Page 260 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

geoengineers discuss carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and solar radia-
tion management techniques at their meetings. Also in 1977, the National Acad-
emy of Sciences looked at a variety of ideas to reduce global warming, should
it ever become dangerous, and concluded that investing in renewable energy
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was more practical than climate engineering. That same year, Freeman Dyson
estimated the scale and cost of an emergency program to plant fast-growing
trees to control the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning.
He later suggested transporting and dispersing sulfates into the stratosphere
using smokestack emissions from burning high-sulfur coal in power plants.
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Recently, he proposed dumping snow in Antarctica to reduce sea levels. These
wild ideas, not taken seriously, were intended as illustrations of how to buy time
for society to switch to non-carbon-based energy sources.
In a 1983 report for the National Research Council on “changing climate,”
Thomas Schelling wrote that “technologies for global cooling, perhaps by inject-
ing the right particles into the stratosphere, perhaps by subtler means, [might]
become economical during coming decades.” Economics however, was not the
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most important dimension. Echoing von Neumann’s 1955 warning, Schelling
wrote that climate control, like nuclear weapons, could become “more a source
of international conflict than a relief ” (470) if several nations possessed the
technology and if they disagreed on the optimum climatic balance. He cited the
possibility that one nation might view landfalling hurricanes as disasters, while
another might see them as providing necessary water for crops. Concerning
interventions that might last for decades or centuries, Schelling predicted that
future environmental agendas might well change, as they had in the past and that
“Co may not . . . dominate discussion of anthropogenic climate change as it does
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now” (470). “It is difficult to know what will still look alarming 75 years from
now” (482)—that is, after 2050. Also, in 1983 the idea of nuclear winter emerged.
A major nuclear war would certainly inject smoke and dust into the strato-
sphere, yet no one in his right mind would consider such a holocaust an offset to
global warming. 49
Growing concern about anthropogenic global warming led Stanford Solo-
mon Penner, director of the Center for Energy and Combustion Research at the
University of California–San Diego, and his associates to suggest in 1984 that
the heating from a doubling of Co could be offset if commercial airlines would
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fly at an altitude of 8 to 20 miles for a ten-year period and tune their engines
to emit more particulates to increase the Earth’s albedo. A major problem with
this suggestion, beyond polluting the stratosphere (which concerned Wexler in
1962), was that commercial aircraft rarely fly at or above 8 miles (although mili-
tary aircraft do). About this time, studies by cloud physicists indicated that an
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