THE GLOBAL WARMING DEBATE is in a rut. In mid-July, for example, Undersecretary of State Timothy Wirth called for a crackdown on the emission of so-called greenhouse gases that are the inescapable byproduct of burning coal and oil. Any effort to choke off carbon-dioxide emissions will hit the American economy hard; nonetheless, to the dismay of industry, Wirth has in mind new, binding treaties to do just that. “The science calls on us to take urgent action,” Wirth declared at a Geneva conference on climate change. Industry — as represented by the Global Climate Coalition — responded as expected, arguing that the science is hopelessly complex and muddled: We should wait and see instead of doing anything rash and ruinously expensive.
This is the stale and predictable state of the global warming debate. Environmental Cassandras declare the world is on fire; naysayers say nay. Greens use elaborate computer models to show that the atmosphere is working its way from a simmer to a full rolling boil. Industry chooses different computer models and finds that global temperatures are the same as they ever were. The scientists can’t agree and the layman is understandably bewildered.
But there might be a way out of this tiresome political shuttlecock. The one thing that the Cassandras and the naysayers seem to agree about is that there is only one solution to global warming — reduce the amount of greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere. But what if that assumption is incorrect? A surprising, and surprisingly large, body of scientific research suggests that it may be entirely possible (and even relatively inexpensive) to cool the planet down, greenhouse gases or no. The whole premise of the greenhouse theory is that human activity is capable of turning the global thermostat up. If so, then why shouldn’t human activity be capable of doing the reverse?
Early this year, the east coast buried in snow, newspapers and newsmagazines declared perversely that the blizzards were the fault of global warming. Shifts in worldwide climates caused the extreme weather, we were told. These stories did point to some evidence of a greenhouse effect: 1995 was the hottest year on record, breaking the mark set in 1991. But little noticed was the fact that between 1991 and 1995 temperatures had not just held steady, they had declined dramatically. And climatologists do agree on the reason temperatures spiked downward for a few years: a volcano. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991 it belched tons of dust, ash, and sulfur into the stratosphere, where the fine haze of debris floated for a couple of years, ever so slightly shading the earth from the sun. Which raises the question, It dust in the stratosphere can cool the planet, why not combat global warming by putting dust in the stratosphere?
There are any number of tidy, discreet, and costeffective ways to get dust or sulfur into the upper atmosphere. A variety of options can be found in a massive 1992 tome from the National Academy of Sciences called “Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming.” Chapter 28 is devoted to what is called ” geoengineering,” the science of purposefully making large-scale changes to the environment. Not only are an abundance of atmospheric fixes considered in the chapter, but careful cost breakdowns are provided for each.
Among the suggested methods for launching dust into the stratosphere are rockets, balloons, airplanes, and naval guns. Naval guns are among the cheapest, and certainly the most dramatic. According to the National Academy, “A 16-inch naval rifle fired vertically could put a shell weighing about 1 [metric] ton up to an altitude of 20 kilometers.” After running the numbers — including the cost of using the Navy ships and crew, the price of shells, and even the going rate for bulk dust — the National Academy found that it would cost somewhere between three cents and $ 1 to offset the effect of one metric ton of carbon-dioxide emissions. Mitigating the amount of carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere by the United States in 1989, given these estimates, would cost, tops, about $ 500 million a year, and probably a lot less.
Less exciting but cheaper by far is the notion of tinkering with the exhaust on commercial airliners. Jet engines in need of tune-ups put out sooty exhaust, and enough soot high in the sky could just manage to help with global air-conditioning. Adjust each jet’s equivalent of a carburetor so that the engine burns off about 1 percent of its fuel, and the U.S. commercial airliner fleet would put out enough high-altitude haze to mitigate all the carbon dioxide produced by the United States every year. This elegantly simple solution to the global warming mess comes with an astonishingly puny price tag — a mere $ 7 million a year (the National Academy’s estimate of the cost of the lost fuel, together with the mechanics’ time adjusting the engines).
It may seem counterintuitive to suggest global warming be combated not by reducing pollution, but by increasing it — rather like suggesting cirrhosis be treated with liberal doses of Scotch. But the ameliorative effect of belching smokestacks is even recognized by climatology shops with impeccably green credentials, like the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The most authoritative warning of impending doom available to the greenhouse Cassandras is the panel’s 1995 forecast predicting global temperatures will rise between 1.8 and 6.3 degrees by the year 2100. Very frightening indeed; but just five years earlier the panel was predicting that temperatures would rise twice as fast. It turns out that in its 1990 calculations, the panel forgot to factor in the atmospheric effect of all the sulfur smoked into the air by power plants burning soft coal. Once the sulfur floats into the stratosphere, it attracts moisture and helps with the formation of clouds. Those added clouds provide a sunscreen to help keep the planet from overheating. It would not be too much of an exaggeration, then, to say that the Clean Air Act has contributed to glooal warming.
Before Sen. Robert Byrd gets too excited and starts mandating that every utility in the country burn West Virginia coal, it should be remembered that those sulfur-rich clouds, however beneficial to the global climate, are responsible for acid rain. Which is why the National Academy of Sciences suggests another seagoing solution to the greenhouse effect: Imagine a fleet of tankers crisscrossing the oceans, downwind from any land, burning huge sulfur smudge-pots. Smelly, yes — but cost effective too. Sulfur incinerators at sea would offset carbon-dioxide emissions at about the same $ 1-per-ton rate estimated for the Navy’s big guns.
For those queasy at the thought of polluting on purpose, other solutions abound. Since carbon in the atmosphere is the stuff blamed for the purported rise in global temperatures, the greenhouse effect could be avoided by finding ways to extract carbon from the air. The simplest and most enviro- friendly approach, of course, is to plant trees. Young forests absorb and store massive amounts of carbon — and make for nice places to go hunting.
There is an even more aggressive approach than forestry for getting carbon out of the air and out of the way, what scientists call the Geritol solution to global warming. In much of the world’s oceans there is very little in the way of plankton. The lack of the microscopic plants in some waters is due, in large part, to a deficiency of iron. But maybe if we add some dilute iron chum to the Pacific, a gazillion plankton will bloom, their photosynthetic frenzy gobbling up carbon like crazy. When the plankton decay or are eaten in the aquatic food chain, the carbon ends up deep in the ocean, harmless. “With half a shipload of iron,” the late oceanographer John Martin once said, “I could give you an ice age.”
Researchers testing Martin’s theory near the Galapagos Islands have found that, indeed, a little iron can turn clear blue waters green and soupy with plankton. But according to Science News, the scientists, far from being exhilarated, have found their success to be a “profoundly disturbing experience.” Martin’s colleague, Kenneth Coale, told Science News, “We are conducting research that may be used toward geoengineering and that does make me feel a bit uncomfortable. I don’t feel we have the same dilemma as the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, but there are some similarities.”
Comparing overblown algae farming to the creation of weapons of mass destruction may seem silly, but Coale’s unease is typical. The geoengineering section of the National Academy of Sciences global warming report was not happily received by the greenhouse crowd — at best, it is referred to as ” controversial.” Environmentalists seem to hate the concept of geoengineering not because they think it wouldn’t work, but because they fear it would.
Their objection is a moralistic one. Think of the industrialized nations as cipsomamacs, guzzling fossil fuels like a drunk sucking down Thunderbird. And think of environmentalists as the Temperance Union. If a guaranteed hangover cure were discovered, the teetotalers would be appalled — without unpleasant consequences to hype, what hope would they have of winning prohibition? The same holds true for environmentalists, who see geoengineering as a threat to the anti-industrial crusade. Without the specter of scorched earth and drowned coastal cities, what hope do the greens have of winning their utopia of bicycles and solar power?
Even if global warming is more than just the febrile imagining of professional Chicken Littles, there is no reason to accept the environmentalists’ ham-handed solution to the problem. Why sign global treaties with industrial-emissions limits costing trillions when $ 7 million in aircraft exhaust might do the trick?
Eric Felten is a writer and jazz musician in Washington, D.C.
