Table Of ContentContents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
The Prophet
A Planetary Cooler
God’s Machine
Big Science
The Blue Marble
Doping the Stratosphere
A Little Cash on the Side
The Romance of Clouds
A Global Thermostat
Human Nature
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Copyright © 2010 by Jeff Goodell
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write
to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New
York 10016.
www.hmhco.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Goodell, Jeff.
How to cool the planet : geoengineering and the audacious quest
to fix earth’s climate / Jeff Goodell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-618-99061-0
1. Climatic changes. 2. Climatic changes—Environmental
aspects. 3. Global warming. 4. Engineering geology.
5. Environmental engineering.
I. Title.
QC981.8.C5G666 2010
551.6—dc22 2009046565
eISBN 978-0-547-48713-7
v3.0316
For Michele
Nature is always better when left to itself—
but for what purpose?
—ANSEL ADAMS
1
The Prophet
I GREW UP in California, where human ingenuity is a force of nature.
Computers, the Internet, Hollywood, blue jeans, the Beach Boys—they are all
inventions of my home state. The economic and cultural power of these things
is obvious. What’s less obvious is how they transformed the place that gave
birth to them. Until the early 1970s, my hometown of Silicon Valley was
mostly orchards and Victorian ranch houses, with rows of cherry and apricot
trees that marked the coming of spring with delicate white and pink blossoms.
During the PC revolution, I watched those orchards fall to make room for
glassy high-tech office buildings. The hillside where I saw the footprint of a
mountain lion in the 1970s is now cluttered with houses. Silicon Valley is still
a beautiful place, but the blossoms are mostly gone, the sky is hazy, and the
beaches are crowded. This is happening everywhere, of course—it’s the story
of modern life. And there are many upsides to this transformation, including
the fact that the ideas and technologies born in California have been a great
boon to humanity. But you have to be pretty obtuse to grow up in a place like
Silicon Valley and not be aware that progress sometimes comes at a price.
I left the Valley in my midtwenties and moved to New York City to begin a
career as a journalist. My connection to the Valley served me well. I spent the
next decade or so writing about the business and culture of my hometown for
publications such as Rolling Stone and the New York Times Magazine. But my
perspective changed after I became the father of three kids. The future of
digital culture was suddenly much less interesting to me than the survival of
the human race. I spent a lot of time with climate scientists while I was
reporting my previous book, which was about the coal industry. It was a
sobering experience. I think of myself as an optimistic person, but the deeper
you probe into the climate crisis, the darker the story gets. It’s hard not to read
it as a parable about the dangers of living in a high-tech society. (No matter
how hard they tried, a world of hunter-gatherers could not cook the planet.)
And it’s harder still not to wonder whether the smartest, most technologically
sophisticated creatures that ever existed on earth will figure out a solution for
this looming catastrophe. My friends in Silicon Valley are sure we can. They
believe we are one big idea—Thin film solar! Cellulosic ethanol! High-altitude
wind power!—away from solving this crisis. I used to think that, too.
In early 2006, a friend emailed me an essay by Paul Crutzen that was about
to be published in an academic journal. Crutzen is a Dutch atmospheric
chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering research on the ozone hole
in the atmosphere. In his note, my friend—a successful entrepreneur in the
solar power industry—wrote: “Read this. We are in deep trouble. We’re going
to geoengineer the damn planet now!”
I may have heard the word “geoengineer” once or twice before, but I knew
next to nothing about it, other than the fact that it generally referred to people
with outlandish ideas about how to counteract global warming. I had a vague
memory of reading an article about a handful of scientists—I imagined them
toiling in a lab buried deep in a mountain somewhere in New Mexico—who
wanted to launch mirrors into space or dump iron into the ocean in a desperate
attempt to cool the earth. The title of Crutzen’s essay certainly amused me:
“Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to
Resolve a Policy Dilemma?” The phrase “albedo enhancement” sounded like a
procedure a surgeon might perform on a lonely middle-aged man.
When I started to read, however, I was captivated. The basic facts were
familiar: carbon dioxide (CO) levels in the earth’s atmosphere are rising to
2
concentrations not seen in twenty million years, with no end in sight.
Meanwhile, the earth’s climate is warming even faster than scientists had
predicted just a few years ago. What was new in Crutzen’s paper—new to me,
anyway—was the view that some of this accelerated warming was driven not
only by high levels of CO but also by the progress we have made in the fight
2
against smog and other traditional pollutants. The tiny particles that cause
some kinds of air pollution act like mirrors in the sky, reflecting sunlight away
from the earth, which cools the planet. As we eliminate pollution, the particles
vanish, letting us all breathe easier—but also letting more sunlight in, which
heats up the earth ever faster. As Crutzen pointed out, by trying to save kids
from asthma, we were inadvertently making the climate crisis worse.
What to do? Clean air is obviously a good thing: air pollution kills people.
The simplest solution would be to cut greenhouse gas emissions. If anyone
should have been confident that we could take bold action to address this
problem, it should have been Crutzen. After all, he was in part responsible for
the fact that the leading nations of the world had come together in the late
1980s to confront another global threat, the ozone hole. In that case, once the
risk of ozone damage was clear, action was swift: an international treaty, the
Montreal Protocol, was negotiated and signed in 1987, banning ozone-
depleting substances. It was an inspiring example of political leaders from
around the world coming together to confront a grave threat in a rational and
decisive way. But when it came to dealing with greenhouse gases, Crutzen was
not so sanguine that a political solution could be found. He understood that the
problem of reducing greenhouse gases is far deeper and more complex than
eliminating chlorofluorocarbons from refrigerators and air conditioners, in part
because greenhouse gas emissions are, in some ways, a proxy for economic
health and prosperity. In fact, Crutzen called the notion that industrialized
nations would join together and significantly reduce emissions “a pious wish.”
Instead, Crutzen offered a radical proposal: rather than focusing entirely on
cutting greenhouse gas emissions, maybe it was time to think about addressing
the potentially catastrophic consequences of global warming in a different way.
If the problem is too much heat, an obvious solution would be to find a way to
reduce that heat. One method to do that would be to increase the earth’s
reflectivity in ways that would not cause asthma attacks and kill people. As
Crutzen knew as well as anyone, about 30 percent of the energy from sunlight
that hits the earth is immediately reflected back into space, while the other 70
percent is trapped here by CO and other greenhouse gases, warming the
2
planet. If we could reflect just 1 or 2 percent more sunlight away from the
earth’s surface, it would be like popping up an umbrella on the beach on a hot
summer day. Crutzen called it albedo enhancement (“albedo” is just another
word for reflectivity).
There are lots of ideas about how one might deflect sunlight away from the
planet, from launching mirrors into space to painting roofs white. But as
Crutzen pointed out in his paper, the simplest way to do it might be to add a
relatively small number of sulfate particles—you can think of them as dust—to
the upper atmosphere. The dust would remain in the stratosphere for only a
year or so before raining out—so any serious geoengineering scheme would
require continuous injection. But unlike pollution in the lower atmosphere,
which is where the nasty stuff we breathe resides, pumping a modest amount of
particles into the upper atmosphere would pose little danger to human health.
The effect they might have on the chemistry of the stratosphere, especially the
ozone layer that protects the earth from the sun’s ultraviolet light, was, Crutzen
admitted, unclear. However, his preliminary calculations suggested that the
risks were low.
Would it work? On a scientific level, there is nothing complicated about it.
Light colors reflect sunlight; dark colors absorb it. That’s why asphalt is hot on
your bare feet and white clothes are popular in the summer. The same basic
idea holds true for the planet. Anything that reflects sunlight (ice, white roofs,
certain kinds of clouds and air pollution) contributes to cooling; anything that
absorbs sunlight (open water, evergreen forests in northern latitudes, asphalt
parking lots) contributes to heating.
In his paper, Crutzen talked specifically about the cooling effect of
volcanoes. For years, scientists have known that the sulfate particles that
volcanoes spew into the air are remarkably effective at scattering sunlight. If
the eruption is large enough, they can have a global impact on temperatures.
One of the most recent examples is Mount Pinatubo, a volcano in the
Philippines that erupted in 1991, lowering the earth’s temperature by a degree
or so for several years. A more extreme example of the phenomenon is the so-
called nuclear winter—a theory that was much debated in the 1980s,
suggesting that a nuclear war could inject enough soot and particles into the
atmosphere to block out the sun and send temperatures plummeting.
Crutzen didn’t say how we might go about mimicking volcanoes to offset
global warming, except to suggest that there are lots of ways to inject particles
into the stratosphere, including spraying them out of high-altitude aircraft,
pushing them up a long hose tethered to a stratospheric balloon, or even
shooting them up into the sky with artillery. As far as engineering challenges
go, it wouldn’t be too difficult. And even more important, it would be cheap. In
Crutzen’s estimation, we could engineer the earth’s climate for less than 1
percent of the annual global military budget.
This all sounded interesting and provocative. It took me a while, however, to
grasp just how mind-bending Crutzen’s proposal really was. Here was one of
the world’s top atmospheric scientists suggesting that the climate crisis was so
urgent and potentially catastrophic that the only way to save ourselves might
be by filling the stratosphere with man-made pollution from artificial
volcanoes. Had it really come to this?
In the media world—at least the part of the media world that takes science
seriously—Crutzen’s essay raised a ruckus. For one thing, the whole idea of
changing the reflectivity of the planet as a way to offset global warming
sounded downright wacky, even coming from a serious guy like Crutzen. As
for injecting particles into the stratosphere—wasn’t the goal to clear the air, not
further pollute it? Geoengineering seemed like an idea ripped out of the pages
of a sci-fi novel, conjuring up associations with Dr. Evil and crazy Cold War
physicists and the hubris of the techno-elite. Perhaps worst of all, Crutzen’s
argument implied that the whole strategy of relying on an international
agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions was misguided—or at least grossly
insufficient.
This was not a message the world was ready to hear. An Inconvenient Truth,
Al Gore’s documentary about global warming, had been released the same
summer, waking millions of people up to the compelling scientific evidence
behind the climate crisis. Progressive politicians around the world were
beginning a major push to reduce emissions, trying, at least in public, to give
the appearance that they were eager to fulfill their commitment to the Kyoto
Protocol, the international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions signed in
1997. In Europe, the first market for greenhouse gas emissions trading was just
taking off. Financial analysts predicted that the market would someday become
the largest in the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of
emissions credits being swapped every year, creating a powerful incentive for
power companies to cut pollution and reap the rewards.
In this context, Crutzen was a turncoat, a man who dared to betray the
growing movement to fight global warming just at the moment when it was
gaining momentum. “This sounds to me like a miracle fix cooked up by Big
Oil to keep the masses fat, dumb and happy,” one blogger commented. “You
keep driving and we’ll get some smart scientists to air-condition the planet!”
But Crutzen’s logic was not easy to dismiss. If there was one thing I had
learned from the four years I’d spent researching and writing about coal, the
dirtiest of fossil fuels, it was that the world was not going to stop burning black
rocks anytime soon. Coal-fired power plants generate half the electricity in
America. In the developing world, the percentage is even higher—India and
China both get about 70 percent of their electricity from coal. The Chinese
consume almost three times as much coal as we do in the United States—
nearly three billion tons a year (although per capita, they consume far less).
Coal is the engine that is lifting people in the developing world out of
poverty, not only giving them the power to light their homes and cook their
food but also transforming them, for better or worse, into Western-style
consumers. Unfortunately, coal is also the most carbon-intensive of fossil fuels,
