Geoengineering_ 'a Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come' _ NPR

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May 29, 2010 12:00 AM

by NPR STAFF

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i

Hack the Planet

By Eli KintischHardcover, 288 pagesWileyList Price: $25.95

Some scientists are taking a more radical

approach to cooling the earth's climate, like

dumping iron dust into the ocean, hoping togrow algae blooms that suck up carbon. Or

putting a giant lens between the Earth and the

sun to reflect some of the sun's rays away from

Earth.

It's all part of a controversial field known as

geoengineering, and science writer Eli Kintisch

spent three years following the men and women

who believe it can work for his new book, Hack

the Planet: Science's Best Hope or Worst

Nightmare for Averting Climate Catastrophe.

Kintisch tells NPR's Guy Raz that many

scientists see geoengineering as a sort of

insurance policy. "We might face emergencies in

the future which driving a Prius or putting up a

windmill or putting up a solar panel will not answer," he says.

So, those scientists argue, we have to have backup plans.

One of those backup plans is known as the "Pinatubo Option." The

name refers to a 1991 volcanic eruption that spewed more than 10

million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. That blocked a

small percentage of the sun's rays and cooled the planet by 1

degree Fahrenheit. One scientist imagines mimicking this volcanic

cooling effect by spraying more sulfur dioxide at high altitudes.

"But cooling the planet with something like the Pinatubo Optiondoesn't address the underlying issues," Kintisch says. It also could

have serious side effects.

engineering: 'A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come' : NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127245606

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"You might actually damage the ability of solar panels to take in

energy, because you are blocking direct sunlight that those panels

need to create energy," Kintisch warns. "So by doing

geoengineering and removing direct sunlight from the planet's

system, you're actually undermining the alternative energy we need

to get off our fossil fuel addiction."

Another scientist is taking a different approach to geoengineering.

Instead of looking to the sky for solutions, he's looking to the ocean.

Victor Smetacek, a German oceanographer, is trying to cool the

planet by growing carbon-absorbing gardens in parts of the ocean

with little life.

In 2009, Smetacek and a team of Indian and German scientists

added 6 tons of iron into a section of the Southern Ocean, which

rings Antarctica, to see if they could get a massive bloom of algae to

flourish. Algae growing in the ocean cools the planet by sucking in

carbon dioxide. The team did get algae to grow, but it was the wrong

kind of algae.

The 10-week experiment, called project LOHAFEX, is the world's

largest geoengineering project to date, and, like many other

geoengineering attempts, was controversial. Greenpeace and other

environmental organizations demanded that LOHAFEX be stopped

from the start, saying that pouring iron into the ocean amounted to

pollution and violated international agreements. Some scientistsfeared the unintended side effects of the project.

"In the case of fertilizing the ocean," Kintisch explains, "you might

create areas that are deprived of oxygen. You might alter

ecosystems in ways you don't understand. You might actually create

organisms in your algae patch that put up greenhouse gasses more

potent than the carbon dioxide, like methane."

Despite the potential drawbacks of geoengineering, major science

organizations such as the American Geophysical Union, the Royal

Society in London, and the National Academy of Sciences have all

called for more geoengineering research.

"It's a bad idea whose time has come," Kintisch says.

May 29, 2010 12:00 AM

by ELI KINTISCH

David Battisti had arrived in Cambridge,i


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Hack the Planet

By Eli KintischHardcover, 288 pagesWileyList Price: $25.95

Massachusetts, expecting a rout, a farce, a

bloodbath. So had many of the other scientists

who had joined him that frigid morning from

around the country. It was an invitation - only

workshop on climate science in November of

2007 for which they convened at the American

Academy of Arts and Sciences, an airy temple

to diligence and scholarship one block from

Harvard University. Battisti shuffled out of the

Massachusetts morning air and into the

Academys expansive premises.

The workshops unholy topic was

geoengineering: the concept of manually

tinkering with Earths thermostat to reverse

global warming. Organizers had arranged the

event to find out whether respected climate

scientists such as Battisti might support research into the

controversial idea. In a button - down shirt opened two buttons

down, Battisti poured his coffee and watched the scientists fiddle

with their muffins. One couldnt take planethacking seriously, he

figured, because theres no way well ever know enough about the

atmosphere to claim we can control it. Just because the radical

notion had made it from the outer fringes of Earth science all the

way to Cambridge didnt mean the group was going to legitimize it,

he thought.

Since the 1960s, a handful of scientists had dreamed up various

schemes to intentionally alter the atmosphere on a global scale:

flying enormous sunshades above Earth, creating billions of thicker

clouds at sea, or spewing light - blocking sulfate pollution at high

altitude to mimic the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions. Ecologists

imagined brightening the planets dark surfaces to reflect more

sunlight, by spreading white plastic across certain deserts. Marine

biologists explored growing algae blooms to suck billions of tons ofcarbon dioxide from the sky.

Each concept took a smidgen or two of sense and added scientific

optimism and a dollop of whimsy. Mostly back - of - the - envelope

affairs, the papers that described them included just enough

observations or calculations to suggest the ideas might work. The

scientists who wrote them knew the concepts were raw and with few

exceptions understood them to be options reserved for worst - case

scenarios. To the broader community of climate scientists, proposing

even to study deliberately altering the atmosphere was a heretical

idea.


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2013 NPR

As Battisti poured himself coffee, he saw one of the heretics

standing beside the buffet table. That guy is scary, Battisti

whispered to a colleague. It was Lowell Wood, a nuclear physicist

with a broad, reddish beard and a dark jacket. His wide torso was

bisected by a tie featuring the periodic table of elements. From his

perch at a California nuclear weapons lab, Lawrence Livermore

National Laboratory, Wood had won notoriety, if not ridicule, for

proposing in 1997 to control the atmosphere's thermostat by

scattering chemicals in the atmosphere. He had done so in

collaboration with his aging mentor Edward Teller, the father of the

hydrogen bomb. Teller, whose conservative views had often put him

at odds with the left - leaning scientific establishment, had

advocated in the same year that geoengineering was a better way

to tackle the climate crisis than the Kyoto accords.

Reprinted from Hack the Planet: Science's Best Hope or Worst

Nightmare for Averting Climate Catastrophe with permission from

Wiley. Copyright 2010 by Eli Kintisch.

Books Featured In This Story

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Hack the Planet

Science's Best Hope-Or Worst Nightmare-For

Averting Climate Catastropheby Eli Kintisch

Hardcover, 279 pages

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NPR reviews, interviews and more

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Geoengineering_ 'a Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come' _ NPR

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