Hi all

This was on the ABC steam radio this morning (Sunday 11th) - I think it
needs serious discussion in these groups. This discussion brings up some
really interesting (and perverse) aspects to foreign policy with regard to
climate change - which also need adressing.

This is why public radio is SO important!!! Atta boy - ABC!

Hugh






http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2009/2444935.htm

11 January 2009
The climate engineers

Listen Now - 11012009 |Download Audio - 11012009

For years it's been one of the science community's great taboos but the
idea of global climate control is starting to be openly discussed. Ideas
like placing giant mirrors in space or firing sulphur particles into the
stratosphere to cool the planet are no longer just in the domain of science
fiction. Many scientists now believe the time for these ideas will come.
Reporter, Wendy Carlisle (This program was originally broadcast on 6th
April 2008.)

Read the following articles:

Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections
Climate Change: The Uncertainties, the Certainties, and what they Imply
About Action
Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming




Show Transcript | Hide Transcript

THEME: El Nino

Wendy Carlisle: Hello, I'm Wendy Carlisle, and this week on Background
Briefing, how a very big idea has come out of the shadows.

With rapid Arctic ice melts and rising emissions, scientists are now
beginning to think planet earth could be running out of time.

And they've begun to talk about what's possibly the most dangerous techno
fix of all time: artificially manipulating the climate to cool the planet
down.

It would be the equivalent of hitting the panic button.

David Keith: Now suppose that space aliens arrived - maybe they are going
to land at the UN Headquarters down the road here, or maybe they will pick
a smarter spot, but suppose they arrive and they give you a box, and the
box has two nobs. One knob is the knob for controlling global temperature,
and maybe another knob is a knob for controlling CO2 concentrations. You
might imagine that we would fight wars over that box, because we have no
way to agree about where to set the knobs. No global governance and
different people will have different places they want it set. Now I don't
think that's going to happen, it's not very likely, but we are building
that box, the scientists and engineers of the world are building it piece
by piece in their labs.

Wendy Carlisle: This is the voice of one of the world's top atmospheric
scientists, Canada's Professor David Keith, speaking at a conference in
California late last year. And he's describing how bit by bit scientists
are learning how to artificially control the climate in a process called
climate engineering.

David Keith: Even when they're doing it for other reasons, even when
they're thinking they're just working on protecting the environment, they
have no interest in crazy ideas like engineering the whole planet. They
develop science that makes it easier and easier to do.

Wendy Carlisle: As a former lead author on UN Climate Change Reports, his
credentials are impeccable. But he's also a maverick.

David Keith is at the forefront of a group of scientists raising what must
be the most unpopular subject in science: climate engineering. It's a
political bombshell and it could be highly dangerous, no-one really knows.

There are lots of reasons David Keith thinks climate engineering is a bad
idea. But he's calling for a brutally honest debate.

David Keith: And so I guess my view on this is not that I want to do it, I
do not, but that we should move this out of the shadows and talk about it
seriously, because sooner or later we will be confronted with decisions
about this, and it's better if we think hard about it, even if we want to
think hard about reasons why we should never do it.

Wendy Carlisle: And on Background Briefing today, you'll hear why
engineering the climate, as far out and crazy as it sounds, is now being
seriously talked about by some of the world's leading scientists and
thinkers.

Nobel Prizewinning economist, Professor Tom Schelling.

Tom Schelling: Back then, if I spoke to an audience about geo engineering,
half the audience thought I was crazy and the other half thought I was
dangerous. And I think scientists who spoke about it or wrote about it
found that they either weren't taken seriously or they were taken too
seriously and were believed to be mad scientists who wanted to try to
control the climate, and I think now it's become a respectable subject to
talk about, and write about, and I think over the coming years it's bound
to receive a lot more attention.

Wendy Carlisle: Not all of them agree with it, in fact there's strong
opposition to climate engineering in many quarters, not just because it
might do more damage than good, but because it could trigger wars.

Thinking on climate engineering has done a complete u-turn in the last 20
years. From Colombia University, Professor Wally Broecker.

Wally Broecker: I used to say that if people had a list of things that they
didn't want scientists to study, probably top of the list would be
dependence of intelligence on race, you know, are Chinese really smarter
than the rest of us? And then No.2 would be engineering the climate.

Wendy Carlisle: In the mid-1980s, he and a colleague, John Knuckles,
decided to look at some modelling by a Russian scientist that suggested an
overheated planet could be cooled by shooting sulphur particles into the
stratosphere, and they concluded that the Russian was right.

But their research was never intended to give political leaders an excuse
not to act on global warming.

It was meant to be a last resort.

Wally Broecker: When Knuckles and I wrote this paper we entitled it an
insurance policy against a bad CO2 trip. So we were thinking of it as a
bail-out, saying 'Well if nothing is done and the climate becomes
everybody's evaluation a lot worse than it is now, then people are going to
demand that we bail it out and that's the way to do it.' So we weren't
proposing it as a solution to the CO2 problem, we were sort of proposing it
as a way to salvage the situation if things went bad.

Wendy Carlisle: Their modelling was based on mimicking volcanic explosions
which shot sulphur particles into the stratosphere.

But it wouldn't be without aesthetic problems.

Wally Broecker: I think one of the principal side effects would be a
psychological one. If we did this, we'd never have a blue sky day again,
because the things we added up there would bleach the sky, so it would
always be a pale blue or white, and that would be worldwide.

In a sense the end of really blue sky days which sort of you know I think
around here anyway, and probably in Europe and places where you don't have
many, they buoy people's spirits, don't they. If you had them all the time,
maybe like cloudy days, I don't know, you Aussies have a lot of blue sky
days.

Wendy Carlisle: Professor Broecker told Background Briefing he thought that
climate engineering was, 'the equivalent of screwing with the atmosphere'.
But like many scientists, he's worried that when global warming starts to
bite, the public will demand action to cool the planet.

Wally Broecker: Doubling of CO2 in models would say is 3-1/2 degrees
warming. I think that's going to dry out Australia like mad; you ought to
be scared to death of that. You're going to really be dry. Dry, dry, dry,
dry. And you know, that's going to cause sea levels to go up and so forth.
So even doubling is going to cause big changes, but if we don't get serious
about it, we're going to triple or quadruple the CO2, no doubt about it.
And that's going to drive us into the realm where people are going to
scream, 'We've got to cool the planet off!'

Wendy Carlisle: But Professor Broecker's paper was never published. Not
because it was junk science, it wasn't, but because the scientific
community decided that a bit of self-censorship was in order.

Wally Broecker: And we wrote a paper about it, and we sent it around to
prominent people in the field, and they said, 'By all means don't publish
this; the world is not ready for it.' So we just put it on the shelf.

Wendy Carlisle: The view was that if politicians discovered you could
artificially cool the planet, they'd do nothing to cut emissions.

Now 20 years later, there's been a sea-change. Instead of shutting the
debate down, it's now game on. And the trigger for the debate has come from
impeccable quarters.

Just two years ago at the end of 2006, the Nobel Prizewinning scientist, Dr
Paul Crutzen, the man who received the Prize for his groundbreaking work on
the ozone layer, wrote an important editorial under the heading:

'Albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulphur injections: a contribution to
resolve a policy dilemma.'

In lay terms, it was about the possible use of technology to bounce the
sun's rays off the planet, to slow down the rate of warming.

Some of the ideas he discussed were things like pumping sunlight-reflecting
particles into the stratosphere, using balloons or artillery guns. Another
idea was to create little 'nuclear winters', using soot.

Professor Crutzen's essay was clearly written in anger and frustration, at
the lack of action to reduce emissions. He pointed out that messing with
the stratosphere could blow a hole in the ozone layer and make ocean
acidification even worse.

But he thought climate geo-engineering should be investigated, because it
might be the only escape route.

Background Briefing sought an interview with Professor Crutzen, but he
declined, telling us he'd said his piece.

Here's a reading from his editorial:

Reader: Building trust between scientists and the general public would be
needed to make such a large-scale climate modification acceptable. Finally,
I repeat: the very best would be if emissions of the greenhouse gases could
be reduced so much that the stratospheric sulphur release experiment would
not need to take place. Currently, this looks like a pious wish.

Wendy Carlisle: Support for Professor Crutzen's provocative editorial was
by no means unanimous, and like Wally Broecker's experience 20 years
before, he encountered substantial opposition. But this time the science
heavyweights swung in behind him.

The President of America's peak science institution, the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, Ralph Cicerone, wrote in
defence of his stance:

Reader: I am aware that various individuals have opposed the publication of
Crutzen's paper, even after peer review and revisions, for various and
sincere reasons that are not wholly scientific. Here I write in support of
his call for research on geo-engineering.

Wendy Carlisle: And that, it seems, was all it took to liberate the discussion.

In November last year, an off-the-record gathering of North America's top
scientists and economists met at Harvard University for two days to discuss
climate engineering.

The meeting was organised by Professor David Keith whom you heard earlier
in the program.

David Keith is the research Chair in Energy and the Environment at the
University of Calgary in Canada, which is where he was when Background
Briefing put in a call to him.

David Keith: That was an amazing fact about this meeting. So in some ways I
found that meeting personally intimidating, because I was coming back to
Harvard and co-organising this meeting in front of all the most famous
crowd in the world. I mean it really was the 'brain trust', a bunch of the
atmospheric science community as well as some of the public policy
community, like the former Head of the World Bank the president of Harvard.
So a really impressive crowd of people. And at the end of the meeting there
was really an extraordinary level of agreement, not every person, but an
amazing consistent level of agreement in the room, that we have to take
this seriously. And you might think that I would feel this was a huge
personal vindication after all I published an early paper in the early '90s
arguing that we should take geo-engineering seriously. Not that we should
do it, but we should take it seriously. So you might imagine that my
reaction at the end of having this meeting of these famous people at
Harvard, that people finally agreed, Yes, we should take it seriously, that
I would feel some huge triumph. But it was the opposite. What I felt was
fear.

Wendy Carlisle: What really shocked Professor Keith was to hear the urgency
with which some of his fellow scientists were now viewing this.

David Keith: Also another stunning thing at that meeting was that there
were several people who talking of doing it quite soon, so my line has
always been, 'we should do some research about this now and think about the
politics and ethics, because one day we're going to face it, 30 or 50 years
from now.' But several credible people in the room were saying, 'well hold
on, if the Arctic ice really keeps melting as fast as in the last few
years, and we have some geo-engineering method that really seems like it
might work, albeit with some side effects, why wouldn't you begin to do a
little bit of geo-engineering even ten or twenty years from now to begin to
take the edge off the rate of warming.'

Wendy Carlisle: And that surprised you, and frightened you?

David Keith: It surprised me a lot. And my instant reaction is that I
disagreed with that. But then when you try and think logically about why
exactly you wouldn't do it it's not so clear.

Wendy Carlisle: Sitting in that Harvard University seminar room, was
Professor Scott Barrett, the Director of the International Policy Program
at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. And as he listened to the
presentations, he imagined a ghastly 'perfect storm' brewing, where
political inaction collides with a worsening climate change forecast.

Scott Barrett: So there's almost a kind of a collision here between the
world failing to address the problem in any kind of fundamental way on the
one hand, and on the other hand the problem itself being perhaps even more
concerning than was thought previously. And if this continues and we
continue not to address the problem in this fundamental way, and the
science of climate change reveals itself to be even more worrisome, with
every passing year, then eventually we're going to get to the point where
people are going to consider using a technology like this, whether we
discuss it or not. So there was a sense of really necessity and that's
really what I think was on a lot of people's minds at that meeting.

Wendy Carlisle: So when you went into this meeting at Harvard late last
year, I suppose were you one of those people who thought this was really
crazy science, and did you come out of that meeting thinking it still was
crazy science?

Scott Barrett: No, I should say that the first time I heard of it, I
thought it was crazy science; it sounded more like science fiction. It was
something that we certainly didn't need to take very seriously; at the time
I first heard about it about 1990 or so, and the idea of tampering with the
global climate it is the stuff of movies, it's not the sort of thing that
most scientists would think about. Scientists tend to be very conservative
in their thinking, and also on the policy side, people like me were
thinking very much about how to address the problem fundamentally. So I
never went into this with great enthusiasm, and I deliberately neglected
the topic actually until 2006, and I think that's true for a lot of people;
I think a lot of scientists had known about it for quite a long time, but
they have been working to help the world understand this challenge, and in
the case of some scientists working to promote activities that will address
the problem in a fundamental way. I think virtually everyone in that room
really was there because of the realisation that all this effort really so
far has not borne fruit.

Wendy Carlisle: The Harvard meeting was not the first top level scientific
gathering convened in the wake of Professor Paul Crutzen's editorial. A
previous meeting at NASA in California, brought together another gathering
of scientists. Amongst the invitees was Professor Jim Fleming, a historian
of weather and climate control.

Jim Fleming: I was invited as a historian working in the field and writing
about this, and we went to the NASA Aimes campus, which is at the south end
of San Francisco Bay, and it was a gated, it was relatively secure base, in
which they do some classified experiments. And so we had to come in and
show our identifications, and I remember the press was waiting there,
wondering if they could get in, and it was a behind-the-scenes kind of
meeting.

Wendy Carlisle: Professor Fleming told the scientists that efforts to
control the weather were not new.

Jim Fleming: And that others had said it was OK to think about climate
engineering. One of the most prominent others was John Fitzgerald Kennedy
in 1962, who had called on the Soviets and the Americans, in fact all
nations of the world, to work together on peaceful uses of outer space and
peaceful ways that they could co-operate in weather programs, including
climate studies, and as he put it, 'large-scale weather control'. And so I
said this field has a very long history. It's not always the most dignified
history, it's really quite a, what I call 'chequered history'. But it does
go back in the US case at least, to the 1830s.

Wendy Carlisle: Jim Fleming had never met any of the people who attended.
But one person he did know by reputation was Dr Lowell Wood, a charismatic
and controversial figure.

Jim Fleming: The others were unknown to me before that time, but people
like Lowell Wood, who was a very prominent defence intellectual, protégé of
Edward Teller, (Teller was the father of the H-bomb) and Wood was very much
engaged in SDI kind of Star Wars defence projects here in the United
States, and was now advocating putting up sunscreens to shade the planet in
case the CO2 warming gets out of hand. And Wood's a cultural icon, formerly
with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and you would imagine if
there is going to be a global thermostat, some people are assuming it might
be built there, the temperature of the world might be adjusted there. It's
a very centrally controlled kind of vision. He talked, in his presentation,
about futuristic hardware, sort of stratospheric gigantic military balloons
on which you could hang hoses to pump sulphates into the stratosphere. He
is very sure of himself, he was very clear to the meteorologists who were
in the group, that their expertise wasn't really relevant to this topic, it
was, in his terms, all physics, he says, 'I understand the radiation
budget, and I know how to attenuate these sunbeams.' And also I got an
impression of him as a very self-assured but in a sense likeable fellow who
was an icon of that era of SDI.

Wendy Carlisle: About a year ago, Rolling Stone magazine ran a feature
profile on Dr Lowell Wood, who they called Dr Evil. The story was about his
ideas on engineering the climate, and the story was called 'Can Dr Evil
Save the World?' Here's a reading.

Reader: In scientific circles, Wood is a dark star. As a physicist at
Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California for more than four decades,
Wood has long been one of the Pentagon's top weaponeers, the agency's go-to
guru for threat assessment and weapons development. Wood is infamous for
championing fringe science, from X-ray lasers to cold-fusion nuclear
reactors, as well as for his long affiliation with the Hoover Institution,
a right-wing think-tank on the Stanford campus. Everyone knew Wood's
reputation. To some, he was a brilliant outside-the-box thinker; to others,
he was the embodiment of 'big science' gone awry.

Wendy Carlisle: Background Briefing requested an interview with Dr Wood,
but he declined, with the following correspondence:

Reader: I've taken a 'vow of silence' after the Rolling Stone 'adventure'.
("Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice, shame on me!")

Wendy Carlisle: In another email, Background Briefing told Dr Wood that we
wanted to address some of the claims floating around that the Pentagon
might be interested in funding research into climate control as a tool of
war, and we asked Dr Wood if this was the case.

Here's a reading.

Reader: No, the Pentagon has nothing whatsoever to do with this research,
to the best of my knowledge. Why in the world would they? And no, I've
never taken any money, or any other form of support from the energy/fuels
industry etc., etc. I've also executed no contracts of any kind with the
Devil, nor do I intend to do so ...

Wendy Carlisle: Lowell Wood recommended we speak to his colleague Dr Ken
Caldeira, whom he has worked with in modelling climate engineering options.
Ken Caldeira is the senior scientist at the Carnegie Institute for Science
at Stanford University, and he's just about the only scientist working on
this full time.

Because most of the work on climate engineering is back-of-the-envelope
stuff by scientists dabbling in their spare time. But Caldeira is on a
mission to make it a research priority for the US government.

But it's clear that when you talk to him, he's sickened at the prospect of
the world resorting to climate engineering. But he can see it coming.

Ken Caldeira spoke to Background Briefing on a studio hook-up from California.

Ken Caldeira: Yes, I think that the fact that these ideas largely came out
of the weaponeers and the nuclear weapons experts, gave this sort of a
dirty or immoral kind of feel to it that it was something that was the
domain of people who were ready to incinerate cities, and not the sort of
thing that people who are worried about polar bears and ice sheets should
really entertain. And so I think it was seen as the idea of sort of crazy
weaponeers and not the domain of sober scientists.

Wendy Carlisle: The 'crazy weaponeers' that Dr Caldeira is referring to
include not only Dr Lowell Wood, but Edward Teller, the father of the
H-bomb. Edward Teller believed that technology would save humans from
themselves. It was this kind of thinking that drove him to work on the
H-bomb, and ultimately on engineering the climate.

Edward Teller.

Edward Teller: I myself was interested in theoretical physics in explaining
atoms molecular vibrations, knowledge and more knowledge. I didn't want to
do it, but then Hitler not only swallowed up half of Poland, he invaded the
west, and two days later there was an invitation to a pan-American congress
that Roosevelt, whom I have never seen before, was going to speak. And he
made a remarkable speech, how the world is really endangered by Hitler
among other things, and at the climax, he said 'You scientists are blamed
for the weapons to be used, but I tell you that if you now won't work on
weapons, the freedom of the world will be lost.'

Ken Caldeira: Yes, Edward Teller was optimistic about technology and
pessimistic about human nature. For example, after the atomic bomb was used
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he thought, 'well humans will never, through
their nature, avoid using these weapons again.' And so what we need to do
is to create a technology that would make these weapons unusable. And so
his idea was to make the super bomb, which was later called the hydrogen
bomb. And the idea was that this was a weapon so terrible that nobody could
imagine a war like this and so nobody would use a regular atomic bombs. And
by the early 1980s, the idea of a first strike nuclear war between Russia
and the United States became thinkable, so then he said, 'Oh well, we'd
better make this Star Wars missile defence system, that we can't trust
treaties to prevent nuclear war, but we can create a technology that will
shield us from incoming ballistic missiles. And so they talked to Ronald
Reagan and got funding for the Star Wars missile defence program.

Wendy Carlisle: It was after the Star Wars adventure that Edward Teller and
Lowell Wood turned their attention to global warming.

Ken Caldeira: And again he thought, Well we can't rely on fallible humans
to reduce their carbondioxide emissions because humans are basically a
selfish, corrupt organism, and will never co-operate on a global scale to
achieve anything. But we could do a number of things to counteract the
climate effects of greenhouse gases, and so one of his colleagues, James
Early suggested that we could put satellites in space between earth and the
sun, maybe a million miles out in space, that would deflect sunlight away
from the earth. They also looked at designer particles that instead of just
blocking the bulk of solar radiation the way sulphur might do, could just
deflect the ultraviolet radiation, or primarily ultraviolet radiation, and
since ultraviolet radiation causes skin cancer and damages crops, they were
saying, 'well not only are we going to solve the climate problem, but we're
going to improve crop yields and we're going to reduce skin cancer, and so
it would be immoral not to do this kind of engineering of the planet.' And
so this is really the most extreme view, saying that we're not just
engineering the planet to alleviate some of the negative effects or
actions, but we could engineer the planet to make it a better place to live.

Wendy Carlisle: Dr Ken Caldeira.

But Professor Jim Fleming says the military has historically been
interested in exploiting technological advances in weather control.

Jim Fleming: The US military has always been interested in controlling the
weather, so it's not simply the modern pentagon. And even one strategic Air
Command General was quoted as saying in the 1950s 'If you control the
weather, you can control the world.' I think this interest has continued.

Wendy Carlisle: Yes, well I wonder if you could talk more about that,
because you do see a real resonance between the weaponeers and the climate
engineers, don't you?

Jim Fleming: Well I think the technology is potentially so powerful that
once people begin to think that they can master it, the military has
resources that private scientific labs or university scale laboratories
simply don't have. And so once an enthusiastic person, for example, one of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the Secretary of Defence, begins to be
convinced about this, they can throw vast resources at it. Some of it can
be justified. During the Cold War there was an attempt to make it rain on
demand. It was thought that we could have such precise forecasts using
computers, that we could deploy field troops out ahead of the storms to
sort of divert them to possibly calm the waters when a hurricane is coming
onshore. And then in the Vietnam era, the Pentagon was secretly seeding the
clouds over the Ho Chi Minh trail, trying to make it rain and make mud on
the trail to reduce the trafficability.

Wendy Carlisle: It's Jim Fleming's view that climate engineering could be
used as a weapon.

Jim Fleming: I think it could, if push came to shove. I have discovered
there is just a tip of the iceberg showing on defence intellectuals
interested in this. Because they're saying climate change is a national
security issue, it's not simply cast in vague, apocalyptic terms, it's
actually threats to their war fighting capability to national security. And
when you see this tip, you must assume that there's more going on that's
not being reported.

Wendy Carlisle: And that present-day military hardware, guns and artillery,
could be retrofitted and used to launch weather-changing particles into the
stratosphere.

Jim Fleming: Well there's comments like the original 1992 National Academy
study, had concluded that it was simpler to shoot sulphates into the
stratosphere using naval guns, than it would be to sequester or reduce
carbondioxide in our environment. And when I mentioned this to one of the
participants, he had been one of the chairs at that National Academy study
and a former Navy official. He said, 'Sure, we've got the Navy guns, we
still have them in mothballs; all we need to do is put liners in them, and
we can be shooting sulphates very soon.' These are huge Naval guns that
would lob basically in the military sense, they would be declaring war on
the stratosphere by shooting sulphates up there to make it more reflective.

Wendy Carlisle: During his time at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Ken
Caldeira says he's been in a meeting to discuss the idea of manipulating
the weather for war. But he doesn't think it's a realistic option.

Ken Caldeira: I used to work at Lawrence Livermore National Lab., which is
basically the lab that created the hydrogen bomb. And one of the strange
things that occurs when you work in such a place is you find yourself in
odd meetings. And one meeting was this question of are there ways to use
the weather or geophysical systems as a weapon. And it turns out that it's
much easier just to drop a bomb on people, or do something much more direct
than toy with the weather and try to get them through some weather
manipulation. And so I really don't think that weather manipulation as a
military weapon is a realistic concern. I do think that climate engineering
could provoke wars and result in military actions.

Wendy Carlisle: And that's the heart of the problem. It's not that climate
engineering could become a weapon of war, but it could be the reason for
wars to begin.

For instance, what might happen if Russia or China or Canada decided that a
few degrees of extra warmth was good, but Australia found this same
temperature rise caused water shortages and crop failure? Whose priorities
would prevail then?

Professor Scott Barrett.

Scott Barrett: The difficulty I think here is that as one country acts,
other countries will be affected. Now they may be affected positively, but
there's also the possibility that they would be affected negatively. And
you really have the prospect here with this technology, of individual
countries essentially having their fingers on the global thermostat. And
that's why there's this question 'who decides?' It's not the same question
we've been grappling with, about how much to reduce and which countries
should cut back, by how much, when. This is much more what should the
temperature be? And different countries of course will be affected by
climate change in different kinds of ways, and they may have very different
views about this. The technology also has the potential of allowing
manipulation of the climate in different directions, so you actually can
even entertain the scenario that one country may want to use
geo-engineering to offset warming, to cool the planet somewhat, against
this background of warming. And other countries might want to do the
opposite. And so there will be the prospect, the potential for conflict,
because of this new technology and the collision really with this
environmental challenge, and our inability so far to address it
fundamentally.

Wendy Carlisle: It's these issues that are now occupying minds at the
Washington think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations. Next month,
they've convened a meeting to discuss what they've termed a most unusual
topic: unilateral planetary scale geo-engineering.

Those on the council think it's time that the policy community started
seriously thinking about what might happen if climate engineering was
deployed.

Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Professor David Victor.

David Victor: The meeting that we're calling is particularly focused on how
to manage the risk that countries will go off and unilaterally start
engineering the climate. And that's the really difficult aspect of this
question, because if a country decides that it very strongly, in its own
merits, wants to do something about this, it'll find that isn't that
expensive, and there isn't a lot of law or expectations to guide its
behaviour right now.

Wendy Carlisle: In fact, David Victor says climate engineering effectively
means that the geopolitics of climate change are turned upside down.

David Victor: When you're trying to control emissions, the only way to be
effective is to get almost all the world's emitters together and get them
to agree to undertake measures that could be expensive, to control their
emissions. And every country has a strong incentive to defect, to free ride
on the efforts of other countries. And this is what makes the climate
change problem politically such a difficult issue to deal with at an
international level. Geo-engineering is exactly the opposite. One country,
or a few countries could get together and decide on their own to go out and
intervene in the atmosphere to offset some of the effects of climate
change, and maybe to intervene in ways that are beneficial to themselves,
so high latitude countries that are worried about the loss of their ice
cover might intervene to block some of the sunlight and help their ice
recover, and that could be beneficial for them but it could be harmful to
other nations on earth. And so it's this complete turning upside down of
the politics that I think will come to be the big political issue in the
geo-engineering debate.

Wendy Carlisle: In late last year, 30 of America's leading scientists and
thinkers, including some of the people you've heard on this program,
Professor Scott Barrett, Wally Broecker, David Keith, Tom Schelling and
Paul Crutzen, wrote an open letter to US Presidential candidates. They
urged them to fund a $30-billion clean energy research project, with the
vigour of the moon mission, as conceived by President John F. Kennedy in
1961.

John F. Kennedy: We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon
in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but
because they are hard, because that challenge is one that we're willing to
accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.

APPLAUSE

Wendy Carlisle: The scientists who signed the letter said they believed
that private investment and the market alone was insufficient to drive the
research needed in the limited time available. They said it needed to be
funded by government.

Back in 1961, President Kennedy recognised that to put a man on the moon
would need vision, commitment, leadership and money. What these scientists
want is another Apollo effort.

John F. Kennedy: But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall
send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a
giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field,
made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable
of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been
experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch,
carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control,
communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown
celestial body, and then return it safely to earthy, re-entering the
atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half
that of the temperature of the sun - almost as hot as it is here today -
and do all this, and do it right, and do it first, before this decade is
out, then we must be bold.

APPLAUSE/MUSIC

John F. Kennedy: I'm the one who's doing all the work, so we just want you
to stay cool for a minute.

SONG: 'Blue Moon'.

Scott Barrett: Yes, President Kennedy was an extraordinary President,
because he showed real leadership. He made the country think about itself
and its role in the world in a different way.

Wendy Carlisle: One of the other things I found extraordinary about
President Kennedy's speech was he talks about this grand idea of putting a
man on the moon, and he doesn't know how it's going to be done. In fact he
says in his speech that all this 'money will be thrown at it and we will
invent alloys that we don't know about yet. We will invent energy systems
we don't know about yet.' So there was no kind of the known knowns there,
he was talking about the known unknowns.

Scott Barrett: Yes, that's exactly why we need basic research, that's
exactly right. And when you contemplate the magnitude of this challenge,
the idea that you're going to do it with just things that are on the shelf
and so on, I mean to some extent, yes, we can take action using those
existing technologies, but to really address it fundamentally we're going
to need to have this incredible transformation and what you just said
really explains why the science is needed and why basic research is needed,
because we'll need to uncover things that we haven't contemplated, and
that's what basic science and research does.

Wendy Carlisle: Professor Scott Barrett.

In 2005, the economist, Professor Tom Schelling received the Nobel Prize
for his work on game theory. It's a branch of economics which describes how
rational actors behave in a given set of circumstances. It's all about
strategic behaviour.

Professor Schelling was the brains behind the thinking on nuclear
deterrence during the Cold War.

In the 1980s he got involved with the global warming debate during the
Carter Administration, and he's still involved. He doesn't think global
attempts to reduce emissions through treaties or trading will work. He
thinks the developed world should show it's serious about climate change,
by massively investing in new technology, just like the moon mission. But
if that doesn't work, he thinks climate engineering could prove
irresistible.

Tom Schelling: If geo-engineering should work, and we don't know whether it
will, we don't know what the side effects might be, but it really
transforms the problem from one of regulating the behaviour of 7 or 8
billion people in the way they cook their food and transport themselves,
and warm and cool themselves, and all of that, instead of having to change
lifestyles and behaviour of billions of people, it simply turns off the
global warming, and that's bound to be very tempting.

And I think what is going to be needed is for some small scale reversible
experiments, to find out just how well some of the ideas work, and what
some of the side effect may be that we have to worry about.

Wendy Carlisle: And would you be able to gauge for me what you think is
amongst the mainstream climate scientist community, what they're attitude
is towards this now? Do they now believe, do you think, that this needs to
be talked about? They've stopped self-censoring themselves, in other words?

Tom Schelling: I don't think we're there yet, but I think we're going to be
there in a few more years. I think the argument in favour of at least
testing some of the ideas about geo-engineering on a small scale, without
any long-term commitment yet, until we've discovered how it works and
whether it works, and whether there are serious disadvantages, I think
gradually this is going to become a subject that eventually be on the
editorial pages of newspapers in Australia or the USA or the UK, or Germany
and such places.

Wendy Carlisle: Professor Schelling believes climate engineering is going
to be a much more attractive option to wealthy nations than trying to
reduce their emissions. And that's the problem, it's cheap and unilateral.
Nations, he says, will act in their own self interest. And he says under
this scenario, conflict is inevitable.

Tom Schelling: Ordinarily we'd think that the problem is going to be get
all the nations together to co-operate at substantial sacrifice. On the
other hand, if geo-engineering turns out to be as effective and as cheap as
some people think it will be, then the question is, 'how many nations will
there be any one of which could afford to undertake its own
geo-engineering, leaving all the other nations to enjoy or suffer the
consequences.' So that if it turns out that the Chinese decide they can
afford to engage in geo-engineering and other nations don't like it, how do
we arrive at a compromise? I think that's likely to be a matter of real
dispute, especially if some people think that we want to reduce global
atmospheric change in temperature by 1-degree Celsius, and others think we
ought to do it by 4-degrees Celsius, there's a lot of room for dispute
there, and I think we ought to recognise that geo-engineering may prove to
be a too attractive solution to the problem. Too attractive to some nations
that foresee that they themselves are going to suffer very seriously, while
other nations would rather not take the risk.

Wendy Carlisle: So how does the world go about governing who should set the
global thermostat? I mean how do we do that?

Tom Schelling: I don't think you can prevent the conflict, I think you have
to recognise with respect to geo-engineering, there is almost certain to be
a conflict over exactly what to do and how much to do and who should pay
for it. I think reaching agreement on how much geo-engineering to engage in
especially if it turns out that there are risks that we haven't yet
identified with geo-engineering, it might appear more dangerous to some
countries than others.

Wendy Carlisle: The idea of controlling the climate through direct
intervention has been around for a long time. But it's true to say it's
come a long way in a very short time, out of the realm of science fiction
and into the science lab.

But the great dilemmas are no closer to being solved. How do you prevent
climate engineering from happening once countries discover it could be
do-able and cheap? And even then, no-one can be sure that the climate
engineering option won't cause an environmental disaster.

As Professor David Keith stood in front of a spellbound audience of
scientists at Harvard University, he laid out what has become a truly awful
set of possibilities, that the more we engage in climate engineering, the
more we walk away from our existing climate.

David Keith: So, here's one way to think about it, which is that we just do
this instead of cutting emissions because it's cheaper. I guess the thing I
haven't said about this is that it is absurdly cheap, it's conceivable that
say using the sulphates method, or this method I've come up with, you could
create an ice age at a cost of .001% of GDP. It's very cheap, we have a lot
of leverage. It's not a good idea, but it's just important. I'll tell you
how big the lever is, the lever is that big. And that calculation isn't in
much dispute. You might argue about the sanity of it, but the leverage is
real. But here's a case which is harder to reject.

Let's say that we don't do geo-engineering, we do what we ought to do,
which is get serious about cutting emissions. But we don't really know how
quickly we have to cut them. There's a lot of uncertainty about exactly how
much climate change is too much.

So let's say that we work hard and we actually don't just tap the brakes,
but we step hard on the brakes and really reduce emissions and then
actually reduce concentrations, and maybe someday, like 2075, October 23rd,
we finally reach that glorious day where concentrations have peaked and are
rolling down the other side, and we have global celebrations and we've
actually started to - we've seen the worst of it.

But maybe on that day we also find that the Greenland ice sheet is really
melting unacceptably fast, fast enough to put meters of sea level on the
oceans in the next 100 years, and remove some of the biggest cities from
the map. That's an absolutely possible scenario. We might decide at that
point that even though geo-engineering was uncertain and morally unhappy,
that it's a lot better than not geo-engineering, and that's a very
different way to look at the problem. It's using this as risk control not
instead of action. It's saying that you do some geo-engineering for a
little while, to take the worst of the heat off, not use it as a substitute
for action.

But there is a problem with that view, and the problem is the following:

Knowledge that geo-engineering is possible makes the climate impacts look
less fearsome, and that makes a weaker commitment to cutting emissions
today. This is what economists call a moral hazard. And that's one of the
fundamental reasons that this problem is so hard to talk about; in general,
I think it's the underlying reason that it's been politically unacceptable
to talk about this, but you don't make good policy by hiding things in a
drawer.

Wendy Carlisle: Background Briefing's Executive Producer is Chris Bullock.
Co-ordinating Producer, Linda McGinness. Research, Anna Whitfeld, and
technical production this week, Mark Don. I'm Wendy Carlisle and you're
listening to Background Briefing on ABC Radio National.

MUSIC: 'Try a little tenderness'

Further Information

'A surprising idea for 'solving' climate change' - A talk by David Keith
delivered in November 2007
Publications

Title: 'Can Dr Evil Save the World?' Rolling Stone, Nov 3, 2006
Author: Jeff Goodell
URL:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/12343892/can_dr_evil_save_the_world/1

Title: 'The Climate Engineers' in Wilson Quarterly Spring 2006
Author: James R Fleming
URL: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=231274
Presenter

Wendy Carlisle