This week, IoM Friends of the Earth’s Pete Christian takes a look at the controversial subject of geo-engineering
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The topic of geo-engineering (GE) has been discussed by a number of people in the island recently, and deserves closer examination by anyone concerned for the environment.
Cloud seeding – that is introducing artificial nuclei of varying substances or chemicals in order to modify cloud behaviour – has been experimented with for maybe 70 years.
The original aim was simply, perhaps innocently, to affect precipitation – increasing rainfall in drought areas, reducing crop damage by decreasing the severity of hail, maybe even mitigating hurricane destructiveness.
But let’s throw light on the sinister bit.
Amid increasing interest, in 1947 the developing science was funded, in effect taken over, by the US Government as Project Cirrus, which in 1950 transferred to the US Naval Weapons Centre.
From the Persian Wars of the 5th Century BC, through Waterloo to D-Day, the impact of weather on the outcome of battles has been significant, with immense advantage to one side if they could control weather.
One of the most widely reported, originally clandestine, schemes to achieve this was exposed in the New York Times in 1977.
Project Popeye was the name given to a project where the US seeded clouds in 1966-67, attempting to waterlog the Ho Chi Minh Trail and interrupt Viet Cong supply lines.
The efficacy of this has never been truly established, and the US military engagement in Vietnam didn’t really end that well.
However, the blowing of this secrecy caused public outcry, leading indirectly in 1977 to the USA, USSR and 40 other countries signing the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD).
Unsurprisingly, this was worded so loosely that it is amenable to all sorts of bypassing. It’s difficult to summarise a useful message for environmentalists from all this, as by definition we will be the last to know about any current secret schemes.
GE is a hot topic in relation to climate change/global warming (CC/GW).
Some green activists favour ‘benign’ GE initiatives, as the rate of uptake of low carbon living is dangerously inadequate.
On the one hand, these could take the form of the no-brainer reversing of deforestation and tree planting on a massive scale – firstly as carbon sinks, and secondly because recent research reveals a cooling effect of natural emissions in the air above some huge forests.
So far,so obvious, but there are some lobbying organisations advocating less obviously beneficial forms of GE – for example, massive air seeding with chemical cocktails, to create a sort of floating molecular mirror which will reflect back solar energy, and hold back global temperatures.
Rather than work with the planet’s useful and helpful sources of clean energy, they would rather carry on as usual and put their faith, and our future, in another invasive and possibly irreversible man-made intervention into the natural environment.
Throughout history, the botanical and zoological catastrophes arising from such an approach should make us very, very wary of this mindset. We must all keep a keen eye on anything which entails yet more brutalisation of our atmosphere.
Finally, a word on contrails, those long white trails following jet aircraft flying at cruising altitude (usually 28 to 40,000 feet) caused by the action of exhaust gases, tiny particulates, and water vapour on very cold air.
There are some who assert that many of these are in fact chemtrails, formed by the covert, deliberate contamination of our skies with all manner of chemicals and poisons, as part of a world-wide conspiracy.
I have failed to find any reliable proof of these claims, and believe that the large number of white trails in Manx skies are there simply because we live beneath busy international flight paths.
This is not to say contrails are of no concern, as they are in fact man-made cirriform clouds, which can be seen under certain atmospheric conditions to spread for miles.
The problem is that the net effect of these high clouds is a warming effect, trapping in heat, which outweighs other cloud cooling characteristics.
Imperial College London has calculated that flying at lower altitudes would increase fuel burn, hence costs, and CO2 emissions of the order of 4 per cent.
However, this would reduce contrail formation by 60-90 per cent, which would have a net significant beneficial effect.
By no means unfeasible, relatively low cost and immediately effective . . . it’ll never catch on.