Cool Geo-Whiz Warming Ideas
More scientists are thinking outside the box on global warming-way outside
Ken Caldeira has a big idea. Really big. At a grim Washington conference on the melting Arctic, the acclaimed global ecologist took the stage not to spell out the effects of global warming but to prescribe a way of "fixing" them.
Caldeira says it's possible to halt the Arctic melt by regularly spraying sulfates into the stratosphere over the North Pole that would deflect anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of the sun's rays over the region-enough to cool the polar cap down so that ice could rebuild to preindustrial levels. "This is the kind of thing that is technically feasible," Caldeira announced.
Really? Once dismissed as wacky, dangerous, or outright impossible, radical geoengineering schemes like Caldeira's are garnering serious consideration from many of the world's most eminent scientists. The impetus: "predictions that we are heading toward catastrophe," says John Latham of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Latham and others say "sci-fi"-sounding solutions shouldn't replace efforts to cut harmful emissions. But scientists increasingly believe that transforming the world's energy system from fossil fuels to clean energy is a staggering task that will require decades of work and trillions of dollars. The idea behind geoengineering "is to hold the Earth's temperature constant as kind of a stopgap to buy us some time," Latham says.
Crisis. The concept got a boost in August when Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, published an essay supporting research, noting that the demand for geoengineering ideas will grow as the global warming crisis deepens. Research now will allow "dangerous ideas to be seen as such and meritorious ones to develop further."
The hubbub over geoengineering comes as the Bush administration released a report last month outlining the White House's principal strategy in the fight against global warming: research on new technology. Three years overdue, the 244-page "Climate Change Technology Program Strategic Plan" touts $29 billion in government programs that include tax credits for hybrid vehicles, energy efficiency mandates for appliances, support for renewable fuels, capturing and storing carbon in geologic formations, and $1 billion for the FutureGen program-a government-industry collaboration to build the world's first coal-fired power plant that is nearly emission free. In testimony before the House Subcommittee on Energy, the program's director, Stephen Eule, hailed the report as a key element of President Bush's "robust and flexible climate change policy."
But upon its release, the report was widely derided by critics, including many congressional Republicans, as being too little, too late. "What we essentially got was an inventory of things as they are now rather than a strategic plan for the future," says Republican Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, chair of the House Science Committee. Rep. Tom Davis, who heads the House Government Reform Committee, blasted the program as a paper tiger, saying it lacks a full-time director or any budgetary authority, noting that nearly all of the billions of dollars cited in the report are controlled by other agencies, like the Department of Energy. So the program has little power, Davis says, to coordinate and implement plans to bring technologies to market. In his opening statement at a CCTP hearing last month, Davis also noted, "Climate solutions that lie outside of existing technology, such as geoengineering ... remain unaddressed."
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