by Naomi Klein
Levitt and Dubner have stressed the relevance of historical precedent most forcefully, writing in SuperFreakonomics that not only did the earth cool after Pinatubo, but “forests around the world grew more vigorously because trees prefer their sunlight a bit diffused. And all that sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere created some of the prettiest sunsets that people had ever seen.” They do not, however, appear to believe that history offers any cautionary lessons: aside from a reference to the “relatively small” number of deaths in the immediate aftermath of the eruption due to storms and mud slides, they make no mention in the book of any negative impact from Pinatubo.33
Critics of sun shielding also draw on history to bolster their arguments, and when they look back, they see much more than pretty sunsets and “proof of harmlessness.” In fact, a great deal of compelling research shows a connection between large volcanic eruptions and precisely the kinds of droughts some computer models are projecting for SRM. Take the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo itself. When it erupted, large swaths of Africa were already suffering from drought due to natural fluctuations. But after the eruption, the situation grew much worse. In the following year, there was a 20 percent reduction in precipitation in southern Africa and a 10–15 percent reduction in precipitation in South Asia. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) described the drought as “the most severe in the last century”; an estimated 120 million people were affected. The Los Angeles Times reported crop losses of 50–90 percent, and half the population of Zimbabwe required food aid.34
At the time, few linked these disastrous events to the Pinatubo eruption since isolating such climate signals takes time. But more recent research looking at rainfall and streamflow patterns from 1950 to 2004 has concluded that only the sulfur dioxide that Pinatubo sent into the stratosphere can account for the severity of the drop in rainfall that followed the eruption. Aiguo Dai, an expert in global drought at the State University of New York, Albany, stresses that though the drought had additional causes, “Pinatubo contributed significantly to the drying.” A 2007 paper cowritten by Dai and Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research, concluded “that the Pinatubo eruption played an important role in the record decline in land precipitation and discharge, and the associated drought conditions in 1992.”35
If Pinatubo was the only large eruption to have been followed by severe and life-endangering drought, that might not be enough to draw clear conclusions. But it fits neatly into a larger pattern. Alan Robock, a leading expert on the effect of volcanoes on climate, points in particular to two other eruptions—Iceland’s Laki in 1783 and Alaska’s Mount Katmai in 1912. Both were sufficiently powerful to send a high volume of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and, like Pinatubo, it turns out that both were followed by a series of terrible, or badly worsening regional droughts.
Reliable records of rainfall go back only roughly one hundred years, but as Robock informed me, “There’s one thing that’s been measured for 1,500 years, and that’s the flow of the Nile River. And if you look back at the flow of the Nile River in 1784 or 1785”—the two years following Laki’s eruption in Iceland—“it was much weaker than normal.” The usual floods that could be counted on to carry water and precious fertilizing nutrients into farmers’ fields barely took place, the devastating consequences of which were recounted in the eighteenth-century travel memoirs of French historian Constantin-François Volney. “Soon after the end of November, the famine carried off, at Cairo, nearly as many as the plague; the streets, which before were full of beggars, now afforded not a single one: all had perished or deserted the city.” Volney estimated that in two years, one sixth of the population in Egypt either died or fled the country.36
Scholars have noted that in the years immediately following the eruption, drought and famine gripped Japan and India, claiming millions of lives, although there is much debate and uncertainty surrounding Laki’s contribution. In Western and Central Europe, meanwhile, a brutally cold winter led to flooding and high mortality rates. Expert estimates of the global death toll from the eruption and the resulting extreme weather range widely, from over one-and-a-half million to as many as six million people. At a time when world population was less than one billion, those are stunningly high numbers, making Laki quite possibly the deadliest volcano in recorded history.37
Robock found something similar when he delved into the aftermath of the 1912 Katmai eruption in Alaska. Once again, his team looked at the historical record of the flow of the Nile and discovered that the year after Katmai saw “the lowest flow for the twentieth century.” Robock and his colleagues also “had found a significant weakening of the Indian monsoon in response to the 1912 Katmai volcanic eruption in Alaska, which resulted from the decreased temperature gradient between Asia and the Indian Ocean.” But it was in Africa where the impact of the great eruption took the heaviest human toll. In Nigeria, sorghum, millet, and rice crops withered in the fields while speculators hoarded what grains survived. The result was a massive famine in 1913–1914 that took the lives of at least 125,000 in western Africa alone.38
These are not the only examples of deadly droughts seemingly triggered by large volcanic eruptions. Robock has looked at how such eruptions have impacted “the water supply for Sahel and northern Africa” over the past two thousand years. “You get the same story from every [eruption] you look at,” he said, adding, “there haven’t been that many big eruptions but they all tell you the same stories. . . . The global average precipitation went down. In fact, if you look at global average precipitation for the last fifty years, the three years with the lowest global precipitation were after the three largest volcanic eruptions. Agung in 1963, El Chichón in 1982, and Pinatubo in 1991.” The connections are so clear, Robock and two coauthors argued in one paper, that the next time there is a large “high-latitude volcanic eruption,” policymakers should start preparing food aid immediately, “allowing society time to plan for and remediate the consequences.”39
So how, given all this readily available evidence, could geoengineering boosters invoke the historical record for “proof of harmlessness”? The truth is the mirror opposite: of all the extreme events the planet periodically lobs our way—from earthquakes and tsunamis to hurricanes and floods—powerful volcanic eruptions may well be the most threatening to human life. Because the people in the immediate path of an eruption are not the only ones at risk; the lives of billions of others scattered throughout the globe can be destroyed by lack of food and water in the drier years to come. No naturally occurring disaster short of an asteroid has such global reach.
This grim track record makes the cheerful talk of a Pinatubo Option distinctly bizarre, if not outright sinister—especially because what is being contemplated is simulating the cooling effects of an eruption like Pinatubo not once but year after year for decades, which could obviously magnify the significant risks that have been documented in the aftermath of one-off eruptions.
The risks can be debated and contested, of course—and they are. The most common response is that, yes, there could be negative impacts, but not as negative as the impacts of climate change itself. David Keith goes further, arguing that we have the power to effectively minimize the risks with appropriate design; he proposes an SRM program that would slowly ramp up and then down again, “in combination with cutting emissions and with a goal to reduce—but not eliminate—the rate of temperature rise.” As he explains in his 2013 book, A Case for Climate Engineering, “Crop losses, heat stress and flooding are the impacts of climate change that are likely to fall most harshly on the world [sic] poorest. The moderate amounts of geoengineering contemplated in this slow ramp scenario are likely to reduce each of these impacts over the next half century, and so it will benefit the poor and politically disadvantaged who are most vulnerable to rapid environmental change. This potential for reducing climate risk is the reason I take geoengineering seriously.”40
But
when climate models and the historical record tell such a similar story about what could go wrong (and of course it wouldn’t be scientists but politicians deciding how to use these technologies), there is ample cause for focusing on the very real risks. Trenberth and Dai, authors of the study on Pinatubo’s harrowing legacy, are blunt. “The central concern with geoengineering fixes to global warming is that the cure could be worse than the disease.” And they stress, “Creating a risk of widespread drought and reduced freshwater resources for the world to cut down on global warming does not seem like an appropriate fix.”41
It’s hard not to conclude that the willingness of many geoegineering boosters to gloss over the extent of these risks, and in some cases, to ignore them entirely, has something to do with who appears to be most vulnerable. After all, if the historical record, backed by multiple models, indicated that injecting sulfur into the stratosphere would cause widespread drought and famine in North America and Germany, as opposed to the Sahel and India, is it likely that this Plan B would be receiving such serious consideration?
It’s true that it might be technically possible to conduct geoengineering in a way that distributed the risks more equitably. For instance, the same 2013 study that found that the African Sahel could be devastated by SRM done in the Northern Hemisphere—a common assumption about where the sulfur injections would take place—found that the Sahel could actually see an increase in rainfall if the injections happened in the Southern Hemisphere instead. However, in this scenario, the United States and the Caribbean could see a 20 percent increase in hurricane frequency, and northeastern Brazil could see its rainfall plummet. In other words, it might be possible to tailor some of these technologies to help the most vulnerable people on the planet, and those who contributed least to the creation of the climate crisis—but not without endangering some of the wealthiest and most powerful regions. So we are left with a question less about technology than about politics: does anyone actually believe that geoengineering will be used to help Africa if that help could come only by putting North America at greater risk of extreme weather?42
In contrast, it is all too easy to imagine scenarios wherein geoengineering could be used in a desperate bid to, say, save corn crops in South Dakota, even if it very likely meant sacrificing rainfall in South Sudan. And we can imagine it because wealthy-country governments are already doing this, albeit more passively, by allowing temperatures to increase to levels that are a danger to hundreds of millions of people, mostly in the poorest parts of the world, rather than introducing policies that interfere with short-term profits. This is why African delegates at U.N. climate summits have begun using words like “genocide” to describe the collective failure to lower emissions. And why Mary Ann Lucille Sering, climate change secretary for the Philippines, told the 2013 summit in Warsaw, Poland, “I am beginning to feel like we are negotiating on who is to live and who is to die.” Rob Nixon, an author and University of Wisconsin English professor, has evocatively described the brutality of climate change as a form of “slow violence”; geoengineering could well prove to be a tool to significantly speed that up.43
Geoengineering as Shock Doctrine
All of this may still seem somewhat abstract but it’s critical to reckon with these harrowing risks now. That’s because if geoengineering were ever deployed, it would almost surely be in an atmosphere of collective panic with scarce time for calm deliberation. Its defenders readily concede as much. Bill Gates describes geoengineering as “just an insurance policy,” something to have “in the back pocket in case things happen faster.” Nathan Myhrvold likens SRM to “having fire sprinklers in a building”—you hope you won’t need it, “but you also need something to fall back on in case the fire occurs anyway.”44
In a true emergency, who would be immune to this logic? Certainly not me. Sure, the idea of spraying sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere like some kind of cosmic umbrella seems crazy to me now. But if my city were so hot that people were dropping dead in the thousands, and someone was peddling a quick and dirty way to cool it off, wouldn’t I beg for that relief in the same way that I reach for the air conditioner on a sweltering day, knowing full well that by turning it on I am contributing to the very problem I am trying to escape?
This is how the shock doctrine works: in the desperation of a true crisis all kinds of sensible opposition melts away and all manner of high-risk behaviors seem temporarily acceptable. It is only outside of a crisis atmosphere that we can rationally evaluate the future ethics and risks of deploying geoengineering technologies should we find ourselves in a period of rapid change. And what those risks tell us is that dimming the sun is nothing like installing a sprinkler system—unless we are willing to accept that some of those sprinklers could very well spray gasoline instead of water. Oh—and that, once turned on, we might not be able to turn off the system without triggering an inferno that could burn down the entire building. If someone sold you a sprinkler like that, you’d definitely want a refund.
Perhaps we do need to find out all we possibly can about these technologies, knowing that we will never know close to enough to deploy them responsibly. But if we accept that logic, we also have to accept that small field tests often turn into bigger ones. It may start with just checking the deployment hardware, but how long before the planet hackers want to see if they can change the temperature in just one remote, low-population location (something that will be described, no doubt, as “the middle of nowhere”)—and then one a little less remote?
The past teaches us that once serious field tests begin, deployment is rarely far behind. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed less than a month after Trinity, the first successful nuclear test—despite the fact that many of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project thought they were building a nuclear bomb that would be used only as a deterrent. And though slamming the door on any kind of knowledge is always wrenching, it’s worth remembering that we have collectively foregone certain kinds of research before, precisely because we understand that the risks are too great. One hundred and sixty-eight nations are party to a treaty banning the development of biological weapons. The same taboos have been attached to research into eugenics because it can so easily become a tool to marginalize and even eliminate whole groups of people. Moreover the U.N. Environmental Modification Convention, which was adopted by governments in the late 1970s, already bans the use of weather modification as a weapon—a prohibition that today’s would-be geoengineers are skirting by insisting that their aims are peaceful (even if their work could well feel like an act of war to billions).
Monster Earth
Not all geoengineering advocates dismiss the grave dangers their work could unleash. But many simply shrug that life is full of risks—and just as geoengineering is attempting to fix a problem created by industrialization, some future fix will undoubtedly solve the problems created by geoengineering.
One version of the “we’ll fix it later” argument that has gained a good deal of traction comes from the French sociologist Bruno Latour. His argument is that humanity has failed to learn the lessons of the prototypical cautionary story about playing god: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. According to Latour, Shelley’s real lesson is not, as is commonly understood, “don’t mess with mother nature.” Rather it is, don’t run away from your technological mess-ups, as young Dr. Frankenstein did when he abandoned the monster to which he had given life. Instead, Latour says we must stick around and continue to care for our “monsters” like the deities that we have become. “The real goal must be to have the same type of patience and commitment to our creations as God the Creator, Himself,” he writes, concluding, “From now on, we should stop flagellating ourselves and take up explicitly and seriously what we have been doing all along at an ever-increasing scale.” (British environmentalist Mark Lynas makes a similar, defiantly hubristic argument in calling on us to become “The God Species” in his book of the same name.)45
Latour’s entreaty to “love your monsters”
has become a rallying cry in certain green circles, particularly among those most determined to find climate solutions that adhere to market logic. And the idea that our task is to become more responsible Dr. Frankensteins, ones who don’t flee our creations like deadbeat dads, is unquestionably appealing. But it’s a terribly poor metaphor for geoengineering. First, “the monster” we are being asked to love is not some mutant creature of the laboratory but the earth itself. We did not create it; it created—and sustains—us. The earth is not our prisoner, our patient, our machine, or, indeed, our monster. It is our entire world. And the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.
Because geoengineering will certainly monsterize the planet as nothing experienced in human history. We very likely would not be dealing with a single geoengineering effort but some noxious brew of mixed-up techno-fixes—sulfur in space to cool the temperature, cloud seeding to fix the droughts it causes, ocean fertilization in a desperate gambit to cope with acidification, and carbon-sucking machines to help us get off the geo-junk once and for all.
This makes geoengineering the very antithesis of good medicine, whose goal is to achieve a state of health and equilibrium that requires no further intervention. These technologies, by contrast, respond to the lack of balance our pollution has created by taking our ecosystems even further away from self-regulation. We would require machines to constantly pump pollution into the stratosphere and would be unable to stop unless we invented other machines that could suck existing pollution out of the lower atmosphere, then store and monitor that waste indefinitely. If we sign on to this plan and call it stewardship, we effectively give up on the prospect of ever being healthy again. The earth—our life support system—would itself be put on life support, hooked up to machines 24/7 to prevent it from going full-tilt monster on us.
