Page 278 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

probably cause unwanted stresses on plant ecosystems and crops. Rasch and his
colleagues also warned of increased ozone depletion attributable to the presence
of additional sulfate particles in the stratosphere. A related article in Science by
Simone Tilmes, Rolf Müller, and Ross Salawitch supported this conclusion: “An
injection of sulfur large enough to compensate for surface warming caused by the
doubling of atmospheric Co would strongly increase the extent of Arctic ozone
2
depletion during the present century for cold winters and would cause a consid-
erable delay, between 30 and 70 years, in the expected recovery of the Antarctic
96
ozone hole.” So much for Crutzen’s proposal.
In 2009 oceanographer John Shepherd and I were on a panel presenting testi-
mony to the U.S. Congress on the governance of geoengineering. He introduced
a recent study that he chaired for the Royal Society of London with the com-
ment “geoengineering is no magic bullet.” I immediately thought, “It is no bullet
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at all” and we would be better off not shooting our ordnance at the atmosphere.
The published report recommends, sensibly, that nations make increased efforts
toward mitigating and adapting to climate change, but it also supports further
research and development of geoengineering, including appropriate observa-
tions, development and use of climate models, and (more ominously) “carefully
planned and executed experiments,” including small- to medium-scale experi-
ments both in the laboratory and in field trials. 98

field tests?

In his 2008 testimony to the British House of Commons, Launder spot-
lighted his recent editorship of the Philosophical Transactions special issue
on geoengineering and urged the government to go beyond paper studies
and “earmark” a portion of its budget for a program of field tests leading to
possible geo-scale deployment. The response of mainstream engineers, how-
ever, was lukewarm. In the opinion of Britain’s Royal Academy of Engineer-
ing, “All the current proposals have inherent environmental, technical and
social risks and none will solve all the problems associated with energy and
climate change.” The academy recommended that the government “stay
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well informed” but treat geoengineering with caution. Geographer Dan
Lunt, from the University of Bristol, and others pointed out that the miss-
ing dimension in all of this was a large-scale program to determine the effi-
cacy, side effects, practicality, economics, and ethical implications of geo-
engineering, a kind of ethical, legal, social implications (ELSI) approach
common in other controversial fields. If American geoengineers are seeking

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