Plan B for global warming

Yet even the harshest critics seem to agree further research into geoengineering is both inevitable, and to some extent, desirable. Pierrehumbert offers what may be the most grudging endorsement in the history of grudging endorsements. “I thought it should be obvious to any sane person that this is barking mad. But since it isn’t going away, and in the absence of any international treaty to ban people from doing it, I feel like we do have to have a very small amount of research just to expose the downsides.”

Protests may be futile anyway. Novim, an influential science think tank in California, has started circulating a research blueprint. (Keith is one of the authors. So is Steve Koonin, Obama’s pick for undersecretary for science.) A surprising array of climate change bodies—including environmental groups and one of Washington’s most conservative policy factories—are quietly working on a coordinated lobbying strategy in support of government funding. Money that is surely on its way, given the White House’s new links and interest.

The focus is already shifting to the next big challenge surrounding geoengineering: how to regulate it. The early estimates that make sulphate scattering look both technologically simple and incredibly cheap—an annual cost of less than 0.5 per cent of global economic output, suggests Keith—also make it dangerous. “You need a strategy because it’s not inconceivable that you could see one country, or even a very wealthy individual, decide to intervene in the climate system,” says Stanford’s Victor. Last spring, he organized a Council on Foreign Relations workshop to kick-start discussions about an international regulatory framework. Another meeting, involving representatives from several European nations and the EU, will take place in Portugal next week.

So far, geoengineering doesn’t appear to be on Ottawa’s radar, but it should be. “The Arctic is going to be the first testing ground,” says Michael Ditmore, the executive director of Novim. The think tank’s 70-page research agenda maps out a quick progression from climate modelling, to lab experiments, then atmospheric tests. “We need to build an international consensus,” he says. But the sulphate-sunshield testing may already have begun. The Russians, keen supporters, tried to put it on the G8 agenda in 2008, and this past summer, Yuri Izrael, their senior climate scientist, announced plans to conduct his own experiments, although it’s not clear if he has followed through.

Keith, who has strong ties to the North—an avid outdoorsman, he has hiked, skied and canoed across much of the Arctic—isn’t that worried. In his mind, there is no question that seeding the stratosphere would be a boon to Canada, reversing the upward temperature trend and protecting the North’s fragile environment. It’s around the equator, where the benefits—and more importantly risks—are harder to predict.

Besides, geoengineering will hardly happen overnight. For all the worry over new data, climate change remains a slow-moving problem, he says. And the research he and other proponents are talking about is merely prudent, like having a fire extinguisher in your house. All the controversy might just spur some meaningful action, Keith argues. “We’re in a phony war on climate. Real money is being spent, but it’s being pissed away. Programs are being enacted, but they’re not close to what you would do if you are serious.”

He pulls up another file on his computer, a joke graphic plotting a colleague’s research interests along the axes of importance and probability of success. A good scientist has a range of projects, says Keith, from the mundane sure bets, to the spectacular long shots. Geoengineering is the perfect synthesis because “it actually might be important, and we might have to do it.”

It’s a neat explanation, but it leaves the whole matter of hubris out of the equation. More than 2,200 years ago, the Greek mathematician Archimedes came up with a formula to explain the workings of the lever. It led him to boast he could move the whole world, if only he had a sufficiently distant place to stand. There’s a famous illustration from the early 19th century of the old Greek doing just that. Keith has included it in a chapter he’s written on geoengineering for a soon-to-be-published textbook. Perhaps someday it too will hang on his office wall.