The powerful coalition that wants to engineer the world's climate

Some people
geo-engineering techniques, such as filling the sky with shiny dust to
reflect sunlight, could curb such temperature rises without the need to
restrict greenhouse gas emissionsIn
August 1883 the painter Edvard Munch witnessed an unusual blood-red
sunset over Oslo. Shaken up by it, he wrote in his diary that he "felt a
great, unending scream piercing through nature". The incident inspired
him to create his most famous work, The Scream.

The sunset he saw that evening followed the eruption of Krakatoa off
the coast of Java. The explosion, one of the most violent in recorded
history, sent a massive plume of ash into the stratosphere, turning
sunsets red around the globe. The gases emitted also caused the Earth to
cool by more than one degree and disrupted weather patterns for
several years.

The cooling effect of large volcanic eruptions has been known for some
time. A haze forms from the sulphur dioxide spewed into the upper
atmosphere reducing the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth.
It's estimated that the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines
in 1991 — the largest since Krakatoa — cooled the Earth by around 0.5°C for a year or more.

Now, a powerful coalition of forces is quietly constellating around the
idea of transforming the Earth's atmosphere by simulating volcanic
eruptions to counter the warming effects of carbon pollution.
Engineering the planet's climate system is attracting the attention of
scientists, scientific societies, venture capitalists and conservative
think tanks. Despite the enormity of what is being proposed — nothing
less than taking control of Earth's climate system — the public has
been almost entirely excluded from the planning.

The Royal Society defines geoengineering as "the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change"
and divides methods into two types: carbon dioxide removal from the
atmosphere, and solar radiation management aimed at reducing heat coming
in or reflecting more of it out.

Techniques ranging from the intriguing to the wacky have been proposed
to remove carbon from the atmosphere, including fertilising the oceans
with iron filings to promote the growth of tiny marine plants that
absorb carbon dioxide, installing in the ocean a vast number of
floating funnels that draw nutrient-rich cold water from the deep to
encourage algal blooms that suck carbon dioxide from the air, and
construction of thousands of 'sodium trees' that extract carbon dioxide
directly from the air and turn it into sodium bicarbonate.

Some of the ideas put forward to block the Sun's heat would be
far-fetched even in a science fiction novel. One is to send billions of
reflective discs to a point in space known as L1 and located between
the Earth and the Sun. Another is to launch hundreds of special
unmanned ships that plough the oceans sending up plumes of water vapour
that increase cloud cover. Or dark-coloured forests could be converted
into light-coloured grasslands that reflect more sunlight.

Enhanced dimming
But the option that is taken most seriously is altogether grander in
conception and scale. The scheme proposes nothing less than the
transformation of the chemical composition of the Earth's atmosphere so
that humans can regulate the temperature of the planet as desired.
Like volcanic eruptions, it involves injecting sulphur dioxide gas into
the stratosphere to blanket the Earth with tiny particles that reflect
solar radiation.

Various schemes have been proposed, with the most promising being
adaptation of high-flying aircraft fitted with extra tanks and nozzles
to spray the chemicals. A fleet of 747s could do the job. To have the
desired effect we would need the equivalent of one Mount Pinatubo
eruption every three or four years. The emissions from the eruption in
April of Iceland's 'Mount Unpronounceable' were less than a hundredth
of those from Pinatubo, so to engineer the climate we'd need the
equivalent of one of those every week, every year for decades.

More cautious scientists recognise that attempting to regulate the
Earth's climate by enhancing global dimming is fraught with dangers.
Most worryingly, the oceans are absorbing around a third of the extra
carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by humans, which is raising
their acidity, dissolving corals and inhibiting shell-formation by
marine organisms. Turning down the dimmer switch may reduce incoming
solar radiation but would do nothing to slow ocean acidification. The
climate system is hugely complicated and tinkering with it might be
akin to introducing cane toads to control sugarcane beetles.

Moral hazards
Although ideas for climate engineering have been around for at least
twenty years, until recently public discussion has been discouraged by
the scientific community. Environmentalists and governments have been
reluctant to talk about it too. The reason is simple: apart from its
unknown side-effects, geoengineering would weaken resolve to reduce carbon emissions.
Economically it is an extremely attractive substitute because its cost
is estimated to be "trivial" compared to those of cutting carbon
pollution. While the international community has found it difficult to
agree on strong collective measures to reduce carbon emissions, climate
engineering is cheap, immediately effective and, most importantly,
available to a single nation.
Among the feasible contenders
for unilateral intervention, one expert names China, the USA, the
European Union, Russia, India, Japan and Australia. Could they agree?
It's like seven people living together in a centrally heated house, each
with their own thermostat and each with a different ideal temperature.
China will be severely affected by warming, but Russia might prefer
the globe to be a couple of degrees warmer.

If there is no international agreement an impatient nation suffering
the effects of climate disruption may decide to act alone. It is not
out of the question that in three decades the climate of the Earth
could be determined by a handful of Communist Party officials in
Beijing. Or the government of an Australia crippled by permanent
drought, collapsing agriculture and ferocious bushfires could risk the
wrath of the world by embarking on a climate control project.

To date, governments have shunned geoengineering for fear of being
accused of wanting to avoid their responsibilities with science fiction
solutions. The topic is not mentioned in the Stern report and receives
only one page in Australia's Garnaut report (see Section 2.4.2).
As a sign of its continuing political sensitivity, when in April 2009
it was reported that President Obama's new science adviser John Holdren
had said that geoengineering is being vigorously discussed as an
emergency option in the White House, he immediately felt the need to
issue a "clarification" claiming that he was only expressing his
personal views.
Holdren is one of the sharpest minds in the business and would not be
entertaining what is now known as 'Plan B'— engineering the planet to
head off catastrophic warming — unless he was fairly sure Plan A would
fail.

Fiddling with the dimmer switch may prove an almost irresistible
political fix for governments. It gets powerful lobbies off their
backs, gives the green light to burn more coal, avoids the need to
raise petrol taxes, allows unrestrained growth and is no threat to
consumer lifestyles.

In short, compared to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, geoengineering
gets everyone off the hook. No government is yet willing to lend
official support to geoengineering. However, the pressure is building
and the day when the government of a major nation like the United
States, Russia or China publicly backs Plan B cannot be far off. Then
the floodgates will open.
Even now, beneath the radar, Russia has already begun testing. Yuri
Izrael, a Russian scientist who is both a global-warming sceptic and a
senior adviser to Prime Minister Putin, has tested the effects of
aerosol spraying from a helicopter on solar radiation reaching the
ground. He now plans a full-scale trial.

Strangelove and son
Two of the earliest and most aggressive advocates of planetary
engineering were Edward Teller and Lowell Wood. Teller, who died in
2003, was the co-founder and director of the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory near San Francisco, described by US author Jeff
Goodell as having a "near-mythological status as the dark heart of
weapons research". Teller is often described as the "father of the
hydrogen bomb" and was the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove, the
wheelchair-bound mad scientist prone to Nazi salutes in Stanley
Kubrick's 1964 film of that name.
Lowell Wood was recruited by Teller to the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory and became his protégé. For decades Wood was one of the
Pentagon's foremost "weaponeers", leading him to be christened "Dr.
Evil" by critics. He led the group tasked with developing Ronald
Reagan's ill-fated Star Wars missile shield that included plans for an
array of orbiting X-ray lasers powered by nuclear reactors.

Since 1998 Wood and Teller have been promoting aerosol spraying into
the stratosphere as a simple and cheap counter to global warming.
Reflecting the dominant opinion of the 1950s, they believe it is
humankind's duty to exert supremacy over nature. It is perhaps for this
reason that they have long been associated with conservative think
tanks that deny the existence of human-induced global warming. Both men
have been associated with the Hoover Institution, a centre of climate
scepticism partly funded by ExxonMobil, and Wood is listed as an expert
with the George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington think tank that
became one of the main centres of climate denial in the 1990s.

It is strange that geoengineering is being promoted enthusiastically by
a number of right-wing think tanks that are active in climate
denialism. The American Enterprise Institute,
an influential think tank also part-funded by ExxonMobil that offered
US$10,000 to academics for papers debunking the reports of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has launched a high-profile
project to promote geoengineering.

Of course, geoengineering protects their supporters and financiers in
the fossil industries because it can be a substitute for carbon
reductions and justify delay. But a deeper explanation lies in their
beliefs about the relationship of humans to the natural world.

Pursuing abatement is an admission that industrial society has harmed
nature, while engineering the Earth's climate would be confirmation of
our mastery over it — final proof that, whatever minor errors made on
the way, human ingenuity and faith in our own abilities will always
triumph. Geoengineering promises to turn failure into triumph.

Lowell Wood believes that climate engineering is inevitable; it's a
matter of time before the 'political elites' wake up to its cheapness
and effectiveness. In a statement that could serve as Earth's epitaph,
he declared: "We've engineered every other environment we live in—why
not the planet?"

Wood is contemptuous of the ability of world leaders to reduce emissions (which he dubs "the bureaucratic suppression of CO₂")
and of their ability to reach a consensus on trialling geoengineering.
He predicts that necessity will overrun popular resistance to the idea
of fiddling with the atmosphere.

Faced with this resistance, Wood speculates about getting private
funding from a billionaire for an experiment. "As far as I can
determine, there is no law that prohibits doing something like this".
Wood is right: there is no law against a private individual attempting
to take control of the Earth's climate.

Regulating climate regulation
This goes to the heart of the push to develop the tools for climatic
manipulation. The debate over climate engineering is at present confined
largely to a tight-knit group of scientists, some of whom want to keep
the public in the dark and fend off regulation of their activities. In
his book, How To Cool the Planet,
Goodell describes a series of three private dinners in early 2009 that
brought together the main players. Convened by two of the leading
advocates, Ken Caldeira of Stanford University and David Keith of the
University of Calgary, they were "a turning point in the evolution of
geoengineering as a policy tool".
In March this year a private meeting
of leading climate engineers,held in Asilomar, California, aimed to
develop guidelines to govern research and testing. The invitees wanted a
voluntary code of conduct that would forestall regulation by
governments and the international community so that the experts could
work unhindered at their task of understanding how to control of the
Earth's climate system.

David Keith
argues that an international treaty may be unnecessary because the
use of solar radiation management could be regulated by unwritten
"norms". This is despite his acknowledgement that the threat of
unilateral action is very real; any one of a dozen countries could
begin it within a few years. Indeed, one wealthy individual could
transform the atmosphere and, with enough determination, bring on an
ice age.

Perhaps the wealthy individual he has in mind is Bill Gates,
who has covertly been funding geoengineering research for three years
with advice from Keith and Caldeira. They now oversee Gates' research
fund, which has spent some $4.5 million to date, including funding the
three private dinners. Keith will not reveal what the money is being
spent on, downplaying it as "a little private funding agency". Right—the
world's richest man has a little private funding agency devoted to
researching ways to manipulate the Earth's climate system. Conspiracy
theory anyone?

Gates is also an investor in a firm named Intellectual Ventures that is promoting a scheme called "StratoShield",
which would pump sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere through a
30-kilometre hose held aloft by V-shaped blimps. Intellectual Ventures
is run by Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer at
Microsoft, and includes Lowell Wood among its associates.

Gates is not the only billionaire lone ranger who wants to save the
planet. Richard Branson has set up his own "war room" to do battle with
global warming. The battalions he wants to mobilise on "the path to
victory" are successful entrepreneurs—like himself—and their weapons
are "market driven solutions to climate change", including
geoengineering.

The Carbon War Room — where
inspirational quotes from Branson are mixed in with those of other
titans like Churchill, Roosevelt and Einstein — represents the type of
rich man's folly common amongst modern entrepreneurs with a Messiah
complex.

The War Room site promotes a paper co-authored by Lee Lane of the
American Enterprise Institute and published by the centre run by
"skeptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg. It argues that the benefits
of geoengineering vastly outweigh the costs and shows how to set an
optimal temperature for the Earth for the next two hundred years.

The authors worry that ethical objections from environmental advocacy
groups may block the deployment of solar radiation management, before
noting with relief, "in reality, important economies remain largely
beyond the influence of environmental advocacy groups." They expect
deployment of solar radiation management will be led by nations with
weak environmental lobbies—which of course means dictatorships.

Blue-sky dreaming
More vivid sunsets like the one Edvard Munch saw in 1883 would be one
of the consequences of using sulphate aerosols to engineer the climate;
but a more disturbing effect of enhanced dimming would be the
permanent whitening of day-time skies. A washed-out sky would become
the norm.

If the nations of the world resort to climate engineering, and in doing
so relieve pressure to cut carbon emissions, then the concentration of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would continued to rise and so would
the latent warming that would need suppressing. It would then become
impossible to call a halt to sulphur injections into the stratosphere,
even for a year or two, without an immediate jump in temperature.

It's estimated that, if whoever controls the scheme decided to stop,
the back-up of greenhouse gases could see warming rebound at a rate
10-20 times faster than in the recent past, a phenomenon referred to,
apparently without irony, as the "termination problem".

Once we start manipulating the atmosphere we could be trapped, forever
dependent on a program of sulphur injections into the stratosphere. In
that case, human beings would never see a blue sky again.

Source:-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/13/geoengineering-coalition-world-climate?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487