Chilling Out Earth
Using giant orbiting mirrors to reduce global
warming may sound like science fiction - but it's not
"You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe."
"You take the red pill and
you stay in Wonderland and I'll show you how deep the
rabbit-hole goes."
- By THANE BURNET - September 27, 2006
We may be pulling out coats for another Canadian winter, but Dr. Roger Angel believes it's time to turn on Earth's AC.
Imagine a world where trillions of sunshades orbit above us.
Where a huge mirror stands between our planet and the sun.
Angel can see the reflection. In fact, the British astronomer, and other scientists, are planning for the day humans switch Earth's environmental controls from automatic to manual.
In the face of skeptics and global warming evidence, a still small but now popular band of geoengineers are fretting over the finer details of world-altering blueprints.
What was once dismissed by even their peers as science fiction -- mastering and manipulating our entire environment using planet-sized solutions -- is suddenly an exercise in heated debate and controversial science.
It's being called our salvation. It's also being called our folly.
"If the icecaps melt, we just can't put them back," said Angel, who proposes sending trillions of butterfly light lenses into space to manipulate sunlight.
"There are enough scenarios where things look grim ... it would be irresponsible to do nothing," Angel said yesterday, over the phone from his University of Arizona office.
DANGEROUS LEVELS
If not now -- he and other proponents of geoengineering the planet argue -- then when do humans consider the extremes in dealing with global warming?
A report in yesterday's issue of an American science journal found the Earth's temperature has risen to its highest level in thousands of years.
"The evidence implies that we are getting closer to dangerous levels of human-made pollution," reported James Hansen, head of a NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies team, which found the globe's overall temperature is the warmest in 12,000 years.
While few scientists doubt things are heating up, the cause is widely debated. But Hansen -- whose report was released in yesterday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences -- concludes human-made greenhouse gases are the main reason the planet is warming.
And there's a growing urgency to turn the dial back.
Most support conventional means to have us cut our use of oil and coal.
Years ago, I stood seasick on an aft deck of a fishing boat, far off Canada's eastern coast, as British adventurer and business tycoon Richard Branson raced past in an attempt to break the transatlantic speed record. His priorities and goals, it seems, have changed over two decades.
He has announced an estimated $3-billion US investment to combat global warming over the coming decade. The fund will be used to find renewable, sustainable energy sources.
"We must not be the generation responsible for irreversibly damaging the environment," he said earlier this month.
Others -- including scientists like Angel -- are looking heavenward for salvation. Their blue-sky answers are mind-boggling, if not potentially very scary.
As well as stationing mirrors in space, theorized plans are being toyed with to spray clouds with sea water to make them better mirrors.
Sulfates could also be pumped into the stratosphere. There's a suggestion to position a 240-km-wide mirror to deflect the sun's rays. And geoengineers envision dust and soot delivered into the atmosphere with high altitude balloons or large guns, in an effort to trap heat.
On the stretch of Atlantic where I watched Branson's Virgin speedboat go past, large ships, burning sulphur to increase cloud cover, could roam. As they do that, they could be pumping iron oxide into the ocean to stimulate mass, carbon dioxide-eating plankton growth.
These disturbing ideas were suddenly given renewed attention recently, when Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen gave his intellectual blessing to an old idea to inject sulfates into the stratosphere.
Not all scientists are on board trying to wrestle control of the environment from the natural order of things.
Dr. David Keith, Canada Research chairman in energy and the environment -- who works at the point where climate and energy science becomes public policy -- cautioned media stories like this one could "spin out of control" in the public's mind. The fear is fancy becomes fact, and people lose the urgency and will to deal with issues at their source.
NEW ICE AGE
"If the government hands out free fire insurance, you tend to become sloppy," he explained to me, cautioning man is capable of anything, including creating a new ice age.
"One view, which is reasonable, is to say this stuff is completely outrageous, immoral and dangerous."
However, he didn't rule out the unthinkable in decades to come, noting he and other experts plan to meet in November to discuss where the world stands on geoengineering.
Alan Robock has already decided. A professor of meteorology at Rutgers University, he told London's Daily Telegraph that our manipulation is "a very bad and dangerous idea."
He envisioned a world where, after planting sulfates into the stratosphere, blue skies would forever turn grey.
Angel is unmoved by such colour.
"If you're going to hell in a handbasket, it's nice to have a recourse," he said. "The sky could be yellow, and it would be better than not having any plants for my grandchildren."
"You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake
in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe."
"You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland
and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."
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