SHOOTING THE BREEZE
The American author Mark Twain is said to have remarked: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
Well, they sure have tried.
While weather modification was once focused entirely on making it rain, today it is centred principally on counteracting climate change. In 1965, when the United States President’s Science Advisory Committee first warned that humans were increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by burning fossil fuels, it also advised that people could jury-rig ways to offset this. Since then, countless climate engineering solutions have been bandied about by scientific groups, governments, and corporations.
Some ideas have focused on carbon capture or sequestration: pumping carbon dioxide into mines, spent oil reservoirs, or deep oceans; seeding the oceans with carbon-absorbing plankton; or dedicating more of the earth’s land area to vast forests.
Others have called for solar radiation management: reducing the amount of sunlight (and thereby heat) that the earth receives and absorbs, thus counterbalancing the effects of global warming. This could involve anything from installing light-coloured roofing materials, to stirring up the oceans in order to produce highly reflective micro-bubbles, to placing mirrors in orbit. Or it could mean shooting millions of tonnes of sulfates into the atmosphere — replicating massive volcanic eruptions that send clouds of dust around the globe and thereby cool its temperature. Of course, none of these would be onetime solutions. We would have to continue them for as long as we keep burning fossil fuels.
Today’s geoengineering strategies can seem as fanciful as rainmaking schemes of a century ago. But it is worth remembering that, even as Charles Hatfield was promising to change the weather, humans were already beginning to modify the climate, albeit unwittingly, through carbon dioxide emissions.
Everybody talks about the weather. As it turns out, we’ve all been doing something about it, too.
— Alan MacEachern