllers.”44 They ended their article by calling for interdisciplinary studies of climate change and its consequences for society. These sorts of studies have subsequently been pursued by the IPCC, but so far with little attention given to geoengineering fantasies.

  In 1977 Cesare Marchetti used the term “geoengineering” to refer to the capture and injection of carbon dioxide into the ocean in down-welling currents.45 He identified the Mediterranean undercurrent at Gibraltar as a likely candidate, with the capacity to sequester all the carbon dioxide emissions of Europe. Today, geoengineers discuss carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and solar radiation management techniques at their meetings. Also in 1977, the National Academy of Sciences looked at a variety of ideas to reduce global warming, should it ever become dangerous, and concluded that investing in renewable energy was more practical than climate engineering.46 That same year, Freeman Dyson estimated the scale and cost of an emergency program to plant fast-growing trees to control the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning. He later suggested transporting and dispersing sulfates into the stratosphere using smokestack emissions from burning high-sulfur coal in power plants. Recently, he proposed dumping snow in Antarctica to reduce sea levels.47 These wild ideas, not taken seriously, were intended as illustrations of how to buy time for society to switch to non-carbon-based energy sources.

  In a 1983 report for the National Research Council on “changing climate,” Thomas Schelling wrote that “technologies for global cooling, perhaps by injecting the right particles into the stratosphere, perhaps by subtler means, [might] become economical during coming decades.”48 Economics however, was not the most important dimension. Echoing von Neumann’s 1955 warning, Schelling wrote that climate control, like nuclear weapons, could become “more a source of international conflict than a relief ” (470) if several nations possessed the technology and if they disagreed on the optimum climatic balance. He cited the possibility that one nation might view landfalling hurricanes as disasters, while another might see them as providing necessary water for crops. Concerning interventions that might last for decades or centuries, Schelling predicted that future environmental agendas might well change, as they had in the past and that “CO2 may not ... dominate discussion of anthropogenic climate change as it does now” (470). “It is difficult to know what will still look alarming 75 years from now” (482)—that is, after 2050. Also, in 1983 the idea of nuclear winter emerged. A major nuclear war would certainly inject smoke and dust into the stratosphere, yet no one in his right mind would consider such a holocaust an offset to global warming.49

  Growing concern about anthropogenic global warming led Stanford Solomon Penner, director of the Center for Energy and Combustion Research at the University of California–San Diego, and his associates to suggest in 1984 that the heating from a doubling of CO2 could be offset if commercial airlines would fly at an altitude of 8 to 20 miles for a ten-year period and tune their engines to emit more particulates to increase the Earth’s albedo. A major problem with this suggestion, beyond polluting the stratosphere (which concerned Wexler in 1962), was that commercial aircraft rarely fly at or above 8 miles (although military aircraft do).50 About this time, studies by cloud physicists indicated that an increase in the amount or brightness of marine stratocumulus clouds in the lower atmosphere might provide significant offsets to global warming. One possible mechanism would be through adding cloud condensation nuclei from emissions of sulfur dioxide; several hundred coal-fired power plants might do the job.

  In 1989 James Early, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, revisited the issue of space mirrors and linked space manufacturing fantasies with environmental issues in his wild speculations on the construction of a solar shield “to offset the greenhouse effect.”51 His back-of-the-envelope calculations indicated that a massive shield some 1,250 miles in diameter would be needed to reduce incoming sunlight by 2 percent. He estimated that an ultrathin shield, possibly manufactured from lunar materials using nano-fabrication techniques, might cost “from one to ten trillion dollars.” Launched from the Moon by an unspecified “mass driver,” the shield would reach a “semi-stable” orbit at the L1 point 1 million miles from the Earth along a direct line toward the Sun, where it would perch “like a barely balanced cart atop a steep hill, a hair’s-width away from falling down one side or the other.”52 Here it would be subjected to the solar wind, harsh radiation, cosmic rays, and the buildup of electrostatic forces. It would have to remain functional for “several centuries,” which would entail repair missions. It would also require an active positioning system to keep it from falling back to the Earth or into the Sun. In other words, it was not feasible. Early did not indicate what a guidance system might look like for a 5-million-square-mile sheet of material possibly thinner than kitchen plastic wrap, with a mass close to 1 billion kilograms (2.2 billion pounds in Earth gravity). He alluded to the enormous scale and costs of this project and its “major undefined systems,” while disingenuously declaring it to be a simpler project, “much smaller in size and scale,” than controlling the temperatures on other planets of the solar system. By this “logic,” even controlling the temperature of the entire solar system would be “simple” compared with galacticscale engineering!

  National Academy, 1992

  The publication of the National Academy of Sciences report Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming: Mitigation, Adaptation, and the Science Base (1992) is well within the memory of the current generation of climate engineers. The massive report, whose synthesis panel was chaired by Daniel J. Evans, former governor and U.S. senator from Washington State, examined what was known about greenhouse gases and
their climatic effects and then presented geoengineering as one of the cheapest mitigation options, at least in its direct costs. One of the controversial aspects was the report’s conclusion that “assumed gradual changes in climate” would produce impacts “that will be no more severe, and adapting to them will be no more difficult, than for the range of climates already on the

  Earth and no more difficult than for other changes humanity faces.”53 Another problem was the report’s narrow focus on cost-effectiveness and the assumed ease of implementing remedial policies. These include fantastic geoengineering schemes conflated with energy-switching and efficiency options under the catchall category “mitigation.”

  Here are the National Academy’s geoengineering options, notable for their impracticability:

  • Space mirrors. Place 50,000 mirrors, each 40 square miles in area, in Earth orbit to reflect incoming sunlight.

  • Stratospheric dust. Use guns, rockets, or balloons to maintain a dust cloud in the stratosphere to increase the reflection of sunlight.

  • Stratospheric bubbles. Place billions of aluminized, hydrogen-filled balloons in the stratosphere to provide a reflective screen.

  • Low-stratospheric dust, particulates, or soot. Use aircraft delivery systems or fuel additives to maintain a cloud of dust, particulates, or soot in the lower stratosphere to reflect or intercept sunlight.

  • Cloud stimulation. Burn sulfur in ships or power plants to form sulfate aerosols in order to stimulate additional low marine clouds to reflect sunlight.

  • Laser removal of atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons. Use up to 150 extremely powerful lasers, consuming up to 2 percent of the world power supply, to break up CFCs in the lower atmosphere.54

  • Ocean biomass stimulation. Fertilize the oceans with iron to stimulate the growth of CO2-absorbing phytoplankton.

  • Reforestation. Plant 3 percent of the entire U.S. surface area (100,000 square miles) with fast-growing trees to sequester 10 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. (433–464)

  Washington insider Robert A. Frosch—a vice president of General Motors Research Labs, former deputy director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, former assistant secretary of the navy for research and development, and former administrator of NASA—spearheaded the geoengineering aspects of the study. His enthusiastic promotion of climate engineering was seen as a rationale for GM and other corporations to argue against cutting carbon dioxide emissions. At the time, Frosch said,

  I don’t know why anybody should feel obligated to reduce carbon dioxide if there are better ways to do it. When you start making deep cuts, you’re talking about spending some real money and changing the entire economy. I don’t understand why we’re so casual about tinkering with the whole way people live on the Earth, but not tinkering a little further with the way we influence the environment.55

  Yale economist William Nordhaus, also a contributor to the National Academy study, used geoengineering scenarios in his dynamic integrated climate economy (DICE) model to calculate the balance between economic growth (or decline) and climate change. Defining geoengineering as “a hypothetical technology that provides costless mitigation of climate change” (emphasis added), he came to the controversial conclusion that “geoengineering produces major benefits, whereas emissions stabilization and climate stabilization are projected to be worse than inaction.”56 At one point, he referred to the scale of his global economic projections as “mind-numbing,” but he could well have applied this description to his overall conclusions regarding the potential for a geoengineering solution. Stephen Schneider later wrote: “As a member of that panel, I can report that the very idea of including a chapter on geoengineering led to serious internal and external debates. Many participants (including myself) were worried that even the thought that we could offset some aspects of inadvertent climate modification by deliberate modification schemes could be used as an excuse to continue polluting.”57 In fact, it was precisely in this way—as an alternative to reducing emissions—that geoengineering discussions found their way into the twenty-first century.

  Such sentiments echoed the dismal opinions of economists at the time on pollution solutions. In 1991, for example, World Bank economist Lawrence Summers (who later resigned as president of Harvard University following a no-confidence vote of the faculty and now directs the White House’s National Economic Council) wrote, in what he assumed would remain a private, and what he later deemed a sarcastic, memo: “Shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries].... I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to the fact that ... under populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted.”58 The outrage generated when this memo became public in 1992, just before the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, motivated José Lutzenberger, Brazil’s secretary of the environment, to respond to Summers:

  Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane.... Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional “economists” concerning the nature of the world we live in.... If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility. To me it would confirm what I often said ... the best thing that could happen would be for the Bank to disappear.59

  “Insane,” “reductionist,” “ruthless,” “arrogant”—such modifiers suit most geoengineering proposals quite well. Nordhaus wrote in 2007 that geoengineering is, at present, “the only economically competitive technology to offset global warming.”60

  A Naval Rifle System

  Frosch called his proposal to bombard the stratosphere using an array of 350 naval guns “designer volcanic dust put up with Jules Verne methods” (figure 8.2).61 He envisioned each $1 million, 16-inch gun being able to fire 1 ton of sulfate or aluminum oxide into the stratosphere about every ten minutes. Each barrel would need replacement after 1,000 to 1,500 shots. Thus a single cannon would have a useful life of less than two weeks, and a total of 300,000 cannon would be needed for a forty-year program! The naval guns had been designed in 1939 and were first put into service in 1943, so they would have to be updated. The cost of ammunition for 400 million shots was estimated at $4 trillion, the barrels would be $300 billion, the firing stations $200 billion, and the personnel costs $100 billion—for a total of $5 trillion over forty years. This system could deliver dust to the stratosphere for about $14 a pound, and each pound was expected to mitigate 45 tons of carbon emissions.62 Balloon delivery systems were estimated to cost $36 a pound and sounding rockets, $45.

  Frosch was aware that damaging side effects could result, such as stratospheric ozone destruction, widespread drought, or unacceptable atmospheric haze, but he did not emphasize that. Instead, he reassured his readers that “the rifle system appears to be inexpensive, to be relatively easily managed, and to require few launch sites” (460). He concluded that “the rifles could be deployed at sea or in military reservations where the noise of the shots and the fallback of expended shells could be managed” (817–819). What Frosch forgot to take into account was the lower tropospheric air pollution generated by the bombardments. If, for example, each 650-pound explosive charge contained pure nitroglycerine (C3H5N3O9), it would generate about 380 pounds of carbon dioxide when fired, so 400 million cannon shots would produce about 76 million tons of carbon dioxide. This calculation does not take into account other gaseous by-products, such as smoke or nitrous oxide, nor does it consider the carbon emissions involved in manufacturing or transporting 300,000 cannon barrels, each of which is over 65 feet long and weighs over 130 tons. 63 Could such a long-term and violent bombardment be sustained without any accidents or other side effects? Is declaring war on the stratosphere the best mitigation strategy? The authors of the 2009 Novim Group report on geoengineering seem to think so and discuss, apparently without a sense of irony, the possibilit
y of opening fire on the ozone layer with M1 tank guns loaded with aerosols.64

  8.2 Shooting dust into the stratosphere to offset global warming, one proposal by the National Academy of Sciences in its report published in 1992. Nobel laureate Paul J. Crutzen revived the idea in 2006. (CARTOON BY JOHN IRELAND, IN GEOGRAPHICAL MAGAZINE, MAY 1992)

  Ocean Iron Fertilization

  The other scheme hatched at the time was ocean iron fertilization (OIF). “Give me half a tanker of iron, and I’ll give you an ice age,” biogeochemist John Martin (a Colby College graduate) reportedly quipped in a Dr. Strangelove accent at a conference at Woods Hole in 1988.65 Martin and his colleagues at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories proposed that iron was a limiting nutrient in certain ocean waters and that adding it stimulated explosive and widespread phytoplankton growth. They tested their iron deficiency, or “Geritol,” hypothesis in bottles of ocean water, and subsequently experimenters added iron to the oceans in a dozen or so ship-borne “patch” experiments extending over hundreds of square miles. OIF worked, just like pouring Miracle-Gro on your tomatoes. Was it possible that the blooming and die-off of phytoplankton, fertilized by the iron in natural dust, was the key factor in regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations during glacial–interglacial cycles? Dust bands in ancient ice cores encouraged this idea, as did the detection of natural plankton blooms by satellites.66