Messing with Mother Nature
I’ve always been impressed with real-time monitoring and control technologies and their ability to improve conditions on the earth. But I had never fully thought through where these technologies might be headed long-term. One possibility is: they are paving the way for sophistricated forms of geoengineering. The whole idea of geoengineering is starting to get buzz in the popular press.
Geoengineering, the application of technology to influence the conditions on a planet and previously thought to be a fringe discipline, has been rescued from kookdom by Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen who suggested releasing vast amounts of sulfurous debris into the atmosphere to create a haze that could cool the planet (an artifical volcano), thereby helping to alleviate the problems associated with global warming.
This concept is not that different from cloudseeding which is currently being used to increase snowpack and mitigate thunderstorms. For example, in the higher mountains of Utah, liquid propane gas is automatically released into the atmosphere when winter conditions are cloudy. This procedure is used to enhance snowpack during dry years.
Also to cool the earth, Roger Angel, an eminent astronomer and telescope designer at the University of Arizona, has proposed launching trillions of two-foot-wide, thinner-than-Kleenix disks of silicon nitride into space where they could deflect sunlight. This effort would take decades and cost trillions of dollars. The two sunshade proposals are not intended as permanent fixes, but as stop-gap measures to be used until we solve our CO2 issues.
Bill Gates even has a geoengineering proposal. He, climate scientist Ken Caldeira, and others recently applied for five patents related to slowing hurricanes. The patents describe methods not limited to “atmospheric management, weather management, hurricane suppression, hurricane prevention, hurricane intensity modulation, (and) hurricane deflection.” The proposal involves pumping cold, deep-ocean water from barges.
” . . . if enough pumps are deployed, it is reasonable to expect some diminution of hurricane power,” says hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel of MIT. He is not part of the Gate’s team. Cutting sea surface temperature by 4.5 degrees under the eye of a hurricane could actually kill a storm.
Who said you can’t do anything about the weather? We can raise (global warming) or potentially reduce (sunshading) the earth’s temperature, increase snowpack (cloudseeding), reduce the intensity of thunderstorms (cloudseeding), and maybe even prevent or mitigate hurricanes (ocean pumping).
But, of course, anytime you mess with Mother Nature, there may be unintended consequences.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:24 am
The following letter appeared in NG (Dec. 2009):
As a dermatologist, I’m all for sunscreens. But launching trillions of sun-deflecting disks into space to combat global warming? I think most folks would call this unconscionable cosmic litter, the scope of which is simply beyond sanity. Changing human behavior means preaching less personal, institutional, and political greed. A competitive society equates success with acquisition and growth. Living within means, with an eye toward simple sustainability and with respect for the Earth? We need to go there: as families, as a country, and as a global community.
Lisa A Pawelski
Pittsburg, Pennsylvania
November 19th, 2009 at 10:28 am
The following letter appeared in NG (Dec. 2009):
This may sound like a good idea, but what are we going to do when we need to get rid of the reflectors because of an impending ice age?
Bill Moulton
Port St. Lucie, Florida
November 19th, 2009 at 11:13 am
The following letter appeared in NG (Dec. 2009):
Bad Idea. We can’s even begin to clean up the space junk already around the Earth. Of course, parking billions of reflectors somewhere like in Lagrangian point may sound slyly techy, but it could also interfere with the way we measure and learn about solar emissions, particularly storms that could kill our astronauts, damage our communications satellites and GPS, and fry our electrical grid. Intelligent use of what we already have on Earth is the wise way forward.
A. Cannara
Menlo Park, California
November 19th, 2009 at 11:17 am
The following letter appeared in NG (Dec. 2009):
It a cloud of reflectors is implemented to reduce the use of fossil fuels, what will we use to heat our homes on this cooler Earth? The cloud will reduce the effectiveness of solar energy, making it even more expensive. Cooler temperatures and less light will also reduce vegetation, reducing the biomass available for biofuels, not to mention food for the world’s population. What’s the big idea.
Tim and Judy Nelson
Jamestown, Tennessee
November 19th, 2009 at 11:32 am
The following letter appeared in NG (Dec. 2009):
I was surprised that your article did not even mention ocean acidification, the evil twin of climate change. While it is true that there may be schemes to temporarily mask increasing temperatures, they will do nothing to combat the problem of increasingly acidic oceans. About a third of our carbon dioxide emissions is absorbed by the oceans, making them more acidic. As ocean acidity increases, many species are threatened, expecially those that build shells and skeletons out of calcium carbonate, such as corals, oysters, and mollusks. In fact, some scientists predict that coral reeefs could be extinct by the end of the century if we do not reduce our carbon dioxide emissions. So, while geoengineering fixes like the one in your article might seem like an easy solution to this problem, the only true solution is to mitigate our caron dioxide emissions.
Ellycia Harrould-Kolieb
Washington, DC
Note that all the above letters are negative toward the “sun-deflecting disk” proposal.
July 20th, 2010 at 11:45 am
The following appeared in NG (Aug 2010):
Trees take CO2 out of the atmosphere. “Physicist Klaus Lackner thinks he has a better idea (than covering the Earth with trees): Suck CO2 out of the air with “artificial trees” that operate a thousand times faster than real ones.
They don’t exist yet, and when they do, they probably won’t look like trees. But in Lackner’s lab at Columbia University he and colleague Allen Wright are experimenting with bits of whitish-beige plastic that you might call artificial leaves. The plastic is a resin of th kind used to pull calcium out of water in a water softener. When Lackner and Wright impregnate that resin with sodium carbonate, it pulls carbon dioxide out of the air. The extra carbon converts the sodium carbonate to bicarbonate, or baking soda.”