Is China Moving Toward Geoengineering?

 

Earlier this month, the State Council of China (its main administrative body) announced that it was planning to expand its weather-modification efforts to cover an area of about 5.5 million square kilometers, which is more than half the size of the United States.  In addition to rainmaking (which the announcement called "precipitation control"), the government-funded efforts include prevention of hailstorms, enhanced accuracy of weather forecasts, and emergency response plans to deal with crises such as forest fires.

 

This is not China's first venture into weather modification.  To prevent rain from dampening the festivitives at the opening of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing on August 8 of that year, over a thousand rockets filled with silver iodide crystals were fired into the skies prior to the event.  Whether the party would have been rained out without the rockets is something we'll never know, but the Party leaders didn't want to take a chance that rain would spoil their parade.

 

Not counting things such as Indian rain dances, the history of scientific weather modification goes back to the late 1940s, when meteorologist Bernard Vonnegut (brother of author Kurt) and the Nobelist Irving Langmuir independently found ways to encourage clouds to form precipitation.  Vonnegut's method involved silver iodide crystals, and the U. S. Army showed in large-scale experiments that spreading finely-divided crystals into actual clouds could cause or increase rainfall under certain conditions. 

 

In the U. S., large-scale cloud-seeding efforts are no longer common, although numerous experiments with hurricanes and conventional storms were carried out as late as the 1970s.  For one thing, it is difficult to do a controlled experiment with cloud seeding, as no two clouds are ever alike and the ideal of changing only one variable (to seed or not to seed) can never be achieved.  Consequently, the typical outcome of an experiment, which can cost many thousands of dollars in flight time, shells, or rockets, is "well, maybe it did something, but we're not sure."  Another issue is that if more rain comes down in location A, that same rain can't also fall in location B, and if A and B are in different states, for example, you have a potential conflict between administrative entities.

 

That may be one reason that, after employing weather modification to a limited extent in theVietnam War, the U. S. signed the Environmental Modification Convention in 1978, which  bans the use of weather modification for hostile purposes.  The Peoples' Republic of China is also a participant in that convention, but that may not make adjacent countries such as India feel much better, as China could always claim that their cloud seeding was for peaceful purposes.

 

The term "geoengineering" is usually reserved for technological activities that would affect the entire globe, not just a part of it.  For example, at various times scientists have floated the idea that to combat global warming, we should inject a lot of sulfur dioxide particles into the air in order to reduce the influx of radiation to the earth's surface and counteract the greenhouse effect of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.  So far, weather modification efforts on the scale that we have seen historically don't amount to geoengineering.  But if the area in which such work is being done gets large enough, and 5.5 million square kilometers is pretty large, then you can begin to wonder whether we are putting the robustness of large-scale weather systems to a test.

 

We already know that seemingly subtle shifts in things such as the El Niño circulation off the Pacific coast of South America can have significant effects on our weather here in North America.  I don't know anything about typical weather patterns in the Far East, but it only stands to reason that mucking around with the weather over a large enough area of China is going to have some kind of effect in areas outside the region as well. 

 

Of course, this assumes that everything the State Council wants to do is successful.  If the history of weather modification tells us anything, it says that the best-laid plans in this field turn out to work less well than the designers hoped they would.  But most of the large-scale experiments in cloud seeding were carried out decades ago, before the advent of modern supercomputer-based weather modeling and enhanced automated weather data acquisition.  It's quite possible that with modern weather-forecasting technology, something closer to a truly controlled experiment can be carried out that will give us a better idea of whether all that silver iodide is doing any good, or whether it's just as useless as shooting off fireworks.

 

China has the dubious advantage of not having to worry about interstate lawsuits or any of the other administrative inconveniences that go with democracy.  Dictatorships can do large-scale, long-term things that democracies find difficult.  It's not an advantage that I personally think is worth the cost, but if the State Council decides to do a thing, there's not much anybody else can do to stop them, whether it's weather modification or a one-child policy. 

 

If the experiments turn out to be successful, I doubt that China will be very generous in sharing the results with the rest of the world, except maybe to brag.  And even if everything works as well as they hope, I'm not sure how applicable the results will be for the rest of the world, unless Russia or some other country dealing with huge land masses gets interested. 

 

You've probably heard someone say, "water is the new oil," meaning that as populations increase and live in cities with modern water supplies, the need for clean water may outstrip the need for fossil fuels.  While water resources will always be important, if weather modification turns out to be as useful as China thinks, that will add a new factor to the question of where future generations will find enough water to use.  My suspicion is that the basic natural processes that put water in the air in the first place are not going to change that much by means of weather modification, and any changes China or any other country can make will be relatively small-scale and short-term.  But I've been wrong before.

 

Sources:  The South China Morning Post carried an article describing the Chinese State Council's announcement of its plans for weather modification at https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/03/asia/china-weather-modification-cloud-seeding-intl-hnk/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on cloud seeding, the Environmental Modification Convention, and El Niño.

Imagining Geoengineering

Okay, suppose some of the most extreme voices warning of global warming are right.  Suppose we really do face the inundation of much of the world's coastlines in a generation or two.  Even if, starting tomorrow, nobody ever burned a drop or a gram of fossil fuel ever again, the carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere might take hundreds of years to fall to pre-industrial levels.  So simply implementing restrictions on fossil fuels to reduce carbon-dioxide levels may not do the job fast enough.  What do we do in the meantime?  To use an automotive analogy, if you're going too fast and you see that the road ahead of you ends in a cliff, it might not be sufficient simply to take your foot off the gas.  You might actually have to apply the brakes.  David Keith says we ought to at least talk about applying the global-warming brakes.  But the question I have is, how could it ever get beyond talk?

Keith is a professor with appointments at both the Harvard Kennedy School, where he teaches public policy, and Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.  An environmental engineer by training, Keith thinks that "geoengineering" ought to be considered along with reductions in fossil-fuel consumption as a way to reduce the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  Geoengineering refers to intentional efforts to manipulate the climate.  So far, the only moderately successful geoengineering projects have been cloud-seeding efforts that arguably increased rainfall in some areas.  But Keith is talking about a worldwide effort to do something that will counteract global warming by artificially cooling the planet somehow.

Interviewed last March by the CBC (Keith is Canadian), he admitted that ideas such as spreading small sulfur particles in the stratosphere to reflect solar radiation as a way of countering global warming are a "brutally ugly technical fix."  But he thinks such geoengineering solutions should be on the table, rather than brushed aside scornfully, as they are by many environmental activists.

Let's try to imagine how such a geoengineering fix would work, not just technically, but politically.  Many of the geoengineering solutions that have been posed are not terribly expensive, globally speaking.  We are talking about industrial quantities of sulfur or other chemicals dispersed in the upper atmosphere, but the cost in terms of the global economy is miniscule.  There is no question that such a project could be mounted by even one well-prepared industrial nation.  The question I'd like to examine is:  could the nations of the world ever reach a consensus on what geoengineering solution to adopt?

If we examine the track record of united global action on the main cause of the carbon-dioxide increase, namely the use of fossil fuels, history is not encouraging.  The most significant effort in this direction is the Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997.  It is technically an extension of a 1995 UN agreement that parties signing it will reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases in accordance with certain goals spelled out in the document.  While 192 countries signed the accord, some of the most significant producers of greenhouse gases either did not participate at all (e. g. the U. S. A., China, India) or have not met their targets (e. g. New Zealand). 

The only global environmental agreement I can recall that actually worked was the way we kept chlorinated fluorocarbons (CFCs) from destroying the ozone layer.  CFCs were once used widely as refrigerant fluids (e. g. under the trademark "Freon"), but in the 1970s, scientists figured out that (a) these compounds lasted for a long time in the atmosphere and (b) they catalyzed the destruction of the important ozone layer in the stratosphere, which protects us from harmful UV radiation from the sun.  The Montreal Protocol, which went into effect in 1989, set its signatories on a path to eliminating the production of new CFCs and phasing out their use by finding alternatives.  By and large, the Montreal Protocol is a success story in international technical agreements, because most of the industrialized world signed on and actually did what they agreed to do.

Why can't we get such cooperation with the global-warming issue?  The simple answer is, it would cost more.  Telling the world economy to give up CFCs was like telling a dieter to give up the tutti-frutti milkshake he has every Shrove Tuesday.  CFCs were a minor part of the global economy compared to fossil fuels.  If we accept the most radical recommendations of those alarmed about global warming and implement restrictions as fast as they want us to, well, the point is, the world won't do it without something approaching a global police state.  Developing nations such as China and India will not willingly forego the advantages of wider use of fossil fuels to grow their economies.  It would take a world war and dictatorial economic domination by a single global-warming-prevention entity to make the world go on a fossil-fuel diet.  And that doesn't sound like a good tradeoff.

The thing that geoengineering proponents like David Keith have going for them is that many geoengineering proposals would cost a lot less than replacing fossil fuels with a sustainable alternative.  Whether geoengineering would work is another question, unfortunately even more complicated than the still-controversial question of exactly how bad climate change is going to get, and what adverse effects it will have in the future. 

Besides the technical issue of whether geoengineering would work, I think there is an esthetic or philosophical factor involved.  Many of those who advocate harsh restrictions on fossil-fuel use to avert further climate change seem to have bought into the "deep-green" assumption that humanity is really a net liability for Planet Earth.  Burning fossil fuels represents meddlesome tinkering with what Mother Nature was up to naturally, and geoengineering would be another step down that evil road of manipulating the environment.  Better we just fold our tents, globally and economically speaking, and go back to living off nuts and berries.  The trouble with that notion is that there would not be enough nuts and berries to go around unless we keep burning fossil fuels, or find an energy-equivalent alternative that won't bankrupt us.  Such an alternative is not yet at hand. 

I admire engineers like David Keith for thinking through important problems such as climate change to arrive at possible solutions that might actually work, at least technically.  Given the dismal track record of the Kyoto Protocol, the chances of arriving at a truly global accord to implement significant fossil-fuel reductions are vanishingly small.  If some of the more dire climate-change predictions come to pass, it might be easier to get international agreement on a geoengineering strategy than it would on fossil-fuel reductions, especially if the price is right.

Sources:  An article on David Keith's ideas about geoengineering appeared on March 29, 2014 on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's website http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/give-geoengineering-a-chance-to-fix-climate-change-david-keith-1.2586882.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on solar radiation management, the Kyoto Protocol, and chlorofluorocarbons.