Revisiting a Heated Debate

Once upon a time, the debate over global warming and climatic change was mildly amusing to me. I could point out the false assumptions, the inadequate science, the contrarian historical evidence, and the typical human arrogance wrapped up in the matter, but I’ve grown very tired of it all now. As I noted several years ago, the obvious and most practical “solution” is already at hand, and I will revisit that in part today.

First, though, I put solution in quotes above because the most important potentially false assumption is that global warming is a problem at all. It may well be, but the facts are not yet in evidence for such a conclusion. Our models are inadequate and have failed to accurately predict outcomes thus far. Alarmism simply isn’t warranted.

Nevertheless, as I’ve previously stipulated, climatic change is something we should be concerned about. There is ample historical evidence for this, and in the longest term, we will have to actively manage the climatic conditions of our habitats, wherever or whatever they may be, if we would have human life and civilization continue indefinitely into the future. The short-term risks, though, are minimal and probably self-correcting.

The real problem, in my opinion, is that legitimate scientific inquiry and concern have been co-opted by political factions that are anti-capitalist and to some degree anti-human. They would slow, halt, or even reverse economic development for a variety of reasons, ranging from misguided environmentalism to outright misanthropy. These factions have spread the dubious alarm and fanned the flames of fear to engender public support for their political goals—and if their most radical proposals are enacted, billions of people will have to die. We will have replaced a remotely possible climatic catastrophe with a very certain political catastrophe.

For the most part, the way to mitigate potential climatic disasters is to keep doing what we have been doing throughout much of the modern era: lifting more and more people out of poverty through global economic development, reducing environmental pollution through improvements in energy technologies, and adapting to ecological changes when necessary. While our times are historically exceptional, these processes aren’t anywhere close to their theoretical limits. Taking the optimistic view, human civilization is only at the end of its beginning.

No! We’re at the beginning of the end! If we don’t do something right now, global warming will lead to mass extinctions and render the planet uninhabitable! Or so the alarmists would have us think. This doomsaying would be laughable … if it weren’t becoming the mainstream narrative believed by so many otherwise reasonable people.

That brings me back to the most obvious and practical solution to the technical problem of climatic management. The primary driver of climatic effects and cycles is solar radiation, sunlight. If we want to control or at least manage the terrestrial climate, the simplest and most direct way would be to control insolation, the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth’s surface.

There are several so-called geoengineering proposals that could achieve this, but the safest and most straightforward would be a series of orbital reflectors or shades. A constellation of such satellites could regulate global temperatures in a dynamic and very controllable manner, decreasing or increasing insolation as required. It’s a solution that would be both elegant and permanent.

The cost of such a program would not be insubstantial, but it wouldn’t be outrageous either. The technological concepts are decades old and would require no scientific breakthroughs to implement. I expect that initial development and deployment of the system would require less than $100 billion. Ongoing maintenance should be considerably less expensive, and follow-on benefits could likely repay the investments.

An array of solar reflectors would work well in conjunction with another proposed space-technology asset, the solar-power satellite. A fleet of these spacecraft could collect solar energy in space and beam it as microwaves to receiving stations, where it would be converted to clean electrical energy. While certainly not the only way to improve solar-power generation on Earth, space-based collection and re-transmission would overcome the reliability/availability problem that local ground-based collectors will always face.

Solar power holds a lot of promise even without on-orbit generation, but it probably can’t supplant hydrocarbon fuels in all applications. The real breakthrough in energy technology will be controlled nuclear fusion. Effective long-term implementation of that technology will also almost certainly require the exploitation of extraterrestrial resources, but the implications of essentially unlimited energy are staggering.

The availability of energy is at the root of all economic systems. The modern economic revolution is due in large part to the high energy density and relatively easy accessibility of our hydrocarbon fuels. Again, despite the doomsaying, petroleum is not going to be exhausted anytime soon. In fact, given unlimited energy, non-terrestrial resources and high-energy conversion methods can deliver virtually endless supplies. That’s when pollution and climatic effects should become our primary concerns.

A fusion-powered infrastructure would open a range of possibilities. Indoor, climate-controlled farming would become viable almost anywhere on the planet … and beyond. High-intensity water-purification and desalination processes would become affordable. Pollution reduction and capture technologies would become similarly inexpensive. And, of course, as basic survival needs became vastly easier to meet, societies would have more wealth to direct toward solving secondary and tertiary social problems.

In fact, the chief dilemma human civilization will face in the future may be surviving its own prosperity.

The Windup Girl

“[H]ow little anyone cares to separate wheat from chaff, when all anyone wants to do is burn a field.”

Science fiction has become so political, or at least I keep selecting works that have political implications. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is another such example. Set after a global-warming catastrophe, the novel uses that context to explain its essentially steampunk background. As a result, environmental politics play a central role in the plot, culminating in a literal battle for supremacy between the trade and environment factions in a future Thailand.

Bacigalupi weaves his plot with threads from five viewpoint characters: a rising capitalist, a fallen capitalist, the incorruptible champion of the environment faction, his somewhat less noble second-in-command, and the eponymous windup girl, the illegal, genetically engineered “new person” whose actions trigger the novel’s climactic turn of events. His tapestry is richly colored by the sights, sounds, and smells of latter-day Bangkok. Street markets, urban filth, and sweltering heat all come to vivid life—but then something will jar the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief.

Part of this problem is technological and part political, though these aspects are obviously related. Bacigalupi uses environmentalist conceits to justify his steampunk setting, but he struggles in the attempt. The world is so far beyond peak oil—or petroleum usage is so strictly regulated—that human and animal power is commonly needed to generate electricity, and draconian carbon-dioxide limits are still enforced long after the damage has been done. Scarcely a solar panel or wind turbine is to be seen, while advanced genetic engineering is widespread.

The cast of character is well rendered in shades of gray, but the so-called capitalists and their allies are the obvious villains by default. Their behavior inevitably borders on crime or even acts of war, and that is somehow treated as normal business practice. The heavy-handed states presumably required to enforce the overbearing environmental regulations of Bacigalupi’s windup world would never tolerate such behavior unless they were sponsoring it, but the foreign corporations that threaten the Thai kingdom seem to be free agents.

Whether the author was writing from his political heart or simply playing with a fictitious fancy, there is a glimmer of rational hope in the novel’s closing acts. Hock Seng, the Chinese refugee who has seen his entire family murdered in previous pogroms, arms himself as Bangkok dissolves into civil war, learning at last that it “is possible to prepare for chaos.” Notably, though, in a story haunted by the environmental evils committed by humans upon the “natural world,” the definitive declaration that humanity is itself natural is put in the mouth of the archvillain Gibbons, a man possibly responsible for creating the worst of the genetically engineered plagues.

Almost everything is political these days, so we probably shouldn’t expect our fiction to be any different. The Windup Girl is a good example of the trend. Though Bacigalupi reaches too far with his political conceits, he does so with delightfully pungent, if awkwardly immediate prose and a good deal of baroque charm. His novel is hard not to enjoy, even if you occasionally have to put it down and shake your head.

Ending a Heated Debate

I must confess that the debate over anthropogenic global warming (climatic change for those of you who’ve shivered through recent summers) has been entertaining. The only thing more amusing than human arrogance is even more human arrogance. Be that as it may, I think the time has come to end the debate.

For the record, human activity obviously affects the global climate. Of course, everything affects the global climate, so that information is not terribly instructive. Where do human influences rank among the various factors? Only the arrogant can provide a definitive answer. However, we should still acknowledge that solar output and orbital dynamics generally have the greatest impact on climatic cycles—an important fact that I will return to shortly.

Since it’s the popular thing to do, I’ll go ahead and assume that anthropogenic climatic change is a bad thing and that we should probably do something about it. Now, though, I will buck the trend and dismiss the mainstream solutions as atmospheric alchemy. Arbitrarily reducing carbon-dioxide emissions over the short term will have a very small effect on global temperatures and will be prohibitively expensive.

Rather than spending hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars for minimal benefit, why not spend only tens of billions on mitigation efforts and on general economic development? As Bjørn Lomborg has cogently argued, focusing on these goals would have a much greater positive effect at only a fraction of the cost. (Dr. Lomborg is also rightly critical of proposed cap-and-trade schemes, which are ripe for corruption.) Yeah, that’s just wishful thinking.

So let’s spend a bunch of money on prevention, but let’s use science instead of alchemy. That brings me back to the sun, since controlling insolation would be the most cost-effective method of regulating global temperatures. Several “geoengineering” schemes have been proposed to accomplish this goal, but one stands above the rest.

A constellation of solar reflectors in orbit could shade the Earth and reduce global temperatures in a dynamic and very controllable manner. Such a system could probably be developed and deployed for the price of a low-budget manned Mars landing (around $50 billion). Ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure should cost significantly less than that. This would keep us within Dr. Lomborg’s suggestion of cost-effective solutions without the more politically difficult challenge of defeating the institutionalized corruption that stands in the way of his more noble goals.

An orbital sunshade may sound like science fiction, but it makes a lot more sense than mucking about blindly with complex atmospheric chemistry. Insolation could be decreased or increased as needed, allowing for long-term climatic regulation (and other potential benefits). Combined with ongoing pollution controls, a soletta program would provide an elegant and permanent solution to the problem of global warming.

So the debate is over. If you want to control the climate, control the amount of sunlight that reaches the planet’s surface. Doing so would cost a fraction of other less effective solutions.

Climatic Change and Human History

As we traveled through the tortured landscape of the Great Basin on our way to and from Utah, I was reminded of the long history of climatic change in this region. Millions of years ago, it was seabed. Thousands of years ago, it was largely filled with lakes and rivers fed by melting glaciers. Even after the glaciers began their abrupt but long retreat, the region remained wet and lush long enough for ancient humans to survive and prosper.


That prosperity didn’t last. The climate continued to change. Lakes and rivers shrank, and some disappeared altogether. Rainfall also declined. The Great Basin dried out. Crops failed. People died. The first inhabitants had all but vanished by the time more adaptable tribes arrived from the east to dig wells, divert rivers, and build cities.

Despite all the recent concern over climatic change, it is simply not a new phenomenon. In the broadest sense, human history has been defined by our response to this ongoing process. Legendary civilizations arose and thrived on the low-lying temperate plains, only to be washed away by the rising seas that heralded the beginning of a warmer, interglacial period. As the ice retreated, the survivors of the great floods migrated into the new lands, where they planted the seeds that grew into the nations we know today.

Humans have always adapted to such change or paid the price for failing to do so. Now, though, we talk of controlling the climate by our own hand and of spending the wealth of nations to do so. Assuming this ability is within our grasp and not another fiction of our own arrogance, how will we select the ideal global climate?

That is the question that still remains unanswered and, for that matter, largely unasked. Why should the predominant climate of the 20th century A.D. be our ideal? It was but one point on the climatic spectrum—and perhaps an unstable one at that. Should we forgo adaptation in our pursuit of control? Our civilization will pay a high price if our quest for control fails—or perhaps even if it succeeds.

The Inconvenient Truth about Climatic Change

I am sure it came as no surprise when An Inconvenient Truth took the Oscar for best documentary feature at the 79th Academy Awards. This film joins the growing chorus sounding the alarm about the phenomenon of global warming. While I will stipulate that the global climate is indeed warming and that human activities play some part in the same, I must question the extent to which this is true and to which it is a problem and the advisability and wisdom of the proposed solutions.

The real inconvenient truth about climatic change is that it is a perfectly natural and normal process. A complex interplay of orbital, solar, biological, and geological factors causes our planet to cycle somewhat regularly between warmer and cooler periods. These cycles develop over approximately 40,000 to 100,000 years.

Currently, we are about 10,000 years into an interglacial period that may persist for another 20,000. Temperatures are generally increasing, and ice coverage is generally diminishing. Even so, there is still variation within the cycle. It was warmer about a thousand years ago, but it was colder just 400 years ago. The climate may very well be right where it is supposed to be, with human activities contributing little to an existing warming trend.

Technically, in fact, we are still in an ice age. In the more distant past, the global climate has been much warmer. Climatic change is a reality, and the biological history of our world has largely hinged on that fact. The only question is what we might do about it.

The assumption behind global-warming alarmism is that a warmer climate would be a bad thing. Sea levels would rise, weather patterns would change, and human civilization would be much disrupted. While such changes could surely be dramatic, I can’t say that they would all be negative.

In a warmer climate, vast tracts of the northern hemisphere would become more favorable to human habitation and agricultural development. The opening of the Northwest Passage would facilitate maritime trade. Perhaps the Sahara would become a verdant savanna once again. As with any change, there would be both positive and negative aspects.

Proposals to halt global warming, such as the Kyoto Protocol, raise still more difficult questions. If human-influenced climatic change is undesirable, is “natural” climatic change any more desirable? Do we stand by and do nothing when the climate “naturally” begins to cool again, starving our multitudes, crushing our cities under the ice, and land-locking our ports? Or do we try to keep things warm? If we decide that climatic control is a human prerogative, which ideal will we choose?

Furthermore, the proposals themselves often appear as much politically as ecologically motivated. Might they do more harm than the problem they are intended to correct? For example, the Kyoto Protocol is somewhat arbitrary in its application and almost seems to punish the developed nations, even though these are the ones working the hardest to reduce pollution and to mitigate environmental damage. This would also threaten to spread the institutionalized poverty that serves as the political power base for many of the parties that support the protocol.

Climatic change is an extremely complicated subject. More research and much more discussion should be undertaken before we begin to make rash decisions about controlling the global climate. We live in a dynamic system, and disrupting that system to maintain some arbitrary status quo may prove just as dangerous as pushing it toward an unknown outcome.

Setting climatic issues aside, however, there are still a number of reasons why we should clean up our act on hydrocarbons. Respiratory health and economic sustainability are just two more immediate and pressing considerations where the rampant use of hydrocarbons is concerned. Tackling these issues would be a safer and more effective strategy than doom saying about global warming.