{"id":502,"date":"2009-06-29T17:30:18","date_gmt":"2009-06-29T23:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/?p=502"},"modified":"2009-06-29T17:31:54","modified_gmt":"2009-06-29T23:31:54","slug":"re-engineering-the-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/2009\/06\/re-engineering-the-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"re-engineering the earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

An article in the most recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly explores aggressive “geo-engineering” projects<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“Humans have been aggressively transforming the planet for more than 200 years. The Nobel Prize\u2013winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen\u2014one of the first cheerleaders for investigating the gas-the-planet strategy\u2014recently argued that geologists should refer to the past two centuries as the \u201canthropocene\u201d period. In that time, humans have reshaped about half of the Earth\u2019s surface. We have dictated what plants grow and where. We\u2019ve pocked and deformed the Earth\u2019s crust with mines and wells, and we\u2019ve commandeered a huge fraction of its freshwater supply for our own purposes. What is new is the idea that we might want to deform the Earth intentionally, as a way to engineer the planet either back into its pre-industrial state, or into some improved third state. Large-scale projects that aim to accomplish this go by the name \u201cgeo-engineering,\u201d and they constitute some of the most innovative and dangerous ideas being considered today to combat climate change. Some scientists see geo-engineering as a last-ditch option to prevent us from cooking the planet to death. Others fear that it could have unforeseen\u2014and possibly catastrophic\u2014consequences. What many agree on, however, is that the technology necessary to reshape the climate is so powerful, and so easily implemented, that the world must decide how to govern its use before the wrong nation\u2014or even the wrong individual\u2014starts to change the climate all on its own.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“If we were transported forward in time, to an Earth ravaged by catastrophic climate change, we might see long, delicate strands of fire hose stretching into the sky, like spaghetti, attached to zeppelins hovering 65,000 feet in the air. Factories on the ground would pump 10 kilos of sulfur dioxide up through those hoses every second. And at the top, the hoses would cough a sulfurous pall into the sky. At sunset on some parts of the planet, these puffs of aerosolized pollutant would glow a dramatic red, like the skies in Blade Runner<\/em>. During the day, they would shield the planet from the sun\u2019s full force, keeping temperatures cool\u2014as long as the puffing never ceased.”<\/div>\n

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A permanent fleet of ships sails the globe, churning the ocean with special propellers to spray seawater into the air and make clouds whiter and fluffier.\u00a0 A battery of twenty electromagnetic guns, “each more than a mile long and positioned at high altitudes”, that would fire tens of millions of ceramic frisbees at the gravitational midpoint between the earth and the sun, putting “the Earth in a permanent state of annular eclipse”.\u00a0 Hovering zeppelins spew sulfur dioxide into the air, turning the sky red at sunset.\u00a0 Forests of Freeman Dyson’s genetically engineered trees hungrily suck carbon out of the air.\u00a0 Vented structures, similar to industrial cooling towers, are filled with grids coated in a solution that captures carbon; the captured carbon is then scrubbed off the grids and sequestered deep below ground in exhausted oil wells.\u00a0 Antarctic waters are seeded with iron, producing massive plankton blooms that cool the globe.<\/p>\n

Didcot Power Station<\/a> cooling towers., via Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/div>\n

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Perhaps the most unexpected (and frightening) turn in the Atlantic article is the suggestion of a worst-case scenario in which a “rich madman… obsessed with the environment” or “a single rogue nation” sets one of these plans into motion unilaterally, with potentially disastorous global side-effects — in the case of the sulfur aerosols, for instance, it is quite likely that any interruption of the supply of aerosols would produce immediate and catastrophically rapid climate change.\u00a0 An appropriately sobering possibility to consider, for though the scenarios seem outlandish(ly exciting) and the risks are real, they are being given hearing<\/a> not just at the fringes of scientific debate, but at bodies like the National Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An article in the most recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly explores aggressive “geo-engineering” projects: “Humans have been aggressively transforming the planet for more than 200 years. The Nobel Prize\u2013winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen\u2014one of the first cheerleaders for investigating the gas-the-planet strategy\u2014recently argued that geologists should refer to the past two centuries as the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[137],"tags":[139,138,95,140],"class_list":["post-502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-engineering","tag-climate-change","tag-geo-engineering","tag-global-warming","tag-terraforming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":506,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions\/506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}