The Power Is Ours!

Man, what's with me lately? A humanist movie interpretation? An analysis of the properties of different curse words? What am I, an English major? Time to get back on track. Time to do something...dangerously cool.

This is what showed up when I googled "dangerously cool." Not too sure about that one, Google.

Anyway, today we're talking about geoengineering. Why is it dangerously cool? Because it's the kind of thing Captain Planet would do if trapped in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It's also dangerous. Now, you might think "Geoengineering. Well, geo is like geology, so maybe it's about engineering rocks." WRONG. Rocks wish they could be half as cool as a geoengineer's testicle and/or boob. Geoengineering is about engineering the whole planet. Right now, when people talk about geoengineering they're talking about fighting global warming, usually.

See, here's how it works. Carbon dioxide has the ability to absorb and re-emit infrared radiation. This means that it traps heat. We are adding CO2 to the atmosphere. That makes it trap more heat, and that's bad, because we have an alarming tendency to build cities on coastlines, where the water is. And where a lot more water will be. Logically, then, we ought to cut our CO2 emissions before we hit a positive feedback loop in terms of oceanic methane or whatever. But, that's looking less and less likely every time we have a failed climate conference. Some scientists got together and said, "Well, what next? What if we can't stop the carbon emissions?" And the answer they decided on? Blow up the sun.

Once someone pointed out that that was a terrible idea, they sat around thought up some other cool things we could do to Holy Terra. In true memetic style, the main goal seems to be to blot out the sun so they can fight in the shade to decrease the amount of radiation Earth receives and thus trigger global counter-cooling. So, human race, what do you do to get out of the sun? If you're any kind of man at all, you carry a parasol. In similar fashion, some scientists propose setting up a solar shade in orbit. This might be the most futuristic of these proposals, simply because it boils down to giant umbrellas in space. Even better, you could mix those with the OTHER kind of futuristic satellite proposal, and use them to beam solar power down to Earth like in Sim City 2000. Those of you who accidentally burnt down your own cities may have an objection to this, but those of us who think that the prospect of giant microwave power beams from the sky are awesome would like to shoot down that objection. Besides, you just check "No Disasters." Problem is, you need a screen...oh...two thousand kilometers across. That's right. Two megameters. You do this by launching lots of little disks, but even still, your parasol would take years and years to build.

Alright, alright, but this is the 2010s, and when we want technobabble, we want nanobot style stuff. Where's the Deus Ex aesthetic? Answer: Reflective aerosol. Admittedly, this isn't actual nanotechnology, but it should be. In this strategy, you reduce the amount of solar radiation not with a giant spacebrellas, but with a fine spray that would be distributed into the atmosphere. After all, this managed to cool the earth for the dinosaurs, and after Krakatoa, and...what awful precedents I'm setting. Point is, we've seen this done before in nature. You don't even need spaceflight for this, just...uh, airflight.

Imagine, though, that this is the far future and we're trying to stop climate change. By that time, we're going to be pretty drastically out of 300 jokes. We're going to have to do something besides blot out the sun. That brings us to the second major class of geoengineering projects: get rid of all that CO2. How do you do this? With something ballsy. Personally, I half-imagined a skyscraper-sized air filter of the type you see on informercials.

 I was going to paste this into a picture of a city, but Paint in Windows 7 is new and scary and I couldn't figure out how to make it ignore the background white.

One method that's almost as cool is to dump iron in the oceans. Why would you do that? Well, see, we're trying to piss off Captain Planet enough that he clears up global warming for us. Captain Planet being a subtle personification, he'll do this by causing a rapid growth in algae. Turns out iron is a major limiting factor. The idea is that the algae eats the iron, eats the CO2, then dies. It then descends all the way to the bottom of the sea and stays there. Ideally. Unfortunately, nobody really knows if it would actually stay there.

Attempt number two at carbon sequestration: Step one is to grow biofuels, which we can already do. Step two is to burn the biofuels, which only makes sense. Step three is to catch the carbon and put it somewhere else, like in empty oil fields (for irony) or turn it into a massive continent made of diamonds (hey, it could work).

You've probably noticed the biggest problem here. Whose job is it to do this? Well, nobody's. Everybody's. Geoengineering engineers the whole geo, so you can't just have some rogue nation like Canada announce that they're going to be putting up solar shades. Likewise, what do you do if you've got the UN or someone doing it when someone batshit insane (North Korea) decides they don't want this? How many countries get to vote on this, exactly? And whose fault is it if the solar shades crash, bringing a cloud of deadly aerosols to ground level which mutate the algae into an unstoppable biofuel-powered killing machine? Eh? What then? Because that's another thing about geoengineering. If you screw up, what do you do? You can't discard that prototype and find a new planet. (Somebody who's a better writer than me: Science fiction. The year is 2100 and geoengineering wrecked the planet. Mars colonization. Write it.) Worse, because no prototype exists, you can't even test it. Your entire experiment consists of modeling and throwing something into the sky, hoping it works. If it doesn't work, a few years later, the world's still warming and your countermeasure failed. Nice try, Captain Fail.

Which is why, cool as it is, geoengineering is something we don't want to do. It would be infinitely, infinitely better to stop emitting and allow the climate to continue as it usually does. In fact, if you read the people proposing these, they don't even offer these as solutions to global warming. Instead, they say it's just a way to buy time. It says something about how screwed we may be when blotting out the sun is just another decade to get our act together.