Controlling the Climate

There are many different reasons why the world's scientists, governments, and citizens should start thinking about artificial climate control.

One reason is long-term climate instability: the fact that the earth's climate is generally unstable on a thousand-year time scale. In the past half-million years, global climate has oscillated many times -- usually being colder than it is now, with widespread glaciation -- and often changing dramatically in just a few thousand years. For many people, though, such a time scale may be too long to worry about.

Another reason to consider artificial climate control is the growing abundance of atmospheric greenhouse gases, especially CO2 from fossil fuels. Although we seem to be approaching a scientific consensus on this issue, there are still plenty of people who disagree on causes, implications, and responses.

But there are additional reasons why -- even if you don't happen to think that humans are causing CO2 increases, or that CO2 is causing global warming, or that global warming is something we need to act on -- you should still care about climate control.

First, short-term climate change can hurt us. The "Little Ice Age" lasted hundreds of years until 1850 or so. Climate aberrations may have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. There is no guarantee that we won't have another major volcano causing sudden (albeit temporary) climate shifts like the one in 535-536.

The next reason, perhaps even more compelling, is that there are large areas of the earth today where the climate is sub-optimal for human purposes. As scientists learn more about what makes the weather and climate work the way it does, it is becoming thinkable to affect the climate deliberately -- to control it.

Until now, humans have been able to influence the climate, but not control it. We could deforest continents and burn fossil fuels by the gigaton, but we had very little clue about what the effects would be. Today, that situation is changing. We don't yet know everything about how climate works, but another decade or two of observation, combined with radically more powerful computers, may tell us enough to start tweaking it -- controlling the amount of rainfall on one continent, for example. Of course, the desired changes would come at the cost of other, undesired changes. And it is starting to look like some climate interventions could be done for low cost -- perhaps as low as a billion dollars per year -- which would be within many national budgets.

Who will decide whether to deliver rain to Africa at the expense of Asia, or vice versa? Who will decide whether the current warming trend needs a response, and what it should be?

Several threads connect the issues of climate control to the issues surrounding molecular manufacturing. It seems likely that both will require decisions to be made on an international level -- decisions that are sufficiently different from previous ones to require new organizational structures. Both will require study and forethought.

Climate control will require large-scale engineering, and probably substantial R&D as well. Exponential manufacturing should be able to help with both design and deployment of whatever technologies are involved -- like rapid prototyping, only a lot more so.

When formulating policy for molecular manufacturing and climate control, there will be in both cases a temptation to go for quick partial fixes that allow major problems to fester. For example, if a relatively small fraction of sunlight were blocked by putting particles in the stratosphere, that might in theory reduce the heat-trapping effect of atmospheric CO2 -- but it would not alleviate the acidification of the oceans also caused by CO2. Some of the problems of molecular manufacturing may be alleviated by restricting its availability -- but that would do nothing to prevent an arms race at the national level.

As we learn more about climate control, we will probably learn that it's better to nudge the climate than try to brute-force it. Even if we have the power to make radical shifts, such actions will probably cause radical problems and will be costlier than a more subtle approach. Likewise, molecular manufacturing policy will work best when it seeks subtle approaches to guide the world away from the major pitfalls; brute-force or panicked solutions will very likely create worse problems than they solve.

Humanity is facing a lot of issues that will affect millions of lives: arms proliferation, disease, and water, to name just a few. Our track record on these issues has not been great, and these are issues that have existed in one form or another for centuries. It remains to be seen whether emerging issues can be handled any better.

Chris Phoenix

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Comments

[Eric]

Can we make a trial run of terraforming Mars before we take a shot at Earth? Just a thought...

One trend that I see is the globalization of government, the UN is a great example of this. The assumption here is that environmental or weather control is going to be a massive engineering feat and will require major alignment and international agreements, treaties and controls. The flip side as you hinted to with "rain for Africa at the expense of Asia" is water wars on a major level.

However, is that assumption completely valid? Do you even need a nation to achieve a global weather impact, if you have a desktop nanofactory that can copy itself and pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, etc?

Is it possible that in the 10-20 year time frame you refer to that we'll see a switch-back on the globalization? Will nano and other advanced technologies cause a resurgence of nationalism (or even individualism) and reverse the trend of globalization?

[Adrianne]

Actually, there are so many ways of controlling the climate, which have already benn tested and they worked: http://www.1ocean-1climate.com/how-to-change-climate.php. I guess is the easyest way to do it, after all!

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

Eric, I'd expect nanofactory technology to make it possible to live in more comfort and security in harsher conditions... always assuming, of course, that people are allowed to use it, and know how to use it appropriately. But that doesn't mean we should just let the earth be desertified and flood the coasts. It'd be a real shame to lose 90% of our species over the next 500 years.

I'd hope we can be constructive enough, once it becomes possible to engineer the climate, to work out some way to at least not leave the Holocene stability.

Chris