Forget emissions, just cool the planet.
Can We 'Cool The Planet' Through Geoengineering?
For years, environmental and energy researchers have been working on solutions to stop or slow down the effects of global warming. One approach that has recently gained popularity is what scientists call geoengineering -- the idea that Earth can essentially be retrofitted with technology to reduce global warming. The field includes proposals to cool the Earth by capturing carbon dioxide emissions, changing the reflectivity of the sun or even redirecting sunlight away from the Earth.
The idea that geoengineering can combat global warming is a controversial one, fraught with scientific uncertainties and ethical issues. In his new book, How to Cool the Planet, Jeff Goodell explains that there are certainly some good reasons to be reluctant to tinker with the Earth's climate -- but there are also some very good reasons to take the idea seriously. "So far, we've shown absolutely no political will to actually cut carbon dioxide emissions," Goodell says. "You know, we've been talking about global warming in a serious way for some 30 years, and by the only measure that matters -- which is the amount of carbon dioxide that's going into the atmosphere -- we're not doing anything. We have a lot of talk about clean energy, about green energy, people trying to do their part and change their lives in small ways, but in fact, we're really not doing anything."
Because of increasing evidence of planetary warming, scientists who previously thought the field was full of what Goodell calls "crackpot ideas" are exploring geoengineering as a serious endeavor. One idea that is being explored by engineers is whether it would be feasible to launch sulfur particles high into the stratosphere in order to lower the Earth's temperature and control the polar melting in the Arctic.
"The impacts of this [on both the atmosphere and the Arctic] are being explored by a number of climate modelers," Goodell says. "One of the concerns right now is that we know that the warming on the planet is happening most quickly in the Arctic and at the poles, so there's a question of, well, if we saw that the Arctic was starting to melt even more quickly than it was now, what could we do to stop it? Is there a way that we could stop the melt of the Arctic?"
Goodell's most recent book, Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future, considers the perils of coal dependency in America. Goodell says that researching his book taught him that the world was not going to be cutting carbon emissions any time soon.
Though a high-altitude, sulfur-spraying hose anchored in the stratosphere to a high-altitude balloon sounds implausible, it's doable from a physics perspective, Goodell says.
"The amount of particles you'd have to put up into the stratosphere is quite small," he explains. "But there are, of course, many issues about holding this thing aloft and actually working out the technical bits of it. There are even people at the National Academy of Sciences [who], when they looked into this, even talked about put[ting] this stuff up with artillery. Using artillery shells to shoot this stuff into the stratosphere -- that's sort of a low-tech way of doing it, but it is possible."
Goodell notes that geoengineering raises all sorts of geopolitical questions: Who controls the Earth's thermostat? Would countries act unilaterally or collectively? And what kind of climate do we actually want to live in?
"It's often compared with nuclear arms: One nation could undertake this, one billionaire could fund this and do this, and so how do you restrain that person?," he says. "If India or China or the United States decides that it's in their political interest to try to do something like this, how do you restrain them? What does it mean to stop them? Is it seen as an act of aggression? If it starts to shift the rainfall patterns in other parts of the world -- if we put rainfall particles into the stratosphere and it causes a drought in China -- what are the consequences of that?"
Jeff Goodell is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine. He also is the author of Big Coal, a book about the coal industry.
Excerpt: 'How to Cool the Planet'
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125789622
Can We 'Cool The Planet' Through Geoengineering?
For years, environmental and energy researchers have been working on solutions to stop or slow down the effects of global warming. One approach that has recently gained popularity is what scientists call geoengineering -- the idea that Earth can essentially be retrofitted with technology to reduce global warming. The field includes proposals to cool the Earth by capturing carbon dioxide emissions, changing the reflectivity of the sun or even redirecting sunlight away from the Earth.
The idea that geoengineering can combat global warming is a controversial one, fraught with scientific uncertainties and ethical issues. In his new book, How to Cool the Planet, Jeff Goodell explains that there are certainly some good reasons to be reluctant to tinker with the Earth's climate -- but there are also some very good reasons to take the idea seriously. "So far, we've shown absolutely no political will to actually cut carbon dioxide emissions," Goodell says. "You know, we've been talking about global warming in a serious way for some 30 years, and by the only measure that matters -- which is the amount of carbon dioxide that's going into the atmosphere -- we're not doing anything. We have a lot of talk about clean energy, about green energy, people trying to do their part and change their lives in small ways, but in fact, we're really not doing anything."
Because of increasing evidence of planetary warming, scientists who previously thought the field was full of what Goodell calls "crackpot ideas" are exploring geoengineering as a serious endeavor. One idea that is being explored by engineers is whether it would be feasible to launch sulfur particles high into the stratosphere in order to lower the Earth's temperature and control the polar melting in the Arctic.
"The impacts of this [on both the atmosphere and the Arctic] are being explored by a number of climate modelers," Goodell says. "One of the concerns right now is that we know that the warming on the planet is happening most quickly in the Arctic and at the poles, so there's a question of, well, if we saw that the Arctic was starting to melt even more quickly than it was now, what could we do to stop it? Is there a way that we could stop the melt of the Arctic?"
Goodell's most recent book, Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future, considers the perils of coal dependency in America. Goodell says that researching his book taught him that the world was not going to be cutting carbon emissions any time soon.
Though a high-altitude, sulfur-spraying hose anchored in the stratosphere to a high-altitude balloon sounds implausible, it's doable from a physics perspective, Goodell says.
"The amount of particles you'd have to put up into the stratosphere is quite small," he explains. "But there are, of course, many issues about holding this thing aloft and actually working out the technical bits of it. There are even people at the National Academy of Sciences [who], when they looked into this, even talked about put[ting] this stuff up with artillery. Using artillery shells to shoot this stuff into the stratosphere -- that's sort of a low-tech way of doing it, but it is possible."
Goodell notes that geoengineering raises all sorts of geopolitical questions: Who controls the Earth's thermostat? Would countries act unilaterally or collectively? And what kind of climate do we actually want to live in?
"It's often compared with nuclear arms: One nation could undertake this, one billionaire could fund this and do this, and so how do you restrain that person?," he says. "If India or China or the United States decides that it's in their political interest to try to do something like this, how do you restrain them? What does it mean to stop them? Is it seen as an act of aggression? If it starts to shift the rainfall patterns in other parts of the world -- if we put rainfall particles into the stratosphere and it causes a drought in China -- what are the consequences of that?"
Jeff Goodell is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine. He also is the author of Big Coal, a book about the coal industry.
Excerpt: 'How to Cool the Planet'
JEFF GOODELL
HOW TO COOL THE PLANET: GEOENGINEERING AND THE AUDACIOUS QUEST TO FIX EARTH'S CLIMATE
BY JEFF GOODELL
HARDCOVER, 272 PAGES
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
LIST PRICE: $26
Chapter 1
The Prophet
I grew up in California, where human ingenuity is a force of nature. Computers, the Internet, Hollywood, blue jeans, the Beach Boys -- they are all inventions of my home state. The economic and cultural power of these things is obvious. What's less obvious is how they transformed the place that gave birth to them. Until the early 1970s, my hometown of Silicon Valley was mostly orchards and Victorian ranch houses, with rows of cherry and apricot trees that marked the coming of spring with delicate white and pink blossoms. During the PC revolution, I watched those orchards fall to make room for glassy high-tech office buildings. The hillside where I saw the footprint of a mountain lion in the 1970s is now cluttered with houses. Silicon Valley is still a beautiful place, but the blossoms are mostly gone, the sky is hazy, and the beaches are crowded. This is happening everywhere, of course -- it's the story of modern life. And there are many upsides to this transformation, including the fact that the ideas and technologies born in California have been a great boon to humanity. But you have to be pretty obtuse to grow up in a place like Silicon Valley and not be aware that progress sometimes comes at a price.
I left the Valley in my midtwenties and moved to New York City to begin a career as a journalist. My connection to the Valley served me well. I spent the next decade or so writing about the business and culture of my hometown for publications such as Rolling Stone and the New York Times Magazine. But my perspective changed after I became the father of three kids. The future of digital culture was suddenly much less interesting to me than the survival of the human race. I spent a lot of time with climate scientists while I was reporting my previous book, which was about the coal industry. It was a sobering experience. I think of myself as an optimistic person, but the deeper you probe into the climate crisis, the darker the story gets. It's hard not to read it as a parable about the dangers of living in a high-tech society. (No matter how hard they tried, a world of hunter-gatherers could not cook the planet.) And it's harder still not to wonder whether the smartest, most technologically sophisticated creatures that ever existed on earth will figure out a solution for this looming catastrophe. My friends in Silicon Valley are sure we can. They believe we are one big idea -- Thin film solar! Cellulosic ethanol! High-altitude wind power! -- away from solving this crisis. I used to think that, too.
In early 2006, a friend emailed me an essay by Paul Crutzen that was about to be published in an academic journal. Crutzen is a Dutch atmospheric chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering research on the ozone hole in the atmosphere. In his note, my friend -- a successful entrepreneur in the solar power industry -- wrote: "Read this. We are in deep trouble. We're going to geoengineer the damn planet now!"
I may have heard the word "geoengineer" once or twice before, but I knew next to nothing about it, other than the fact that it generally referred to people with outlandish ideas about how to counteract global warming. I had a vague memory of reading an article about a handful of scientists -- I imagined them toiling in a lab buried deep in a mountain somewhere in New Mexico -- who wanted to launch mirrors into space or dump iron into the ocean in a desperate attempt to cool the earth. The title of Crutzen's essay certainly amused me: "Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?" The phrase "albedo enhancement" sounded like a procedure a surgeon might perform on a lonely middle-aged man.
When I started to read, however, I was captivated. The basic facts were familiar: carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the earth's atmosphere are rising to concentrations not seen in twenty million years, with no end in sight. Meanwhile, the earth's climate is warming even faster than scientists had predicted just a few years ago. What was new in Crutzen's paper -- new to me, anyway -- was the view that some of this accelerated warming was driven not only by high levels of CO2 but also by the progress we have made in the fight against smog and other traditional pollutants. The tiny particles that cause some kinds of air pollution act like mirrors in the sky, reflecting sunlight away from the earth, which cools the planet.
As we eliminate pollution, the particles vanish, letting us all breathe easier -- but also letting more sunlight in, which heats up the earth ever faster. As Crutzen pointed out, by trying to save kids from asthma, we were inadvertently making the climate crisis worse.
What to do? Clean air is obviously a good thing: air pollution kills people. The simplest solution would be to cut greenhouse gas emissions. If anyone should have been confident that we could take bold action to address this problem, it should have been Crutzen.
After all, he was in part responsible for the fact that the leading nations of the world had come together in the late 1980s to confront another global threat, the ozone hole. In that case, once the risk of ozone damage was clear, action was swift: an international treaty, the Montreal Protocol, was negotiated and signed in 1987, banning ozone-depleting substances. It was an inspiring example of political leaders from around the world coming together to confront a grave threat in a rational and decisive way. But when it came to dealing with greenhouse gases, Crutzen was not so sanguine that a political solution could be found. He understood that the problem of reducing greenhouse gases is far deeper and more complex than eliminating chlorofluorocarbons from refrigerators and air conditioners, in part because greenhouse gas emissions are, in some ways, a proxy for economic health and prosperity. In fact, Crutzen called the notion that industrialized nations would join together and significantly reduce emissions "a pious wish."
Instead, Crutzen offered a radical proposal: rather than focusing entirely on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, maybe it was time to think about addressing the potentially catastrophic consequences of global warming in a different way. If the problem is too much heat, an obvious solution would be to find a way to reduce that heat. One method to do that would be to increase the earth's reflectivity in ways that would not cause asthma attacks and kill people. As Crutzen knew as well as anyone, about 30 percent of the energy from sunlight that hits the earth is immediately reflected back into space, while the other 70 percent is trapped here by CO2 and other greenhouse gases, warming the planet. If we could reflect just 1 or 2 percent more sunlight away from the earth's surface, it would be like popping up an umbrella on the beach on a hot summer day. Crutzen called it albedo enhancement ("albedo" is just another word for reflectivity). There are lots of ideas about how one might deflect sunlight away from the planet, from launching mirrors into space to painting roofs white. But as Crutzen pointed out in his paper, the simplest way to do it might be to add a relatively small number of sulfate particles -- you can think of them as dust -- to the upper atmosphere. The dust would remain in the stratosphere for only a year or so before raining out -- so any serious geoengineering scheme would require continuous injection. But unlike pollution in the lower atmosphere, which is where the nasty stuff we breathe resides, pumping a modest amount of particles into the upper atmosphere would pose little danger to human health. The effect they might have on the chemistry of the stratosphere, especially the ozone layer that protects the earth from the sun's ultraviolet light, was, Crutzen admitted, unclear. However, his preliminary calculations suggested that the risks were low.
Would it work? On a scientific level, there is nothing complicated about it. Light colors reflect sunlight; dark colors absorb it. That's why asphalt is hot on your bare feet and white clothes are popular in the summer. The same basic idea holds true for the planet.
Anything that reflects sunlight (ice, white roofs, certain kinds of clouds and air pollution) contributes to cooling; anything that absorbs sunlight (open water, evergreen forests in northern latitudes, asphalt parking lots) contributes to heating. In his paper, Crutzen talked specifically about the cooling effect of volcanoes. For years, scientists have known that the sulfate particles that volcanoes spew into the air are remarkably effective at scattering sunlight. If the eruption is large enough, they can have a global impact on temperatures. One of the most recent examples is Mount Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines that erupted in 1991, lowering the earth's temperature by a degree or so for several years. A more extreme example of the phenomenon is the so-called nuclear winter — a theory that was much debated in the 1980s, suggesting that a nuclear war could inject enough soot and particles into the atmosphere to block out the sun and send temperatures plummeting.
Crutzen didn't say how we might go about mimicking volcanoes to offset global warming, except to suggest that there are lots of ways to inject particles into the stratosphere, including spraying them out of high-altitude aircraft, pushing them up a long hose tethered to a stratospheric balloon, or even shooting them up into the sky with artillery. As far as engineering challenges go, it wouldn't be too difficult. And even more important, it would be cheap. In Crutzen's estimation, we could engineer the earth's climate for less than 1 percent of the annual global military budget. This all sounded interesting and provocative. It took me a while, however, to grasp just how mind-bending Crutzen's proposal really was. Here was one of the world's top atmospheric scientists suggesting that the climate crisis was so urgent and potentially catastrophic that the only way to save ourselves might be by filling the stratosphere with man-made pollution from artificial volcanoes. Had it really come to this?
In the media world -- at least the part of the media world that takes science seriously — Crutzen's essay raised a ruckus. For one thing, the whole idea of changing the reflectivity of the planet as a way to offset global warming sounded downright wacky, even coming from a serious guy like Crutzen. As for injecting particles into the stratosphere -- wasn't the goal to clear the air, not further pollute it? Geoengineering seemed like an idea ripped out of the pages of a sci-fi novel, conjuring up associations with Dr. Evil and crazy Cold War physicists and the hubris of the techno-elite. Perhaps worst of all, Crutzen's argument implied that the whole strategy of relying on an international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions was misguided -- or at least grossly insufficient.
This was not a message the world was ready to hear. An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's documentary about global warming, had been released the same summer, waking millions of people up to the compelling scientific evidence behind the climate crisis. Progressive politicians around the world were beginning a major push to reduce emissions, trying, at least in public, to give the appearance that they were eager to fulfill their commitment to the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions signed in 1997. In Europe, the first market for greenhouse gas emissions trading was just taking off. Financial analysts predicted that the market would someday become the largest in the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of emissions credits being swapped every year, creating a powerful incentive for power companies to cut pollution and reap the rewards. In this context, Crutzen was a turncoat, a man who dared to betray the growing movement to fight global warming just at the moment when it was gaining momentum. "This sounds to me like a miracle fix cooked up by Big Oil to keep the masses fat, dumb and happy," one blogger commented. "You keep driving and we'll get some smart scientists to air-condition the planet!"
But Crutzen's logic was not easy to dismiss. If there was one thing I had learned from the four years I'd spent researching and writing about coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, it was that the world was not going to stop burning black rocks anytime soon. Coal-fired power plants generate half the electricity in America. In the developing world, the percentage is even higher -- India and China both get about 70 percent of their electricity from coal. The Chinese consume almost three times as much coal as we do in the United States -- nearly three billion tons a year (although per capita, they consume far less).
Coal is the engine that is lifting people in the developing world out of poverty, not only giving them the power to light their homes and cook their food but also transforming them, for better or worse, into Western-style consumers. Unfortunately, coal is also the most carbon-intensive of fossil fuels, generating more than a third of the world's CO2 pollution. Everyone wants to be hopeful about the possibilities of the renewable energy revolution, but the truth is, getting off coal in the near future -- or, equally unlikely, figuring out a cheap and efficient way to burn coal without releasing CO2 into the atmosphere -- is a monumentally difficult challenge. And if we can't get off coal, it doesn't matter if every SUV driver rides a skateboard to work and Al Gore takes over as chairman of ExxonMobil -- we won't have a hope in hell of staving off dangerous climate change.
From How to Cool the Planet by Jeff Goodell. Copyright 2010 by Jeff Goodell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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