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The Discovery of Global Warming                      February 2018

Climate Modification Schemes





See also
Models (GCMs)





=>Public opinion













=>Simple models





<=>Simple models


<=Public opinion






<=Public opinion


Meanwhile the U.S. government had secretly been spending many millions of dollars on a grand experiment in actual climatological warfare. The Department of Defense directed extensive cloud-seeding over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, hoping to increase rainfall and bog down the North Vietnamese Army's supply line in mud. Hints about the program were leaked in 1971, but the public did not learn the full extent of the effort until 1974, two years after it wound down in failure. Many people were dismayed when they learned of the experiment. There followed a series of resolutions, in bodies from the U.S. Senate to the General Assembly of the United Nations, outlawing climatological warfare. The movement culminated in a 1976 international convention that foreswore hostile use of "environmental modification techniques."(11)



=>Public opinion


Already back in 1965, a Presidential advisory panel had suggested that if greenhouse effect warming by carbon dioxide gas ever became a problem, the government might take countervailing steps. The panel did not consider curbing the use of fossil fuels. They had in mind what later came to be called "geoengineering" schemes — spreading something across the ocean waters to reflect more sunlight, perhaps, or sowing particles high in the atmosphere to encourage the formation of reflective clouds. Some back-of-the-envelope arithmetic suggested such steps were feasible, and indeed could cost less than many government programs.(13) In 1974, Budyko calculated that if global warming ever became a serious threat, we could counter it with just a few airplane flights a day in the stratosphere, burning sulfur to make aerosols that would reflect sunlight away.




<=Climate cycles

<=Public opinion






=>Public opinion


<=Models (GCMs)







=>Models (GCMs)

As environmental concerns grew more widespread and sophisticated, experts and the public alike demanded a cautious approach to any intervention. A 1977 Academy report looked at a variety of grand schemes we might use to reduce global warming, should it ever become dangerous—for example, massive planting of forests to soak up carbon dioxide gas from the atmosphere. The experts could not muster much optimism for any of these schemes. The panel thought that a turn to renewable energy resources seemed a more practical solution.(16)  










As the world began to visibly suffer from global warming, scientists revisited the issue. In 2004 a group gathered at a symposium in Cambridge, England to review the possibilities for climate "Macro-Engineering". Wider attention converged on the issue in 2006 after Paul Crutzen, widely respected for his Nobel Prize-winning work on ozone, sent the leading journal Climatic Change an article that called for more research on climate engineering. "Given the grossly disappointing international political response" to calls to restrict greenhouse emissions, Crutzen argued that such research should no longer be "tabooed." His submission roused passionate opposition from some senior colleagues, who insisted it would be irresponsible to publish the article. Eventually they accepted a compromise that gave them space for counter-arguments.  
Suppose the climate turned so bad that some nation insisted on launching a geoengineering project? Crutzen and his supporters argued that it would be best to have research on hand in advance to point out the true possibilities and pitfalls. Another respected senior climate scientist followed up with calculations reaffirming that it was economically feasible to spread sulfate particles in the stratosphere to hold back warming. Yet Crutzen himself admitted there was a risk that hopes for a cheap technical fix would be used "to justify inadequate climate policies." (22*)  
Over the next few years the hope that geoengineering would solve the problem of global warming was indeed taken up by people who opposed government regulation of greenhouse gases. The debate grew intense.(23) Two companies were founded that proposed to fertilize the oceans and get paid for offsetting carbon emissions elsewhere. Sea trials failed to prove that the results would be beneficial, and legal battles erupted, exposing the lack of any framework of international law to deal with such initiatives. Not only a single nation, but even a private group, could engage in climate engineering. In 2008 an international agreement declared a moratorium on large-scale ocean fertilization experiments, but pressure for studies of every option persisted.  
Ocean fertilization was only one approach to what was coming to be called "Carbon capture and storage (CCS)." Capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) as it was emitted from power plants was probably feasible at a cost of perhaps a fifth of the plant's energy production. The gas could be stored underground or deep in the oceans, although it would be hard to guarantee it would stay there. CCS could only affect a fraction of CO2 emissions and did not touch the other greenhouse gases.  
It was also technically possible to extract CO2 from the atmosphere itself by combining it with calcium or through some other chemical process, or to sequester it biologically through management of forests, agricultural soils, and the like. Indeed the commitment that nations made in the 2015 Paris Agreement to keep global temperature rise below 2°C could not be met without such "negative emissions." That would mean constructing industrial and agricultural systems on the scale of, say, the entire global coal industry, at vast expense and using technologies not yet developed. Only the most sanguine imagined that would actually happen. Research was pursued in hopes of a miraculous breakthrough, but the obviously most efficient option would be simply to produce less emissions in the first place.




Any climate engineering effort was bound to produce winners and losers, as in the old fights over rainmakers "stealing" precipitation from folks downwind. Preliminary computer studies suggested, for example, that spreading sulfates in the atmosphere might shut down the Asian monsoon. Would India and China stand idly by while droughts starved their populations? Still more worrisome were calculations showing that once a sulfates program began it would have to continue for centuries, regardless of economic disruption or wars. For if the program paused, global temperatures would snap to a higher level with catastrophic speed. As one team explained, "Coming generations would have to live with the danger of this 'Sword of Damocles' scenario, the abruptness of which has no precedent in the geologic history of climate." Most ominous of all was the likelihood that there would be consequences nobody had even guessed at. Many of the scientists who advocated research on climate engineering did so in the belief that the results would serve mainly to persuade people it was too risky to attempt, except as a last-ditch attempt in the midst of global cataclysm. It would be far safer and easier to negotiate restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.(24)  
The problem was not only means, but ends: whose goals would climate engineering serve? Even the nightmare of climatological warfare could stalk back into history, strengthened by scientific advances. As a historian remarked, "Who would have the wisdom to dispense drought, severe winters, or the effects of storms... If, as history shows, fantasies of weather and climate control have chiefly served commercial and military interests, why should we expect the future to be different?"(25) The technical, political and ethical problems raised by deliberately influencing the global climate remained at least as great as the problems raised by our ongoing unintended influence.



Government: The View from Washington


1. von Neumann (1955), p. 41 of reprint. BACK

2. For this and all the following see Fleming (2006); Fleming (2010); Hamblin (2013). Kwa (2001); Kwa (1994); Keith (2000), p. 252; Fleming (2007a), pp. 54-57; A. Spilhaus, interview by R. Doel, Nov. 1989, AIP. BACK


4. von Neumann (1955), pp. 108, 151. BACK





9. Lamb (1971), quote p. 95. BACK

10. Ponte (1976), pp. 156-58; Kwa (2001); on all the foregoing, Fleming (2006). BACK

11. For the public acknowledgment, see New York Times, May 19, 1974, p. 1, also Shapley (1974). Indications were already published in 1971 in a Jack Anderson column in the Washington Post, 18 March 1971, and in the "Pentagon Papers," see Seymour Hersh, "Weather as a weapon of war," New York Times, July 9, 1972, p. IV:3; for background and response, see Ponte (1976), ch. 11; Fleming (2006), pp. 13-14. Convention on the Prohibition of Military or any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, UN Treaty Ser. 1108:151.See Harper (2017) for the US government and weather control 1950-1980 in general. BACK

12. Lamb (1971). BACK

13. President's Science Advisory Committee (1965), estimated cost $500 million per year, p. 127; see National Academy of Sciences (1966), vol. 2, pp. 60-62. The term "geoengineering" may have first appeared in Marchetti (1977) but only became common in the 1990s. BACK

14. Budyko (1977), p. 240; Budyko and Korol (1975), p. 469; see Fleming (2010), pp. 241ff.; Landsberg (1970), p. 1268. He cites 1968-69 RAND Corp. reports by J.O. Fletcher; for spreading smog from supersonic transports, see Wilson and Matthews (1971), p. 9; a summary with warnings is Kellogg and Schneider (1974), pp. 169-70. BACK



17. Notably Marchetti (1977). BACK

18. Coate et al. (1996); Chisholm (2000). BACK

19. Schneider (2001), p. 418; National Academy of Sciences (1992). BACK

20. Byers (1974), p. 3. BACK

21. Teller, “The Planet Needs a Sunscreen,” Oct. 17, 1997. Teller’s 2002 technical paper on the subject is here. BACK

22. Crutzen (2006); see the entire Climatic Change special issue on geoengineering, with commentaries by Cicerone, M.G. Lawrence and others (vol. 77 nos. 3-4, Aug. 2006). On Crutzen see the essay on other greenhouse gases. Sulfate calculations: Wigley (2006). Press reports include Kerr (2006) and William J. Broad, New York Times, June 27, 2006. For the history see also Morton (2007). BACK

23. For example the best-selling Levitt and Dubner (2009) and a report issued by Lomborg's center, Bickel and Lane (2009). Good discussions include Inman (2010), Blackstock and Long (2010), Keith et al. (2010), all three published in the same month. BACK

24. A good summary: Strong (2009). One computer model: Jones et al. (2010). Damocles: Brovkin et al. (2009), p. 255. For post-1965 history in general see Caldeira and Bala (2017). One broad overview of contemporary ideas on geoengineering is Boettcher and Schäfer (2017). BACK

25. Fleming (2007), p. 60. BACK

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