February 2007
Is Radically Changing Our Environment The Best Way To Protect It?
As a race, humans are full of contradictions: kind and cruel; creative and destructive; hopeful and desperate. Now, the latter of these paradoxes is manifesting itself through some of the world’s leading scientists calling for us to save the world from climate change by polluting it.
Hadley Centre models have shown that even if we are able to prevent increases in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere (which alone would involve a 70% cut in emissions with immediate effect), man’s actions have already committed us to a 1.5ºC increase in temperatures and a 1m rise in sea level in the coming years.
But rather than address the causes of warming, we are being presented with an ever increasing number of ideas to combat warming, often from pre-eminent scientists, that seem outlandish at best. It is clear that one cannot afford to be a luddite about such inventions, but there are grave concerns about these schemes. Whether they simply provide a license to pollute, or represent a danger that they themselves may damage the natural balance of the world’s environment, their backers agree that they can only ever be a short term solution to provide a breathing space for society to reduce emissions at a base level.
There are six prominent proposals at the moment, five of which were broadcast on 19th February in "Five Ways to Save the World"; on BBC Two. These include:
- A fleet of futuristic yachts using sea water to create clouds (and increase the amount of sunlight reflected back into space).
- Adding nutrients to areas of the ocean so as to increase levels of photosynthetic phytoplankton, thus reducing CO2 in the atmosphere.
- Creating "artificial trees";. These are man made structures able to trap CO2 in the atmosphere so that it may be stored underground.
However, the most intriguing of these are those that involve exporting man’s "ingenuity"; to the upper limits of our atmosphere and even into space itself. The least impractical of these involves launching rockets into the stratosphere and blanketing the world with sulphur; and this from a Nobel prize winning professor of chemistry working at the Max Planck Institute in Mainz! Stating that the sulphur would act as a giant atmospheric mirror, reflecting heat and creating a cooling effect, Professor Crutzen also acknowledges that there could be unknown and potentially devastating side effects even if sulphur was to be injected at higher altitudes. Indeed, sulphur’s effect on human activity at lower altitudes has included the death of thousands from respiratory diseases as well as extensive acid rain damage.
So what of the other space scheme? British astronomer Roger Angel is a firm believer in the "big mirror"; idea. By blocking just 2% of the sun’s rays, the earth could be significantly cooled. But this would require a 100,000km wide sunshade placed 1.5million km from earth, orbiting at an exact point in space. As to how the 20m tonne reflector would be positioned, Angel suggests the use of millions of tiny glass optics launched into space by an electromagnetic rocket launcher fired from inside a mountain. And the best part of this plan? It would take approximately £2 trillion and 30 years to put into place.
Not to be outdone, Curtis Struck, Professor of Astrophysics at Iowa State University has also put forward a last gasp solution. It involves creating a huge sun shield made from dust mined from the moon and blasted into space, to be injected at two precise locations along the moon’s orbit. The dust would then form a pair of stable clouds, each passing in front of the sun once a month, blocking sunlight for about 2 hours per month.
The author believes that this type of lateral thinking is essential, indeed inherent to humankind, helping us to grow and learn, and scientists play a pivotal role in this. What is worrying however, is the dysfunctional politicians and business leaders who begin clutching at these straws for a permanent solution, rather than regarding them as a last resort, which they are. One does not need to be a latter day Carl Jung to realise that such personality types are not yet mature in both themselves and their attitude to climate change. This is a call for them to grow up.
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