Alexis Madrigal Wired Magazine 23 Mar 10;
While humans have unintentionally been altering Earth’s climate for centuries, some scientists have begun to study how to intentionally hack the globe to cool the overheated planet.
Eli Kintisch’s new book, Hack the Planet provides a thorough and nuanced portrait of the development of geoengineering. Through long acquaintance with the field’s biggest names, Kintisch, a staff writer for Science, paints a deep sociological portrait of a radical new scientific discipline bursting messily into the world.
He reminds us that even though the techniques may be wild and global, many of the people dreaming them up are regular scientists trying to deal rationally with a carbon problem that they don’t see society solving. Faced with a warming world, they are torn between watching nature die or trying to surgically kill it themselves.
Wired.com: What are some of the basic geoengineering options being discussed?
Eli Kintisch: The main geoengineering techniques fall into two basic categories: One, the ways to block sunlight at different points in the atmosphere and earth system to lower the temperature rapidly in that way, and the other is enhancing the planet’s ability to take up carbon dioxide through a variety of techniques. So, sun-blocking and carbon-sucking are the two main ways.
With sun-blocking, what you are essentially doing is brightening the planet, increasing the earth’s albedo. That can change the amount of total radiation that the planet experiences. Scientists have proposed ways of intercepting solar radiation at every single point from the surface of the earth by whitening roofs or brightening the ocean’s surface itself with tiny bubbles, to brightening low-lying and high clouds, to one of the most radical and discussed geoengineering techniques: adding particles called aerosols to the stratosphere. That technique has many names, but I like to call it the Pinatubo option, because it was influenced by the rapid cooling that follows volcanic eruptions.
The Pinatubo option involves spraying some kind of particles (usually people talk about sulfur) into the upper atmosphere to form a kind of haze that blocks a small percentage of the sun’s rays before they can enter the lower atmosphere.
The carbon methods involve generally enhancing natural systems to take in more carbon, perhaps genetically modifying plants so they have more carbonaceous cells or growing large blooms of algae in the ocean by using some sort of key nutrient that can catalyze and fertilize their growth. The main way has been to use iron. You could also build machines to suck in the carbon dioxide.
Wired.com: You pinpoint one moment as really touching off the latest interest in geoengineering: a paper by Paul Crutzen. Why was that paper so influential?
Kintisch: Scientists had considered mimicking the cooling effect that volcanic aerosols have on the planet for decades before Crutzen’s paper. The scientist who first published on it was the Soviet scientist Budiko. But Crutzen came at a time where many scientists felt that the climate crisis was accelerating and he had the stature of a Nobel Prize. As an atmospheric chemist, he certainly had knowledge in this particular field.
And while he does have a reputation as a bit of a maverick, Crutzen’s paper was assiduously spelled out and he sent it to all of the top minds in the field before publishing it. That made it hard to argue with his essential conclusion, which is that we better at least study the method. It was difficult for anyone to disagree with. The furthest people could go was arguing that the paper shouldn’t be published. It was controversial and required intervention by the president of the National Academy of Science, Ralph Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist himself and friend of Crutzen.
Wired.com: Early in your book, you split the people working on geoengineering into two basic camps: the red team and the blue team. Who are these teams and how are they different?
Kintisch: First, I don’t think anyone really wants to do geoengineering right now. Maybe a handful of people think we are at that stage or think it would be a good idea to “take control.” But the [blue team] scientists who are starting to spend more of their time studying geoengineering are generally engineering types, the kinds of scientists who like to think up new solutions and create new ideas and synthesize existing ones. The red team scientists have more of the temperament of skeptics. They are better at shooting holes in proposals and identifying problems. For any field, you usually have these two types.
The blue team includes most famously Edward Teller [nuclear scientist and former head of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory], who passed away in 2003, and his acolyte Lowell Wood. They are two of the blue team when it comes to the Pinatubo option. Then, when it comes to cloud-brightening, you have a British scientist named John Latham, who for most of his life has studied weather and came up with a way to brighten clouds. And when it comes to iron fertilization, which is growing algae blooms, there are a variety of scientists but most notably John Martin.
The red team includes scientists who have focused on the ways that these solutions could be deleterious, or on early technical problems with them. For the stratospheric aerosols, there is an expert on volcanoes, Alan Robock at Rutgers, who has focused on the problems with the Pinatubo option. For iron fertilization, there is an ecologist, Penny Chisholm at MIT, who is mostly focused on a variety of ecological and environmental issues related to growing these giant algae blooms.
Wired.com: One fascinating connection you draw is between scientists developing the atomic bomb and scientists working on geoengineering. “You hope to God this is never used but if you have to use it, you better know how it behaves,” David Battisti tells you. That argument runs throughout post-war science. Does anyone have a better answer than the atomic scientists did?
Kintisch: At this point, a lot of scientists feel the cat is out of the bag. If anything, a desperate politician 30 years form now may suddenly decide, “I need to cool the planet.” And if we don’t study it, scientists won’t have any way to warn this leader of what the consequences will be. From that perspective there is a Pandora’s box that has been opened.
Geoengineering is a bad idea whose time has come. It is something that you have to study and hope to never use. [For the atomic scientists], the other side has nuclear weapons and they are pointed at you, so you have no choice but to develop a deterrent. In this case, the nuclear weapons are the unknown chance that the planet’s sensitivity to CO2 is very high and will respond to some of these worst-case tipping points.
Scientist feel they have no choice but to develop this response that viscerally is almost sickening to many scientists, especially someone like David Battisti, who thinks a lot about the internal dynamics of the climate system and understands how hard it is to understand how the parts fit together and then predict its behavior.
Wired.com: We talk a lot about the “tails” of climate-change risk, the big, seemingly low-probability stuff that could have a major impact. Do we know what the tails of geoengineering schemes, particularly the Pinatubo option, are? Is there some slight chance that something really bad could happen?
Kintisch: For the most part, scientists are trying to focus their efforts on geoengineering ideas that have some natural analogue. The Pinatubo option mimics volcanoes. Cloud-brightening happens as a result of salt particles and dust.
But, we don’t really know that much at all about any of these wild concepts. So, what scientists say is that the best way to make a decision is to compare not doing geoengineering and experiencing the worst-case scenarios of global warming with doing geoengineering and experiencing the tails or worst-case scenarios of geoengineering.
Often a mistake people make in talking about this, is that they consider that geoengineering schemes would work perfectly without weighing that there would be these unintended consequences.
Wired.com: Do you think it will be possible to design experiments that can address the risks and uncertainties of geoengineering?
Kintisch: I think in all areas of science involving risk, it’s probably fair to say that there is no such thing as the perfect experiment that gives you the information you want and involves the least amount of risk. The best example is drug trials. People even die after a drug has been studied. In geoengineering, this gets down to how much information we will need to act in the future. We might be able with the Pinatubo option to understand more about the consequences on ozone. But we may not have thought to ask about other effects, like the impacts of diffuse light on various ecosystems. The larger you go [with experiments], the better the chance that you’re going to discover the unknown unknowns. But the larger you go, the greater the risk that the studies themselves will have a deleterious effect.
Wired.com: One of your sources asks you, “If, say, a Huckabee administration suddenly woke up and started geoengineering the planet, what could anybody else do about it?” This seems like a real question. What would anyone else do about it?
Kintisch: I’m not an expert on international relations or nuclear brinksmanship, but I do think that we have no idea. One thing that makes that question hard to answer is that we don’t know how severe the climate crisis would have to be before countries would consider unilateral geoengineering. Would there be food conflicts? Would there be problems with immigration? What other factors would be happening? Would it be a developing country with nuclear weapons or a coalition of nations?
This gets to the reason that scientists are meeting now in Asilomar. The worst- case scenario is, with any new risk, you don’t want its existence or its use in the future to cause conflict in and of itself. One way to do that is to set up international norms and agreements that countries cooperate, and the technology itself won’t become a flashpoint for conflict like what happened with nuclear weapons after WWII.
But the challenge for setting up rules for geoengineering is that scientists very rightly fear that if rules are set up right now, we might restrict research that might tell us things we need to know about geoengineering.
You don’t want a free-for-all with everyone going out and trying geoengineering at a large scale out of fear or strategic reasons. But you have to do some studies to understand what those rules should be. And the scientists here in Asilomar are trying, at an early stage, to lay out voluntary guidelines to square that circle, and do some studies in the environment that could give us some early clues about the risk of geoengineering.
Wired.com: It seems like the toughest issue is having some sort of global governance structure in place. But if we got that in place, wouldn’t we be most of the way toward a meaningful way to keep carbon in the ground?
Kintisch: That’s an interesting point. If we can’t get our act together to reduce by a relatively modest percent, this very dangerous trace gas that we’re spitting into the atmosphere, it does suggest that we’re going to have a lot of trouble regulating geoengineering.
One problem with geoengineering research that scientist Ken Caldeira has pointed out to me is that there are a lot of private companies who are involved in this research, who are out to do research but also to create a business around selling carbon credits. Is this a field that should be dominated by private enterprises?
I titled the chapter on the history of climate and weather modification as a pursuit of levers. Because what I think geoengineering comes down to is looking for levers, making small changes that have big effects in the climate system. And that’s usually the goal of a company, they look for ways to profit off a small investment and yield big returns.
We’re looking for good investments for our geoengineering buck, so it doesn’t surprise that you’d have [private companies] Climos and Planktos interested in the very lucrative leverage involved in iron fertilization. And Nathan Myhrvold, inventor and close confidante of Bill Gates, interested in the stratospheric aerosols.
Wired.com: But is this an area where the work should be done just with national sponsorship?
Kintisch: Unlike most branches of Earth sciences, geoengineering is this kind of radically multidisciplinary idea. You take a supposed understanding of a basic system and develop an engineering method of altering or radically changing it. Generally, when it comes to developing real-world products, scientists come up with the kernel of the idea and companies have proven to be the best at turning the kernel into a working technology. In a way, I can see the allure of letting companies develop geoengineering ideas because they are set up to try different things and the allure of profits can drive new ideas.
That said, it is a really worrisome proposition that for-profit companies would be entrusted in developing techniques that might be deployed and have such far-reaching environmental or ecological consequences. That’s why openness and transparency and scientific integrity is so important in this field.
Wired.com: You’re heading to the Asilomar conference today on geoengineering. Do you see a scientist-led effort to regulate themselves internally as the best way of proceeding with small-scale research? Are they capable of that?
Kintisch: I think in other areas of science, researchers have shown that they are able to regulate themselves, at least initially. There is usually this tension between the scientists wanting to regulate themselves because they want a free hand in exploring a bunch of ideas, but then at some point having the officials come in.
It’s such an early stage with geoengineering. Many of the people involved with it don’t have experience working with dangerous things. They are Earth scientists or energy experts. They don’t have the institutional experience that scientists in molecular biology have developed over the years.
And when it comes to molecular biology, there still are struggles between the community of scientists who study sensitive pathogens and governments. That community got started in regulating itself here in 1975.
It may sound like a lame answer, but there will be a continuous push and pull on geoengineering.
Wired.com: The biggest argument against geoengineering research raised by critics is that it causes delays in going after carbon emissions directly, and quite possibly will kneecap those efforts by providing political cover for big emitters. Do you think that’s a strong enough argument to pull geoengineering off the table?
Kintisch: I don’t think so. All the time we deal with moral hazard. We deal with it when it comes to insurance or people wearing seatbelts. As a society, we should be able to deal with the moral hazard of people understanding that geoengieering is a dangerous concept that has to be studied and should be kept as an absolute worst-case scenario, but that requires vigorous and public debate. It probably requires a more scientifically literate society than we have. When someone says a quick fix is available and you don’t know much about geoengineering, you might easily be persuaded.
So, I think moral hazard is among the dangers of intervening on a larger scale with the planet, but like any of them, it shouldn’t discount an idea that we have little choice but to look at.
Climate Hackers Want to Write Their Own Rules
Alexis Madrigal Wired 23 Mar 10;
This week, 200 scientists will gather in an attempt to determine how research into the possibilities of geoengineering the planet to combat climate change should proceed.
They say it’s necessary because of the riskiness and scale of the experiments that could be undertaken — and the moral implications of their work to intentionally alter the Earth’s climate.
The group is meeting at the Asilomar resort in California, a dreamy enclave a few hours south of San Francisco. The gathering intentionally harkens back to the February 1975 meeting there of molecular biologists hashing out rules to govern what was then the hot-button scientific issue of the day: recombinant DNA and the possibility of biohazards.
The 1975 process wasn’t perfect, but after a fraught and meandering few days, the scientists released a joint statement that placed some restrictions and conditions on research, particularly with pathogens. That meeting is now held up as a model for how researchers can successfully assume the mantle of self-regulation.
“And perhaps that was the final, foggy significance of Asilomar: a promise that the scientists who deal with the most fundamental of life stuff will not sequester themselves beneath Chicago stadiums or within blockhouses in the New Mexico desert — that their work, at least as significant as the most subtle of sub-nuclear manipulations, will be done with care and public scrutiny,” wrote Michael Rogers in a June 19, 1975 Rolling Stone article.
Organized by the Climate Response Fund, a new group created to support geoengineering, this week’s conference is self-consciously recalling its famous Asilomar predecessor: All the participants in the new conference were sent Rogers’ article.
A conference brochure summed up the popular attitude toward its predecessor, praising it “as a landmark effort in self-regulation by the scientific community” and attributing the lack of “dangerous releases of organisms modified with recombinant DNA” to the “effectiveness of the ultimate guidelines and procedures.” It includes a black-and-white photograph of 1975 scientists meeting in the resort’s hoary chapel (above).
But in important ways the the two Asilomars are different. The Climate Response Fund was founded by Margaret Leinen, who although a respected scientist, already had a commercial interest in a company doing geoengineering. The original Asilomar had a more official provenance: It was organized by the National Academy of Sciences with $100,000 from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
But even if the two conferences were identical, the real history of the ‘75 Asilomar conference highlights the problems of scientific self-governance as much as the solutions it offers. It was messier than most would probably like to recall.
Crucially, the 1975 Asilomar meeting sidestepped the question of how recombinant DNA research should be done and who it should benefit, in favor of the more technical question of how it could be done more safely.
“The recombinant DNA issue was defined as a technical problem to be solved by technical means, a technical fix,” wrote MIT historian of science Charles Wiener in a 2001 retrospective. “Larger ethical issues regarding the purposes of the research; long-term goals, including human genetic intervention; and possible abuses of the research were excluded.”
This year’s version of Asilomar could draw even more attention to the fundamental tension of scientific self-regulation of risk- and value-laden experiments. Already, this week’s conference has drawn criticism from high-level scientists with an interest in geoengineering like Stanford’s Ken Caldeira and the University of Calgary’s David Keith.
“My only concern about this meeting is that the convening organization, [Climate Response Fund] is nontransparent and appears to be closely tied to Climos which was conceived to do ocean fertilization for profit,” Keith wrote. “While I am happy to see profit-driven startups drive innovation, I think tying ocean fertilization to carbon credits was a sterling example of how not to govern climate engineering, and I am therefore concerned to see a closely linked organization at the center of a meeting on governance. A meeting on governance ought to start by having transparent and disinterested governance.”
Despite Keith’s strongly worded statement about the conference, he has decided to attend to, as he put it, “speak out.” Caldeira declined his invitation, telling Wired.com that he preferred governance meetings held by “established professional societies and non-profits without a stake in the outcomes.”
The 1975 Asilomar conference did go through more established routes and even with that pedigree, the molecular biologists struggled to come up with a decision-making strategy that could address the concerns of the public.
“The motive from the start was to reduce potential hazards and to proceed with the research, avoiding public interference by demonstrating that scientists on their own could protect laboratory workers, the public and the environment,” MIT’s Wiener continued. “Of course, this action contained a contradiction: They were dealing with a public health issue and simultaneously attempting to keep the public out of it.”
Certainly, there’s a logic to letting experts in a scientific field decide about the field’s future. The presumption is that those closest to the science know its possibilities — both good and bad — best. Yet, that assumes that the science is guiding the proceedings.
Rolling Stone’s Rogers recorded a remarkable amount of confusion and the suggestion that the conference’s organizers had structured the rules to protect their own lines of research, while limiting other people’s work. In a March 22, 1975 article, Science News‘ Janet Weinberg described the scientists’ collective response to draft rules as “a barrage of unyielding, self-indulgent, and conflicting attitudes.”
This historical reality led Tufts University bioethicist Sheldon Krimsky to write that the modest regulations that emerged from Asilomar were not based on some systematic definition of risk, in the 1982 book, Genetic Alchemy: The Social History of the Recombinant DNA Controversy. Rather, they represented a much more human solution, a “negotiated settlement among scientists incorporating some science and considerable conjecture and intuition.”
While most scientists believe that the Asilomar meeting was a qualified success, some do not. The most outspoken, DNA co-discoverer, James Watson, reportedly blurted out during panel on risk, “These people have made up guidelines that don’t apply to their own experiments.” Watson argues the conference led to the creation of “totally capricious and totally unnecessary” guidelines and actually made the public more afraid of biotechnology. In 1978, Watson railed against Asilomar and similar meetings, saying they were “a real theater of the absurd in which the only professionals were a bizarre collection of kooks, sad incompetents, and down-right shits.”
It’s obvious but worth noting that Watson was concerned that science was, and would be, too limited. In fact, he had experiments that he had to put off for two years due to the regulations. But social scientists have generally drawn the opposite conclusion about Asilomar’s power to limit science.
Susan Wright, a historian of science at the University of Michigan, has called the bargain supposedly struck at Asilomar — some research restrictions in exchange for scientific self-governance — a myth on both sides of the deal.
“It is a myth that most scientists working under competitive pressures can address the implications of their own work with dispassion and establish appropriately stringent controls — any more than an unregulated Bill Gates can give competing browsers equal access to the world wide web,” she wrote. “Sure enough, some five years later, the controls proposed at Asilomar and developed by the National Institutes of Health were dismantled without anything like adequate knowledge of the hazards.”
Further, she says, “it is equally a myth that scientists in this field are self-governing.” Instead, their research agendas are shaped by utilitarian interests of government or corporate sponsors. Even at that early stage, before the biotech boom of later years, molecular biologists were never doing pure science.
Even researchers who consider the 1975 Asilomar conference a success, who convened on its 25th anniversary realize that the its process is no longer feasible.
“While there is general agreement that the 1975 Asilomar meeting made a large contribution to the resolution of a major scientific policy issue, it was clearly the consensus at the 2000 meeting that perceptions of science and of scientists have changed so drastically over the last quarter century that it is virtually inconceivable that a similar format could be successful today,” wrote the editors of Perspectives in Biology in a special issue in 2001.
The Asilomar conference this week will have to deal head-on with these dilemmas. Odds are, no matter what happens, any statement that comes out of the meeting will be incomplete, unfinished and provisional. It should also incorporate and remain open to input from critics of geoengineering.
Perhaps, the messy negotiations of parties guided by science and their own interests will push the discussion to the sensitive middle ground that the 1975 conference found, making no one totally happy, but recognizing the potential — good and bad — of a radical new field of scientific inquiry.
6 Ways We’re Already Geoengineering Earth
Brandon Keim Wired 23 Mar 10;
Scientists and policymakers are meeting this week to discuss whether geoengineering to fight climate change can be safe in the future, but make no mistake about it: We’re already geoengineering Earth on a massive scale.
From diverting a third of Earth’s available fresh water to planting and grazing two-fifths of its land surface, humankind has fiddled with the knobs of the Holocene, that 10,000-year period of climate stability that birthed civilization.
The consequences of our interventions into Earth’s geophysical processes are yet to be determined, but scientists say they’re so fundamental that the Holocene no longer exists. We now live in the Anthropocene, a geological age of mankind’s making.
“Homo sapiens has emerged as a force of nature rivaling climatic and geologic forces,” wrote Earth scientists Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty in a 2008 Frontiers in Ecology paper, which featured their redrawn map of the human-influenced world. “Human forces may now outweigh these across most of Earth’s land surface today.”
Draining the Rivers
Of all the fresh water accessible in lakes, rivers and aquifers — what scientists call “blue water” — humankind uses about one-third every year. A fourth of Earth’s river basins run dry before they reach the sea.
At local scales, this changes weather patterns. The Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River for example, seems to be causing temperatures in its valley to drop, which in turn reduces rainfall. The draining of Kazakhstan’s once-vast Aral Sea has made regional temperatures hotter in summer and colder in winter, and rain now rarely falls.
Whether regional changes in turn have global consequences remains to be seen.
Painting Earth Black
In 500 million households, mostly in Asia and Africa, cookfires are fed by wood, coal and animal dung. Smoke carries particles of what is known as “black carbon” into the atmosphere, where they form a heat-absorbing layer; raindrops form around the particles, and when they fall, black carbon ends up absorbing heat on the ground, too.
It’s estimated that half of a 3.4-degree-Fahrenheit rise in Arctic temperatures over the last century is a result of black-carbon pollution, and it may also have altered weather patterns in a way that’s reduced rainfall over South Asia and West Africa. Black carbon is also causing Himalayan glaciers to melt, threatening water supplies for hundreds of millions of people.
The Infinite Farm
About 12 percent of Earth’s land surface is now used for crops. Some of the consequences are difficult to predict. It’s hard to know, for example, how agriculture in the Great Plains has affected weather. Other consequences are more obvious. Deforestation of the Amazon rain forest disrupts regional cycles of evaporation and condensation, raising the possibility that Earth’s lungs could become a savanna. Should the Amazon rain forest lose much of its carbon dioxide-absorbing capacities, planetary temperatures will rise.
More immediately, fertilizers used in farming have injected vast amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus into regional environments. About 120 million tons of nitrogen are removed from the atmosphere each year and converted into fertilizer-friendly “reactive” forms, while 20 million tons of phosphorus are mined from the ground. In both cases, that’s far more than would enter the biosphere naturally, and most of it is carried by streams and rivers to the sea, where it fuels rapidly growing marine dead zones.
Wiping Out Reefs
Of all the extinctions now taking place, perhaps the most dramatic is that of coral reefs, the rain forests of the oceans and a foundation of many marine ecosystems. As a result of pollution, climate change, overfishing and ocean acidification, one-quarter of global reef cover has been lost in the last 50 years and one-third of reef species are endangered.
The loss of corals and the animals that depend on them doesn’t just threaten fishing. From a geophysical perspective, ecosystems are biological mechanisms that regulate flows of nutrients and energy. Stripped-down ecosystems — like the once-rich northwest Mediterranean, now dominated by bacteria and jellyfish — can’t always do the job. Some scientists think that massive ocean extinction events in the past caused Earth’s carbon cycle to fluctuate wildly for millions of years afterwards. Marine ecosystems lost their regulatory abilities, and changes in climate and weather followed.
There have been five planetary extinction events in the last half-billion years. The sixth is happening now.
The Plastic Revolution
Human industry has led to the invention of chemicals that were unknown in Earth’s history, and can remain active in the environment for thousands of years. These include compounds used in pesticides, and especially in plastic, some 60 billion tons of which are produced every year.
At high doses, these chemicals can disrupt animal endocrine systems, cause cancer and alter reproduction. At low doses, their effects aren’t known, but may involve subtle and widespread stresses that ultimately change the composition of ecosystems.
The United Nations estimates that there are 47,000 pieces of plastic in every square mile of Earth’s oceans. Low levels of organic pollutants and plastic-derived endocrine disruptors have been measured all over the world, even in areas where they’ve never been used, such as Antarctica.
Altering the Atmosphere
The economic engine of the Anthropocene is literally fueled by pulling carbon-rich materials from the ground, and burning them. As a result, about 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide are sent into the atmosphere every year, making fossil fuel consumption the biggest of all humankind’s unwitting geoengineering experiments.
With atmospheric levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide higher than at any time in the last 15 million years, global weather patterns are changing and average temperatures rising. Some of this carbon dioxide is absorbed by ocean water, altering the proportion of hydrogen and carbonate ions, and making the water more acidic. Corals, plankton and shellfish may literally dissolve.
Over the next several centuries, oceanic pH may change more than it has in the last 300 million years.
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