ELI KINTISCH
SCIENCE’S BEST HOPE—OR WORST NIGHTMARE—FOR AVERTING CLIMATE CATASTROPHE
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
Published simultaneously in Canada
 |
| Hack the Planet Science's |
Hundreds of scientists and experts were generous and patient
with me in the researching and writing of this book, but some
were particularly so. Many thanks to Ken Caldeira, Tom Wigley,
Dan Schrag, David Keith, Howard Herzog, Phil Rasch, Gera
Stenchikov, Kelly Wanser, Victor Smetacek, Margaret Leinen,
Peter Weiss and Maria-Jose Vinas at the American Geophysical
Union, and Ralph Cicerone and Edward Patte at the National
Academy of Sciences.
Thanks to the assistants who ably served on this project,
including Victoria Yu, Steven Yoon, Reza Mahmoodshahi,
especially hardworking Susan Lyon, and the diligent and thorough
Margaret Trias. A big thank-you to experts who reviewed sections
of the book for accuracy, including Konrad Steffen, Steve Wofsy,
Spencer Weart, Philipp Assmy, John Perry, Peter Clark, Rafe
Pomerance, Vaughan Turekian, Katharine Ricke, John Marra,
Mike MacCracken, Michael Oppenheimer, Richard Kerr, Sheril
Kirshenbaum, and Armond Cohen. Friends who helped me by
reading chapters were especially kind and thoughtful: thanks to
Derek Walters, David Romps, Noam Scheiber, Jennifer Couzin-
Frankel, Sandra Marks, Lilah Pomerance, Chris Mooney, Jeremiah
Baronberg, Avi Kumin, Peter Scoblic, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, and
Noah Levine-Small. Any errors that remain in the text despite the
keen reviews by others are, of course, mine.
Thanks to Colin Norman, Al Teich, Jeff Mervis, Fannie
Groom, and the rest of Science’s staff for supporting this effort,
including a summer leave of absence to work on the project.
Benjamin Marra, Martyn Green, Zach Cutler, Jeremy Cutler,
and many others helped me to publicize the book. For friendship,
emotional support, and help thinking through the selling
and writing of the book, special thanks go to Lauren DeMille,
Sam Apple, Lilah Pomerance, Dan Gordon, Sandra Marks, Sara
Polon, Oded Turgemon, Sharon Zamore, Nelson DeMille, my
agent Jud Laghi, and his boss Larry Kirshbaum. At John Wiley &
Sons, I’m grateful for the careful work of John Simko, Ellen
Wright, and Eric Nelson, my talented editor who saw this book
through from inception to the end. My brother Ben and sister-in-law
Elana Hoffman were great cheerleaders.
Most of all I thank my parents, Alice and Larry Kintisch, who
supported me throughout and spent countless hours reading drafts,
making edits, and even looking up facts. I’m lucky to have you.
Introduction
ON A HOT AUGUST DAY IN 2008 A TEAM OF RUSSIAN SCIENTISTS
set up an experiment to block the Sun and cool
Earth. The experiment was to be carried out over a
2-square-mile area of farmland near the city of Saratov on
the Volga River, roughly 300 miles southeast of Moscow.
Russian Federation offi cials provided them with a military
helicopter and a truck from which engineers would release
smoke for the effort.
The leader of the experiment was Yuri A. Izrael, a
controversial scientist in Russia with an international reputation
to match. Said to be a close confi dant of Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin, he was also a prominent member of the
Russian Academy of Sciences. Four years earlier, Izrael had
published a letter he had sent Putin, then the Russian president,
in which he said global warming required “immediate
action.” But it wasn’t cutting Russia’s greenhouse gas emissions
that he proposed. Instead, he suggested burning hundreds
of thousands of tons of sulfur-rich aircraft fuel in the upper
atmosphere, which studies suggested would lower the temperature
of Earth by as much as 4°F. “We really will be able
to control the climate,” Izrael said at the time.
Climate scientists around the world believed Izrael’s
idea was at best premature and at worse dangerous. “He’s
a loose cannon, past his prime,” said Stephen Schneider of
Stanford University. After Dmitry Medvedev assumed the
presidency in the spring of 2008, the government began to
embrace more mainstream positions on climate science, culminating
in a release of an offi cial report the following year
that omitted Izrael’s proposal.
But the strong-willed climate scientist had the wherewithal
to proceed with his experiment anyway. Its aim was
to validate basic calculations on a small scale. Scientists set
up two detectors on the ground to measure solar radiation
as well as wind velocity, temperature, humidity, and pressure.
At 10:50 A.M. the experiment began. The helicopter,
a Soviet Mikoyan-8, began a series of passes upwind of
the detectors, fl ying 650 feet above the ground. Following
a course perpendicular to the direction of the wind, the
pilot fl ew back and forth fi ve times, each pass roughly 3
miles long, and the scientists released billows of smoke as
they fl ew. Six hours later, the scientists conducted a similar
experiment using smoke sprayed from the truck.
Cloudy conditions made it difficult to detect which
changes in the brightness of the Sun were a result of the
experiment, but close analysis of the data suggested
the smoke had scattered up to 10 percent of the Sun’s rays at
different points in the experiment. In a paper published in a
Russian meteorology journal in May 2009, Izrael and his colleagues
concluded that the trial showed “how it is principally
possible” to add chemical droplets to the sky “to control solar
radiation.” That summer, scientists conducted a more successful
follow-up experiment in which they released smoke
from a helicopter at an altitude of roughly 8,000 feet.
Alexey Ryaboshapko, an atmospheric chemist in Izrael’s
institute, said that they hoped to soon conduct even larger
experiments, using airplanes, perhaps over an area roughly
10 kilometers long. “It would be a very local experiment—over
Russia, only over Russia,” he said. “If we are talking about
implementing this geoengineering approach, the experiment
must be global.” Izrael aknowledged that some opponents,
including colleagues in Russia, feared “negative consequences”
of geoengineering. “Such fears are speculative and
have no scientifi c basis,” he said. What was needed was “an
international conference” where scientists could “estimate
quantitatively the degree of real or imagined danger.”
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Product details
Price
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File Size
| 6,482 KB |
Pages
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290 p |
File Type
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PDF format |
ISBN
| 978-0-470-52426-8 (cloth) |
Copyright
| 2010 by Eli Kintisch |
Contents
1 It’s Come to This 3
2 Hedging Our Climate Bets 21
3 The Point of No Return 39
4 The Pinatubo Option 55
5 The Pursuit of Levers 77
6 The Sucking-1-Ton Challenge 103
7 Credit Is Due 129
8 Victor’s Garden 151
9 The Sky and Its Reengineer 171
10 The Right Side of the Issue 191
11 A Political Climate 211
12 Geoengineering and Earth 231
Acknowledgments 245
Notes 247
Index 269
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