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Climate Hackers Want to Write Their Own Rules

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This week, 200 scientists will gather in an attempt to determine how research into the possibilities of geoengineering the planet to combat climate change should proceed.

They say it’s necessary because of the riskiness and scale of the experiments that could be undertaken — and the moral implications of their work to intentionally alter the Earth’s climate.

The group is meeting at the Asilomar resort in California, a dreamy enclave a few hours south of San Francisco. The gathering intentionally harkens back to the February 1975 meeting there of molecular biologists hashing out rules to govern what was then the hot-button scientific issue of the day: recombinant DNA and the possibility of biohazards.

The 1975 process wasn’t perfect, but after a fraught and meandering few days, the scientists released a joint statement that placed some restrictions and conditions on research, particularly with pathogens. That meeting is now held up as a model for how researchers can successfully assume the mantle of self-regulation.

“And perhaps that was the final, foggy significance of Asilomar: a promise that the scientists who deal with the most fundamental of life stuff will not sequester themselves beneath Chicago stadiums or within blockhouses in the New Mexico desert — that their work, at least as significant as the most subtle of sub-nuclear manipulations, will be done with care and public scrutiny,” wrote Michael Rogers in a June 19, 1975 Rolling Stone article.

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6 Ways We’re Already Geoengineering Earth

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Scientists and policymakers are meeting this week to discuss whether geoengineering to fight climate change can be safe in the future, but make no mistake about it: We’re already geoengineering Earth on a massive scale.

From diverting a third of Earth’s available fresh water to planting and grazing two-fifths of its land surface, humankind has fiddled with the knobs of the Holocene, that 10,000-year period of climate stability that birthed civilization.

The consequences of our interventions into Earth’s geophysical processes are yet to be determined, but scientists say they’re so fundamental that the Holocene no longer exists. We now live in the Anthropocene, a geological age of mankind’s making.

“Homo sapiens has emerged as a force of nature rivaling climatic and geologic forces,” wrote Earth scientists Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty in a 2008 Frontiers in Ecology paper, which featured their redrawn map of the human-influenced world. “Human forces may now outweigh these across most of Earth’s land surface today.”

Draining the Rivers

Of all the fresh water accessible in lakes, rivers and aquifers — what scientists call “blue water” — humankind uses about one-third every year. A fourth of Earth’s river basins run dry before they reach the sea.

At local scales, this changes weather patterns. The Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River for example, seems to be causing temperatures in its valley to drop, which in turn reduces rainfall. The draining of Kazakhstan’s once-vast Aral Sea has made regional temperatures hotter in summer and colder in winter, and rain now rarely falls.

Whether regional changes in turn have global consequences remains to be seen.

Images: 1) Aral Sea in 2006/European Space Agency. 2) Aral Sea in 1973/U.S. Geological Survey.

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Exclusive Excerpt: Hack the Planet

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The battle lines on geoengineering have begun to take shape. On one side are modern-day romantics, who consider geoengineering an a priori violation of humans’ role as planetary citizens to let nature be natural and take a humble place within it. Better to solve the climate problem by reducing our impact on the planet, they say. Prominent among their antecedents is American forestry ecologist and writer Aldo Leopold, who asserted in A Sand County Almanac in 1949 that environmental problems demanded that man change his role from “conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it.”

Find out more about hacking the planet in a Q&A with the author.

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Eli Kintisch is a reporter for Science magazine. He has also written for Slate, Discover, MIT Technology Review and The New Republic. He has worked as Washington correspondent for the Forward and science reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 2005 he won the Space Journalism prize for a series on private spaceflight. His new book, Hack the Planet, will be available April 19.

“A wilderness is where the flow of wildness is essentially uninterrupted by technology; without wilderness, the world’s a cage,” wrote David Brower, the former executive director of the Sierra Club. Technology and development, he lamented, had rid most of the world of this essential quality.

Extending this common trope of American environmentalism to the question of climate engineering would be writer and climate activist Bill McKibben, who views geoengineering as the “junkie logic” of a culture addicted to technological solutions. He has urged humanity “to truly and viscerally think of ourselves as just one species among many.”

And then there are the rationalists, who believe that to minimize suffering, it just may be more technological hubris that our species needs. In The Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, Brand wrote of humanity’s responsibility as Earth’s gardeners and caretakers, “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” Recently he updated his thinking. “Those were innocent times. New situation, new motto: ‘ We are as gods and have to get good at it.’”

He views geoengineering as part of an “eco-pragmatist” approach. “Whether it’s called managing the Commons, natural infrastructure maintenance, tending the wild, niche construction, ecosystem engineering, mega gardening, or intentional Gaia, humanity is now stuck with the planet’s stewardship role,” he wrote in 2009.

Deciding what role geoengineering should play as the climate crisis unfolds in the twenty-first century will take balancing both Enlightenment perspectives. And yet we may not have a choice between embracing the God role with climate models and artificial volcanoes or shunning it to take our place among the rest of the species. Events, and catastrophic ones, may dictate our decisions.

Perhaps climate stewardship simply won’t work, and tinkering with the atmosphere won’t be available. Or it will — and we’ll kill one another over the thermostat. Now we contemplate wielding global powers previously imagined only in science fiction. Maybe the biggest question we’ll face may be how changing the planet will change ourselves….

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Q&A: Geoengineering Is ‘A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come’

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While humans have unintentionally been altering Earth’s climate for centuries, some scientists have begun to study how to intentionally hack the globe to cool the overheated planet.

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Read a Wired.com exclusive excerpt from the new book by Eli Kintisch, Hack the Planet.

Eli Kintisch’s new book, Hack the Planet provides a thorough and nuanced portrait of the development of geoengineering. Through long acquaintance with the field’s biggest names, Kintisch, a staff writer for Science, paints a deep sociological portrait of a radical new scientific discipline bursting messily into the world.

He reminds us that even though the techniques may be wild and global, many of the people dreaming them up are regular scientists trying to deal rationally with a carbon problem that they don’t see society solving. Faced with a warming world, they are torn between watching nature die or trying to surgically kill it themselves.

Wired.com: What are some of the basic geoengineering options being discussed?

Eli Kintisch: The main geoengineering techniques fall into two basic categories: One, the ways to block sunlight at different points in the atmosphere and earth system to lower the temperature rapidly in that way, and the other is enhancing the planet’s ability to take up carbon dioxide through a variety of techniques. So, sun-blocking and carbon-sucking are the two main ways.

With sun-blocking, what you are essentially doing is brightening the planet, increasing the earth’s albedo. That can change the amount of total radiation that the planet experiences. Scientists have proposed ways of intercepting solar radiation at every single point from the surface of the earth by whitening roofs or brightening the ocean’s surface itself with tiny bubbles, to brightening low-lying and high clouds, to one of the most radical and discussed geoengineering techniques: adding particles called aerosols to the stratosphere. That technique has many names, but I like to call it the Pinatubo option, because it was influenced by the rapid cooling that follows volcanic eruptions.

The Pinatubo option involves spraying some kind of particles (usually people talk about sulfur) into the upper atmosphere to form a kind of haze that blocks a small percentage of the sun’s rays before they can enter the lower atmosphere.

The carbon methods involve generally enhancing natural systems to take in more carbon, perhaps genetically modifying plants so they have more carbonaceous cells or growing large blooms of algae in the ocean by using some sort of key nutrient that can catalyze and fertilize their growth. The main way has been to use iron. You could also build machines to suck in the carbon dioxide.

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African Footprint Fossils Are Oldest Evidence of Upright Walk

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Despite a penchant for hanging out in trees, human ancestors living 3.6 million years ago in what’s now Tanzania extended their legs to stride much like people today do, a new study finds. If so, walking may have evolved in leaps and bounds, rather than gradually, among ancient hominids.

sciencenewsThe discovery comes from the famed trackway site in Laetoli, Tanzania, where more than 30 years ago researchers discovered footprint trails from two, and possibly three, human ancestors who had walked across a wet field of volcanic ash. The new analysis shows that the Laetoli hominids made equally deep heel and toe impressions while walking across a soft surface, say anthropologist David Raichlen of the University of Arizona in Tucson and his colleagues.

That pattern is a cardinal sign of a humanlike gait, and suggests that an energetically efficient, extended-leg stride appeared surprisingly early in hominid evolution, Raichlen’s team proposes in a paper published online March 22 in PLoS ONE. Until now, many researchers suspected that such a gait did not appear at least until the appearance of early Homo species around 2.5 million years ago.

“By the time hominids walked through the ash at Laetoli, they walked more like us than like apes,” Raichlen says.

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Dinosaurs Rode Volcanic Armageddon to Victory

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Geologists have turned a series of 200 million-year-old lake-bed sediments into an epic narrative of the dinosaurs’ journey from ecological obscurity to Earthly supremacy, a mystery that has lingered even as their disappearance is explained.

The dino path to dominance appears to have been cleared when the supercontinent Pangea cracked, setting off 600,000 years of volcanic activity that wiped out the dinosaurs’ crocodilian competitors.

“This is the strongest case for a volcanic cause of a mass extinction event to date,” wrote geoscientists in a paper published March 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

From 250 million to 200 million years ago, dinosaurs were just upstart lizards. The planet was dominated by a family of vaguely crocodile-like animals called crurotarsans that filled every major ecological niche, from slow-munching herbivores to fleet predators.

About halfway through that period, known as the Triassic, an asteroid struck Earth. Many of the planet’s species went extinct, but the crurotarsans weathered the storm. Then, 25 million years after that, in what’s known as the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event, the crurotarsans and at least half of all other animal species vanished. Exactly why isn’t known, but scientists now have a pretty good idea.

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Why Dark Coffee Is Easier on Your Stomach

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SAN FRANCISCO — Roasting coffee beans doesn’t just impart bold, rich flavor. It also creates a compound that helps dial down production of stomach acid, according to research presented on March 21 at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society. The discovery may explain why dark-roasted brews are gentler on the stomach than their lighter peers, and could lead to a new generation of tummy-friendly coffees.

sciencenewsEven though several studies have found a cup-a-day habit imparts health benefits such as decreased risk of obesity, Alzheimer’s and colon cancer, many coffee lovers drink decaf or forgo the beverage altogether because it irritates the stomach or spurs heartburn. Previous work suggested that coffee made from steam-treated beans tamps down this gastric distress, a finding attributed to lower levels of caffeine and other compounds in these brews.

“But there is no experimental or human data that says these compounds increase gastric acid,” said Veronika Somoza of the University of Vienna, who presented the research.

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Channeling Earth: Rivers Seen From Space

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Rivers connect Earth’s mountains and lakes to its oceans, creating lifelines that provide water, food, transportation and recreation along the way. Some rivers, like the Nile, bring life to barren landscapes that would otherwise be uninhabitable. Others, like the Mississippi, defy our best efforts to tame them.

Rivers carve their way across the continents, some becoming ever more entrenched while others meander freely across the surface. The myriad paths they carve make patterns that are best seen from above.

In this gallery, we’ve collected images from satellites and astronauts of some of the longest, twistiest, most beautiful and interesting rivers in the world.

Click on any image in this gallery for a high-resolution version.

Rio Negro, Argentina

The Rio Negro in Argentina is a beautiful example of how mobile some rivers are. This is one of the most meandering rivers in South America. In the image above, taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station on January 4, the river has left scars all across the floodplain as it moved and carved new channels. Some of the old river channels still have water in them and are known as oxbow lakes.

Image: NASA

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Shark-Bitten Crocodile Poop Fossils Found (No, Really)

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Paleontologists have stumbled across a scientific first that’s sure to inspire both fascination and disgust: coprolites, or fossilized fecal matter, bearing the distinct impressions of a creature’s teeth.

sciencenews The coprolites — one chunk of rock is fist-sized, the other is about 30 percent larger — were discovered on a beach along the western shore of Chesapeake Bay, says Stephen Godfrey, a paleontologist at the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Md.

The impressions in the coprolites are as much as 6.5 millimeters (just over a quarter of an inch) deep, Godfrey and a colleague report online March 9 in Naturwissenschaften. A silicone rubber mold of the tooth marks indicates that the biter was most likely a close relative of today’s tiger shark.

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Large Hadron Collider Triples Its Own Record

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The Large Hadron Collider set a new record for the creation of energetic particle beams this morning. The particle accelerator, which surpassed Fermilab’s Tevatron in December as the baddest atom smasher of them all, smashed its own record, charging particles to 3.48 trillion electron volts.

That’s three times the energy of any beam ever created by human beings and just a shade under half the LHC’s proposed maximum capabilities.

After a series of mishaps and repairs over the last year and a half, CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology Steve Myers sounded a triumphant note.

“Getting the beams to 3.5 TeV is testimony to the soundness of the LHC’s overall design, and the improvements we’ve made since the breakdown in September 2008,” Myers said in a press release. “And it’s a great credit to the patience and dedication of the LHC team.”

The LHC could allow scientists to better understand the nature of mass, dark matter and the origins of the universe. But many of them hope that instead of confirming the current set of theoretical models we have all come to know — string theory, dark energy, the Higgs-Boson, etc. — something entirely unexpected will emerge from the CERN-run experiment.

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