Virtudes Prusianas

VIRTUDES PRUSIANAS (Brandenburgo-Prusia, Alemania):

domingo, 19 de septiembre de 2010

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

The Guardian

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




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.



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.


Moral hazards

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.



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.




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.




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


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




Via -- -->
Miguel Valencia


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