Page 272 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

attack on the upper atmosphere might be conducted from “remote tropical
island sites or from ships” (213), but nowhere indicated that he had considered
the need to consult residents of the tropics for their opinions on this. Whether
from Budyko, Penner, Izrael, or Crutzen, the idea of purposeful stratospheric pol-
lution, for whatever purpose, is extremely grating to modern sensibilities. Nev-
ertheless, there have been several more workshops in recent years. NASA-Ames
and the Carnegie Institution convened one in 2006 on the Phaethon-like topic
“managing solar radiation.” Participants could not help but laugh when a meeting
coordinator apologized for not being able to control the temperature of the room.
Ad hoc meetings on climate engineering pop up on a regular basis. In 2007 one
was held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, another at MIT in 2009,
and a large gathering on “climate intervention” in 2010 at the Asilomar campus
in Pacific Grove, California. The topics under discussion at these meetings have
been far from mainstream, involving more speculation than science. 80
Geoengineering does not have a widespread following. In 2006 Ralph Cice-
rone wrote: “Ideas on how to engineer the Earth’s climate, or to modify the envi-
ronment on large scales . . . do not enjoy broad support from scientists. Refer-
eed publications that deal with such ideas are not numerous nor are they cited
81
widely.” The situation has not changed substantially since then. According to a
2008 report by the Tyndall Centre, geoengineering proposals have not advanced
beyond the outline/concept stage and are best confined to computer model
simulations, since small-scale field experiments would be inconclusive and global
experiments would be far too risky and socially unacceptable. Recently, atmo-
spheric scientist Richard Turco, founding director of the UCLA Institute of the
Environment and one of the authors of “Nuclear Winter” (1983), called many
geoengineering plans “preposterous” and “mind-boggling.” He saw “no evidence”
that technological quick fixes to the climate system would be as cheap or as easy
as their proponents claim, and he said that many of them “wouldn’t work at all”
and could not be field-tested without unacceptable, even unpredictable, risks.
Embarking on such projects, he said, “could be foolhardy.” 82
Late in 2009, Izrael and his colleagues reported on what they called a geo-
engineering field experiment in Russia to study solar radiation passing through
aerosol layers. Citing Crutzen’s 2006 editorial, they made the dubious and self-
referential claim that “injection of reflecting aerosol submicron particles into
the stratosphere can be an optimal option to compensate warming” (emphasis
added). The experimenters then proceeded to experiment, not in the strato-
83
sphere but near the ground. In several tests, a military helicopter burning
“metal-chloride pyrotechnic” flares and a military truck spraying an “overheated
vapor-gas mixture of individual fractions of petroleum products” generated

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