For all the fears and controversy about a warming planet, scientists have settled on one simple fact: It would be pretty cheap and easy to cool it back down again.
The potential side effects, however, are serious. Various tactics for blocking the sun could dry out equatorial regions, accelerate sea-level rise, trigger wars, and sidestep the need to confront problems of fossil fuels beyond the simple issue of the earth’s average temperature.
But now, after another year of record temperatures and stalemated climate politics, a more serious look at the science of quick-fix global temperature solutions may be coming. Both the Obama administration and the United Nations-led climate research body, now writing its first full-scale assessment report since 2007, are giving earnest attention to geoengineering.
“The hundred-year floods are now the five-year floods,” Thomas R. Armstrong, the Obama administration’s top adviser on climate change, said as Congress debated a bill last month to pay more than $50-billion in damages from Hurricane Sandy, the latest supersize storm to wallop the country.
Policy makers need to know more about their options, said Mr. Armstrong, executive director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the coordinating body for federal spending on climate research. “There has not been enough open public discussion about the pros and cons of geoengineering,” he said.
Even some of the small handful of American university researchers pursuing geoengineering have qualms about it. “Personally, I think it’s insane to try to do this,” said David S. Battisti, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. “I’m doing work on this,” he said, “but I hope that whatever I do, it never inspires anyone to actually use this technology.”
One sign of the political and scientific paralysis is the growth on university campuses of diplomatic and ethical studies of geoengineering. In the past few years, geoengineering appears to have been the subject of more publications in the humanities than in the hard sciences, said Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science and professor of environmental earth-system sciences at Stanford University.
A common conclusion is that the world needs more structural and legal guidelines to shape geoengineering research.
Plankton Evangelist
One episode that’s drawn widespread scorn concerns an American entrepreneur and activist, D. Russell (Russ) George, who has been dumping iron-sulfate particles into the Pacific Ocean. Such particles feed phytoplankton—tiny sea plants at the bottom of the ocean’s food chain—and Mr. George is among those who believe that increasing their growth might fight global warming. That’s because the phytoplankton eventually die and sink to the bottom of the ocean, thereby burying the carbon they absorbed while growing.
Many scientists consider such actions irresponsible, and believe that Mr. George is conducting a unilateral geoengineering project without studying overall effects on ocean ecology.
“There is little evidence that it would work well,” said Robert B. Jackson, a biology professor at Duke University.
Benjamin S. Kravitz, a former climate researcher at Stanford University now working for the U.S. Energy Department, said that the amount of iron seeding necessary to make a meaningful dent in the world’s carbon-dioxide problem would most likely exhaust all of the nutrients in the upper ocean, with dire ecological effects.
Mr. Kravitz, a postdoctoral research associate in the Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, called Mr. George’s effort both “irresponsible behavior” and a violation of international treaties.
But Edward A. Parson, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, said the problem is that there’s nothing in international or federal law that explicitly forbids what Mr. George did.
There have been some voluntary efforts to curb such approaches, including the Oxford Principles of geoengineering research, drafted at the University of Oxford, which set out general guidelines, Mr. Parson said. And the United Nations is considering an update to its “London Convention” of 1972, prohibiting ocean dumping for the purposes of waste disposal, that would cover ocean-fertilization experiments, he said. But so far there’s nothing specific or operational, and no enforcement systems.
There have also been individual attempts to self-police. Alan Robock, a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers University, has been among the most outspoken critics, writing in a September commentary in the journal Peace and Security that any outdoor geoengineering research might be unethical.
His analysis found fault with a series of strategies for reflecting sunlight back to space. One, developed by Russell Seitz during a recently completed physics fellowship at Harvard University, would equip ships traveling the ocean with spray devices that inject seawater with tiny bubbles of air, brightening the water and making it more reflective.
Mr. Robock uses a slippery-slope argument to oppose such measures, saying that even small-scale studies, clearly posing no widespread environmental threats, can and will eventually grow. “Up to what temporal and spatial scales, and what amount of emissions or disturbance should be allowed? And how will this decision be made?” he wrote.
Mr. Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution for Science, is among many who have been trying to walk on both sides, financing some geoengineering work while setting limits on how far he’ll go. In 2006 he and David W. Keith, now a professor of applied physics and of public policy at Harvard University, got a call from Jabe Blumenthal, a former Microsoft executive. Mr. Blumenthal said the company’s founder, Bill Gates, wanted to learn more about climate change and wondered if Mr. Caldeira and Mr. Keith might be willing to give the billionaire philanthropist a personal tutorial.
The professors were warned by organizers of the meeting not to ask for money, and they did not. But after a year of giving Mr. Gates private seminars on climate change, Mr. Gates began giving the two men $1.5-million a year—one-third to each for his own work, and the remaining third for them to distribute to others, all in the pursuit of technologies to deal with climate change.
Other private financers supporting geoengineering work include Sir Richard C.N. Branson, founder of Virgin Group; N. Murray Edwards, a Canadian oil developer; Niklas Zennström, one of the founders of Skype; and the Seattle-based Tamaki Foundation, which finances various educational activities.
Mr. Caldeira has been generally willing to let scientists pursue the projects they consider most worthwhile. But he has grown more cautious, especially after he and Mr. Keith brought Mr. Gates some criticism from environmentalists for a job involving Armand P. Neukermans, a former Hewlett-Packard scientist. That project was aimed at testing the idea that clouds could be made whiter and more reflective by spraying them with a mist of seawater. It wasn’t clear to scientists that they could make sufficiently tiny droplets, and Mr. Neukermans, who led the development of ink-jet printer technology, used his Gates money to show how to make a spray nozzle that could do the job.
“Once they showed it was feasible to my satisfaction,” Mr. Caldeira said, “we cut them off, because I didn’t want to be in the business of funding deployment hardware.”
Stung by the controversy, given their own qualms about geoengineering, and more eager to do their own work than distribute money to others, Mr. Caldeira and Mr. Keith asked Mr. Gates to reduce the annual amount. Even then, Mr. Caldeira acknowledged, the money to be distributed to others is slowly piling up.
Sucking Up Carbon
For many, carbon reduction is the only real answer. Peter M. Eisenberger, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University, is running a start-up called Global Thermostat that has built a demonstration plant in California for sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and using it to produce energy.
The process relies on the fact that nitrogen-containing organic compounds known as amines bind chemically with the carbon dioxide. His company is now working on a larger commercial version of the facility, in Alabama.
Even if fossil-fuel plants are forced or encouraged to adopt practices that reduce carbon emissions—a major focus of federal climate research dollars—technologies like the Global Thermostat plant are still going to be needed to remove all the extra carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere, Mr. Eisenberger said. But, he said, “We need more time and money to complete this.”
The Obama administration is not sure it should divert any of its scarce climate-research allocations from carbon capture to emergency cooling strategies, though Mr. Armstrong said it is listening. Altogether, the federal government spends $2.6-billion a year on climate science, distributed through 13 different agencies, mostly aimed at cutting carbon emissions. Although it’s a fraction of the amount spent repairing the damage from Hurricane Sandy, the amount is still more than that spent by any other government in the world.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office tried in 2010 to tally up all federal geoengineering expenditures. It identified 52 research activities, totaling about $100-million, relevant to geoengineering in the fiscal years 2009 and 2010. Most involved reducing carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Only nine projects, worth about $1.9-million, directly investigated alternatives like reflecting sunlight back into space, the GAO said.
Those numbers probably haven’t changed significantly since then, Mr. Armstrong said.
A push for more studies of geoengineering is coming on both the national and international levels. Scientists drafting the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a process established at the United Nations, have already been evaluating calls for more attention to geoengineering. And a just-completed draft of a federal assessment of climate strategy, expected to be completed next year, makes a similar suggestion.
The draft, from the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee, said the risks associated with purposely altering the earth’s climate are “poorly understood, suggesting the need for caution and comprehensive research, including consideration of the implicit moral hazards.”
Researchers will most likely conclude that, given the dangers of a hotter earth, some limited amount of geoengineering is unavoidable. “To all the people who would say we don’t know what the consequences are of doing geoengineering,” said Douglas G. MacMartin, a senior research associate in computing and mathematical sciences at the California Institute of Technology, “I would say we don’t know what the consequences are of not doing geoengineering.”
