David Battisti had arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, expecting a rout, a farce, a bloodbath. So had many of the other scientists who had joined him that frigid morning from around the country. It was an invitation - only workshop on climate science in November of 2007 for which they convened at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an airy temple to diligence and scholarship one block from Harvard University. Battisti shuffled out of the Massachusetts morning air and into the Academy’s expansive premises.
The workshop’s unholy topic was geoengineering: the concept of manually tinkering with Earth’s thermostat to reverse global warming. Organizers had arranged the event to find out whether respected climate scientists such as Battisti might support research into the controversial idea. In a button - down shirt opened two buttons down, Battisti poured his coffee and watched the scientists fiddle with their muffins. One couldn’t take planethacking seriously, he figured, because there’s no way we’ll ever know enough about the atmosphere to claim we can control it. Just because the radical notion had made it from the outer fringes of Earth science all the way to Cambridge didn’t mean the group was going to legitimize it, he thought.
Since the 1960s, a handful of scientists had dreamed up various schemes to intentionally alter the atmosphere on a global scale: flying enormous sunshades above Earth, creating billions of thicker clouds at sea, or spewing light - blocking sulfate pollution at high altitude to mimic the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions. Ecologists imagined brightening the planet’s dark surfaces to reflect more sunlight, by spreading white plastic across certain deserts. Marine biologists explored growing algae blooms to suck billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the sky.
Each concept took a smidgen or two of sense and added scientific optimism and a dollop of whimsy. Mostly back - of - the - envelope affairs, the papers that described them included just enough observations or calculations to suggest the ideas might work. The scientists who wrote them knew the concepts were raw and with few exceptions understood them to be options reserved for worst - case scenarios. To the broader community of climate scientists, proposing even to study deliberately altering the atmosphere was a heretical idea.
As Battisti poured himself coffee, he saw one of the heretics standing beside the buffet table. “That guy is scary,” Battisti whispered to a colleague. It was Lowell Wood, a nuclear physicist with a broad, reddish beard and a dark jacket. His wide torso was bisected by a tie featuring the periodic table of elements. From his perch at a California nuclear weapons lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Wood had won notoriety, if not ridicule, for proposing in 1997 to control the atmosphere's thermostat by scattering chemicals in the atmosphere. He had done so in collaboration with his aging mentor Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb. Teller, whose conservative views had often put him at odds with the left - leaning scientific establishment, had advocated in the same year that geoengineering was a better way to tackle the climate crisis than the Kyoto accords.
Reprinted from Hack the Planet: Science's Best Hope -- or Worst Nightmare -- for Averting Climate Catastrophe with permission from Wiley. Copyright 2010 by Eli Kintisch.
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