Beware “Magic Bullets.”

On November 18, 2006 a closed to the public meeting was conducted in Washington D.C. by researchers from both NASA and laceName w:st="on">StanfordlaceName> laceType w:st="on">UniversitylaceType>.  See this link for available details: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/11/18/talk_of_manipulating_earths_climate/

The subject of this secretive conclave was averting significant anthropogenic (human caused) climate change by means of introducing millions of tons of aerosols into the Earth’s atmosphere on a YEARLY basis. This would reduce the amount of near-ultra-violet wavelength light reaching the planet’s surface by several percent. I believe this to be possibly the WORST idea I have ever heard of. I’ll explain why below.

Awareness of the reality of global warming has now reached almost everywhere—except perhaps for the White House. A critical mass of public support is building in favor of doing something decisive to redress the problem. We should not expect that the powers that be will voluntarily accept any limits upon their ability to generate ever increasing monetary profits, although their profits are gained at the expense of the planetary biosphere and of humanity’s future.

Apparently these forces are preparing a diabolically clever counterattack against global warming’s triggering restraints upon business as usual. I learned of this when I attended a lecture based largely upon concepts developed at the conservative Hoover Institute. The speaker’s thesis was a simple one: Global warming could be halted without any negative side effects by simply injecting tens of millions of tons of sub-micron sized aerosolized sulfate particles into the Earth’s stratosphere at an altitude of about 25 kilometers, or about 15 miles. These particles would disperse across the entire planet and remain aloft for about five to six years. The initial cost, according to the speaker, would be about one billion dollars, with yearly incremental costs of around one hundred million dollars to maintain the aerosol density. These particles would allow for essentially all of the Earth’s visible light radiation to pass through the aerosol unabated; however, the near ultraviolet component of atmospheric sunlight would be largely filtered out. These ultraviolet photons, comprising about four percent of all solar photons (that is to say, of all sunlight) which are passed to the ground by our atmosphere, are considerably more energetic than those of visible light. They account for among other things, sunburn and skin cancer.

According to the proponents of this strategy, humanity could then continue to burn hydrocarbons without limit and without any environmental constraint! We could drive polluting SUV’s without guilt. Business as usual could continue indefinitely. Truly, this would be the ultimate free lunch! As to profligate usage of hydrocarbon energy sources leading to hydrocarbon depletion and thus forcing us into a program of conservation of petroleum, the speaker stated that the immense deposits of oil shale deposits and tar sands found in the USA and Canada mean that “there will always be plenty of oil.”

The speaker’s presentation was based mainly upon an apparently unpublished study (which the speaker was kind enough to provide to me) entitled as follows:

GEOENGINEERING:  Albedo Modulation Approaches To Preferred Climates As The Atmospheric CO₂ Level Rises Toward The “Agricultural Optimum. Prepared as a discussion brief by Dr. Lowell Wood for consideration at the Energy Modeling Forum’s Workshop on Critical Issues in Climate Change (Prof. John Prof. John Weyant, Director; Dr. Haroon Kheshgi, Session convenor), Snowmass CO, 26 July-4 August 2005, based primarily on studies done by Drs. Edward Teller, Roderick Hyde and himself (University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore CA, and Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford CA U.S.A.). Opinions expressed herein are those of the preparer only.[i]

I’ll cut right to this study’s summary, which I’m reproducing below, and which appears grammatically as it does in the printed in the copy that I received:

SUMMARY: Significant Earth-albedo modulation–Well-known to occur naturally, e.g., volcanoes–May be technically feasible to do “as you wish” •Many distinct modalities–Wide spectrum of technologies, effects, risks, benefits,…•Negligible economic cost: ≤$1 B/year ⇒100% offset–Non-economic costs presently uncertain (magnitude; sign) –Seemingly capable of fully offsetting any GHG warming –or Ice Age-scale cooling–Proffers several other possible benefits •Reduction of peak summer Ts: bright-but-cool–Agricultural advantages, e.g., more food, water efficiency gains •Suppression of near-UV insolation-at-ground-level–Less photo-damage to people,…plants –direct-&-indirect •Reduced sunburn, skin cancer,…crop lossage,…•Politically do-able, e.g., no ‘forced march’ to ≥5X CO₂-drop–Satisfies Rio Framework spec for cost-efficient solutions •Ethically superior, e.g., fair access to energy technologies •Aesthetic gains, e.g., bluer skies, redder sunsets,… •Subject to inexpensive, near-term evaluation–Modeling–Sub-scale, “out in the real world” experiments.[ii]

Glancing at these rather astonishing conclusions, one section in particular, leapt out at me:

“Suppression of near-UV insolation-at-ground-level – Less photo-damage to people, plants–direct-&-indirect. Reduced sunburn, skin cancer, crop lossage,…”[iii]

Suppressing the near ultraviolet (UV) spectrum is a horrifically misguided idea, because many insects including honey bees depend upon UV radiation to select flowers and other plants for feeding upon.[iv] If the flower is not illuminated by UV, they will reject it for feeding.[v] Given this reality, substantially decreasing ambient UV levels, as depicted in the summary above, could cause flowers to no be longer “illuminated” by UV; and could destroy the ability to feed of many insects, including honey bees and other pollinators upon which our agriculture depends. Further, honey bees[vi], numerous insects including monarch butterflies,[vii] and many other animals[viii] rely upon UV radiation for direction finding—everything from the dance of the honey bee to long distance bird migration.[ix] Quoting one source:

For example, it is now known that while honey bees do not possess the fine-grained retinal mosaics of humans, they can navigate with precision by optically scanning the sky's polarization patterns through their ultraviolet receptors.[x]

All of the above strongly suggest that life on Earth has evolved to take full advantage of high energy UV photons for direction finding, feeding etc.  This seems to be because their higher energy allows for navigation and foraging even when the sun is obscured by clouds. Knocking out much of this UV radiation could severely disrupt the ability of vast numbers of species—possibly millions of species—to navigate, feed, and eat.  This would crash our planetary ecology very quickly if it were to occur.  Without the pollination work of insects, global famine would quickly follow. And of course, there would be no way to remove these UV screening particles in the atmosphere—five or six years would be required for it to completely settle back down to ground.

            At the deepest level, I believe that this stratospheric UV blocking strategy is likely to be hugely counterproductive, even if it were to work as claimed without major environmental side effects.  This is because global warming is NOT our species’ primary problem.  Rather, it is a symptom, an effect of something much deeper.  We evolved, as I’ve discussed extensively above, with little ability to seriously impact our environment, and as a consequence our most fundamental assumptions about reality treat nature as an infinite resource.  In The Future of Life, Edwin O Wilson states:

The relative indifference to the environment springs, I believe, from deep within human nature. The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future. To look neither far ahead nor far afield is elemental in a Darwinian sense. We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination.  It is, people say, just good common sense. Why do they think in this shortsighted way? The reason is simple: It is a hardwired part of our Paleolithic heritage. For hundreds of millennia, those who worked for short term gain within a small circle of relatives and friends lived longer and left more offspring—even when their collective striving caused their chiefdoms and empires to crumble around them. That long view that might have saved their distant descendants required a vision and extended altruism difficult to marshal. The great dilemma of environmental reasoning stems from this conflict between short-term and long-term values. To select values for the near future of one’s own tribe or country is relatively easy. To select values for the distant future of the whole planet also is relatively easy—in theory at least. To combine the two visions to create a universal environmental ethic is, on the other hand, very difficult. But combine them we must, because a universal ethic is the only guide by which humanity and the rest of life can be safely conducted through the bottleneck into which our species has foolishly blundered.[xi]

At present, humanity’s choices are not made on the basis of the long view but rather are almost entirely based upon very short-term material enrichment considerations of the ruling few. Our civilization is controlled by its most powerful form of organization, the multi-national corporation—particularly energy corporations—acting with the legitimacy of the nation-state governments which they control (think Bush/Cheney and Big Oil, for example). Numerous researchers, as I document in Infinity's Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization, have concluded that we are at or near the global peak production of oil.

            Studies by these researchers and many others consistently show that the oil shale deposits such as those in Alberta do not and cannot represent a solution or a replacement for petroleum reserves that will soon be diminishing ever more rapidly. The EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) is far too low, and the environmental constraints are far too high.

Anything which appears to negate the effects of global warming such as the stratospheric blocking approach seem likely, to me at least, to prevent more appropriate measures from being taken. Business as usual will prevail for a few additional years, during which time even more people will be born than would have been the case otherwise; global population overshoot will increase further; even more environmental devastation will occur; and then hydrocarbon energy per capita will begin a rapid decrease.

During this period, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, apparently decoupled from the environmental consequences of global warming, would have increased far above all previous projections. Not only will this set of events trigger catastrophic collapse of global civilization as the oil supply runs low, but once this crash has occurred, the aerosols will be gone after a few years and then the full fury of hyper global warming will be unleashed.  This second punch has the potential to take down industrial civilization everywhere—a far worse scenario than occurs when the energy crisis occurs sooner and is not decoupled from global warming.

A metaphor for this can be provided by Albert Speer’s comments after WWII on the V-I and V-II projects.  These rockets rained tens of thousands of weapons onto London and Antwerp, but were not able to meaningfully influence the outcome of the war. Speer said that he believed the allocation of resources and skilled personnel to the projects was detrimental to the war effort.  Speer believed that if these human and material resources had been applied instead to building thousands of additional ME 262 jet fighters[xii] in 1944, the outcome of the war could have been materially affected.[xiii]

The speaker that I recently heard also proposed building nuclear power plants to “cook” oil shale deposits into oil. In my book Infinity’s Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization, I’ve discussed the limitations of nuclear power utilization in “cooking” oil shale. And as I’ve also previously discussed, nuclear power suffers from severe fuel constraints of its own, and thus is likely not the optimal choice for energy generation at all. However, if any new nuclear plants are to be built, it would be best to use to use them for electricity production as part of a program of moving rapidly to electric rail for long haul transportation. This would allow the quick phase-out of energy-inefficient long haul trucking fleets, long distance bussing, and oil burning locomotives, at considerable hydrocarbon fuel savings.

Humans, as I discussed throughout my book, can only learn fundamentally new behavioral algorithms through the mechanism of crisis which occurs when old behavioral algorithms fail amid novel circumstances, leading to existential crisis.  Survival under such conditions forces innovation--or compels death (or collapse in the case of civilization) in its absence. Once the lessons which are compeled by crisis are learned and incorporated, civilization will be able to reconstitute itself, freed from its previous delusions about reality.  Life and the process of counter-entropic civilizational development will go on.  If, however, a total collapse occurs, then surviving humanity is forced into a Stone Age existence.  All knowledge of prior civilization is lost, and due to lack of easily utilizable energy sources (already exhausted), a high energy, high technology civilization cannot be restarted. That is why this so called “solution” to global warming is so dangerous.

It is also disingenuous. Dr. Lowell Wood, the person who is apparently principally responsible for this study, is, according to my personal observation, a lifelong flack for the military-industrial complex. I recall seeing him in operation at the founding meeting of the Mars Society in Boulder Colorado in 1998. Wood, who impressed me at the time as being a portly, arrogant, and thoroughly unpleasant man, used his opportunity to speak to the attendees to excoriate all of us for failing to have gone to bat for former President G.H.W. Bush’s $500 billion Mars extravaganza in 1989. “Shame on all of you” Wood admonished us all. “You should never again look a gift horse in the mouth.” And so on, ad nauseum.

What Wood actually meant, in my opinion, was that his masters expected that their transfer of hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars to the military-industrial complex, thinly disguised as a Mars exploration initiative, should receive uncritical support from all groups advocating human spaceflight. The support of these groups would give the patina of popular support to a program of massive graft. Unfortunately, most people could see Bush’s gambit for what it truly was and acted accordingly. For example, Mars Society founder and President Dr. Robert Zubrin, rightly denounced it as “Battlestar Galactica.”

The sudden end of the Cold War had presented the military-industrial complex with a quandary: How to continue to engorge themselves at the public trough after the Soviet Union and its empire had suddenly imploded? A hyper-expensive “Mars initiative” seemed to be just what was needed. Except that public support, even from self-avowed “space activists,” never materialized. At least a modicum of public support is needed to convince Congress to agree to appropriate vast amounts of public monies for such purposes. In 1989, much to Lowell Wood’s chagrin, such support was not forthcoming.

Wood and the other flacks for the military-industrial complex have learned how to transfer the yearning of many citizens to create an open-ended, space-faring human future into lobbying support for their masters’ bottom lines. They are indeed diabolically clever in their manipulation and exploitation not only of human fears, but also of human hopes and dreams.

So Wood’s latest gambit on behalf of his corporate patrons is to parlay public angst over global warming into support for continued pollution-intensive “business as usual.” All that is needed to transform this angst into support is a “magic bullet” which, when fired into the stratosphere, makes unlimited burning of hydrocarbons just fine, without any need for legal restraint. Accordingly, we can do away with all of those pesky anti-pollution laws now! Carbon emissions tax—forget it—it’s no longer needed! The ultimate free lunch has arrived! And it even provides “fair access to energy technologies.” Not to mention “Bluer skies, redder sunsets!” Can mass public support be far behind?

This material clearly shows careful focus grouping. Most probably, the corporate oligarchs are readying a new strategy that involves admitting the existence of a massive global warming problem. After building public anxiety to the level of sheer terror, their “magic bullet” solution will suddenly be unveiled. This will—miracle of miracles—allow life to go on as usual. In fact we will even be able to pollute at will, since increased CO₂ pollution is actually described as being a good thing in Wood’s paper: With even more CO₂  in the atmosphere, plants will grow more vigorously, allowing for billions more people to be fed! Wood’s manuscript actually states:

Titanic agro-benefits from 800±ppmv [CO₂]|ΔT≤0: $0.3-1 TT/yr.–Far higher [CO₂], same/lower T, far less UV, same ground-level sunlight in the ‘photosynthesis action spectrum’–“How much better can it get?”–Compelling answer to “From whence comes the food for ~4 B more people?” •“Feed your plants better, and they’ll feed you more-&-better!”[xiv]

Wood actually extols the benefits of polluting our way to CO₂ levels of 800 parts per million (it is now 384 parts per million) and beyond! This will doom humanity and much of the biosphere in the medium term, but, oh, what immense profits our corporatist rulers can reap in their temporarily-extended short-term feeding frenzy at the public trough thanks to this deceptive ploy!

Do not be deceived by this corporatist “magic bullet” sleight of hand. Do look any and all “gift horses” in the mouth carefully!