Climate Controlled Environment

Will humankind be controlled by the climate or will we control the climate?

Science Fiction aficionados have probably contemplated this question before. I noticed an old Star Trek episode that directly referenced a world with a planetary climate control, and I remember other episodes that showed the characters trying to correct various climatological and even geological problems of planets in peril. I've always wondered if this capability was far off for man. I remember a science magazine article that turned my perceptions of climate around when it discussed what it would take to transform Mars into a world where people could survive comfortably. They estimated that it would take 250 years of serious effort. That has always impressed me as a striking contrast to the time it takes planets to change their climate naturally, hundreds of millions of years, usually.

I just finished the book The Discovery of Global by Spencer Weart. In this work, Spencer Weart reviews the history of the scientists and their work for the last 150 years creating the science of Climatology and unravelling the mystery of what our Earth has in store for it.

I have never had much problem comprehending this subject before I read the book, I may not have had an in-depth knowledge of the background of the research, but the science behind what is happening and the conclusions that were drawn were never in any doubt in my mind. What I have trouble comprehending is how so many people, some intelligent and well-educated, can even begin to doubt that humans are impacting our environment. I grew up in the era of awareness and awakening to man-made pollution. I got to see a full cycle of some of the problems being identified and successfully coped with through laws and social awareness. People not much younger than me can probably not remember a time when garbage was piled up alongside most roads and highways. I do. I remember polluted streams and acid rain, and the discovery of the holes in the ozone layer. I remember when gasoline had lead in it and you saw lingering clouds of exhaust coming out of every car driving down the road. I also remember all the work that was done to correct these problems, from catalytic converters to the clean water and clean air act. I remember the bans of CFCs in aerosol cans, and the changeout of the old refrigerants to more environmentally friendly ones.

I also remember ice skating on ponds here in Kansas City when I was younger. I remember how each winter would freeze the ponds, lakes, and streams hard enough to walk on. I remember how that happened some time in December or January and lasted into March. I remember months with snow covering the ground, rather than occasional snow storms that usually melt before the next storm comes around. I don't remember ever seeing a 60 degree day in January when I was little, but I notice that most Januaries have a few of those days in the last few years.

I remember enough that Global Warming seems real and is believable on a simple, non-scientific basis. I realize that the world has had ice ages in the past, but I would not expect to notice a shift in my lifetime of a natural cycle. I understood that the ice ages lasted for tens of thousands of years at a time, and never expected that these events switched on and off quickly.

When scientists started pondering these issues, it was not necessarily with a question of how quick they changed, if they were currently changing, or if man was having an impact. Many of the early studies were simply trying to chronicle the past ages and understand what causes the shifts between temperate and icy world climates. It was thought for many years that the transition into or out of an ice age would be a matter of thousands of years. Some scientist proposed that this could change quickly and they were soundly criticized by the rest of the scientific community. Then more scientists began to see that rapid change was possible. The other debate that moved back and forth was whether we were headed into a cooling or warming trend. This debate had two sides, the naturally occurring cycles, and what the human changes were pushing the planet to. Up to the 1970s, you still had reputable scientists that believed that global cooling was in effect as a result of human pollution. I say reputable scientists because these people were not under the pay of big oil or any other polluting or energy producing company, but I suppose some of their colleagues would not call them reputable, when you look at the shellacking they took from the rest of the scientific community. The peer review process is only rarely contentious for long. Most issues resolve into a clear consensus within a very few years, and the announcement that man was causing global cooling was quickly dismissed. What was agreed was that the balance of whether there would be a shift in climate was more precarious and could change more rapidly than the scientists had believed for years. New information made them realize that things could change very quickly.

In the 50s we started understanding that man could effect weather. The nuclear tests were the first concrete example that man could have a large impact on nature, and it got people thinking. Then someone noticed that airplane contrails actually resolved into cloud systems. While some scientists were studying urban pollutants and trying to figure out what their effect was, other scientists were deliberately trying to have an effect on the weather by testing the theory of cloud seeding. Cloud seeding never proved to be a reliable way to produce rain, but it did teach the scientists that there would be legal and regulatory consequences to man made climate changes. There were lawsuits against people seeding clouds when the people downwind claimed that they were stealing rain that would have fallen on them. Those suits were not widespread. I imagine it was difficult to prove that it would have rained if there had not been cloud seeding. Meanwhile, the aerosol people were looking at the effect that pollution was having on climate. Some started with the idea that particulates in the air would block the sun from coming through and have a net cooling effect. Others argued that it would trap heat in and cause a warming effect. Studies were coming in that gave different answers for different gasses and aerosols. As you can imagine, this was very difficult to measure, and even more difficult to isolate the effect of a single component in an atmospheric stew of chemicals and particles.

People became concerned about the more visible forms of pollution and started working to reduce man made atmospheric contaminant. These efforts were largely successful, but targeted mostly the visible or more readily apparent problems. Methane and Carbon Dioxide remained invisible and unregulated. As a result, what the scientists were studying was changing. They eventually saw the carbon dioxide, and to a lesser extent, the methane as the two emissions having the biggest impact, and that impact was to make the climate warmer as they worked as greenhouse gasses and trapped the sun's energy in the atmosphere. This really only started becoming abundantly apparent in the 80s and 90s. This is why many people today still throw up objections to global warming by saying that a short time ago, scientists thought there was global cooling. It would be more fair to say that a short time ago, scientists did not have a good handle on the extent and speed of global warming.

Many suggestions to fixing the mess we are in have been proposed. On the extreme ends of the argument, some are saying we need to drill for more oil and that the Earth cannot be harmed while others are saying we need to abandon fossil fuels as soon as possible. The rational science based response is that we need to shift our energy consumption away from fossil fuels and into renewable fuels. The energy companies make huge profits from delivering fossil fuel based energy and use a portion of these profits to buy "scientists" to put out reports supporting their position that we should do nothing because there is no harm being done (does that not sound exactly like big tobacco?) and funding politicians that will try to block any move away from fossil fuels and any effort to regulate fossil fuel emissions. They have also found friends in the media and talk radio, raising fears that the only answer people concerned about the environment have is to destroy our economy and way of life. In reality, the decision is being made for us, we will quickly reach a time when we have no choice. When you consider the security that will come from producing our own energy, it is amazing to me that the conservatives and denialists are getting anywhere with their obstructionism. When you see the number of companies out there sinking money into research and development of alternative energy, not to mention the fact that retooling our power infrastructure for homegrown energy will put a lot of people to work and reap huge profits for the companies with foresight to get their solutions online and up and running first, it is amazing to me that anyone is fighting alternate energy or supporting the enormous power industries that aren't even trying to be part of the solution. It seems to me that the big energy companies are in the best position to benefit from the movement to local and sustainable homegrown renewable energy. They have the infrastructure and the financing to make these things happen, they clearly love controlling the energy markets and reaping huge profits from it. Why on earth are they not the first ones out the door to rush to jump into new energy production?

Getting back to climate changes, I have been daydreaming for years about humans taking control of the environment and making it do what they want it to do. One of my fondest dreams is to transform the Sahara into a lush landscape. Obviously, this would entail changing the way the weather generates and deposits rain in this region of the world, a project beyond the scope of people at this time. However, if this could be accomplished, it would be fantastic. This region of Africa was a lush forest not that long ago, and could be again. That much more green space on the planet would serve not only as a carbon sink and a generator of oxygen, but it would undoubtedly have a cooling effect on the globe. Not to mention that a growing population will need more space to live in and more arable land. This huge chunk of real estate is being wasted in the form it is in now. Yet, for every great idea, there is always a scary host of catastrophic unintended effects. Who knows what problems would crop us elsewhere if the Sahara Dessert were changed into the Sahara Rain Forest. Would the effect be self sustaining at some point? Anyone who has read Dune by Frank Herbert, which involved the dream of transforming a desert planet into a lush water Eden, has surely thought of this idea at some time.

One idea that came to my mind when I read the book was that perhaps we could change the way aerosols and particulates effect the sun by changing molecular alignment of molecules in air. Like sunscreen, which works by having tiny particles that act as sunshades or perhaps more like the way a venetian blind blocks the sun, we might be able to make Carbon Dioxide more transparent to sun trying to escape back into space or more opaque to the sun energy as it enters the atmosphere. Assuming that you could ionize, polarize, or maybe magnetize gasses in the atmosphere to align in such a way that they no longer perform randomly to pass or block heat, but act as we choose, this could be an important tool for man to actually control the climate. Need Cooling? you align gasses in the atmosphere to block and reflect heat and solar radiation. Need Heating? Align the gasses to allow heat through or to traps heat in and blanket the atmosphere. We would need a field mechanism on a large scale, a way to induce molecular alignment with remote fields. I'm envisioning some kind of spaced based emitters that would train on portions of the atmosphere and change the way they treat heat energy. Of course this is future technology, not even really conceived of at this time, but I tend to believe that with enough time and effort, man can achieve anything. I just want it to be something that helps us that we intended to do, not something that destroys it that we did not intend to do.