David Battisti had arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
expecting a bloodbath. So had many of the other scientists
who had joined him for an invitation-only workshop on
climate science in 2007, with geoengineering at the top of
the agenda. We can't take altering the atmosphere seriously,
he thought, because there's no way we'll ever know enough to
control it. But by the second day, with bad climate news
piling on bad climate news, he was having second thoughts.
When the scientists voted in a straw poll whether to support
geoengineering research, filled with fear about the future,
Battisti voted in favor of it.nnWhile the pernicious
effects of global climate change are clear, efforts to
reduce the carbon emissions that cause it have fallen far
short of what's needed. Some scientists have started
exploring more direct and radical ways to cool the planet,
among them pouring reflective pollution into the upper
atmosphere and growing enormous blooms of algae in the
ocean. Schemes that were science fiction just a few years
ago have become earnest plans being studied by alarmed
scientists determined to avoid a climate catastrophe. In
Hack the Planet, Science magazine reporter Eli Kintisch
looks more closely at this array of ideas and characters,
asking if these risky schemes will work and just how
geoengineering is changing the world.nnScientists are
developing geoengineering techniques for worst-case
scenarios. But what would those desperate times look like?
Kintisch outlines four circumstances in which climate change
could be quick and cataclysmic: collapsing ice sheets,
megadroughts, a catastrophic methane release, and slowing of
the global ocean conveyor belt.nnIt takes compelling
characters to come up with Earth-cooling ideas like making
cement from coal-plant exhaust, spraying a fine mist over
the entire Middle East, and spraying gas from airplanes to
make shade. Kintisch takes readers from a geoengineering
expedition on the frigid Southern Ocean to the halls of
conservative think tanks to profile the players in this
emerging field, including Russia's Yuri Israel, Edward
Teller's former protégé Lowell Wood, and David Keith and Ken
Caldeira, informal coleaders of the Geoclique that conducts
and encourages geoengineering research. Kintisch tackles the
scientific and geopolitical issues involved—including the
dubious arguments for geoengineering in
SuperFreakonomics.nnAs incredible and outlandish as many
of these plans may seem, could they soon become our only
hope for avoiding calamity, or will the plans of brilliant
and well-intentioned scientists cause unforeseeable
disasters as they play out in the real world? And does the
advent of geoengineering mean that humanity has failed in
its role as steward of the planet—or taken on a new
responsibility? Kintisch lays out the possibilities and
dangers of geoengineering in a time of planetary tipping
points. His investigation is required reading as thedebate
over global warming shifts to whether humanity should Hack
the Planet.
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