The CIA Wants To Control the Climate!!!!

Jamais at Open The Future has a look at the recent Mother Jones report on geoengineering funding - The CIA Wants To Control the Climate!!!!11!.

This is an entirely appropriate use of a very small amount of money (in government terms) and the resources of the intelligence services. As I've gone into multiple times, the global political risks around geoengineering are massive, likely greater than the environmental risks. A better understanding of an emerging complex geopolitical issue is precisely what I'd want an intelligence service to be doing. It's a lot better than operating killer drones and reading our email.

This is an entirely appropriate use of a very small amount of money (in government terms) and the resources of the intelligence services. As I've gone into multiple times, the global political risks around geoengineering are massive, likely greater than the environmental risks. A better understanding of an emerging complex geopolitical issue is precisely what I'd want an intelligence service to be doing. It's a lot better than operating killer drones and reading our email. People who don't want to see geoengineering happen should be glad that the US government is taking this seriously as a potential issue. I had an opportunity a couple of years ago to participate in a "wargame" project run by the CIA Center on Climate Change and National Security -- see souvenir above -- and watched as a climate-focused exercise turned into a geoengineering-focused game. As far as I could tell, this was not the designer's intent, but an organic result of player actions. And over the course of the game it came very close to leading to armed conflict between the US and China, a conflict over uncertain (and unsettling) consequences of a geoengineering effort. [The CIA Center on CCNS is now closed, in part due to climate issues being integrated across the spectrum of CIA research, and in part because House Republicans cut funding. Can't have the government studying climate change as if it were a real thing, you know.]

There's no question that geoengineering needs to be thought of as a potential global political risk. I'm glad to see a project like this. And I hope that the intelligence and strategic risk analysis services of other governments around the world are doing the exact same thing. ...

People who don't want to see geoengineering happen should be glad that the US government is taking this seriously as a potential issue. I had an opportunity a couple of years ago to participate in a "wargame" project run by the CIA Center on Climate Change and National Security -- see souvenir above -- and watched as a climate-focused exercise turned into a geoengineering-focused game. As far as I could tell, this was not the designer's intent, but an organic result of player actions. And over the course of the game it came very close to leading to armed conflict between the US and China, a conflict over uncertain (and unsettling) consequences of a geoengineering effort.

[The CIA Center on CCNS is now closed, in part due to climate issues being integrated across the spectrum of CIA research, and in part because House Republicans cut funding. Can't have the government studying climate change as if it were a real thing, you know.] There's no question that geoengineering needs to be thought of as a potential global political risk. I'm glad to see a project like this. And I hope that the intelligence and strategic risk analysis services of other governments around the world are doing the exact same thing.

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CIA Backs Geoengineering Study

Mother Jones has an article on geoengineering funding in the US - CIA Backs $630,000 Scientific Study on Controlling Global Climate. I think the title is overstating it a bit - geoengineering (in any of its myriad, crazed forms) isn't really "controlling" the climate.

The Central Intelligence Agency is funding a scientific study that will investigate whether humans could use geoengineering to alter Earth's environment and stop climate change. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) will run the 21-month project, which is the first NAS geoengineering study financially supported by an intelligence agency. With the spooks' money, scientists will study how humans might influence weather patterns, assess the potential dangers of messing with the climate, and investigate possible national security implications of geoengineering attempts.

The total cost of the project is $630,000, which NAS is splitting with the CIA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA. The NAS website says that "the US intelligence community" is funding the project, and William Kearney, a spokesman for NAS, told Mother Jones that phrase refers to the CIA. Edward Price, a spokesman for the CIA, refused to confirm the agency's role in the study, but said, "It's natural that on a subject like climate change the Agency would work with scientists to better understand the phenomenon and its implications on national security." The CIA reportedly closed its research center on climate change and national security last year, after GOP members of Congress argued that the CIA shouldn't be looking at climate change.

The goal of the CIA-backed NAS study is to conduct a "technical evaluation of a limited number of proposed geoengineering techniques," according to the NAS website. Scientists will attempt to determine which geoengineering techniques are feasible and try to evaluate the impacts and risks of each (including "national security concerns"). One proposed geoengineering method the study will look at is solar radiation management—a fancy term for pumping particles into the stratosphere to reflect incoming sunlight away from the planet. In theory, solar radiation management could lead to a global cooling trend that might reverse, or at least slow down, global warming. The study will also investigate proposals for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The National Academies has held two previous workshops on geoengineering, but neither was funded by the intelligence community, says Edward Dunlea, the study director for the latest project. The CIA would not say why it had decided to fund the project at this time, but the US government's apparent interest in altering the climate isn't new. The first big use of weather modification as a military tactic came during the Vietnam War, when the Air Force engaged in a cloud seeding program to try to create rainfall and turn the Ho Chi Minh Trail into muck, and thereby gain tactical advantage. Between 1962 and 1983, other would-be weather engineers tried to change the behavior of hurricanes using silver iodide. That effort, dubbed Project Stormfury, was spearheaded by the Navy and the Commerce Department. China's "Weather Modification Office" also controversially seeded clouds in advance of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, hoping to ensure rain would fall in the Beijing suburbs instead of over the Olympic stadiums.

Although previous efforts to manipulate weather and climate have often been met with mockery, many geoengineering proposals "are fundamentally doable, relatively cheap, and do appear to be able to reduce climate risk significantly, but with risks," explains David Keith, a Harvard researcher and top geoengineering proponent.

But if geoengineering is cheap and "fundamentally doable," as Keith claims, that suggests foreign countries, or even wealthy individuals, could mess with the climate to advance their own ends. "This whole issue of lone actors: Do we need to be concerned about China acting unilaterally? Is that just idle chatter, or is that something the US government should prepare for?" asks Ken Caldeira, a geoengineering researcher at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology and a member of the current National Academy of Sciences panel.

At least one individual has already tried modifying the climate. Russ George, the former head of Planktos, a company that works to develop technology to deal with global warming, seeded the Pacific Ocean off western Canada with iron to generate a plankton bloom that, in turn, was supposed to suck up carbon dioxide from the air. George's effort was widely condemned, but at present there's little to stop other individuals or countries from trying it or something similar. That's part of what has the US intelligence community interested.

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Who's watching the weather makers ?

The Climate Spectator has a look at the state of the geoengineering debate - Who's watching the weather makers?.

With expectations lower than a snake's armpit for the climate talks currently underway in Durban, there are likely to be renewed calls for geoengineering to be taken seriously as a "Plan B" for avoiding dangerous climate change.

Geoengineering – or, more accurately, climate engineering – was defined by the IPCC in 2009 as "the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment." The three main types are solar radiation management (SRM), carbon dioxide removal (CDR), and weather modification (WM).

The scientists involved in geoengineering research mostly profess to be reluctant converts to the cause, and protest that research does not mean deployment, but rare are the new technologies that have not been eventually applied in the real world. So who will watch those mucking about with our climate?

In last week's article on geoengineering by climate scientist David Karoly, he referred to the importance of "ethical and governance considerations" and the need for "urgent, well-informed, high-level international discussions."

This is already happening. In 2010, scientists working in this field proposed five "Oxford Principles" to govern research: geoengineering to be regulated as a public good; public participation in geoengineering decision-making; disclosure of geoengineering research and open publication of results; independent assessment of impacts; and governance before deployment.

This is all well and good, but these principles carry no legal weight. Fortunately, there are more formal moves afoot to regulate an industry that could turn the skies white and the oceans green, if attempts to produce an artificial "volcano effect" in the atmosphere or for phytoplankton to store carbon on the seabed go horribly wrong.

In Nagoya last year, countries party to the Convention on Biological Diversity (that is, most of the world, with the notable exception of the United States) adopted a de facto moratorium on all geoengineering activities. However, this decision is qualified and open to interpretation, and the legal force of decisions made at COPs (Conventions of Parties) is debatable.

The CBD parties are now involved in a process to determine whether that treaty or other existing or new treaties might be the best way to regulate research and projects. Its secretariat has produced draft studies on the impacts of geoengineering on biological diversity and the regulatory framework, and is inviting public comment.

Led by the Canada-based ETC Group, there are also moves afoot to ensure that geoengineering is on the table at the Rio+20 global environment summit next June. In September, a meeting of the European Parliament adopted a resolution expressing “opposition to proposals for large-scale geoengineering” and aiming to develop a common EU position ahead of Rio+20.

ETC has already had success in stopping a proposed ocean fertilisation experiment by US company Planktos Inc near the Galapagos Islands in 2007. In October, pressure by ETC and other groups led to the suspension of plans by a British scientific consortium called SPICE to erect a one kilometre long hose. Dubbed the "Trojan hose" by opponents, the aim was to test the feasibility of constructing a much longer hose that would pump sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect solar radiation.

The ETC Group has also proposed a new International Convention for the Evaluation of New Technologies. But (with the notable exception of the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer) new global treaties are usually lengthy to negotiate and only apply directly to countries that choose to sign onto them.

To date, neither the Australian government nor any major Australian environmental group other than Friends of the Earth appears to have expressed any view on geoengineering research. But in 2007, the ABC reported that a small Australian company with research links to the University of Sydney, Ocean Nourishment Corporation, did an ocean fertilisation trial in the Sulu Sea off Philippines in 2007, involving one tonne of nitrogen-rich urea. Although a growing body of research has cast doubt on the potential efficacy of ocean fertilisation, the company is pursuing "ecosystem based modelling" and says it is interested in validating its findings "through third party independent open ocean experimentation." ...

There is, however, one obvious ground rule that could apply while the world works out how best to regulate this emerging plethora of technologies. The International Energy Agency's latest World Energy Outlook gives the world until 2017, at the latest, to start reducing emissions under its most plausible "New Policies" scenario; after this time it becomes prohibitively expensive to keep warming under the 2°C threshold. In view of this, no real world experiments should occur before then that could undermine efforts to reduce global emissions. This would most notably preclude any research ultimately aimed at injecting sulphides into the atmosphere or any form of ocean fertilisation.

On the other hand, purely biological methods of geoengineering that would also assist climate change mitigation efforts, such as reforestation, avoiding deforestation and improving soil health, should be encouraged.

In between these extremes, things get tricky. Recent research suggests that even some of the more benign and promising ideas, like painting rooves white to increase surface albedo and thereby reduce atmospheric heating, may be ineffective. And despite all the money thrown at carbon capture and storage, its prospects for large-scale carbon sequestration look unpromising to date. There are also serious concerns about the side effects of biochar production, which has been widely spruiked as an effective means of terrestrial carbon storage (including, according to Friends of the Earth, the production of "phytotoxic and possible carcinogenic materials... during pyrolysis").

On current indications, after 2017 we may have to reconsider our options. But so far, silver bullets there are none.

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Pantheon

Jamais Cascio is pondering what sort of gods humanity are - Pantheon.

"We are as gods and might as well get good at it." -- Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968.

Stewart Brand's observation has simultaneously enchanted, terrified, and driven me ever since I first heard it (probably some 20-25 years after he wrote it). It's both an admonition (we're not very good at being gods) and encouragement (...but we could be!); Brand saw that our capabilities as humans (when using the tools devised by human minds) equalled or exceeded most of the capabilities of the gods of myth, and even those abilities not yet in our toolkit would likely be right over the horizon. Brand also saw that our sense of ourselves, and our responsibility to the world, remained firmly rooted in simple humanity.

"We have more power than we think we do," he seemed to be saying, "and we can't use it wisely until we acknowledge that fact."

The statement can be critiqued from a number of perspectives, and has been. (My own push-back against it these days is that it has the equation exactly backwards. Gods are just people who can truly see the extent of their power.) But there's one observation about the "We are as gods..." line that I haven't seen elsewhere -- and it requires a little digression. ...

"We are as gods --" okay, but which gods? In our generally monotheistic age, we tend to lump all "gods" and "godlike powers" into a bucket of Almighty Power. But that's not the way humans have thought of gods until relatively recently; for much of human civilization, gods were seen as individuals, with their own personalities, domains, and entries in an AD&D manual.

We are gods, but we're the gods of an earlier age. Powerful, yes, but petulant; wise yet warlike; arrogant and utterly capricious... and also able to create sublime beauty. The Greek gods were the ones that came to mind last week, but really nearly every mythic pantheon followed a similar pattern.

We are as gods, but we have gotten pretty good at it -- as long as we remember that this means we are as likely to be Loki as Athena.

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British to Test Geoengineering Scheme

Technology review has a look at the latest scheme to test a geoengineering approach - British to Test Geoengineering Scheme.

In October, British researchers supported by the U.K. government will attempt to pump water a kilometer into the air using little more than a helium balloon and a rubber hose. The experiment, which will take place at a military airfield along England's east coast, is meant as a test of a proposed geoengineering technique for offsetting the warming effects of greenhouse gases. If the balloon and hose can handle the water's weight and pressure, similar pipes rising 20 kilometers could pump tons of reflective aerosols into the stratosphere.

The scheme, called SPICE (stratospheric particle injection for climate engineering), is one of several proposed geoengineering methods under study. In this case, the idea is that particles injected into the stratosphere would reflect a small percentage of the sun's energy back into space, thereby cooling the planet. The concept seeks to mimic the cooling effect of volcanoes that inject sulfide particles into the stratosphere in large quantity. A 2009 study by the U.K. meteorological office estimated that 10 million metric tons of sulfide particles injected annually into the stratosphere would cool the planet by approximately 2 °C within a few years.

Other methods of geoengineering have also been tested, including fertilizing oceans to encourage algae blooms and pulling carbon dioxide out of the air. But a 2009 report by the U.K.'s Royal Society concluded that reflective aerosol injected into the stratosphere would be the least expensive and most effective way to rapidly cool the planet.

In addition to the pipe tethered to the balloon, airplanes and rockets could be used to deploy the particles. But Hugh Hunt, a senior lecturer in engineering at the University of Cambridge and a member of the SPICE project, says the balloon-and-pipe approach that his group is testing would be significantly less expensive. "Trying to use airplanes or rockets ends up costing 100 or 1,000 times more than a pipe and balloon," Hunt says. "At an altitude of 20 kilometers, an airplane can only carry one, maybe two, tons of payload. That means five to 10 million flights per year, burning roughly 1 percent of global oil production. It seems unlikely to me that that would be economically viable when a few dozen pipes would do just as good a job."

The current pilot program will pump 100 kilograms of water per hour to an altitude of one kilometer. Full-scale designs call for as many as 64 pipes spread around the world, each lifting five kilograms of sulfur dioxide or other reflective particles per second—approximately 160,000 metric tons per year. Each pipe alone would weigh 30 tons and would be held aloft by a balloon 100 meters in diameter, slightly larger than the largest balloons ever built. The biggest challenge of all, however, would be developing a flexible pipe that can withstand ultrahigh pressures.

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Australia to host geoengineering conference

The Brisbane Times reports that a geoengineering conference will be held in Canberra later this month - Australia to broach radical global warming solutions.

Clouds could be made more reflective and oceans fertilised to increase carbon dioxide absorption under ideas to be discussed at Australia's first high-level climate engineering conference later this month. International interest in climate engineering – also known as geoengineering – is increasing as efforts to curb the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases continue to falter.

Scientists said the event was an important step for Australia into the controversial geoengineering debate but expressed grave concerns some proposed technologies could have dangerous and far-reaching side effects.

The two-day science symposium, starting in Canberra on September 26, is being hosted by the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. Among the more controversial ideas being discussed is the injection of sulphur particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and slow global warming.

Other technologies include fertilising oceans to increase uptake of carbon dioxide and spraying aerosols into the atmosphere to increase the reflectiveness of clouds. But the meeting will also cover relatively benign ways to pull greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, including planting more trees and using climate-friendly agricultural techniques.

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