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Via MIT Technology Review

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Illustration by McKibillo

More than a decade ago, Paul Crutzen, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research on the destruction of stratospheric ozone, popularized the term “Anthropocene” for Earth’s current geologic state. One of the more radical extensions of his idea—that human activity now dominates the planet’s forests, oceans, freshwater networks, and ecosystems—is the controversial concept of geoengineering, deliberately tinkering with the climate to counteract global warming. The logic is straightforward: if humans control the fate of natural systems, shouldn’t we use our technology to help save them from the risks of climate change, given that there’s little hope of cutting emissions enough to stop the warming trend?

In recent years a number of scientists—including Crutzen himself in 2006—have called for preliminary research into geoengineering techniques such as using sulfur particles to reflect some of the sun’s light back into space. With the publication of A Case for Climate Engineering, David Keith, a Harvard physicist and energy policy expert, goes one step further. He lays out arguments—albeit hedged with caveats—for actually deploying geoengineering. He says that releasing sun-blocking aerosol particles in the stratosphere (see “A Cheap and Easy Plan to Stop Global Warming,” March/April 2013) “is doable in the narrow technocratic sense.”

Indeed, Keith is steadfastly confident about the technical details. He says a program to cool the planet with sulfate aerosols—solar geoengineering—could probably begin by 2020, using a small fleet of planes flying regular aerosol-spraying missions at high altitudes. Since sunlight drives precipitation, could reducing it lead to droughts? Not if geoengineering was used sparingly, he concludes.

Australian ethicist Clive Hamilton calls the book “chilling” in its technocratic confidence. But Keith and Hamilton do agree on one thing: solar geoengineering could be a major geopolitical issue in the 21st century, akin to nuclear weapons during the 20th—and the politics could, if anything, be even trickier and less predictable. The reason is that compared with acquiring nuclear weapons, the technology is relatively easy to deploy. “Almost any nation could afford to alter the Earth’s climate,” Keith writes. That fact, he says, “may accelerate the shifting balance of global power, raising security concerns that could, in the worst case, lead to war.”

Thing reviewed

A Case for Climate Engineering
David Keith MIT Press, 2013

The potential sources of conflict are myriad. Who will control Earth’s thermostat? What if one country blames geoengineering for famine-inducing droughts or devastating hurricanes? No treaties ban climate engineering explicitly. And it’s not clear how such a treaty would operate.

Keith professes ambivalence about whether humans are truly able to wield such powerful technology wisely. Yet he feels that the more information scientists uncover about the risks of geoengineering, the lower the chances the technology will be used recklessly. Though his book leaves unanswered many of the questions that arise over how to govern geoengineering, a policy paper that he published in Science  last year goes further to address them: he and a coauthor proposed government authority over research and a moratorium on large-scale geoengineering but said there should be no treaties regulating small-scale experiments.

Hamilton says this approach would lead nations on a path toward the conflict that he thinks would inevitably surround geoengineering. Allowing lightly regulated small experiments, he suggests, could undermine the urgency of political efforts toward cutting emissions. This, in turn, increases the possibility that geoengineering will be used, since failing to restrain emissions will leave temperatures rising. Hamilton accuses Keith of seeking a “naïve … cocoon of scientific neutrality” and says researchers cannot “absolve themselves of responsibility for how their schemes might be used or misused in the future.”

That may be true, but Keith deserves credit for directing attention to ideas he knows are dangerous. Accepting the concept of the Anthropocene means accepting that humans have the responsibility to find technological fixes for disasters they have created. But little progress has been made toward a process for rationally supervising such activity on a global scale. We need a more open discussion about a seemingly outlandish but real geopolitical risk: war over climate engineering.

Personal comment:

"Who will control Earth’s thermostat?" Oh well, following yesterday's news, I would suggest Google, they have "smart" technology ...
By the way, will we also reach some "climate neutrality quash" one day (compared to "net neutrality quashed" by a federal court), once global weather will definitely be an artifact and a product?

Via BLDGBLOG

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[Image: Triggered lightning technology at the University of Florida's Lightning Research Group].

This past winter, I had the pleasure of traveling around south Florida with Smout Allen, Kyle Buchanan, and nearly two dozen students from Unit 11 at the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Florida's variable terrains—of sink holes, swamps, and eroding beaches—and its Herculean infrastructure, from canals and freeways to theme parks and rocket facilities, served as the narrative backdrop for the many architectural projects ultimately produced by the class (in addition, of course, to the 2012 U.S. Presidential election, the results of which we watched live from the bar of a tropical-themed hotel near Cape Canaveral, next door to Ron Jon).

While there were many, many interesting projects resulting from the trip, and from the Unit in general, there is one that I thought I'd post here, by student Farah Aliza Badaruddin, particularly for the quality of its drawings.

[Images: From a project by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

Badaruddin's project explored the large-scale architectural implications of applying radical weather technologies to the task of landscape remediation, asking specifically if Cape Canaveral's highly contaminated ground water—polluted by a "viscous toxic goo" made from tens of thousands of pounds of rocket fuels, chemical plumes, solvents, and other industrial waste products over the decades—could be decontaminated through pyrolysis, using guided and controlled bursts of lightning.

In her own words, Badaruddin explains that the would test "the idea that lightning can be harnessed on-site to pyrolyse highly contaminated groundwater as an approach to remediate the polluted site."

These controlled and repetitive lightning strikes would also, in turn, help fertilize the soil, producing a kind of bio-electro-agricultural event of truly cosmic (or at least Miller-Ureyan) proportions.

[Image: Triggered lightning technology at the University of Florida Lightning Research Group].

Her maps of the area—which she presents as if drawn in a Moleskine notebook—show the terrestrial borders of the proposal (although volumetric maps of the sky, showing the project's fully three-dimensional engagement with regional weather systems, would have been an equally, if not more, effective way of showing the project's spatial boundaries).

This raises the awesome question of how you should most accurately represent an architectural project whose central goal is to wield electrical influence on the atmosphere around it.

[Images: From a project by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

In short, her design proposes a new infrastructure of "rocket-triggered lightning technology," assisted and supervised by a peripheral network of dirigibles—floating airships that "surround the site and serve as the observatory platform for a proposed lightning visitor centre and the weather research center."

The former was directly inspired by real-world lightning research equipment found at the University of Florida's Lightning Research Group.

[Image: Triggered lightning technology at the University of Florida's Lightning Research Group].

Badaruddin's own rocket triggers would be used both to attract and "to provide direct lightning strikes to the proposed sites," thus pyrolizing the landscape and purifying both ground water and soil.

[Image: Aerial collage view of the lightning farm, by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

The result would be a lightning farm, a titanic landscape tuned to the sky, flashing with controlled lightning strikes as the ground conditions are gradually remediated—an unmoving, nearly permanent, artificial electrical storm like something out of Norse mythology, cleansing the earth of toxic chemicals and preparing the site for future reuse.

[Image: Collage of the lightning farm, by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

I should say that my own interest in these kinds of proposals is less in their future workability and more in what it means to see a technology taken out of context, picked apart for its spatial implications, and then re-scaled and transformed into a speculative work of landscape architecture. The value, in other words, is in re-thinking existing technologies by placing them at unexpected scales in unexpected conditions, simultaneously extracting an architectural proposal from that and perhaps catalyzing innovative new ways for the original technology itself to be redeveloped or used.

[Image: Farah Aliza Badaruddin].

It's not a question of whether or not something can be immediately realized or built; it's a question of how open-ended, fictional design proposals can change the way someone thinks about an entire field or class of technologies.

[Images: From a project by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

But I'll let Badaruddin's own extraordinary visual skills tell the story. Most if not all of these images can be seen in a much larger size if you open the images in their own windows; they're well worth a closer look—

[Images: From a project by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

—including what amount to a short graphic novel telling the story of her proposed controlled-lightning landscape-decontamination facility.

[Images: From a project by Farah Aliza Badaruddin at the Bartlett School of Architecture].

All in all, whether or not architecturally-controlled lightning storms will ever purify the land and water of south Florida, it's a wonderfully realized and highly imaginative project, and I hope Badaruddin finds more opportunities, post-Bartlett, to showcase and develop her skills.  

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Via Cabinet

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By Nicola Twilley

More than three-quarters of the food consumed in the United States today is processed, packaged, shipped, stored, and sold under artificial refrigeration. The shiny, humming stainless steel box in your kitchen is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak—a tiny fragment of the vast global network of temperature-controlled storage and distribution warehouses cumulatively capable of hosting uncounted billions of cubic feet of chilled flesh, fish, or fruit. Add to that an equally vast and immeasurable volume of thermally controlled space in the form of shipping containers, wine cellars, floating fish factories, international seed banks, meat-aging lockers, and livestock semen storage, and it becomes clear that the evolving architecture of coldspace is as ubiquitous as it is varied, as essential as it is overlooked.

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More about it and about a "perpetual winter" on Cabinet's website.

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Geoengineering—using technology to purposefully change the climate—is the only option for reducing the risk of climate change from greenhouse-gas emissions in the next few decades, says David Keith, a professor of public policy and applied physics at Harvard University. And he says that if it’s done in moderation, it could be much safer than some experts have argued. In fact, says Keith, effective methods of geoengineering are so cheap and easy that just about any country could do it—for better or worse.

Keith, speaking this week at MIT Technology Review’s annual EmTech conference, says it is already too late to avoid climate changes by reducing carbon emissions alone. The carbon dioxide that’s been released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels is already likely to cause significant harm, such as raising temperatures enough to hurt crop yields in many places. “If you want to, say, really stop the loss of Arctic sea ice or stop heat-stress crop losses over the next few decades, geoengineering is pretty much the only thing you can do,” he says (see “Why Climate Scientists Support Geoengineering Research”).

One of the main objections to geoengineering is that the measures that might be taken to cool the planet won’t exactly offset the effects of carbon dioxide, so they could actually make things much worse—for example, by altering patterns of precipitation. Keith says recent climate models suggest that injecting sulfate particles into the upper reaches of the atmosphere might not affect precipitation nearly as much as others have warned.

“I propose that you start in about 2020, and you start very, very gradually increasing your amount of sulfate engineering so that you cut about in half the rate of warming,” he says. “Not eliminate it, but cut it about in half. Cutting it in half is a big benefit.”

One of the benefits could be increased crop production. Though some critics have worried that geoengineering would alter monsoon patterns that are key to agriculture in India, Keith says moderate geoengineering could actually boost crop productivity there by 20 percent, in part by reducing temperatures.

Keith and some of his colleagues recently hired engineers to estimate how much one approach to sulfate injection might work, and how much it might cost. It could be done at first with existing airplanes—certain business jets can fly high enough to inject the particles into the upper atmosphere. Eventually we would need new planes that can fly higher. All in all, once the procedure is scaled up it would cost about a billion dollars a year and require about 100 aircraft. That’s cheap enough for most countries to pull off on their own.

The fact that it’s easy isn’t necessarily a good thing, Keith says. There’s the potential that if one country does it, another might blame that country—rightly or wrongly—for ensuing bad weather (see “The Geoengineering Gambit”).

And there are also real concerns about the impact sulfates might have on the atmosphere (see Geoengineering May Be Necessary, Despite Its Perils). It’s known that sulfates can be involved in reactions that deplete the ozone layer. As the earth warms, water vapor levels are increasing, which could exacerbate the problem. Keith is proposing a test to discover quantitatively just what the effect of the injections could be. He would introduce small clouds of sulfate and water vapor into the stratosphere using balloons, and then carefully measure the reactions that take place.

And Keith acknowledges a concern many have had about geoengineering: that using it to offset problems from climate change will reduce the incentive to tackle the greenhouse-gas emissions at the root of the problem. Even if geoengineering is employed, reducing emissions will still be important. Sulfate injection does nothing to address the ocean acidification associated with increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And if emissions continue to grow, ever-increasing amounts of sulfate will be needed.

But Keith thinks the potential benefits might be worth the dangers. “We don’t know enough yet to start,” he says. “But the current balance of evidence is that doing this really would reduce risks. And for that reason, we’ve got to take it seriously. It really would be reckless not to look at something that could reduce risk like this could.” 

Via BLDGBLOG

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5) "Imagine a lush forest: silent but for the chirping of birds flying through a dense canopy overhead, and damp, aromatic earth underfoot. Now picture a mountain of incinerated trash, 12 million tons of what was once a toxic heap of rotting fish and vegetables, old clothes, broken furniture, diapers and all manner of discarded items." This describes a new project by architect Tadao Ando called the Sea Forest. The Sea Forest "will transform 88 hectares of reclaimed land, a 30-meter deep mound of alternating layers of landfill, into a dense forest of nearly half a million trees" in Tokyo Bay. Ando adds that it is also an experiment in climate-engineering, or weather control as the future of urban design: "not only will [the forest] become a refreshing retreat for stressed out city workers, it will also create a cool ocean breeze to sweep through the capital and cool its sweaty denizens in summer."

[Images: Spreads from Project Japan, courtesy of Taschen].

6) The new book Project Japan by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist is an incredible document, in both physical and intellectual terms. The design, by Irma Boom, is gorgeous, and the contents—consisting of long, illustrated interviews with such figures as Arata Isozaki, Kenzo Tange's Tange Lab, Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, and many others, scattered amongst historical imagery and present-day site photos—offer a fascinating oral history of the Metabolist movement. As Koolhaas sums it up, Metabolism offered "a manifesto for the total transformation of the country" based on three specific principles. Still quoting Koolhaas:

a) The archipelago has run out of space: mostly mountainous, the surfaces fit for settlement are subdivided in microscopic, centuries old patchworks of ownership
b) Earthquakes and tsunamis make all construction precarious; urban concentrations such as Tokyo and Osaka are susceptible to potentially devastating wipeouts [ed. note: cf. today's calls for a "back-up Tokyo"]
c) Modern technology and design offer possibilities for transcending Japan's structural weakness, but only if they are mobilized systematically, almost militaristically, searching for solutions in every direction: on the land, on the sea, in the air...

Architecture thus becomes the literal geopolitical extension of the state, constructing new territory—such as floating forests and artificial islands—over which to govern. It's a kind of proactive gerrymandering, we might say: not redesigning the district map, but constructing new districts. In any case, I recommend the book.

(...)

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Via TSR

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Personal comment:

This is a quite beautiful object. Architectured weather and light effects around the convergent point of the solar beams. 800 °C around the top!

Via GOOD

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by Sarah Laskow

Not long ago, geoengineering was a verboten topic. It’s the sort of idea that dips deep enough into the wells of human ambition and hubris that it seems too dangerous to even consider. In the words of a Woodrow Wilson Center report, geoengineering “involves intentional, large-scale interventions in the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, soils or living systems to influence the planet’s climate”—in other words, a man-made fix to the man-made problem of climate change. In its most extreme forms, geoengineering could mean seeding the sky with chemicals to deflect sunlight away from Earth and change the sky’s color from blue to white. Or it could mean blocking solar energy by sending reflectors into orbit that, in certain configurations, would banish the Milky Way from the night sky. It's easy to see why such scenarios would make scientists nervous.

Yet there is a growing belief in the Washington think-tank world that although geoengineering is not an optimal solution to climate change, it may be a necessary one. In the past couple of months, both the Wilson Center and the Bipartisan Policy Center have released reports that suggest further research into geoengineering. Both organizations emphasize that other fixes to climate change—mitigation through energy innovation and adaptation to harsher conditions—are preferable, but they conclude that geoengineering might be the best option to deal with the extreme threats posed by climate change to human living conditions.

One the first reports on geoengineering, published in 1965, proposed it as a climate solution without imagining that decreasing coal or oil use might be a more reasonable approach. Since that era, though, the magnitude of climate change and the limits of human ingenuity have become clear. The Wilson Center cautions that faith in geoengineering may be misplaced because "we may know too little about the Earth's geophysical and ecological systems to be confident we can engineer the climate on a planetary scale."

The Wilson Center favors research into less risky forms of geoengineering, like siphoning carbon out of the atmosphere and storing its elsewhere. A few similar techniques—better soil management and reforestation—double as mitigation strategies already under investigation by climate researchers. The Bipartisan Policy Center, meanwhile, is more gung-ho about the more radical forms of geoengineering, the “solar radiation management” strategies that include seeding the sky with chemicals, though they emphasize that mitigating risk is a priority.

The appeal of geoengineering is obvious: It’d be easy compared to the effort needed to wean the country off coal and oil altogether. That’s one reason a slew of conservative think thanks, from the American Enterprise Institute to the Heartland Institute, have supported it for years. But it should be a last-ditch resort. The scary part is that climate change could get bad enough to warrant such measures. Earlier this month, the International Energy Agency reported that the world has just five years left to avoid catastrophic climate change. It’s still possible to turn away from a future where serious people are advocating for a white-sky world. But there’s not much time left.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user dcysurfer/Dave Young

Personal comment:

While I agree with the fears of Sarah Laskow about geo-engineering the planet, I want also to add this comment: we've already geo-engineered the planet for decades! Even so it was not an intended one (or was it?), 7 billion humans with their food production systems, architectures and travel infrastructures, energy production, factories, etc. are a very strong geo-engineering force, especially in the developed countries! It is no more a natural Earth we are living in, but a man transformed one (the famous "anthropocene" described by some), in its very essence (up to the quality of the air we are breathing).
So, would a radical "geo-engineering" solution be to go back to 1-2 billions humans on Earth or less within the next 200 years (like we were 200 years ago, before the industrial revolution)? Is it the sustainable approach of reducing this and that, trying to find new ecological solutions to many different problems, without asking this question of population? Should we rather change our economy or is it a headlong rush that is characterized by the geo-engineering approach?
This sound like a real crossroads question ...

Via The Guardian via WMMNA

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Field test by British academics marks first step towards recreating an artificial volcano that would inject particles into the stratosphere and cool the planet

• John Vidal, environment editor
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 31 August 2011 16.00 BST

It sounds barmy, audacious or sci-fi: a tethered balloon the size of Wembley stadium suspended 20km above Earth, linked to the ground by a giant garden hose pumping hundreds of tonnes of minute chemical particles a day into the thin stratospheric air to reflect sunlight and cool the planet.

But a team of British academics will next month formally announce the first step towards creating an artificial volcano by going ahead with the world's first major "geo-engineering" field-test in the next few months. The ultimate aim is to mimic the cooling effect that volcanoes have when they inject particles into the stratosphere that bounce some of the Sun's energy back into space, so preventing it from warming the Earth and mitigating the effects of man-made climate change.

(...) more about it on The Guardian.

and also, in the same article:

Hacking the planet - potential geo-engineering solutions

Ocean nourishment

Billions of iron filings are deposited in the ocean to stimulate a phytoplankton bloom. The aim is to enhance biological productivity to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Many experiments have been conducted, including fertilisation of 900 square kilometers (350 sq miles) of the Atlantic. Results so far are disappointing.

Space mirrors

Giant "mirrors", made of wire mesh, could be sent into in orbit to deflect sunlight back into space. But the scale needed, the expense and the potential unintended consequences are so great that it is widely considered unrealistic. In the same league as the idea to mine the moon to create a shielding cloud of dust.

Cloud whitening

The idea is to increase the water content in low clouds by spraying sea water at them. This makes them reflect more sunlight. It would be pretty harmless, and cheap but would have to be done on an immense scale to have any global effect. Backed by Bill Gates.

Artificial trees

Proposed by climate scientist Wallace Broecker who imagines 60m artificial "trees" dotted around the world, "scrubbing" the air by capturing CO₂ in a filter and then storing it underground. The trees could remove more carbon dioxide than an equivalent-sized real tree.

Albedo changes

Painting roofs and roads white, covering deserts in reflective plastic sheeting, dropping pale-coloured litter into the ocean and genetically engineering crops to be paler have all been proposed to reflect sunlight back into space.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS)

Carbon dioxide is collected from coal or other fossil fuel power plants and is then pumped underground. Works in principle but it is expensive and increases the fuel needs of a coal-fired plant by 25%-40%. More than 40 plants have been built with many others planned.

Personal comment:

Read also the scientific article on MIT Technology Review.