Page 258 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

States would be a full participant in the World Weather Watch, which certainly
involved observation and prediction, if not understanding and control, and
would take steps to support “the theoretical study and evaluation of inadvertent
climate modification and the feasibility of intentional climate modification” (22).
While the WWW is still functioning and there have been numerous integrated
assessments of climate change, recall that even as Fletcher was writing this piece,
Project Popeye and operation Motorpool were under way in the jungles of
Southeast Asia, giving a black eye to schemes for the intentional modification of
the environment.
Budyko included a section on climate modification in his book Climatic
Changes (1974). Noting how difficult it had been to control urban air pollution,
he predicted that it would be even more difficult to prevent an increase in the
carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and a growth in waste heat release.
Agreeing with Fletcher, he concluded that “in the near future climate modifica-
41
tion will become necessary in order to maintain current climatic conditions.”
Budyko was quite skeptical of plans to remove the polar ice, rehydrate Africa, or
redirect ocean currents, commenting that it remained “quite unclear how they
may influence climate” (239). He was more favorable, however, toward the pos-
sibility of triggering instabilities in large-scale atmospheric flows.
Budyko’s preferred technique—one discussed by the National Academy
of Sciences in 1992 and still under discussion—involved increasing the aerosol
content of the lower stratosphere using aircraft or rocket delivery systems. In a
back-of-the-envelope calculation, he estimated that a 2 percent reduction in
direct solar radiation and a 0.3 percent decrease in total radiation were needed
to cool the Earth by several degrees. This could be accomplished by generating
an artificial cloud of 600,000 tons of sulfuric acid, the result, under favorable
circumstances and assumptions, of burning some 100,000 tons of sulfur per
year. Budyko considered this to be a “negligible” quantity compared with other
anthropogenic and natural sources. He wrote that “such amounts [of sulfur]
are not at all important in environmental pollution” (240), with the important
exceptions of the unfavorable effects of such injections on the ozone layer and
on agricultural activity, which required further study. Budyko was aware that
current simplified theories were inadequate to specify all the possible changes
in weather conditions resulting from modifications of the aerosol layer of the
stratosphere. obviously, he believed then, and it holds true today, that deliberate
climate modification would be premature before the consequences could be cal-
culated with confidence.
In 1974 William Kellogg and Stephen Schneider published an article in Sci-
ence titled “Climate Stabilization: For Better or Worse?” one of their major

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