Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [88]
So Budyko’s Blanket could effectively reverse global warming at a total cost of $250 million. Compared with the $1.2 trillion that Nicholas Stern proposes spending each year to attack the problem, IV’s idea is, well, practically free. It would cost $50 million less to stop global warming than what Al Gore’s foundation is paying just to increase public awareness about global warming.
And there lies the key to the question we asked at the beginning of this chapter: What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common? The answer is that Gore and Pinatubo both suggest a way to cool the planet, albeit with methods whose cost-effectiveness are a universe apart.
This is not to dismiss the potential objections to Budyko’s Blanket, which are legion. First of all, would it work?
The scientific evidence says yes. It is basically a controlled mimicry of Mount Pinatubo’s eruption, whose cooling effects were exhaustively studied and remain unchallenged.
Perhaps the stoutest scientific argument in favor of the plan came from Paul Crutzen, a Dutch atmospheric scientist whose environmentalist bona fides run even deeper than Caldeira’s. Crutzen won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for his research on atmospheric ozone depletion. And yet in 2006, he wrote an essay in the journal Climatic Change lamenting the “grossly unsuccessful” efforts to emit fewer greenhouse gases and acknowledging that an injection of sulfur in the stratosphere “is the only option available to rapidly reduce temperature rises and counteract other climatic effects.”
Crutzen’s embrace of geoengineering was considered such a heresy within the climate-science community that some peers tried to stop publication of his essay. How could the man reverently known as “Dr. Ozone” possibly endorse such a scheme? Wouldn’t the environmental damage outweigh the benefits?
Actually, no. Crutzen concluded that damage to the ozone would be minimal. The sulfur dioxide would eventually settle out in the polar regions but in such relatively small amounts that there, too, significant harm was unlikely. If a problem did arise, Crutzen wrote, the sulfur injection “could be stopped on short notice…which would allow the atmosphere to return to its prior state within a few years.”
Another fundamental objection to geoengineering is that it intentionally alters the earth’s natural state. To that, Myhrvold has a simple answer: “We’ve already geoengineered the earth.”
In just a few centuries, we will have burned up most of the fossil fuel that took 300 million years of biological accumulation to make. Compared with that, injecting a bit of sulfur into the sky seems pretty mild. As Lowell Wood points out, sulfur isn’t even the optimal chemical for a stratospheric shield. Other, less noxious-sounding materials—aluminized plastic micro beads, for instance—could make an even more efficient sunscreen. But sulfur is the most palatable choice “simply because we’ve got the volcano proof of feasibility,” Wood says, “and along with that, a proof of harmlessness.”
Wood and Myhrvold do worry that Budyko’s Blanket might create an “excuse to pollute.” That is, rather than buying time for us to create new energy solutions, it would lure people into complacency. But blaming geoengineering for this, Myhrvold says, is like blaming a heart surgeon for saving the life of someone who fails to exercise and eats too many french fries.
Perhaps the single best objection to the garden hose idea is that it is too simple and too cheap. As of this writing, there is no regulatory framework to prohibit anyone—a government, a private institution, even an individual—from putting sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere. (If there were, many of the world’s nearly eight thousand coal-burning electricity units would be in a lot of trouble.) Still, Myhrvold admits that “it would freak people out” if someone