Global warming can’t be stopped. Even if greenhouse gas emissions were reduced to zero today, the CO2 we’ve already pumped into the atmosphere will take 1,000 years to dissipate. Worldwide temperatures would continue to rise—about three-quarters of a degree Celsius according to the best estimates. And that’s the good news.
For all the talk about climate change, no real progress—political or otherwise—has been made. In fact, things are getting worse. According to new data, global carbon emissions have grown 3.5 per cent a year since 2000, substantially up from the 0.9 per cent annual growth of the 1990s. The main cause has been the booming, coal-reliant economies of the developing world, although it’s not as if Europe or North America have lessons to impart: no region’s emissions have declined.
Current rates of warming already have glaciers melting at alarming rates. Arctic waters may be ice-free in summer as soon as 2013. And the latest satellite measurements show sea levels rising even faster than expected—as much as a centimetre a year. As things accelerate, they could be up to 78 cm higher by century’s end. This all means that the International Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case scenarios of just two years ago—a 7° C global average temperature rise by century’s end—may now be too optimistic. And it is frankly scaring the hell out of a lot of experts. “The recent science suggests we have to rethink everything,” says Joe Chaisson, director of research for the Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based group that focuses on atmospheric issues. “Because we’re a lot closer to the lip of the cliff than we thought.”
And in bad times, desperate measures begin to look a lot more inviting. Earlier this year, the British newspaper the Independent asked 80 international climate specialists whether things are so dire that the world needs a back-up plan. Just over half—54 per cent—came down in favour of goosing the climate. True, a bare majority is hardly a ringing endorsement, but one has to understand how unpopular the concept of artificial manipulation has been. “As recently as last year, nearly the whole community would fit comfortably in a university seminar room,” David Victor, the head of Stanford University’s Program on Energy & Sustainable Development, and his co-authors write in “The geoengineering option,” a piece in this month’s issue of Foreign Affairs. “And the entire scientific literature on the subject could be read during the course of a transcontinental airplane flight.”
For years, mainstream researchers wrote climate-fixing ideas off as more fantasy than science. It didn’t help that most early advocates were fierce Cold Warriors, and proponents of using the weather as a military weapon. In Russia, it was the geophysicist Michael Budyko who in the early 1970s first suggested reducing the albedo (earth’s solar reflection) by adding particles to the stratosphere. In the U.S. it was Edward Teller, co-founder of the famous Lawrence Livermore weapons lab, father of Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative—and the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove—who was most intrigued with the idea of playing with the temperature control. “This is just part of a continuous history of tinkering on larger scales,” says James Fleming, a science historian at Maine’s Colby College, whose book, Fixing the Sky: The chequered history of weather and climate control, will be published later this year. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, for example, the U.S. flew more than 2,600 cloud-seeding sorties over the jungles of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in hopes making the Ho Chi Minh Trail impassable. The most they could claim was a 10 per cent rainfall increase, and even that was unverifiable.
David Keith was different. He first stumbled across geoengineering while working on his Ph.D. in experimental physics at MIT in the late 1980s. The schemes appealed to the Ottawa native’s contrarian nature, and offered a fun way to explore earth sciences, a field he knew little about. “Asking hard questions is a useful way to learn your way into something new,” he says. The same went for global warming. At the time, he was openly skeptical about claims it was man-made. A heresy he long ago repented.
Keith’s first work on the subject was a presentation for a group of fellow MIT and Harvard brainiacs who met weekly for lunchtime seminars. It must have been impressive. Twenty years later, many of those who were around the table are among the voices now calling for more research. David Victor is one. So is Thomas Homer-Dixon, the University of Waterloo futurist who co-authored a New York Times op-ed on geoengineering with Keith last fall. (Keith has returned the favour, penning a chapter in Dixon’s new book, Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future, out next week.) “It’s astonishing that we’ve come to this,” says Ted Parson, a fellow Canadian who organized the group, now a University of Michigan law professor. “But the longer we screw up and fail to get serious action on mitigation, the more attractive the geoengineering option starts to look.”
Keith and a colleague published a paper with the somewhat defensive title, “A serious look at geoengineering,” in 1992. And through his early career as a researcher at Harvard, then a prof at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, he remained one of the few serious academics who would talk publicly on the subject. “David is really one of the most far-seeing thinkers on this question,” says Parson.
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[...] International Obama administration shifts position on possible interrogation-related prosecutions Rebels hijack train carrying 500 in India The history of Earth Day What might happen after scientists mess with bits and pieces of the global climate? [...]
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So plants don’t breathe CO2? We are not carbon based life forms? Is everything I was taught wrong? Does not pumping Co2 into a greenhouse produce larger plants faster? ie.. more food for us? Is this for real? Why must you publish lies and propaganda? Why must we put up with this in Canada? SHAME on you
CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas, there is also nitrous oxide, which can heat up the atmosphere faster than CO2. You can’t produce larger plants with just CO2, you need nutrients from the soils and steady temperature-ranges, or else you won’t have any plants. Plants don’t produce all the food most of hte people on Earth eat. Moreover, plants are extremely sensitive to the slightest changes in temperature and humidity. You should do more reading.
Actually YOU should do more reading, because, I know that No2 will be the next ‘evil’ gas to be attacked by the enviro zombies. Pull your head gently out of the medias ass and think for yourself.
How do you figure our food doesn’t come from plants? are you insane? Wow this really has become bizzaro land.
Ohh and btw… how has the ice caps on mars been affected by our activities? same or not the same? Has or has not the ice cap grown 30% this year? do you know the answer? Do you know about the thing in the sky called the sun? it’s pretty big. Might have some slight effects on our temp, i’m not too sure though.
Errrr….you mean the 30% growth in the Southern Martian Ice cap that occurs……every Martian winter?
Or perhaps you’re talking about year to year changes in albedo that occur as a result of dust storms?
What scares me is people like this guy are allowed to vote. . . and reproduce. . .
Of course they do. But there’s only so much plants can do at a time, and, oddly enough, the plant-life we had developed to be in equilibrium with the natural emissions of CO2. The problem is, we’re pulling it up from down in the ground and putting it out into the atmosphere a hell of a lot faster than plants can adapt. Which gives us a net-gain in CO2 levels in the atmosphere, which traps more solar energy here on the planet, which makes it too hot for the plants to grow well.
http://www.globalwarminghysteria.com/home/
I guess after reading about these scams for thirty years i’ve become jaded
stop talking to hear your own voice
“Spurred by new data suggesting global warming is progressing faster”
Yeah, this new data is about as real as the Easter bunny.
They make a big deal that one part of Antarctica is warming and neglect to mention the continent as a whole is cooling. They neglect to mention the world as a whole is cooling.
This new data is hogwash.
This is the biggest scam in history.
As the late great George Carlin said on his take about people “saving the planet”.(it’s a hoot, have a look on U-Tube for it),” haven’t we done enough already, it was all this meddling that got us here in the first place? Can’t we just leave well enough alone?” This whole bloody idea is preposteous. I just smell another eco-scam from another bunch of hucksters attempting to access taxpayers money from gutless politicians who will do anything to look “green” and buy votes. I have a vision of Al Gore setting up another company to suck up more money like his carbon credit company is doing now. I cannot believe how gullible people are. We just got rid of the televangalists in time for the eco-evangalists to take their place. One buch of snake oil salesmen after another it seems.
Damn those inconvenient facts getting in the way of your mindless belief, eh?
As for your myth that antarctica is cooling?
Already debunked.
No it isn’t, your source is wrong. It has been shown in numerous studies that antarctica is cooling. That page has been selective with data (it uses a single source, Zhang 2007, which is obviously a flawed study because it contradicts all the others).
“Antarctic sea ice is growing despite a warming Southern Ocean”
Ha, did they actually write that? These are the same people who claim the arctic is cooling because they have observed reductions in sea ice. Hilarious.
Meant to write:
These are the same people who claim the arctic is warming because they have observed reductions in sea ice.
I agree with sf.
Lookup chaos theory and most likely you will find weather and climate described as chaotic systems. It’s simply beyond our full understanding, making any prediction based on a deterministic model an educated guess. Even if every last scientist in the field could agree one on climate model, wouldn’t it take at least a thousand years of scientific observation to validate the underlying theories?
What I find most interesting in this debate is how a group of astral physicists studying surface temperatures on the other planets have been largely ignored. They have observed surface temperatures on Mars, for example have been rising and falling just as they have on Earth. They have concluded that solar radiance plays the greatest role in determining climate and predict a cooling trend form 2010 to 2040. Furthermore it appears recent data, as SF suggests, does indeed support the notion that it’s getting cooler. Perhaps this is an “inconvient truth” for climatologists.
I’m all for reducing waste and excess. Looking after the only habitat available to us for the forseeable future just makes sense. There is no shortage of examples in human history of advanced civilisations coming to screeching halt when their consumption of natural resources outpaced the environment’s ability to replenish them.
The “Pan Evaporation Rate’ studies that have been going on for decades indicate that the ‘other’ pollutant most affecting climate is in fact increasing. Particulate matter is actually lessening the amount of sunlight reaching the surface (in some places by as much as 30-40%). The day of and after 911 when all air travel was grounded in North America, the skies became intensely blue and clear across the entire continent. ‘Climate change’ is in fact a push-pull going on between the warming from increased CO2 emissions and the ‘cooling’ resulting from higher levels of particulate matter (read coal fired power plants,etc) If one were to turn down (or even temporarily off) the cooling from all the particulate matter already in the atmosphere, the ‘tug of war’ would favor the warming from CO2 and we would experience runaway warming. It isn’t, therefore ONE thing, ie ‘CO2′ that is at work here. This planetary weather system is much more complicated with many more moving parts than our supercomputers can handle. Tinkering around with the atmosphere instead of addressing the major climate inputs will only make maters worse I fear!
[...] out that we’ve passed the point of no return with global warming. Many scientists believe we already have, that even if every nation on earth immediately curbed their greenhouse gas emissions by 100% it [...]
We aren’t we focusing more on adapting things for change? Weather it be cooling on some regions or warming in others? Almost all of the argument for or against the idea of climate change are conservative. Wanting to keep things the way they are or the way they want them. Imagine how much more we could do with our lives if energy was cleaner faster and took less to produce? Ideas for food production and storage beyond refrigeration and chemical stasis.
So many ideas and technologies stall or die because of conservative thinking. Maybe we should try moving forward for a change instead of sideways.
Many of the worlds cities are close to sea level. Thus, as seas rise, they will be flooded, leading to enormous expense in rebuilding.
Do it now or wait for another New Orleans or Alexandria; their choice.
[...] over water [Christian Science Monitor] Petaluma Eliminates Its Planning Department [CP & DR] Plan B for global warming [Macleans] Get On the Bus [GOOD Magazine] Artists vs. Blight [Wall St. [...]
It makes perfect sense for us to investigate all the options. If you’re serious about mitigating the impact of greenhouse gases, why not investigate all the technological solutions, instead of liking some and arbitrarily rejecting others based on spurious reasoning? How any sincere global warming activist could reject possible solutions like nuclear power is completely beyond me.
It is completely reasonable to investigate “Plan B” style technological solutions. Eventually many themes of science fiction will become science fact, and terraforming is one of them. The most pessimistic climate change scientists are also those who will most readily admit that global warming is inevitable (i.e. if we were magically able to cease all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, we still couldn’t prevent global warming.) If global warming is truly inevitable, it makes sense to research technology that could substantially mitigate its effects.
Seems to play out between those who can accept the planet is changing, those who can’t and those who think if we disappeared that the dinosaurs would roam again. OK that’s harsh but I’m lost when some think we can turn the clock back without breaking some eggs to make the omelet.
If I recall some of the old Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes dealing with terraforming, if you make even the slightest error — Oops! — you destroy the planet.
Let’s hope they got that wrong.
I just can’t believe spraying particulates into the atmosphere is a viable option!? seems counter intuitive. What if we find out those very particulates end up being a genetic mutagen? Can you guarantee the cancer rates wont jump more than they are? Or is that the real agenda?
[...] here’s Jonathan Gatehouse for Maclean’s: The work Keith is engaged in now messes with nature itself, breaking some of the greatest taboos [...]
After enduring this past winter on the Prairies, we could do with a little global warming, not cooling!!
Well after ten years of global cooling I guess it just isn’t cool enough. I would love to get a straight answer from the “global warming” crowd as to what actual global temperature would be suitable for them. At times though history the Earth has been warmer and the Earth has been cooler. No one every seems to ask this most basic question. Where the hell do all the alarmist want this to end. Does the Northern Hemisphere have to be incased in ice 12 months of the year like it has in the past to please them? I really doubt they have an answer as they are too busy peddling their new eco-religion. Cheers
How many people will die if we overshoot cooling targets? Environmental literature has many examples of people trying to manipulate the environment with disastrous consequences.
We already have low-tech solutions which are much safer: revenue-neutral taxation. An example of a system based on it is outlined at Cap-and-Trade Alternative Solutions.
The structural strategy discussed could be more powerful than cap-and-trade and handle a host of environmental issue.
Tags: global warming alternative strategies
PRIME 8 IS A LOSER!!!!!!!
And you are an intellectual superior quite obviously!
[...] – Sunday, May 3, 2009, 10:02 Read More: Climate Change, drought, global warming, ice, temperature MaClean’s, in last week’s issue, meets with David Keith of the University of Calgary to discuss plan B [...]
[...] Maclean’s has featured an article last week on geoengineering – http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/04/22/plan-b-for-global-warming/ [...]
Here’s a thought: rather than messing with the earth’s climate and causing another ice age, why don’t we invest in breakwaters/dikes for coastal cities? It’s not exactly new technology; Holland has been doing it successfully for centuries. It would be both cheaper and less risky.
Also, if global warming turns out to be a politically driven error (as I suspect it will, given that the earth has actually cooled for the past decade) this course would be a lot easier to reverse than a cloud of pollutants in the atmosphere.
Maybe if the sea-level were actually rising that would be a good idea.
My thinking is to invest in the technology (this can’t hurt; know-how is always useful), not the dikes and dams themselves, until/unless the problem actually manifests itself. If the problem turns out to be fictional then this leaves no downside, while if the problem turns out to be real then we have a solution in hand. This is far better than ruining the atmosphere on a hunch.
i like the way jonathon sayes it it help people alot when thet need some thing its all here to help them with there work