October 2007 Newsletter Vol. 36 No. 4
The Climate Engineers: Playing God to Save the Planet
As alarm over global warming spreads, a radical idea is gaining momentum. Forget cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, some scientists argue. Find a technological fix. Bounce sunlight back into space by pumping reflective nanoparticles into the atmosphere. Launch mirrors into orbit around the earth. Create a “planetary thermostat.” But what sounds like science fiction is actually an old story. For more than a century, scientists, soldiers, and charlatans have hatched schemes to manipulate the weather and climate. Like them, today’s aspiring climate engineers wildly exaggerate what is possible, and they scarcely consider political, military, and ethical implications of attempting to manage the world’s climate – with potential consequences far greater than any their predecessors were ever likely to face.
Beyond the security checkpoint at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, a small group gathered in November [2006] for a conference on the innocuous topic of “managing solar radiation.” The real subject was much bigger: how to save the planet from the effects of global warming. There was little talk among the two dozen scientists and other specialists about carbon taxes, alternative energy sources, or the other usual remedies. Many of the scientists were impatient with such schemes. Some were simply contemptuous of calls for international cooperation and the policies and lifestyle changes needed to curb greenhouse-gas emissions; others had concluded that the world’s politicians and bureaucrats are not up to the job of agreeing on such reforms or that global warming will come more rapidly, and with more catastrophic consequences, than many models predict. Now, they believe, it is time to consider radical measures: a technological quick fix for global warming.
“Mitigation is not happening and is not going to happen,” physicist Lowell Wood declared at the NASA conference. Wood, the star of the gathering, spent four decades at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he served as one of the Pentagon’s chief weapon designers and threat analysts. (He reportedly enjoys the “Dr. Evil” nickname bestowed by his critics.) The time has come, he said, for “an intelligent elimination of undesired heat from the biosphere by technical ways and means,” which, he asserted, could be achieved for a tiny fraction of the cost of “the bureaucratic suppression of CO2.” His engineering approach, he boasted, would provide “instant climatic gratification.”
Wood advanced several ideas to “fix” the earth’s climate, including building up Arctic sea ice to make it function like a planetary air conditioner to “suck heat in from the mid latitude heat bath.” A “surprisingly practical” way of achieving this, he said, would be to use large artillery pieces to shoot as much as a million tons of highly reflective sulfate aerosols or specially engineered nanoparticles into the Arctic stratosphere to deflect the sun’s rays. Delivering up to a million tons of material via artillery would require a constant bombardment – basically declaring war on the stratosphere. Alternatively, a fleet of B-747 “crop dusters” could deliver the particles by flying continuously around the Arctic Circle. Or a 25-kilometer-long sky hose could be tethered to a military superblimp high above the planet’s surface to pump reflective particles into the atmosphere.
Far-fetched as Wood’s ideas may sound, his weren’t the only Rube Goldberg proposals aired at the meeting. Even as they joked about a NASA staffer’s apology for her inability to control the temperature in the meeting room, others detailed their own schemes for manipulating earth’s climate. Astronomer J. Roger Angel suggested placing a huge fleet of mirrors in orbit to divert incoming solar radiation, at a cost of “only” several trillion dollars. Atmospheric scientist John Latham and engineer Stephen Salter hawked their idea of making marine clouds thicker and more reflective by whipping ocean water into a froth with giant pumps and eggbeaters. Most frightening was the science-fiction writer and astrophysicist Gregory Benford’s announcement that he wanted to “cut through red tape and demonstrate what could be done” by finding private sponsors for his plan to inject diatomaceous earth – the chalk like substance used in filtration systems and cat litter – into the Arctic stratosphere. He, like his fellow geoengineers, was largely silent on the possible unintended consequences of his plan.
The inherent unknowability of what would happen if we tried to tinker with the immensely complex planetary climate system is one reason why climate engineering has until recently been spoken of only sotto voce in the scientific community. Imagine, for example, that Wood’s scheme to thicken the Arctic icecap did somehow become possible. While most of the world may want to maintain or increase polar sea ice, Russia and some other nations have historically desired an ice-free Arctic ocean, which would liberate shipping and open potentially vast oil and mineral deposits for exploitation. And an engineered Arctic ice sheet would likely produce shorter growing seasons and harsher winters in Alaska, Siberia, Greenland, and elsewhere, and could generate super winter storms in the midlatitudes. Yet Wood calls his brainstorm a plan for “global climate stabilization,” and hopes to create a sort of “planetary thermostat” to regulate the global climate.
Who would control such a “thermostat,” making life-altering decisions for the planet’s billions? What is to prevent other nations from undertaking unilateral climate modification? The United States has no monopoly on such dreams. In November 2005, for example, Yuri Izrael, head of the Moscow-based Institute of Global Climate and Ecology Studies, wrote to Russian president Vladimir Putin to make the case for immediately burning massive amounts of sulfur in the stratosphere to lower the earth’s temperature “a degree or two” – a correction greater than the total warming since pre- industrial times.
Despite the large, unanswered questions about the implications of playing God with the elements, climate engineering is now being widely discussed in the scientific community and is taken seriously within the U.S. government. The Bush administration has recommended the addition of this “important strategy” to an upcoming report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-sponsored organization whose February study seemed to persuade even the Bush White House to take global warming more seriously. And climate engineering’s advocates are not confined to the small group that met in California. Last year, for example, Paul J. Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate, proposed a scheme similar to Wood’s, and there is a long paper trail of climate and weather modification studies by the Pentagon and other government agencies.
Three stories (there are many more) capture the recurring pathologies of weather and climate control schemes. The first involves 19th-century proposals by the U.S. government’s first meteorologist to make artificial rain and relieve drought conditions in the American West. The second begins in 1946 with promising discoveries in cloud seeding that rapidly devolved into exaggerated claims and attempts by cold warriors to wea-ponize the technique in the jungles of Vietnam. And then there is the tale of how computer modeling raised hopes for perfect forecasting and ultimate control of weather and climate – hopes that continue to inform and encourage present-day planetary engineers.
James Pollard Espy (1785–1860), the first meteorologist employed by the U.S. government, was a frontier schoolmaster and lawyer until he moved to Philadelphia in 1817. Espy viewed the atmosphere as a giant heat engine. According to his thermal theory of storms, all atmospheric disturbances, including thunderstorms, hurricanes, and winter storms, are driven by “steam power.” Heated by the sun, a column of air rises, allowing the surrounding air to rush in. As the heated air ascends, it cools and its moisture condenses, releasing its latent heat (this is the “steam”) and producing rain, hail, or snow. The thermal theory is now an accepted part of meteorology, and for this discovery Espy is well regarded in the history of science.
His stature has been diminished, however, by his unbridled enthusiasm for rainmaking. Espy suggested cutting and burning vast tracts of forest to create huge columns of heated air, believing this would generate clouds and trigger precipitation. “Magnificent Humbug” was one contemporary assessment of this scheme. Espy came to be known derisively as the “Storm King,” but he was not deterred.
Seeking a larger stage for his storm studies and rainmaking proposals, Espy moved in 1842 to Washington, D.C., where he was funded by the Navy and employed as the “national meteorologist” by the Army Medical Department. This position afforded him access to the meteorological reports of surgeons at Army posts around the country. He also collaborated with Joseph Henry at the Smithsonian Institution to establish and maintain a national network of volunteer weather observers.
The year Espy moved to Washington, the popular magazine writer Eliza Leslie published a short story in Godey’s Lady’s Book called “The Rain King, or, A Glance at the Next Century,” a fanciful account of rainmaking set in 1942 in Philadelphia, in which Espy’s great-great-grand-nephew offers weather for the Delaware Valley on demand. Various factions vie for the weather they desire. Three hundred washerwomen petition the Rain King for fine weather forever, while cabmen and umbrella makers want perpetual rain. An equal number of applications come from both the fair- and foul-weather camps, until the balance is tipped by a late request from a winsome high-society matron desperately seeking a hard rain to prevent a visit by her country-bumpkin cousins that would spoil the lavish party she is planning.
Of course, when the artificial rains come, they satisfy no one and raise widespread suspicions. The Rain King, suddenly unpopular because he lacks the miraculous power to please everybody, takes a steamboat to China, where he studies magic in anticipation of returning someday. “Natural rains had never occasioned anything worse than submissive regret to those who suffered inconvenience from them, and were always received more in sorrow than in anger,” Leslie wrote. “But these artificial rains were taken more in anger than in sorrow, by all who did not want them.”
Just over 100 years after Espy arrived in Washington, another seminal episode in the history of weather and climate control commenced at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York. On a warm, humid day in 1946, a laboratory technician named Vincent Schaefer dropped some dry ice into a home freezer unit he was using as a cloud chamber. To his surprise, he saw the moisture in his breath instantly transform into millions of tiny ice crystals. He had generated the ice cloud from “supercooled” water droplets.
On November 14, 1946, Schaefer rented an airplane and dropped six pounds of dry ice pellets into a cold cloud over Mount Greylock in the nearby Berkshires, creating ice crystals and streaks of snow along a three- mile path. According to Schaefer’s laboratory notebook, “It seemed as though [the cloud] almost exploded, the effect was so widespread and rapid.” Schaefer’s boss was Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir, a chemist who had worked on generating military smoke screens and de-icing aircraft in World War II – and who did not lack for media savvy. Langmuir watched the experiment from the control tower of the airport, and he was on the phone to the press before Schaefer landed. According to an article in The New York Times the next day, “A single pellet of dry ice, about the size of a pea... might produce enough ice nuclei to develop several tons of snow,” or perhaps eliminate clouds at airports that might cause dangerous icing conditions, thus, in the words of the story’s headline, “Opening Vista of Moisture Control by Man.” The Boston Globe headline read “Snowstorm Manufactured.”
From this moment on, in the press and before the meteorological community, Langmuir expounded his sensational vision of -large-scale weather control, including redirecting hurricanes and changing the arid Southwest into fertile farmland. His first paper on the subject used familiar military terminology to explain how a small amount of “nucleating” agent such as dry ice, silver iodide, or even water could cause a “chain reaction” in cumulus clouds that potentially could release as much energy as an atomic bomb, but without radioactive fallout. The Department of Defense took due note. It would take an intense interest in the military possibilities of weather modification in the years -ahead.
Weather modification technology seemed of such great potential, especially to military aviation, that Vannevar Bush, a friend of Langmuir’s who had served as head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, brought the issue to the attention of Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall and General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Pentagon immediately convened a committee to study the development of a Cold War weather weapon. It was hoped that cloud seeding could be used surreptitiously to release the violence of the atmosphere against an enemy, tame the winds in the service of an all-weather air force, or, on a larger scale, perhaps disrupt (or improve) the agricultural economy of nations and alter the global climate for strategic purposes.
Howard T. Orville, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s weather adviser, published an influential 1954 article in Collier’s that included a variety of scenarios for using weather as a weapon of warfare. Planes would drop hundreds of balloons containing seeding crystals into the jet stream. Downstream, when the fuses on the balloons exploded, the crystals would fall into the clouds, initiating rain and miring enemy operations. The Army Ordnance Corps was investigating another technique: loading silver iodide and carbon dioxide into 50-caliber tracer bullets that pilots could fire into clouds. Speculative and wildly optimistic ideas such as these from official sources, together with threats that the Soviets were aggressively pursuing weather control, triggered what Newsweek called “a weather race with the Russians,” and helped fuel the rapid expansion of meteorological research in all areas, including the creation of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which was established in 1960.
Weather warfare took a macro-pathological turn between 1967 and ’72 in the jungles over North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Using technology developed at the naval weapons testing center at China Lake, California, to seed clouds by means of silver iodide flares, the military conducted secret operations intended, among other goals, to “reduce trafficability” along portions of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which Hanoi used to move men and materiel to South Vietnam. Operating out of Udorn Air Base, Thailand, without the knowledge of the Thai government or almost anyone else, but with the full and enthusiastic support of presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, the Air Weather Service flew more than 2,600 cloud seeding sorties and expended 47,000 silver iodide flares over a period of approximately five years at an annual cost of some $3.6 million. The covert operation had several names, including “POPEYE” and “Intermediary-Compatriot.”
In March 1971, nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson broke the story about Air Force rainmakers in Southeast Asia in The Washington Post, a story confirmed several months later with the leaking of the Pentagon Papers and splashed on the front page of The New York Times in 1972 by Seymour Hersh.
Operation POPEYE, made public as it was at the end of the Nixon era, was dubbed the “Watergate of weather warfare.” Some defended the use of environmental weapons, arguing that they were more “humane” than nuclear weapons. Others suggested that inducing rainfall to reduce trafficability was preferable to dropping napalm. As one wag put it, “Make mud, not war.” At a congressional briefing in 1974, military officials downplayed the impact of Operation POPEYE, since the most that could be claimed were 10 percent increases in local rainfall, and even that result was “unverifiable.”
At a time when the United States was already weakened by the Watergate crisis, the Soviet Union caused considerable embarrassment to the Ford administration by bringing the issue of weather modification as a weapon of war to the attention of the United Nations. The UN Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD) was eventually ratified by nearly 70 nations, including the United States. Ironically, it entered into force in 1978, when the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, where the American military had used weather modification technology in war only six years earlier, became the 20th signatory.
The language of the ENMOD Convention may become relevant to future weather and climate engineering, especially if such efforts are conducted unilaterally or if harm befalls a nation or region. The convention targets those techniques having “widespread, longlasting or severe effects as the means of destruction, damage, or injury to any other State Party.” It uses the term “environmental modification” to mean “any technique for changing – through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes – the dynamics, composition, or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere, or of outer space.”
A vision of perfect forecasting ultimately leading to weather and climate control was present at the birth of modern computing, well before the GE cloud seeding experiments. In 1945 Vladimir Zworykin, an RCA engineer noted for his early work in television technology, promoted the idea that electronic computers could be used to process and analyze vast amounts of meteorological data, issue timely and highly accurate forecasts, study the sensitivity of weather systems to alterations of surface conditions and energy inputs, and eventually intervene in and control the weather and climate.
Zworykin imagined that a perfectly accurate machine forecast combined with a paramilitary rapid deployment force able literally to pour oil on troubled ocean waters or even set fires or detonate bombs might someday provide the capacity to disrupt storms before they formed, deflect them from populated areas, and otherwise control the weather.
In a 1962 speech to meteorologists, “On the Possibilities of Weather Control,” Harry Wexler, the MIT-trained head of meteorological research at the U.S. Weather Bureau, reported on his analysis of early computer climate models and additional possibilities opened up by the space age. Reminding his audience that humankind was modifying the weather and climate “whether we know it or not” by changing the composition of the earth’s atmosphere, Wexler demonstrated how the United States or the Soviet Union, perhaps with hostile intent, could alter the earth’s climate in a number of ways. Either nation could cool it by several degrees using a dust ring launched into orbit, for example, or warm it using ice crystals lofted into the polar atmosphere by the explosion of hydrogen bombs. And while most practicing atmospheric chemists today believe that the discovery of ozone-destroying reactions dates to the early 1970s, Wexler sketched out a scenario for destroying the ozone layer using chlorine or bromine in his 1962 speech.
“The subject of weather and climate control is now becoming respectable to talk about,” Wexler claimed. But if weather control’s “respectability” was not in question, its attainability – even using computers, satellites, and 100-megaton bombs – certainly was.
In 1965, the President’s Science Advisory Committee warned in a report called Restoring the Quality of Our Environment that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide due to the burning of fossil fuels would modify the earth’s heat balance to such an extent that harmful changes in climate could occur. This report is now widely cited as the first official statement on “global warming.” But the committee also recommended geoengineering options. “The possibilities of deliberately bringing about countervailing climatic changes... need to be thoroughly explored,” it said.
After the embarrassment of the 1978 ENMOD Convention, federal funding for weather modification research and development dried up, although freelance rainmakers continued to ply their trade in the American West with state and local funding. Until recently, a 1991 National Academy of Sciences report, Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming, was the only serious document in decades to advocate climate control. But the level of urgency and the number of proposals have increased dramatically since the turn of the new century.
In September 2001, the U.S. Climate Change Technology Program quietly held an invitational conference, “Response Options to Rapid or Severe Climate Change.” Sponsored by a White House that was officially skeptical about global warming, the meeting gave new status to the control fantasies of the climate engineers. According to one participant, “If they had broadcast that meeting live to people in Europe, there would have been riots.”
Two years later, the Pentagon released a controversial report titled An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security. The report explained how global warming might lead to rapid and catastrophic global cooling through mechanisms such as the slowing of North Atlantic deep-water -circulation – -and recommended that the government “explore -geo-engineering options that control the climate.” Noting that it is easier to warm than to cool the climate, the report suggested that it might be possible to add various gases, such as -hydro--fluorocarbons, to the atmosphere to offset the effects of cooling. Such actions would be studied carefully, of course, given their potential to exacerbate conflict among -nations.
With greater gravitas, but no less speculation, the National Research Council issued a study, Critical Issues in Weather Modification Research, in 2003. It cited looming social and environmental challenges such as water shortages and drought, property damage and loss of life from severe storms, and the threat of “inadvertent” climate change as justifications for investing in major new national and international programs in weather modification research. Although the NRC study included an acknowledgment that there is “no convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather modification efforts,” its authors nonetheless argued that there should be “a renewed commitment” to research in the field of intentional and unintentional weather modification.
The appeal of a quick and seemingly painless technological “fix” for the global climate dilemma should not be underestimated. The more practical such dreams appear, the less likely the world’s citizens and political leaders are to take on the difficult and painful task of changing the destiny that global climate models foretell.
These issues are not new. Yet thanks to remarkable advances in science and technology, from satellite sensors to enormously sophisticated global climate models, the fantasies of the weather and climate engineers have only grown. Now it is possible to tinker with scenarios in computer climate models – manipulating the solar inputs, for example, to demonstrate that artificially increased solar reflectivity will generate a cooling trend in the model.
There are signs among the geoengineers of an overconfidence in technology as a solution of first resort. Many appear to possess a too-literal belief in progress that produces an anything-is-possible mentality, abetted by a basic misunderstanding of the nature of today’s climate models. The global climate system is a “massive, staggering beast,” as oceanographer Wallace Broecker describes it, with no simple set of controlling parameters. We are more than a long way from understanding how it works, much less the precise prediction and practical “control” of global climate.
Assume, for just a moment, that climate control were technically possible. Who would be given the authority to manage it? Who would have the wisdom to dispense drought, severe winters, or the effects of storms to some so that the rest of the planet could prosper? At what cost, economically, aesthetically, and in our moral relationship to nature, would we manipulate the climate?
When Roger Angel was asked at the NASA meeting last November how he intended to get the massive amount of material required for his space mirrors into orbit, he dryly suggested a modern cannon of the kind originally proposed for the Strategic Defense Initiative: a giant electric rail gun firing a ton or so of material into space roughly every five minutes. Asked where such a device might be located, he suggested a high mountaintop on the Equator.
I was immediately reminded of Jules Verne’s 1889 novel The Purchase of the North Pole. For two cents per acre, a group of American investors gains rights to the vast and incredibly lucrative coal and mineral deposits under the North Pole. To mine the region, they propose to melt the polar ice. Initially the project captures the public imagination, as the backers promise that their scheme will improve the climate everywhere by reducing extremes of cold and heat, making the earth a terrestrial heaven. But when it is revealed that the investors are retired Civil War artillerymen who intend to change the inclination of the earth’s axis by building and firing the world’s largest cannon, public enthusiasm gives way to fears that tidal waves generated by the explosion will kill millions. In secrecy and haste, the protagonists proceed with their plan, building the cannon on Mount Kilimanjaro. The plot fails only when an error in calculation renders the massive shot ineffective. Verne concludes, “The world’s inhabitants could thus sleep in peace.” Perhaps he spoke too soon.
James R. Fleming is professor of science, technology, and society at Colby College. In 2006-07 he was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and held the Roger Revelle Fellowship in Global Stewardship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His books include Meteorology in America, 1800-1870 (1990), Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (1998), and The Callendar Effect: The Life and Work of Guy Stewart Callendar (2007).
Adapted from “The Climate Engineers: Playing God to Save the Planet,” Wilson Quarterly (Spring 2007), 46-60.