Wired Interview with Eli Kintisch
Now attending the international geoengineering conference in Asilomar, California, I was recently interviewed by Wired as part of a big geoengineering package. Great interview by Alexis Madrigal, and also featured was two excerpts from the book.
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.
Wired.com: You pinpoint one moment as really touching off the latest interest in geoengineering: a paper by Paul Crutzen. Why was that paper so influential?
Kintisch: Scientists had considered mimicking the cooling effect that volcanic aerosols have on the planet for decades before Crutzen’s paper. The scientist who first published on it was the Soviet scientist Budiko. But Crutzen came at a time where many scientists felt that the climate crisis was accelerating and he had the stature of a Nobel Prize. As an atmospheric chemist, he certainly had knowledge in this particular field.
And while he does have a reputation as a bit of a maverick, Crutzen’s paper was assiduously spelled out and he sent it to all of the top minds in the field before publishing it. That made it hard to argue with his essential conclusion, which is that we better at least study the method. It was difficult for anyone to disagree with. The furthest people could go was arguing that the paper shouldn’t be published. It was controversial and required intervention by the president of the National Academy of Science, Ralph Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist himself and friend of Crutzen.
