Climate Controls

If we treated global warming as a technical problem instead of a moral outrage, we could cool the world.

Gregory Benford from the November 1997 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

A major factor here will be whether mitigation looks like yet another top-down contrivance, another set of orders from the elite. Draconian policing of fuel burning will certainly look that way, a frowning Aunt Bessie elbowing into daily details, calculating your costs of commuting to work and setting your thermostat level. In contrast, mitigation does not have to push a new camel's nose into our tents. Technical solutions can play out far from people's lives, on the sea or high in the air.

Better, widespread acceptance of mitigation strategies could lead to an albedo chic--ostentatious flaunting of white roofs, the Mediterranean look, silvered cars, the return of the ice-cream suit in fashion circles. White could be appropriate after Labor Day again.

More seriously, every little bit would indeed help. This is crucial: Mitigation wears the white hat. It asks simple, clear measures of everyone, before going to larger-scale interventions. Grassroots involvement should be integral from the very beginning. Local efforts should go apace with those at the nation-state level, especially since mitigation intertwines deeply with diplomacy. Here appearances are even more critical, given the levels of animosity between the big burners (especially the United States) and the tropical world.

Plausible solutions should stay within the NAS panel's sober guidelines. Learning more is the crucial first step, of course. This is not just the usual academic call for more funded research; nobody wants to try global experiments on a wing and a prayer.

Beyond more studies and reports, we must soon begin thinking of controlled experiments. Climate scientists so far have studied passively, much like astronomers. They have a bias toward this mode, especially since the discernible changes we have made in our climate generally have been pernicious. Such mental sets ebb slowly. The reek of hubris also restrains many. But a time for many limited experiments like the iron-dumping one will come. This will be the second great step as we ponder whether to become geoengineers. Constraints must be severe to ensure clear results.

Most important, perturbations in climate must be local and reversible--and not merely to quiet environmentalist fears. Only controlled experiments, well designed and well analyzed, will be convincing to all sides in this debate. Indeed, the green plume near the Galapagos Islands showed this. Its larger features were best studied by satellite, which picked up the green splotch strongly against the dark blue sea. But the crucial issue of whether the carbon stayed tied up in ocean waters was poorly addressed. Satellites were of no help. Slightly better funding and more scientists in dispersed, small craft could have told us a lot more.

Careful climate modeling must closely parallel every experiment. Few doubt that our climate stands in a class by itself in terms of complexity. Though much is made of how wondrous our minds are, perhaps the most complex entity known is our biosphere, in which we are mere mayflies. Absent a remotely useful theory of complexity in systems, we must proceed cautiously.

While computer studies are notorious for revealing mostly what was sought, confirming the prejudices of their programmers, methods are improving quickly. They can explore the many side avenues of small-scale geoengineering experiments. Invoking computer models as crucial watchdogs in every experiment will calm fears, at least among those who read beyond the headlines.

Who pays, in the end? Political pressure may well compel nations to comply with some target goals. A crucial factor will be what ratio to use in assessing a nation's (or region's) rectitude: net fossil-fuel consumption divided by what? Population? This favors the poor and populous nations. Economic value created with the fuels? The United States would fare reasonably well. Some weighted mean between the two?

To avoid descending into pure power politics and making policy sausage in public, a World Warming Authority could copy our fledgling pollution-voucher methods, bringing some market forces into play. But instead of simply trading the right to burn more--a negative unit--one could use a positive Mitigation Unit as well. Industries amassing them by, say, paying for rich-burning jet fuel could then burn more oil themselves. A market-driven dynamic equilibrium could then minimize costs for a given anti-warming target.

Such approaches might drive the emergence of suites of methods, which regions could choose among to their best advantage. Deserts reflect light well (though their roads are usually dark), so added cloud cover is less effective there overall; the whitewashing of cities could be measured by their average decrease in the heat-island effect; lands with high rainfall may favor forestation. Any such policy calculus should hover over the
intricacies of markets, which will move faster and with more ingenuity than any committee. Rigid mandates will inevitably fail.

Still, going from the local to the global is fraught with uncertainty--and sure to inspire much anxiety. We will always be ambivalent stewards of the Earth. And greenhouse gas emissions certainly will not be our last problem, either. We are doing many things to our environment, with our numbers expected to reach 10 billion by 2050. What new threats will emerge? Catastrophes may come at a quickening pace, springing from the many synergistic effects that we must trace through the geophysical labyrinth.

As we begin correcting for our inadvertent insults to Mother Earth, we should realize that it's forever. Once we become caretakers, we cannot stop. The large tasks confronting humanity, especially the uplifting of the majority to some semblance of prosperity, must be carried forward in the shadow of our stewardship.

And yet, even among the able nations, those who have the foresight to grasp solutions, an odd reluctance pervades the policy classes. As the atmospheric physicist Ralph Cicerone has noted, "Many who envision environmental problems foresee doom and have little faith in technology, and therefore propose strong limits on industrialization, while most optimists refuse to believe that there is an environmental problem at all."

Having sinned against Mother Nature inadvertently, many are keenly reluctant to intervene knowingly. Sherwood Rowland, a chemist at the University of California at Irvine who predicted, with Mario Molina, the depletion of the ozone layer, declared, "I am unalterably opposed to global mitigation." This added considerable weight to the abstention cause. At root, such people see mankind as the problem; only by behaving humbly, living lightly upon our Earth, can we atone. Here most scientists and theologians agree, at least for now.

The next century will see a protracted battle between the prophets who would intervene and the moralists who see all grand-scale human measures as tainted. Even now, many argue that even to speak of geoengineering encourages the unwashed to more excess, since the masses will think that once again science has a remedy at hand.

Some, though, will say quietly, persistently, Well, maybe science does....