Top Scientists Say Man
May Need to Dirty Skies to Shield against Warming
November 16, 2006 — By Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press
NAIROBI — If the sun warms the Earth
too dangerously, the time may come to draw the shade.
The "shade" would be a layer of pollution deliberately spewed into the
atmosphere to help cool the planet. The proposal comes from prominent
scientists, among them a Nobel laureate. The reaction here at the annual
U.N. conference on climate change is a mix of caution, curiosity and some
resignation to such "massive and drastic" operations, as the chief U.N.
climatologist describes them.
The Nobel Prize-winning scientist who first made the proposal is himself
"not enthusiastic about it."
"It was meant to startle the policymakers," said Paul J. Crutzen, of
Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. "If they don't take action
much more strongly than they have in the past, then in the end we have to
do experiments like this."
Serious people are taking Crutzen's idea seriously. This weekend at
Moffett Field, California, NASA's Ames Research Center hosts a
closed-door, high-level workshop on the global haze proposal and other "geoengineering"
ideas for fending off climate change.
In Nairobi, meanwhile, hundreds of delegates were wrapping up a two-week
conference expected to only slowly advance efforts to rein in greenhouse
gases blamed for much of the 0.6-degree-Celsius (1-degree-Fahrenheit) rise
in global temperatures in the past century.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol requires modest emission cutbacks by industrial
countries -- but not the United States, the biggest emitter of carbon
dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, because it rejected Kyoto. Talks on
what to do after Kyoto expires in 2012 are all but bogged down.
When he published his proposal in the journal Climatic Change in August,
Crutzen cited a "grossly disappointing international political response"
to warming.
The Dutch climatologist, awarded a 1995 Nobel in chemistry for his work
uncovering the threat to Earth's atmospheric ozone layer, suggested that
balloons bearing heavy guns be used to carry sulfates high aloft and fire
them into the stratosphere.
While carbon dioxide keeps heat from escaping Earth, substances such as
sulfur dioxide, a common air pollutant, reflect solar radiation, helping
cool the planet.
Tom Wigley, a senior U.S. government climatologist, followed Crutzen's
article with a paper of his own Oct. 20 in the leading U.S. journal
Science. Like Crutzen, Wigley cited the precedent of the huge volcanic
eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991.
Pinatubo poured so much sulfurous debris into the stratosphere that it is
believed it cooled the Earth by 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees
Fahrenheit) for about a year.
Wigley ran scenarios of stratospheric sulfate injection -- on the scale of
Pinatubo's estimated 10 million tons of sulfur -- through supercomputer
models of the climate, and reported that Crutzen's idea would, indeed,
seem to work. Even half that amount per year would help, he wrote.
A massive dissemination of pollutants would be needed every year or two,
as the sulfates precipitate from the atmosphere in acid rain.
The American scientist said a temporary shield would give political
leaders more time to reduce human dependence on fossil fuels -- main
source of greenhouse gases. He said experts must more closely study the
feasibility of the idea and its possible effects on stratospheric
chemistry.
Nairobi conference participants agreed.
"Yes, by all means, do all the research," Indian climatologist Rajendra K.
Pachauri, chairman of the 2,000-scientist U.N. network on climate change,
told The Associated Press.
But "if human beings take it upon themselves to carry out something as
massive and drastic as this, we need to be absolutely sure there are no
side effects," Pachauri said.
Philip Clapp, a veteran campaigner for emissions controls to curb warming,
also sounded a nervous note, saying, "We are already engaged in an
uncontrolled experiment by injecting greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere."
But Clapp, president of the U.S. group National Environmental Trust, said,
"I certainly don't disagree with the urgency."
American geophysicist Jonathan Pershing, of Washington's World Resources
Institute, was also wary of unforeseen consequences, but said the idea
might be worth considering "if down the road 25 years it becomes more and
more severe because we didn't deal with the problem."
By telephone from Germany, Crutzen said that's what he envisioned: global
haze as a component for long-range planning. "The reception on the whole
is more positive than I thought," he said.
Pershing added, however, that reaction may hinge on who pushes the idea.
"If it's the U.S., it might be perceived as an effort to avoid the
problem," he said.
NASA said this weekend's California conference will examine "methods to
ameliorate the likelihood of progressively rising temperatures over the
next decades." Other such U.S. government-sponsored events are scheduled
to follow.