You remember that scene in Armageddon where they have realized the Earth is in a tight spot and they have to come up with a solution. There they are, NASA’s best and brightest, sitting around a table brainstorming when on team comes up with the idea of attaching solar sails to a rock the size of Texas and letting it sail off course.
That’s what I pictured when I thought about President Obama’s global warming team trying to solve climate change:
Holdren, a 65-year-old physicist, is far from alone in taking geoengineering more seriously. The National Academy of Science is making climate tinkering the subject of its first workshop in its new multidiscipline climate challenges program. The British parliament has also discussed the idea.
The American Meteorological Society is crafting a policy statement on geoengineering that says “it is prudent to consider geoengineering’s potential, to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment.”
Last week, Princeton scientist Robert Socolow told the National Academy that geoengineering should be an available option in case climate worsens dramatically.
But Holdren noted that shooting particles into the air—making an artificial volcano as one Nobel laureate has suggested—could have grave side effects and would not completely solve all the problems from soaring greenhouse gas emissions. So such actions could not be taken lightly, he said.
Still, “we might get desperate enough to want to use it,” he added.
Another geoengineering option he mentioned was the use of so-called artificial trees to suck carbon dioxide—the chief human-caused greenhouse gas—out of the air and store it. At first that seemed prohibitively expensive, but a re-examination of the approach shows it might be less costly, he said.
Where’s Billy Bob Thornton when you need him?
He’d put a stop to this mess, just by yelling, “LOOK! THERE EARTH’S BEEN COOLING! IT HASN’T GOTTEN WARMER IN NEAR TEN YEARS! LET IT GO!”
