How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate by Jeff Goodell

Author:Jeff Goodell [Goodell, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Technology & Engineering, Environmental, General, Science, Global Warming & Climate Change, Nature, Weather
ISBN: 9780547487137
Google: 5hAnBB-wmH4C
Amazon: 0547520239
Publisher: HMH
Published: 2010-04-14T23:00:00+00:00

7

A Little Cash on the Side

ONE OF THE MOST frequently cited objections to geoengineering is that the earth’s climate is just too complex for us to mess around with. “We’re fiddling with a very complicated system, trying to counter the consequences of other large human influences, inadvertent ones, in that system,” said John Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser. “And it’s a dicey business, because we’re doing it without a complete understanding of how the machinery works.”

Obviously, there is much truth to this, especially given the potential consequences of a mistake. (Oops, sorry, didn’t mean to turn France into a desert!) But it is also true that messing with things we don’t understand is what human beings do. Isaac Newton, confounded by the mysteries of white light, messed around with a prism and invented the modern science of optics. Thomas Edison messed around with electric current; today we have light bulbs, laptops, and a digital economy. Curiosity and exploration are what drive scientific discovery, and until the twentieth century, when scientists started fiddling with genetic structures and nanomaterials and atomic bombs, no one was too concerned that an aggressively inquisitive scientist was going to wreck the planet. Newton may have poisoned his brain by trying to smelt lead into gold, but that was his problem.

In the world of geoengineering, mistakes—even if they’re well-intentioned—are everyone’s problem. Holdren is exactly right when he talks about geoengineering being dicey business—but it only becomes dicey when you move from talking about it and thinking about it to actually doing it. In this sense, it’s a little like robbing a bank. It’s perfectly fine to sit home all day and draw up plans; it’s only when you walk up to the teller and actually pull out a gun that you’re asking for trouble.

Consider the notion that we can remove CO2 from the atmosphere by dumping iron into the oceans. As an idea, it’s pretty interesting. Just as we have deserts on land, we also have deserts in the sea—not because of a lack of water, of course, but because of a lack of nutrients (especially iron) that allow plants to grow. If you dump a few hundred tons of iron into the barren waters near Antarctica, it’s like pouring Miracle-Gro on your garden: suddenly, phytoplankton (the scientific term for the single-cell plants that live in the surface waters) are blooming everywhere. Like all plants, phytoplankton suck up CO2. In fact, phytoplankton are ruthlessly efficient little carbon-eating machines. Although they make up less than 1 percent of the photosynthetic life on earth, they are responsible for about half the CO2 that is pulled out of the atmosphere each year (the other half is pulled out by land plants). The phytoplankton use the carbon to build calcium carbonate shells. When the organisms die, they slowly drift down into the deep ocean, where the carbon is effectively trapped for hundreds to thousands of years. Some of them settle on the ocean floor, where their shells are eventually transformed into

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