Enter the geoengineers. Could OIF speed up the biological carbon pump to sequester carbon dioxide, and was it a solution to global warming? Because of this possibility, Martin’s hypothesis received widespread public attention. What if entrepreneurs or governments could turn patches of ocean soupy green and claim that the carbonaceous carcasses of the dead plankton sinking below the waves constituted biological “sequestration” of undesired atmospheric carbon? Or could plankton blooms increase the production of dimethyl sulfate (DMS) and cool the Earth by making marine clouds slightly more reflective? Several companies—Climos, Planktos (now out of the business), the aptly named GreenSea Ventures, and the Ocean Nourishment Corporation—have proposed entering the carbon-trading market by dumping either iron or urea into the oceans to stimulate both plankton blooms and ocean fishing. The scientific consensus, however, supported by diplomatic negotiations, held that more research was needed to evaluate risks and benefits before anyone should even think of selling carbon offsets from ocean iron fertilization. Some of the key questions that are as yet unanswered include the amount and fate of carbon from a bloom, how long it would remain sequestered, and, most important, how all this could be verified. If the commercial companies are going to try to sell an artificial and beneficial “rain” of ocean phytoplankton, then all the caveats and all the verification and attribution challenges of artificial rainmaking apply. It is similar to the relationship between cloud physics and commercial cloud seeding; as Kenneth Coale, director of Moss Landing, pointed out, “iron experiments are about how nature works; commercial ocean seeding is about getting nature to work for us.”67
Totally unresolved issues related to all large-scale OIF projects include possible damage to the ocean food web and the world’s fishing industry caused by disturbing marine ecosystems, production of biological “dead zones,” pollution of the deep ocean by the buildup of iron compounds, possible destruction of stratospheric ozone, and generation of undesirable greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. OIF projects could be undertaken unilaterally by a rogue state or a group out to make a point; and if the fertilization ever stopped, the carbon dioxide would immediately begin to return to the atmosphere.68 Regarding OIF, chemist Whitney King wrote in 1994,
No engineer would consider designing a building which has a less than a 1 percent chance of standing up and the potential of wiping out a whole city if it falls. Yet this is probably a good analogy for our state of understanding the carbon cycle and the role iron plays in controlling it. So why has the iron fertilization theory gained so much attention? I would suggest that we enjoy the thought of being able to control global climate.69
Artificial Trees or Lackner Towers
Klaus Lackner of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, collaborating with Tucson, Arizona–based Global Research Technologies, envisions a world filled with millions of inverse chimneys, some of them more than 300 feet high and 30 feet in diameter, inhaling up to 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year (the world’s annual emissions) and sequestering it in underground or undersea storage areas. Picture in your mind’s eye Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth movie logo of a smokestack apparently exhaling a Katrinalike hurricane; now run the smokestack in reverse and imagine millions of such giant planetary vacuum cleaners or, more accurately, air filters. Lackner prefers a different, somewhat greener metaphor: a forest of artificial trees covered in CO2absorbing artificial leaves. Note, however, that trees sequester carbon, not carbon dioxide, and they return oxygen to the atmosphere. Unlike Lackner forests, trees also provide shade, habitat, and food for squirrels, birds, and other living things. Although Lackner says he is not a geoengineer, but merely interested in compensating for current emissions, he envisions his devices being enlisted in the “fight against climate change.”70 Others hope someday to attain negative global carbon dioxide emissions, but this would entail immense storage problems, similar to nuclear waste disposal.71
Lackner has built a demonstration unit in which a filter filled with caustic and energy-intensive sodium hydroxide can absorb the carbon dioxide output of a single car. He admits, however, that this system is not safe or practical, so he is currently looking into proprietary “ion-exchange resins” with undisclosed energetic and environmental properties. Of course, the capture, cooling, liquefaction, and pumping of 30 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide would require an astronomical amount of energy and infrastructure, and it is not at all certain that the Earth has the capacity for safe long-term storage of such a large amount of carbon.
Let us look briefly at the chemical energetics that make air capture of carbon and its sequestration (CCS) such a non-starter (with the possible exception of selected local sites, such as North Sea oil rigs, where pumping carbon dioxide back into the wells makes more sense than venting it). First there is the mass problem. Combustion of coal (mainly carbon-12) results in carbon dioxide waste products of molecular weight 44. Thus a mole of carbon burned yields energy, plus a mole of carbon dioxide waste, a mass gain of 267 percent. Lackner did not acknowledge this mass problem when he wrote, “Ultimately carbon extraction must be matched by carbon dioxide capture and storage. For every ton of carbon pulled from the ground, another ton of carbon must be taken out of the mobile carbon pool” (emphasis added).72 In actuality, for every ton of carbon used, 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide have to be captured and stored. There are other problems as well. Liquefying such a huge amount of CO2 requires immense pressures, on the order of 80 to 100 atmospheres. We are still not done, since the liquid CO2 must be piped to injection sites. Imagine all the pipelines needed for the pipe dream of erecting 3 million large Lackner towers worldwide, or up to 100 million smaller, container-size units.
The image of a Lackner tower, resembling a huge flyswatter, was superimposed over New York’s Central Park in a photomontage created by a Canadian film company.73 Left unmentioned was the fact that Manhattan alone would require hundreds of these scrubbers for its resident population of 1.5 million people (not counting visitors), so about one in every ten large structures in the city would resemble a giant flyswatter. The cost of the land to build them, energy to run them, piping to drain them, and makeup and maintenance of their “idealized” filters were not specified, making Lackner’s proposal at present untenable. Oh, by the way—each of the large Lackner towers would cost at least $20 million.
Lackner’s dream of carbon sequestration found support from his Columbia University colleague Wallace Broecker and science writer Robert Kunzig in their book, Fixing Climate (2008). Their overall thesis is that carbon dioxide capture and storage represents the equivalent of sewage treatment, which modern societies deem a necessity. They quoted Harrison Brown, the Caltech geochemist, eugenicist, futurist, and role model for the current presidential science adviser, John Holdren. In 1954 Brown imagined feeding a hungry world by increasing the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere to stimulate plant growth:
We have seen that plants grow more rapidly in an atmosphere that is rich in carbon dioxide.... If, in some manner, the carbon-dioxide content of the atmosphere could be increased threefold, world food production might be doubled. One can visualize, on a world scale, huge carbon-dioxide generators pouring the gas into the atmosphere.... In order to double the amount in the atmosphere, at least 500 billion tons of coal would have to be burned—an amount six times greater than that which has been consumed during all of human history. In the absence of coal ... the carbon dioxide could be produced by heating limestone.74
Recall that Nils Ekholm and Svante Arrhenius had suggested in the first decade of the twentieth century that, facing the return of an ice age, atmospheric carbon dioxide might be increased artificially by opening up and burning shallow coal seams—a process that would also fertilize plants. Broecker and Kunzig end their book with just such a fantasy:
Our children and grandchildren, having stabilized the CO2 level at 500 or 600 ppm [parts per million], may decide, consulting their history book
s, that it was more agreeable at 280 ppm. No doubt our more distant descendents will choose if they can to avert the next ice age; perhaps, seeing an abrupt climate change on the horizon, they will prevent it by adjusting the carbon dioxide level in the greenhouse. By then they will no longer be burning fossil fuels, so they would have to deploy some kind of carbon dioxide generator, shades of Harrison Brown, to operate in tandem with the carbon dioxide scrubbers. (232)
Lackner reportedly agreed, adding that capturing, storing, and releasing carbon dioxide may one day be possible. Can you imagine a world in which Lackner’s carbon dioxide scrubbers and the Ekholm–Arrhenius/Brown carbon dioxide generators would operate in tandem as a kind of planetary thermostat? “Trying to see that far into the future is crazy, of course” (232) (Broecker and Kunzig’s words, not mine).
How can we comprehend such proposals? It may be common for people living in close proximity to the megalopolis—for example, just off Broadway—to see the sky as an open sewer and try to “fix it.” Bus exhaust, steam vents, fumes, and foul odors serve as constant reminders that something is indeed wrong with the sky. Fly into a major city near or after sunset, and you will see, on approach, streams of red taillights and white headlights of opposing traffic. Stand on the street, perhaps daring to cross, and you will see the grim visages of oncoming drivers or the tailpipes and exhaust plumes of the passing traffic. In such a dense infrastructure, when almost every building is air-conditioned, it is not hard to imagine a future in which every tenth building might in fact be a giant outdoor air filter or an inverse chimney. To put it simply, when you see pipes sticking out everywhere, it is not hard to imagine more pipes—good pipes correcting emissions from the bad pipes.
Today’s city dwellers, especially the influential ones, do not choose to spend much time on crowded, dangerous, and uncomfortable streets. Instead, they shuttle between microtopian environments, from air-conditioned vehicles to air-conditioned buildings, and even to air-conditioned shopping malls and sports arenas. Near Washington, D.C., certainly a city known for both its international influence and its need for air-conditioning, the power brokers always wear business suits to signal their status and their unlimited access to HVAC. The tunnels running under Capitol Hill and into the Library of Congress symbolize this, as does Pentagon City, across the Potomac River in nearby Virginia, which is known for its underground warrens where not only can the air be conditioned, but Muzak can be pumped in and the homeless can be kept out. This is the type of “environment” in which most of our decision makers operate.
Recycling Ideas
In the twenty-first century, geoengineers have convened several meetings, regularly exchange views on Google Groups, and continue to hatch, nurture, and recycle their ideas. In September 2001, the U.S. Climate Change Technology Program quietly held an invitational conference on “response options to rapid or severe climate change.” Sponsored by a White House that was officially skeptical about greenhouse warming, the meeting gave new status to the control fantasies of the climate engineers. According to one participant, however, “If they had broadcast that meeting live to people in Europe, there would have been riots”—a comment indicative of a much more robust green movement in Europe, which at the time still hoped the United States might sign the Kyoto Protocol.
Two years later, the Pentagon released a controversial report titled “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security.” The report explained how global warming might lead to rapid and catastrophic global cooling through mechanisms such as the slowing of North Atlantic deep-water circulation—and recommended that the government “explore geoengineering options that control the climate.”75 Such actions would have to be studied carefully, of course, given their potential to exacerbate conflict among nations. A symposium sponsored in 2004 by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Cambridge, England, set out to “identify, debate, and evaluate” possible but highly controversial options for the design and construction of engineering projects for the management and mitigation of global climate change.
“Russian Scientist Suggests Burning Sulfur in Stratosphere to Fight Global Warming,” read the headlines from Moscow in November 2005. The article referred to a letter from the prominent scientist Yuri Izrael, the head of the Global Climate and Ecology Institute, to President Vladimir Putin warning that global warming required immediate action and suggesting burning thousands of tons of sulfur in the stratosphere as a remedy. Izrael said his plan was based on the idea of putting aerosols into the atmosphere at an altitude of 8 to 12 miles to create a reflective layer that would lower the heating effect of solar radiation: “In order to lower the temperature of the Earth by 1–2 degrees we need to pump about 600,000 tons of aerosol particles. To do that, we need to burn from 100–200,000 tons of sulfur. And we do not have to burn the sulfur there, we can simply use sulfur-rich aircraft fuel.” It seems that Izrael did not make his own calculations, but simply dusted off Penner’s 1984 idea and used the exact figures of his countryman Budyko, published in 1974.76
A 2006 editorial on geoengineering by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen contained a proposal that was very similar to Budyko’s, although framed by different environmental and policy concerns.77 He came to similar conclusions, too, except his calculations indicated that ten times more sulfur would be needed, between 1 and 2 million tons per year. Budyko had pegged the geoengineering sulfur input at about one-ten-thousandth of “that due to man’s activity,” while Crutzen had it as “only 2–4 percent of the current input” (emphasis added).78 Crutzen wrote that albedo enhancement was not the best solution to global warming “by far,” but he still recommended that the Budyko/National Academy notions of using artillery guns, balloons, or aircraft to inject sulfates or other particles into the stratosphere “might again be explored and debated.”79 He suggested that the attack on the upper atmosphere might be conducted from “remote tropical island sites or from ships” (213), but nowhere indicated that he had considered the need to consult residents of the tropics for their opinions on this. Whether from Budyko, Penner, Izrael, or Crutzen, the idea of purposeful stratospheric pollution, for whatever purpose, is extremely grating to modern sensibilities. Nevertheless, there have been several more workshops in recent years. NASA-Ames and the Carnegie Institution convened one in 2006 on the Phaethon-like topic “managing solar radiation.” Participants could not help but laugh when a meeting coordinator apologized for not being able to control the temperature of the room. Ad hoc meetings on climate engineering pop up on a regular basis. In 2007 one was held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, another at MIT in 2009, and a large gathering on “climate intervention” in 2010 at the Asilomar campus in Pacific Grove, California. The topics under discussion at these meetings have been far from mainstream, involving more speculation than science.80
Geoengineering does not have a widespread following. In 2006 Ralph Cicerone wrote: “Ideas on how to engineer the Earth’s climate, or to modify the environment on large scales ... do not enjoy broad support from scientists. Refereed publications that deal with such ideas are not numerous nor are they cited widely.”81 The situation has not changed substantially since then. According to a 2008 report by the Tyndall Centre, geoengineering proposals have not advanced beyond the outline/concept stage and are best confined to computer model simulations, since small-scale field experiments would be inconclusive and global experiments would be far too risky and socially unacceptable. Recently, atmospheric scientist Richard Turco, founding director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and one of the authors of “Nuclear Winter” (1983), called many geoengineering plans “preposterous” and “mind-boggling.” He saw “no evidence” that technological quick fixes to the climate system would be as cheap or as easy as their proponents claim, and he said that many of them “wouldn’t work at all” and could not be field-tested without unacceptable, even unpredictable, risks. Embarking on such projects, he said, “could be foolhardy.”82
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Late in 2009, Izrael and his colleagues reported on what they called a geoengineering field experiment in Russia to study solar radiation passing through aerosol layers. Citing Crutzen’s 2006 editorial, they made the dubious and selfreferential claim that “injection of reflecting aerosol submicron particles into the stratosphere can be an optimal option to compensate warming” (emphasis added).83 The experimenters then proceeded to experiment, not in the stratosphere but near the ground. In several tests, a military helicopter burning “metal-chloride pyrotechnic” flares and a military truck spraying an “overheated vapor-gas mixture of individual fractions of petroleum products” generated thick toxic clouds of smoke (266). The petroleum device was not unlike Irving Langmuir and Vincent Schaefer’s smoke screen generator of World War II. Ground-based solar radiation measurements then showed what everyone already knows—a thick cloud obscures the Sun: “Possible changes in the irradiance are estimated in this case rather approximately. The irradiance reduction in this case was about 28%” (269). Note the experimenters’ use of the terms “possible” and “approximately”; a reduction of sunlight of 28 percent, sustained globally, would devastate life on Earth. Another experimental trial also yielded inconclusive results. Cloudy weather with sky clearing made it difficult for the researchers to detect a “possible change in the solar radiation caused by the artificial aerosol sample passing over the instrument complex against the background of natural changes” (269). Nevertheless, for this team, inconclusive small-scale experiments near the ground were seemingly a sufficient proof of concept: “Based on the experimental results obtained in our work, it is shown how it is principally possible to control solar radiation passing through artificially created aerosol formations in the atmosphere with different optical thickness” (272). We can only hope these Russian experimenters are not in charge of managing solar radiation for the globe.
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