The old saying goes, Everyone talks about the weather
but no one does anything about it. Well, if White House science adviser John Holdren has his way, that might change. In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Holdren joined the National Academy of Science and the British Parliament in seriously considering starting an effort to tinker with the atmosphere in hopes of stopping the car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog that is global warming. Geo-engineering ideas that are being tossed around by the Obama administration include shooting particles of pollution into the atmosphere, so that the Earth's albedo, or reflectivity, would be increased. The more of the sun's light that the Earth reflects, the less radiation the atmosphere absorbs, and in theory, the cooler the Earth gets.
Given that scientists don't fully understand the complexity of the Earth and its natural processes, doesn't geo-engineering seem like a bad idea? To stretch Holdren's car analogy beyond its breaking point, geo-engineering without knowing what the results will be seems a bit like pushing random buttons in that car with bad brakes. Also, polluting to save the environment? Really? I hereby nominate John Holdren for the Peter Arnett Award for Silliness. Peter Arnett was a Vietnam-era journalist who claims to have been told by a major that it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. Let's shoot pollution into an atmosphere and ecosphere whose processes we don't understand, in order to solve a problem that was caused by not understanding atmospheric and ecospherical processes. Right-o.
Most Holdrenesque (or should that be Rube Goldberg-esque?) geo-engineering ideas revolve around injecting sulfur dioxide en masse into the atmosphere, specifically the stratosphere, which is 13 kilometers up. Assuming that Nature doesn't pull a Jurassic Park and find a way to screw this up, the idea is that the sulfur dioxide would combine with other molecules and form sulfuric acid. Drops of sulfuric acid would bind with the water in the air, and form a shiny aerosol that would reflect 1-3 percent of the sun's rays. Ironically, this plan would also help deplete the ozone layer, but that's just small potatoes.
The Holdren Plan is already done with the proof-of-concept phase, thanks to Mother Earth; in 1991, Mount Pinatubo belched 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide, and according to researchers, the global average temperature dropped by half of one degree Celsius, thanks to the planet-wide haze that permeated the air. However, the fact remains that scientists and government bureaucrats would be messing with complex systems that not even the most powerful computer models can accurately model. There are too many risks that some unknown or misunderstood interaction could set off a chain reaction that messes up the Earth, at least in the opinions of geo-engineering critics such as prominent climate scientists Alan Robock and James Rodger Fleming. Oh, that and the off-chance that Holdren Plans could cause acid rain and decreases in overall world precipitation. Small price to pay, right?
Look here, folks. Not understanding how complex and interconnected our world got us here in the first place. If you believe that man is the cause of global warming, then don't make the cure worse than the disease. Speaking with the clown nose on, I saw a movie in which man tried to play God on a grand scale, and we got Velociraptors that learned how to turn doorknobs. Let's not play God with the weather. We only have one Earth; let's not make Nature find a way to enforce the Law of Unintended Consequences against us.
Jesse Hathaway is a senior studying English. Send him an e-mail at jh309105@ohiou.edu. 4
Opinion
Jesse Hathaway
