Hacking Nature

Is nature to be left alone? Or should it be hacked? Yes, hacked. That is the term used by those advocating geo-engineering as a means to tackle the many problems. This is the culture addicted to technological fixes to all issues. They call themselves rationalists in a subtle way and in a bold language, the ‘gods’ who have to take things into their hands. Geo-engineering is practical, pragmatic, etc etc they say. We can’t sit and do nothing but wait for calamity. No doubt it was a calamity of our making, but that’s not important now, is it?

On a hot August day in 2008 a team of Russian scientists set up an experiment to block the Sun and cool Earth. The experiment was to be carried out over a 2-square-mile area of farmland near the city of Saratov on the Volga River, roughly 300 miles southeast of Moscow. But it wasn’t cutting Russia’s greenhouse gas emissions that was proposed. Instead, it was to burn hundreds of thousands of tons of sulfur-rich aircraft fuel in the upper atmosphere, which studies suggested would lower the temperature of Earth by as much as 4°F.

Cloudy conditions made it difficult to detect which changes in the brightness of the Sun were a result of the experiment, but close analysis of the data suggested the smoke had scattered up to 10 percent of the Sun’s rays at different points in the experiment. In a paper published in a Russian meteorology journal in May 2009, Izrael and his colleagues concluded that the trial showed “how it is principally possible” to add chemical droplets to the sky “to control solar radiation.” That summer, scientists conducted a more successful follow-up experiment in which they released smoke from a helicopter at an altitude of roughly 8,000 feet.

Alexey Ryaboshapko, an atmospheric chemist in Izrael’s institute, said that they hoped to soon conduct even larger experiments, using airplanes, perhaps over an area roughly 10 kilometers long.

If we opt for these experiments, eventually the sulphur will cause another kind of problem. For which we will need another fix. Isn’t it much simpler to live by the laws of nature and sustainability?

Can we control and ‘tame’ the planet? Can we be the gods? Will it not be an excuse to keep blundering on the assurance that someone can fix the problem anyway?