Page 247 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

files or networks. Hackers typically have “big projects” about which they obsess.
one project of the computer climate engineers is to cut off the sunbeams in a
simple climate model to “prove” that the Earth will cool and sea ice will grow.
Much more sophisticated modelers have shown that the unknown consequences
of doing this may be very, very serious. When people propose to cool the Earth
by 2°C (3.6°F) using a technical fix, they are overlooking the fact that Earth has
not yet warmed 2°C in the past century. So we are really dealing with dangerous
speculation about speculation. A more apt term might be “geohacking,” which
is hopefully harmless enough if the practice is restricted to tinkering with com-
puter models and never “sees the light of day” in the form of potentially danger-
ous outdoor demonstration projects or planetary-scale tinkering.
Placing his faith firmly in progress, engineer and policy analyst David Keith
is of the opinion that scientific understanding grants us increased Archimedean
leverage and an “ever greater capability to deliberately engineer environmental
processes on a planetary scale.” Echoing William Suddards Franklin and his
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grasshopper of long ago or Ross Hoffman and his misunderstanding of the but-
terfly effect, Keith maintains that “accurate knowledge of the atmospheric state
and its stability could permit leverage of small, targeted perturbations to effect
proportionately larger alterations of the atmospheric dynamics.” But no mat-
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ter how great the scientific wizardry, the modern Archimedes still has no place
to stand, no acceptable lever or fulcrum, and no way to predict where the Earth
will roll if tipped. Failing ultimate control, geoengineering may indeed have the
potential to enrage the chaotic “climate beast” of the influential geochemist and
oceanographer Wallace Broecker. 16

terraforming and beyond
Geoengineering is a subset of “terraforming,” or the engineering of planetary
environments. Martyn J. Fogg reviewed the history and some of the technical
aspects of “orchestrated planetary change” in his book on this subject, published,
curiously, by the Society of Automotive Engineers, a group that one might
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expect would be most familiar with automobile air-conditioning. He defined
“planetary engineering” as “the application of technology for the purpose of influ-
encing the global properties of a planet” and “terraforming” as the process of
“enhancing the capacity of an extraterrestrial planetary environment to support
life. The ultimate in terraforming would be to create an uncontained planetary
biosphere emulating all the functions of the biosphere of the Earth—one that
would be fully habitable for human beings.” 18

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