Year 4, Month 1, Day 11: Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on one of our technological back-up plans:

One afternoon last fall, Armand Neukermans, a tall engineer with a sweep of silver bangs, flipped on a noisy pump in the back corner of a Sunnyvale lab. Within moments, a fine mist emerged from a tiny nozzle, a haze of salt water under high pressure and heat.

It didn’t look like much. But this seemingly simple vapor carries a lot of hope – and inspires a lot of fear. If Neukermans’ team of researchers can fine-tune the mechanism to spray just the right size and quantity of salt particles into the sky, scientists might be able to make coastal clouds more reflective.

The hope is that by doing so, humankind could send more heat and light back into space, wielding clouds as shields against climate change.

The fear, at least the one cited most often, is that altering the atmosphere this way could also unleash dangerous side effects.

“Ten years ago, people would have said this is totally wacky,” Neukermans said. “But it could give us some time if global warming really becomes catastrophic.”

When, not if. Sent January 6:

While the prospect of geoengineering technologies for mitigating climate change’s effects is terrifying, the crisis allows for no non-terrifying outcomes. We’re midway through a mass extinction of a magnitude unprecedented in human history; our greenhouse emissions have achieved a critical mass sufficient to forestall an ice age 50,000 years from now (even if we completely stopped burning fossil fuels today); melting methane in the Arctic has transformed the “Venus effect” from a never-in-a-million-years nightmare to a statistically significant probability.

There’s no single cause of the climate disaster, and no single solution. But the business-as-usual approach which has brought us to this point must be rejected; we humans must transform ourselves, our communities, and our nations — putting the survival of our species above our short-term gratification. Armand Neukermans’ work on increasing cloud reflectivity could never as dangerously uncontrolled an experiment on Earth’s atmosphere as the multi-century endeavor known as industrial civilization.

Warren Senders

Published.