Page 220 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

In Japan, engineers imagined that the icy Sea of okhotsk could be tamed by
deflecting the warm Kuroshio Current with a dam or one-way water valve built
at the Tatarsk Strait. And in a 1970 geoengineering experiment thought suitable
only for testing on a computer model (aren’t they all?), the Japanese geoscien-
tific speculator Keiji Higuichi wondered what would happen to the global atmo-
spheric and oceanic circulation and thus the world’s climate if the Drake Passage,
between the tip of South America and Antarctica, was blocked by an ice dam.
one possibility was the onset of a new ice age. 35
Russian scientists warned of possible climate disruption from such mega-
projects. Borisov admitted that the large-scale climatic and ecological effects of
his Bering Strait dam could not be fully predicted, nor could they be confined
within the borders of any one national state; rather, they would directly involve
the national interests of the Soviet Union, Canada, Denmark, and the United
States and indirectly affect many countries in other areas that might experience
climate change caused by the project. With such a dam in place, the middle-
latitude winters would be milder due to the warming of Arctic and polar air
masses. He thought areas such as the Sahara would be much better watered and
would perhaps turn into steppe land or savannah. Direct benefits of an ice-free
Arctic ocean would include new, more-direct shipping routes between East
Asia and Europe, while, by his overly optimistic calculations, sea-level rise would
be modest, even with the melting of the Greenland ice cap. Yet such climatic
changes elsewhere were of little concern to the Soviets.
Larisa R. Rakipova noted that a substantial Arctic warming could cool the
o
o
winters in Africa by 5 C (9 F), “leading to a complete disruption of the living
36
conditions for people, animals, and plants,” and oleg A. Drozdov warned that
the warming of the Arctic would lead to a total breakdown of moisture exchange
between the oceans and continents with excess rain in the Far East and great
aridity in Europe. The resulting drastic changes in the soils, vegetation, water
regime, and other natural conditions would have widespread negative ecological,
economic, and social consequences (25). As in the fictional case described earlier
in The Evacuation of England, Rusin and Flit also wondered what might happen
if the Americans implemented one of their projects and turned the Gulf Stream
toward the shores of America: “In Europe the temperature would drop sharply
and glaciers would begin to advance rapidly” (22). In his book The Gulf Stream
(1973), T. F. Gaskell pointed out, “This is why such natural phenomena as the
Gulf Stream have political implications.” Geoengineers should realize that the
37
same is true of a wide range of natural phenomena.
In addition to sea ice, the Soviets were also battling the “curse of the Siberi-
ans”—permafrost as thick as 1,600 feet in places. one suggestion to remove it

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