American Physical Society Discusses Climate Change and its Mitigation

My colleague Jim Boyden (PhD, physics, Cal Tech, 1960) was kind enough to brief me on the highlights of the meeting of the American Physical Society at the University of California at Berkeley last weekend. The core of the meeting, apparently, was an update on climate change (what can we expect, and when can we expect it), and the status of the major technologies that may come to bear to help us migrate away from fossil fuels while there is still time to avert catastrophe.

Of course, on top of all the normal discussion of solar, wind, nuclear, etc., resides the subject of geo-engineering: what can we do to the Earth’s atmosphere, land masses, and oceans to do one of a few main things:

• Reflect more of the sun’s heat back into space when it hits the outer atmosphere.

• Absorb less and reflect more of the heat that made its way to the Earth’s surface off the land and ocean and back through the atmosphere.

• Absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, thus reducing the greenhouse effect.

Needless to say, this is tricky business for a great number of reasons surrounding the technology, economics, and politics. The questions that we must ask are endless, but two of the most obvious are: How can we make any of these bullet points above happen without unintended consequences? And who’s going to be in charge of this, i.e., controlling the Earth’s thermostat?

For now, all of this sounds like science fiction, and I, for one, will be happy if it remains in precisely that status. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that I’d have to see the Hudson River flowing through the Roman art section on the first floor of the Metropolitan Art Museum (pictured above) before I’d want to take measures like these.