Page 282 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Texas, using patented “ionization towers.” Now, are you ready for the “Welsbach
Patent” to offset global warming? It was granted in 1991 to inventors David B.
Chang and I-Fu Shih of Hughes Aircraft Company. Chemtrail conspiracy theo-
rists, suspicious of the U.S. government, are certain that the military is using this
technique to seed the lower stratosphere with microscopic particles of aluminum
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and barium oxide emitted in jet aircraft exhaust. Climate engineers may point
out that the early patents were just fantasies, while Welsbach seeding would actu-
ally “work.” This depends on what you mean by making something “work” in
more than a narrow technical sense.
Earlier modification plans always were couched in the context of the press-
ing issues and available technologies of their eras: James Espy wanted to purify
the air and make rain for the East Coast, General Robert Dyrenforth set out
to solve the problem of drought in the West, and L. Francis Warren hoped to
clear airports in the 1920s, while the Russians and Americans vied over milita-
rizing weather and climate control throughout the cold war. In 1971 climatolo-
gist Hubert Lamb wrote that the greatest pending climate emergency might be
the overuse of the natural water supply in Central Asia and elsewhere. In 1991
Michael MacCracken at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory turned his
attention to geoengineering the climate as a response to global warming; that
same year, Ralph Cicerone and his colleagues proposed injecting alcane gases
(ethane and propane) into the ozone layer as a possible way to heal the damage
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being caused by chlorine compounds. Each generation, it seemed, has had its
own leading issues for investing in technologies of control.
Ideas about fixing the sky are seemingly endless, and wild new ideas arrive
daily in my in-box. Recently, an engineer claiming space science credentials pro-
posed to shuttle tanks of liquid nitrogen to high altitudes to chill the air and
form high, thick contrail-like clouds—this with no analysis of the energetics of
the process, either in producing sufficient quantities of liquid nitrogen (which is
energy-intensive), in delivering it to altitude (which is both polluting and energy-
intensive), or in understanding the radiative consequences of artificial cirrus haze
(which can serve to warm the atmospheric layers beneath it). Ideas about stirring
up the deep-ocean column with Mixmasters, laying down gigantic plastic bags of
liquefied Co on the ocean floor, tilling “biochar” charcoal into the soil, blow-
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ing bubbles to make the oceans more reflective, or perhaps shooting each individ-
ual Co molecule into space have all been floated as trial balloons. Just yesterday,
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my in-box had a proposal to flood the Sahara Desert and the Australian outback
to plant mega-forests of eucalyptus trees. My personal favorite involves super-
nanotechnology of the future and would entail adding tiny “shock absorbers”
to each carbon–oxygen bond in Co molecules. This would serve to keep the
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