Plan B for global warming

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.