The CIA Wants To Know How To Control the Climate

Taco Cowboy writes " The CIA is currently funding, in part, a $630,000 study on geoengineering, the science of using experimental techniques to modify Earth's climate. Scientists will study how humans might influence weather patterns, assess the potential dangers of messing with the climate, and investigate possible national security implications of geoengineering attempts. The study calls for information on two geoengineering techniques in particular, 'solar radiation management (SRM),' which refers to launching material into Earth's atmosphere to try and block the Sun's infrared radiation, limiting global temperature rise; and 'carbon dioxide removal (CDR),' taking carbon dioxide emissions out of the climate, which scientists have proposed doing through a variety of means, from structures that eat air pollution to capturing carbon emissions as they come out of smokestacks."

Comments

The US just has to control everything, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm.

Re:The US just has to control everything, eh?

[lxs]

After earthquake control where do you go as an agency? Remote viewing? Mind control lasers? That's so 1970s. Let's face it, in this harsh world you're only as good as your latest doomsday weapon.

Re:The US just has to control everything, eh?

[interkin3tic]

Humans in general like to LOOK at nature, not be subject to it's whims. Especially after we messed up the usual pattern.

And why not the US? The UN has signaled it is against geoengineering in principle. This makes strategic sense, it would be foolish to allow big carbon emitters to say "Oh, we'll just fix it later" while continuing to burn coal like there's no tomorrow. However, it's clear that some climate change is going to happen, and that it will negatively impact a lot of people. Not researching geoengineering is kind of foolish in that sense. Those countries which are contributing to climate change should probably invest in fixing the problems they largely created. Ideally after doing no further damage, but none of us were born yesterday: we know we're going to be getting our power coal until some climate-change related problem makes enough people in the US realize that nuclear or solar power would have been a better choice.

I'm not sure why they're focusing only on blocking the sun and not iron fertilization or other things.

Re:The US just has to control everything, eh?

[jeffmeden]

Humans in general like to LOOK at nature, not be subject to it's whims. Especially after we messed up the usual pattern.

And why not the US? The UN has signaled it is against geoengineering in principle. This makes strategic sense, it would be foolish to allow big carbon emitters to say "Oh, we'll just fix it later" while continuing to burn coal like there's no tomorrow. However, it's clear that some climate change is going to happen, and that it will negatively impact a lot of people. Not researching geoengineering is kind of foolish in that sense. Those countries which are contributing to climate change should probably invest in fixing the problems they largely created. Ideally after doing no further damage, but none of us were born yesterday: we know we're going to be getting our power coal until some climate-change related problem makes enough people in the US realize that nuclear or solar power would have been a better choice..

It's pretty clear that managing emissions down to pre-industrial levels is a non-starter; even if we did agree that it is a problem, we simply can never agree as a planet on what each nation's "fair" reduction would be. Therefore, it will be the usual token gestures of reducing carbon by x percent in a certain industry while other industries quickly rise up to fill the gap. If climate change is going to hurt us, our only protection will be taking action *after* it happens, until then there just won't be consensus on what to do. I for one am glad at least someone realizes that (they probably got the idea from reading my emails).

Re:The US just has to control everything, eh?

[Sperbels]

And why not the US? The UN has signaled it is against geoengineering in principle. This makes strategic sense, it would be foolish to allow big carbon emitters to say "Oh, we'll just fix it later" while continuing to burn coal like there's no tomorrow.

Um, we're talking about the CIA here...not the NOAA. The CIA doesn't give a shit about climate change.

Re:The US just has to control everything, eh?

[Electricity Likes Me]

Most national intelligence agencies care about climate change, because changes in local rainfall, drought and flood patterns is going to lead to unrest and the movement of peoples and what comes with that. Geoengineering falls under this umbrella easily: being able to predict who's going to get screwed by it is a pretty good way to predict who's going to be coming after the US for it, and where the new hotspots/issues will arise.

A huge part of any intelligence agency's mission is to discern the underlying factors which motivate the behavior of countries: someone beating the drums for war usually has an ulterior motive to the stated one, both locally and abroad.

Re: The US just has to control everything, eh?

[Gilmoure]

Everyone knows humans don't have an effect on climate. Look how little a person is compared to the Earth! It's all solar cosmic rays and Martian volcanos getting closer to Earth that makes it get warmer, just like when dinosaurs ruled things and made people's live in caves instead of drive cars wherever they wanted.

Obvious

[BSAtHome]

The most obvious answer is always the one (almost) never thought of or mentioned: stop polluting the planet.

Re:Obvious

[gigaherz]

To expand on it: avoiding pollution can be expensive, and it's not in anyone's immediate interests to spend money just to be greener. People can think long-term, but corporations are usually short-term money-making machines, so green is only ever used as a PR measure to paint themselves more attractive, or avoid taxes.

Re:Obvious

[pinkushun]

Exactly this. $630,000 that could be used to educate and bring awareness to the people. We are the ones targeted by products, and we have to make an informed choice about what is useful vs what is damaging. Isn't that also known as "geoengineering"? I believe it is, and on a global scale too.

Re:Obvious

[DarkOx]

It's not just the corporations. Actually most of the corporations like being in a somewhat affluent society. They are much cleaner than they otherwise would be. Consider here in the US we have more forest than we had 100 years ago, we have about doubled the cars on the road since the 70s and held emmisions mostly constant. Our carbon foot print is big because our living standard is high but if you look at and activity basis rather than a per capita basis we do things with higher carbon efficiencies than most of the world.

Think about cooking, driving, electrical generation etc. compare the carbon output of the way we usually do those activities to say India, or Chad.

Running around trying to manage all the greenhouse gas sources only works when you have piles of money to throw at the problem and even then it does not achieve the goal of preserving our comfortable life style and stopping climate change, it demands sacrifice and sacrifice sucks!

Geoengineering or centralized carbon scrubbing is the future, that or radical population controls. I am more comfortable with the former, I bet most people will be too when they sit down and think on it. What's sad here is its the spooks behind this instead of transparent organization

Re:Obvious

[Sockatume]

It's not the reaction that's the problem - it's close to 100% complete in a properly maintained car - but that turning the heat into useful work is not trivial. You can get more useful work out of the same energy with, say, a gas turbine.

Re:Obvious

[Poeli]

Our carbon foot print is big because our living standard is high but if you look at and activity basis rather than a per capita basis we do things with higher carbon efficiencies than most of the world.

Most (western) European countries have an equally high living standard but a considerable lower carbon footprint. I doubt that bringing activity into the calculation will change much...

Re:Obvious

[trendzetter]

Government elected by corporations

Re:Obvious

[Seumas]

That seems to completely miss the point. The CIA doesn't give a shit about "climate change" or whatever we're calling it this week. They care about ability to and implications of controlling and weaponizing weather. Some asian country giving the USA shit? Send a hurricane their way. Some south american country not playing along with US policy or making us look bad? Cause an earthquake. Want to bolster US corn syrup? Cause an extensive drought in sugar producing regions of other nations.

Re:Obvious

[internerdj]

I'm definitely in the camp that Americans need to do more but that is a bit disingenuous comparison. It looks like the Western European Country with the lowest population density is three times the population density of the US. That has huge public transportation ramifications.

Re:Obvious

[khallow]

At present our economy is based solely on the creation of infinite products out of finite resources

Premise is wrong. The economy is about the same thing that economies are about - distributing scarce resources to make things and services of value which are themselves scarce. If it were somehow true, then why would producing infinite products of value out of finite base materials be somehow "stupid" rather than really useful? Last I checked, infinite was bigger than finite so that looks to me to be stretching the usefulness of those finite resources quite a bit.

Simply put our economy is incompatible with the environment and this cannot be fixed unless our economic system is changed, which is highly unlikely to happen.

There are other choices such as accepting some degree of harm to the environment, which don't require this supposed "fix".

If every person on Earth gave a dime each to develop tech that would allow for highly efficient and cost effective recycling methods it would have been done within a year and we wouldn't even have this conversation.

Right. I bet at least two orders of magnitude more has been burned on recycling technologies than the mere $700 million you propose here. And that huge spending resulted in the "hardly efficient" recycling methods you complain about. Now, if this recycling demonstration were done in Earth orbit, I'd be willing to pony up. But otherwise, it just isn't that useful compared to the other things I could be doing with my dime or my ten dollar bill.

Re:Obvious

[Noughmad]

Any problem with corporations is a problem with the government.

In a democracy, any problem with the governemnt is a problem with the people.

The summarization of the summary of the summary is left to the reader.

Re:Obvious

[hrvatska]

West European countries would need to significantly raise their energy consumption or the US drastically lower its to have the US start approaching European levels of energy consumption. Even comparing urban dwellers, US cities tend to be much more car centric. You just can't consider living a middle class life in a great many US cities without a car for each working person. This is much less the case in Europe. And while the US has made great strides in improving the energy efficiency of its cars, West Europeans tend to drive much more fuel efficient cars than people in the US. It's not so much that people in Western Europe are more virtuous than people in the US, but that fuel is just so much more expensive. Raise the price of gasoline to $7/gal in the US and people would be driving very fuel efficient cars in a hurry. And then consider nuclear power. While it doesn't affect total energy consumption, it does affect a country's carbon footprint. France and Sweden dwarf the US in nuclear energy per capita. The Nordic countries rival the US in energy consumption, but I suspect a lot of that has to do with heating. It would be interesting to compare Minnesota to Norway.

Re:Obvious

[jellomizer]

It is the most obvious and most thoughtless answer.

1. There is a trade off for everything we do. If we do not pollute we in essence will live back in the stone ages. However we will still be producing Bio Waste and without those polluting infrastructures we will create a hazardous environment that will kill millions of people and plants and animals, really messing stuff up. There is a reason why Stone age man life span was averaged at 35 years, and it wasn't getting eaten by a predator.

2. If too many people don't like the tradeoffs they will not follow them. You cannot expect people to live a lower quality of life, just because you said you should, to save the environment. People get pissed, when people get pissed they get violent, when they get violent people will die. So you are saying we need an oppressive regime to save the environment, we think we have loss too many right to the government already, wait and see when there is a man with a gun from the government making sure you don't burn your trash, or start up your vintage 1955 chevy.

In short there should be less stupid saber rattling and giving one sided answers and work to look at the tradeoffs and try to get a proper balance.

Re:Obvious

[NatasRevol]

There are no democracies.

Re:Obvious

[interkin3tic]

In politics, if there's a problem with an obvious solution, and it's not already happening, there are barriers to that. Usually someone with a lot of power, and very often a lot of FUD confusing the idiot voters.

The drug war, for example. It's blindingly obvious what SHOULD happen to anyone with half a brain, but that doesn't describe a lot of voters, and there's law enforcement and the prison industry making sure we don't decriminalize drugs, so we don't. Instead we waste a hell of a lot of money and lives.

It's possible to try to overcome that barrier AND think of ways around it though. If we can't get politicians to value the future of the planet more than they value fossil fuel campaign contributions (and obviously we haven't so far), then perhaps we can think of another way to fix the planet.

Re:Obvious

[bill_mcgonigle]

The most obvious answer is always the one (almost) never thought of or mentioned: stop polluting the planet.

Since we already know that dung fires are more polluting than industrial power plants, per capita, what does this really mean? It means bringing technology to the masses, and then building clean, distributed power plants to power that technology.

We have the technology to do this, and clean up previous generations' left-behind pollution (i.e. nuclear waste) but governments are preventing industry from providing the solution that everybody wants, because they are protecting the monied power interests.

So, on the net, you need to fundamentally reform or abolish the extant government structures if you want to get to a pollution-free world. I don't see the CIA funding this research.

Re:Obvious

[jeffmeden]

You have a point in that Europe has a higher population density than the US, but some European countries are less actually less dens.

Country Density Carbon efficiency

- - - - -

USA 35 pop/km2 1.77 CO2 emissions/$ GDP

Sweden 23 pop/km2 0.7 CO2 emissions/$ GDP

Norway 16 pop/km2 0.74 CO2 emissions/$ GDP

That said Sweden and Norway probably have an advantage in having plenty of waterpower.

That's some pretty intense cherry picking. If you looked at the stats for just Oregon or Washington (with decent carbon-free power sources) you would find the same. However, across the entire US (just like across the entire EU) the picture is different because not all areas have the same resources.

Re:Obvious

[MightyYar]

I agree that the US is behind Europe on fuel efficiency of our car fleet - though we have made recent strides. Also, the measure that the Europeans use for fuel economy is much looser than the US standard - in reality, many of the cars available are virtually the same yet have drastically different ratings in the US and Europe.

You can't compare the entire US to France - the US on the whole has a much rougher climate than most of France. There are few areas of the US with the kind of mild climate that part of Europe enjoys. Our east coast has extremes of temperature - if you live in a place that is warm in the winter, it is almost uninhabitable without AC in the summer. If you live in a place with nice summers, the winters are cold and require a lot of heating. There are places in the Northwest with similar temperatures, but they tend to have a 6-month drought season and a 6-month rainy season, so they aren't ideal for traditional agriculture and thus aren't as densely settled.

We have some recent trends in the US that you might not be aware of. One, kids are less interested in cars. Young people are going completely carless in cities - though the cities tend to be those with decent public transportation. That's not even a requirement, though, as car sharing has become the vogue. Young people are flooding into once-crumbling downtowns.

In addition to these recent demographic shifts, we found a new way to get at huge reservoirs of natural gas that Europe is skittish to do themselves, and now Europe is burning our excess coal. The result is that the US has decreased its own emissions by 20%, and much of that is now added to Europe's total (though the economic downturn is still keeping emissions low). It's true that France is crazy for nuclear, and I admire and covet their willingness to reprocess fuel. But they are very much an anomaly in Europe - everyone else is abandoning nuclear (or at least pretending to), because a tidal wave might suddenly hit Germany and cause a nuclear emergency.

Re:Obvious

[MightyYar]

The UK and France have very mild climates compared to most of the US. The UK is the most densely populated country in the EU. Comparing energy use of residents in Wyoming or even Atlanta to France or the UK is silly. The closest approximation would be the Delaware-to-New York part of the East Coast, but even that has much harsher temperature extremes than the UK or most of France. As an example, residents of NYC have half the carbon footprint of other people in the US - mostly because heating (the units are rarely single family) and transportation (something like 90% of residents use public transit).

Anyway, the US unquestionably emits more carbon per capita than the EU, but cherry-picking the UK and France and then comparing that to the entire US is not very instructive.

Re:Obvious

[buchner.johannes]

I'm definitely in the camp that Americans need to do more but that is a bit disingenuous comparison. It looks like the Western European Country with the lowest population density is three times the population density of the US. That has huge public transportation ramifications.

Only if you look at the average. The US has large empty areas. If you ignore them -- and you can, for the discussion about public transportation -- the eastern third of the country is densely populated, entirely comparable to Europe.

Well, I guess that answers the question...

[mitcheli]

Global warming is real. Now if the Department of Transportation starts digging lots of holes in the ground then I guess well also know the meteor is coming...

Re:Well, I guess that answers the question...

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Global warming is real.

. . . if it's not real, the CIA will now be able to make it real for us . . .

I'm not disputing that this is useful research

[maroberts]

I just wonder why the funding is coming from the CIA. Surely having another US Government organisation providing the money would be less controversial.

Re:I'm not disputing that this is useful research

[FaxeTheCat]

Doing something unusual like reading the TFA reveals:
"It should be noted, and in fact highlighted, that CIA is only funding a portion of this study, with the rest provided by NOAA, NASA, and the National Academy of Sciences itself."
"one of the objectives of the study is to discuss the possible national security concerns that might arise should geoengineering techniques be deployed (expected or unexpectedly), either by a private entity or another country."

Climate Change

[arcite]

Goes hand in hand with rising populations, particularly in Africa and SE Asia. As populations continue to grow in these regions, ever more pressure will be put on food production. Food production has to effectively quadruple in the next fifty years. Those who master Geo-engineering technologies will be best suited to survive the increasingly hostile planet. In respect to the CIA, processing these technologies will provide leverage with foreign governments, to maintain the balance of power, maintain alliances, and create new ones.

HAARP

[scan2006]

I thought they used HAARP to control the weather

relax!

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the use of "ad trap" tactics (CIA... Geoengineering... success!) are usual nowdays in Slashdot:
The study is commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences (http://www8.nationalacademies.org/cp/projectview.aspx?key=49540) and their spokesperson states that the study is not designed to test any geoengineering methods or experiment with any findings whatsoever, but rather "assess the current state of knowledge about several geoengineering techniques," and use the findings to inform "future discussions" about their use, and the CIA's involvement "begins and ends with its financial contributions.", CIA is only funding a portion of this study, with the rest provided by NOAA, NASA, and the National Academy of Sciences itself.", the study sponsors, including the CIA, only address the committee in charge of the study once, at the beginning, and "do not correspond with the committee or provide any further input into the study. They receive a final, independently peer-reviewed report with the study's findings at the end of the project", "one of the objectives of the study is to discuss the possible national security concerns that might arise should geoengineering techniques be deployed (expected or unexpectedly), either by a private entity or another country.".

They're called trees you idiots.

[Anonymous Coward]

If only we had a solar powered carbon sink, that you could put somewhere and leave for 20 years, then come harvest it for a resource to build buildings and create heat? If only they also made oxygen helped nature and looked good on the horizon.

Re:They're called trees you idiots.

[abies]

Because they are terribly inefficient? According to http://www.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/treefact.htm, 1 tree process around 24kg of CO2 per year. Refrigerator (which I'm not giving away to be 'green'), according to http://www.botany.org/planttalkingpoints/co2andtrees.php, produce almost 900kg of CO2 because of energy used per year. This means, I need almost 40 full-grown trees just to cover my refrigerator. If you add some other things, like PC I'm writing it on, water heating, house warming, washing machine, etc etc, we are probably talking about acre of forest just to cover my family needs. Don't know about you, but I live in area where space is a bit of premium and people are sometimes failing to secure 50m^2 apartment in multi-store building (which translates to probably like 20m^2 of real ground space, even with pavements etc) - they can hardly affort paying for extra 5000m^2 of ground to plant forest there.

Generally, plants are very bad at anything they do, if you look from pure efficiency point of view. Same way as solar panels are order (or even few) of magnitude better at converting solar to energy than plants, there might be a non-plant solution for getting rid of CO2 in hundred times more efficient manner than trees are doing that now.

I'm a lot more worried about all these ideas with 'lets change the albedo', 'lets spray air with nanoparticles of HaArP molecules' etc. We don't know a lot about our planet and I'm afraid that any manual steering of single variables will cause catastrophic results.

Re:They're called trees you idiots.

[xtal]

Canada has around 1,000 million acres of forest lands. It is hard to get your head around exactly how big a space that is.

You can make up for low efficiency with volume, unlike profit. Trees are a tremendously underutilized resource. The trees don't have to necessarily be on top of where you are to get a mass benefit - although that depends on where you are.

The US has similar potential volumes for tree growth; maybe more so, depending as the average state is more temperate than up here.

A giant PRISM

[Anonymous Coward]

To divert the sun's rays

Sigh

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

in particular, 'solar radiation management (SRM),'

Don't do it! We know ice ages can come on in as little as a few years. All it takes is one extra cool summer where the snow pack doesn't fully melt and so much energy gets reflected back into space the next winter is severe and even more snow builds up. It's a local attractor in chaos theory, or a stable local minimum on the energy gradiant space.

With warming, moving in from the sea over 100-300 years: irritation but nobody dies, and lives continue to improve anyway thanks to technology.

Accidentally inducing an ice ace, billions die in a few years and much of society collapses, dictatorships, and lives of those who remain stop improving and start degrading.

Don't do it.

Expensive = Less Green

[Overzeetop]

Consider this: since our economy is based on carbon fuels (renewable sources are very small), every dollar (or euro or yuan) goes into creating carbon emissions.

  0. If you buy stuff or services, where does the money go?
  1. To the seller (20%) - who pays for stuff (goto 0), services (goto 0), and fuel (heat, electricity, personal transportation - carbon emissions)
  2. To the distributer (20%) - who pays for stuff (goto 0), services (goto 0), and fuel (heat, electricity, transportation - carbon emissions)
  3. To the shipper (5%) - of which most goes to fuel (carbon emissions), and the rest goes for stuff (goto 0), and services (goto 0)
  4. To the producer (55%)
  5. And the producer pays for wages for people [to buy stuff (goto 0), services (goto 0), fuel (heat, electricity, manufacturing - carbon emissions)] and raw materials [which used carbon-based fuels for extraction/mining/refinement/etc. and results in carbon emissions]

With the industrial revolution switch from human power to machine power, the entire economy is based on us paying for energy. The root of all transactions are to pay for fuel. Nobody "pays" for crop growth or minerals - dollars don't flow to mother nature or the ruler of the earth as a dead-end, just to the people who use energy to promote growth or extract minerals. If the economy were based entirely on real/near-time solar sources (sun, wind, hydro) and nuclear, that would be a different equation as all roads wouldn't lead to carbon emissions. But even buying a solar panel or windmill is non-green, as current technology spends as much in fossil fuel to mine, refine, produce, distribute, install, and maintain the equipment as you get back in power.

Now, that kind of sucks, but it does offer insight into how to *truly* reduce carbon emissions, and that is to minimize your lifecycle costs for everything. Being efficient *is* being green if you're at the end-user point where you cannot control the mix of energy production sources. If you are at the energy producer level (which is almost none of us), you can control carbon emissions through the selection of source - coal, oil, nat gas. (I leave out nuclear and solar, as they are simply purchasers of carbon-based materials like the rest of us, and I leave out fiber incineration/contemporary organics as that's primarily an oil-based source as oil is used for promotion, harvest, and transportation).

Fusion

[Thanshin]

The most obvious answer is always the one (almost) never thought of or mentioned: stop polluting the planet.

- Develop cold fusion.
- Replace polluting energy sources by unlimited fusion energy.
- Use unlimited energy to reverse the polluting mechanisms (carbon scrubbing).

Some times I wonder how bad is the player that's managing Humans in the intergalactic strategy game. Somewhere there's a civilization that made a fusion rush and are now conquering their galaxy.

Maybe we're the AI set to Dumb.

What could possibly go wrong?

[Hypotensive]

This reminds me eerily of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.O.S._Meteors:_Mortimer_in_Paris

That's like, one cup of government coffee

[argStyopa]

$630k is like pop-machine change in government terms.

$80,000 writing the proposal for funding
$170,000 for 17 interns to edit it
$60,000 for 3 admins to bang the interns during "late night editing sessions"
$3000 for abortions
$200,000 the inevitable hush-money to the interns
$310,000 for the multimedia presentation of the project to admins.

No, it doesn't add up to $630k. This is GOVERNMENT. Having the numbers match up costs extra.

Re:GIven our track record

[Biosci777]

Come on, what's the worst that could happen?

"Trust me, I'm with the government."
[Presses Climate-o-matic button]...
[Europe freezes and India is wiped off the map by tsunamis]
"Oops. Uh, somebody confiscate Fox News' e-mails so they don't report this."

CIA?

[Hoi Polloi]

Shouldn't this be a project(s) funded by the NSF? Just because it might have national security implications doesn't mean the CIA's role should be expanding into scientific research.