Page 251 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

global sulfate cloud; imagine a night sky in which sixth-magnitude stars are invis-
ible, with a barely discernible Milky Way and fewer visible star clusters or galaxies.
This would be worse than Project West Ford. It would constitute a worldwide
cultural catastrophe.
When contemplating planetary-scale engineering, regionally or nationally
based technical initiatives are not nearly broad enough. As the Tyndall Cen-
tre for Climate Change Research pointed out, the equity issues are likely to be
substantial: “There will be winners and losers associated with geo-engineering
(as there will be with climate change itself ). Should the losers be compensated,
and if so how? Where the losses include non-market goods, which may be irre-
placeable, how are they to be valued?” The process of discussion and decision
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making needs to include an interdisciplinary mix of historians, ethicists, policy-
makers, and a broad and inclusive array of international and intergenerational
participants—features that have been sorely lacking in recent meetings, which
featured mostly white, Western, scientifically trained, and technocratically ori-
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ented males. In fact, the field’s current lack of diversity indicates that some of
the most critical questions have probably not even been posed! For example, how
would geoengineering alter fundamental human relationships to nature? Does
this or the other questions posed so far have univocal answers? How do they
play out in different cultures? Has anyone considered this? A large-scale envi-
ronmental technological fix framed as a response to undesired climate change
could be seen as an act imposed on the multitude by the will of the few, for the
primary benefit of those already in power. Many would undoubtedly interpret it
as a hostile or an aggressive act. Isn’t geoengineering in the category of “Western
solutions to global problems”? Rather than engaging in speculative large-scale
climate engineering, isn’t it better to reduce the effects of greenhouse gas emis-
sions—by reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler
at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, offered a “rock the boat” anal-
ogy to illustrate the point:

Think of the climate as a small boat on a rather choppy ocean. Under normal cir-
cumstances the boat will rock to and fro, and there is a finite risk that the boat
could be overturned by a rogue wave. But now one of the passengers has decided
to stand up and is deliberately rocking the boat ever more violently. Someone sug-
gests that this is likely to increase the chances of the boat capsizing. Another pas-
senger then proposes that with his knowledge of chaotic dynamics he can counter-
balance the first passenger and, indeed, counter the natural rocking caused by the
waves. But to do so he needs a huge array of sensors and enormous computational
resources to be ready to react efficiently but still wouldn’t be able to guarantee abso-

234 | tHe Climate enGineerS