atlas(t)

liveblogging: emerging terraformations: consequences

and now, for the final installment (once again, will post now and correct later):

Michael Light (photographer and pooky)
Not a scientist or historian, but a visual artist. feels like a journalist, in that he can do everythign but not in great depth. Conference is a heavy load, taking away alot. As artists, atrracted to very vast spaces. Practices invlves two starins. One is looking at images that have been alread made by others. Going through archives. The other is making his own images, mostly aerial. Is a pilot.
Photo: of Mike in cockpit of his plane with his 20 pound 4x5 camera. Planetary images, vast desert landscapes.
Explorer of what we as a people are doing to our landscapes. Settleed and unsettled landscsapes. larger project called SOME DRY SPACE.
Makes books. Large book projects, book as a project. They're the beginning of the project, handmade artists books.
2003 100 suns book.
Meditative look at the view from the imperial veranda. Images from 100 nuclear detonations. Came to it from a landscape perspective.
Edward Teller, dark grandfather laughing at us all. Image of first hydrogen bomb detonation. Changes everything. Up til that point the sublime was the province of the gods, until now humans ignited their own small stars. Arguably the greatest moment of civilization, tool-bearing humans setting off their own stars. We are the architect of our own sublime. Immense implications.
Becomes possessive of photos other people made.
Pilgrimage to Bikini Atolll, image of Mike detonation.
Image of bravo detonation, largest test we ever detonated. 15 megatons. Bikini remains uninhabitable from Bravo blowback.
Creepy, tropical, only evidence left is the undersea craters.
Briefly Full Moon, 1999.
Used NASA apollo archive to view the moon not as an event but as a place. Truism what we really got out of apollo was perspective on Earth.
Aerial work
Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack
from helocopter
Bingham Mine is largest human excavation. Outside of Salt Lake City, metaphor for geomanipulation.
Planet now utterly geomanipulated. It's now a human park. No more wilderness. Gardening? Anthropocene. Humans are larger force than erosion and rain.
Snow articulates architecture. City in reverse. Roman amphitheater. Mine was capitalized by Guggenheims, in metals. copper.
Often shoots into the sun, comes from lunar work, and meditations on the bomb.
vaginal mine, tailings looking like a glaciar.
Garfield stack, largest free standing structure west of what? Image shows highwater mark of great salt lake.
Big book, on automobile infrastructure in L.A.
More recent work over Phoenix, Sun City, first planned retirement community.
A kind of terraforming. A kind of lunar or Martian colony.
Importnat for artist to hang on to feeling of being alien on this planet, viewin thrings from an alien eye.
Helicopter work. Hard to photograph. Corporate purpose-built communities dropped wholesale.
Sacred architecture, cloverleaf pass.
Trailer park with date palms. and the other end of socio economic scale, Camelback mountain.
Architecture as a reflection of people's views on the sublime.
Newest work. Phoenix and Vegas are stepchildren of L.A. shooting now in Vegas. Lake Las Vegas, artificial lake.
Connection between mining and extractive industries, and residential and inhabiting stuff. Same processes.
A kind of geomanipulation.

Gregory Benford (astronomer and sf writer)
Observations about geoengineering
20th anniversary of National Academy of Sciences report on geoengineering.
first time somebody tried to suppress a publication after it had been issued. B/c they felt it was wrong. Huge battle.

2 major issues:

• Climate change itself
• Acidification of Oceans.

These things will take place w/in a few decades to a half century

Carbon restriction will fail. The time to turn around fossil fuel industry is about a century. Economics: $30-50 trillion, a major fraction of world GDP. Has to be replaced by something else, and will cost a lot.

War on alcohol failed (15 years) war on drugs has failed (39 years), war on carbon is not going to be won for a long time. Most people don't feel bad when they get into their car. Asking for an enormous change in a short time.

War metaphor is limited. If you keep thinking it's a moral problem and addressing it with policies, but it has a large engineering component. Must be thought of as an engineering problem.
Arctic: thawing permafrost releases methane. About a thousand gigatons of methane in arctic tundra.

Projections always have a come-to-Jesus moment in about 20 years. Tragedy of commons writ large. Dealing with a substance which, until recently, was fine with everyone.

If you could decrease the sunlight by 1%, you would solve the warming problems for about a century. Unnoticeable to ordinary eye.
the only planes that could carry aerosols are the fighter jet refuelers. But we have a great number of them. This craft can fly into the stratosphere in the arctic, and it's built to take fluids. We don't have an aircraft that can fly into stratosphere in tropics. This all means U.S. has a horse in this race.

Policy: climate change is a national security issue - new declaration? Seven nations in the Arctic circle. Governance is going to be a big problem because of coal burning in India. India will quadruple its coal burning by 2020.

He's in favor of doing labwork now, b/c we don't know when we'll need it. We're running out of time. dithered for two decades and gotten nowhere. He thinks case for geoengineering has become obvious. No other real option. Others think carbon restriction is the way to go. The adversary is the natural world. the problem comes from the biosphere, which is reacting to what we've been doing. There's no way to interact with the biosphere. It doesn't want what we want.

Boy oh boy, he couldn't have modeled the male dominant attitude any better.

Andrew Matthews (anthro UCSC)
Gathering threads of the last two days.
Use the word "imagination":

• Ways imagination works for us
• Imagination -> politics
• Value of the worst kind of imaginations

The kind of imaginations that go into successful modeling. Ken Caldeira. Surprising quality of the world. Writing is also a surprising business. Importance of writing that kind of surprise and resistance. Commonalities imagination, surprise, resistance.

Power of imagination. Just thinking about geoengineering gets ppl scared. Just saying has the possibility of escaping the particular place and getting out into the larger world. Questions of when it becomes reasonable to collaborate. In policy, it makes no sense to commit to carbon reduction, b/c they pay the cost, others get the benefit. But in a geoengineering world, it makes sense, b/c you deploy the technology, get the benefit, and maybe don't even pay the cost. New form of rationality.

Who has power? Assymetry of imagination. Some people's imaginations matter and some don't. It's good to think about who is "we"? When we have more kinds of imaginations going in, more is coming out. When we construct knowledge about the world, we're also constructing some kind of authority/agency that will control the world we have described. Anytime we're constructing knowledge but not thinking about that other half, we run grave risks. Legitimacy of state in the face of climate change. Construct the kind of political authority that could respond to climate change in that way. Political imagination at work among deniers and skeptics. Sees the state itself as fundamentally illegitimate. Imagining a state that speaks to more people, and more kinds of imaginations.

Nightmares. s.th. different between scientists of 50s and now. Scientist like Ken Caldeira speaking about divided heart is a new thing. Sheila Jassinov? Technologies of humility. We do know that we're not going to get it right right away. How do we keep an eye open for unforeseen consequences? Retaining humility about technologies. Legitimacy of science. Nobody's going to trust us if we say "trust me, It'll be alright." Grave decline of legitimacy of state as a result of nuclear testing.

Gardening and terraformations. Soil radiation management comes from failed air conditioning. Maybe environmental justice, family planning etc. Geoengineering coming from above vs. gardening. But we do need a way to sign up for big projects that are not horrible and destructive.

We tend to think about the ways citizens and publics are excluded from decisionmaking. Instead let's think about the ways they are included. The public attitudes are already present and having an effect on how these technologies are discussed and made.

Open discussion.
I'm going to sign off here, because my hands and wrists hurt. Conclusions from me later.

liveblogging: emerging terraformations: speculations

aaaand we're back. Posting now, cleaning up later.

Format: having speakers sit in audience so they can see slides.

Ira Bennett (ASU, Cosortium for Science, Poicy and Outcomes, Ctr for Nanotch in Society, chemist, policy wonk)
"Science Fiction as Technology Assessment"
Where does public policy have something to add to sf?
Is there a value in sf-inspired approaches to public policy?
Anticipatory governance

• Not givernment but governance
• not "do" or "ban"
• Wide array of mechanisms

components

• foregsight: how to appropriately speculate on future tech
• engagement: inform the public and the reserach endeavor
• integration

Foresight: sf potential model, human experience
100 mil Americans read or have read sf.

Integration: Get scientists to read and write sf. Enabled to tell stories about own work.

Engagement: technology assessment for the rest of us. Enjoyable.
Engagement with Participation:
Participatory Technology assessment: supplement expert opinions with input from public. Democracy in action. Voices not usually heard.
Why:

• A matter of democratic right: lay citizen ethically entitled to direct participation in tech decisions. One of the outcomes has to be that it might not happen.
• Social values: Publics good at articulating ethical issues.
• Broader knowledge base
• Expedited conclusions

CNS "scenes" not just scenarios, but more strong images. Vetted by scientists for plausibility.
Eg: living w/ brain chip, barless prison
Have them turned into graphic novels. Collection of consensus statements from each site. How these techs should and should not be used.
Project with HS students in D.C. about cloud whitening. Able to talk to experts online. 4 week process. Created consensus document and presented it to a mock Congressional panel.

Elliott Campbell (UC Merced, Engineering)
"Bioengineering: Terrestrial Options"
Focusing on stratospheric options: timescale is short, quick result. Could also back out of it quickly -- unintended consequences. Other options:

1. Natural sequestration
2. Forests
3. Crop Management
4. Bioenergy and Storage

Natural sequestration: photosynthesis, plant respiration, ocean exchanges. Land surface takes up carbon more than ocean. Engineering solutions that mimic or speed up these processes. Concern that terrestrial environment is becoming saturated, absorbing more carbon than it can release. Drought in areas has caused decrease in uptake. Very little data-driven estimates.

Forests: Prevent deforestation, commit aforestation. Not a bad idea. We're in a land crunch, have to double the food supply over the next fifty years, more people eating more affluent diets. Increasing intensity of agriculture: more food with less land. Important historically. Intensive agriculture led to: Fertilizer production, soil emissions. but without this, there's massive land conversion, which leads to more emissions.
3 important processes:

• reflected sunlight
• evaporation
• transmitted heat

These can be more important than carbon emissions. So in some conditions we can do more for climate by removing forests.

Crop management: so that more carbon is stored in soils. Reason that soil carbon has decreased over time has to do with how we work the land, not THAT we work the land (fertilizer, for example.)

Bioenergy + storage: you can reduce amount of carbon in atmosphere.
biochemical + storage: sugars into ethanol
thermochemical + storage: underground storage heat, convert to gases
combustion + storage: you can store more carbon here.

In this case, what does "storage" mean?

Competition between food and fuels. Increase price of food? We now use a quarter or third of corn harvest for ethanol, but hasn't offset much.

Big issue: how much land is available. We appropriate a quarter of Earth's photosynthesis for other needs.

Greg Rau (UCSC, Laurence Livermore, Carbon research)
"Carbon-Negative Energy Or How to Produce Fuels or Electricity While Re-terraforming the Earth"
Is it possible to re-terraform Earth that allow us to consume rather than generate CO2.
We are currently unterraforming Earth by emitting CO2.

• Carbon positive energy: fossil fuels
• Carbon neutral energy: gereen energy: hydro win, solar, biomass, foss with 10% CCS,e tc.
• Carbon negative: super green eneggy, incorporates net OC2 remval it usable neergy production
• biomass omustion with CCS
• nofossil powered electrolytic hydrogen production with enhanced mineral weathering

Why mineral weathering?

• primary way excess atmosphere co2 is consumed on goelogic time scales (natural and effective but er slow)
• avoids constly and risky concentration and storage of molecular CO2 (carbon capture and storage, ccs)
• return alkalinity to the ocean, which can offset ocean acidification

Mineral hydroxides: CO2 readily consumed by hydroxides.
Production of hydroxides - very energy intensive.

Lots of formulae here and various chemical talk, all of which I'm ignoring. I'm not going to try to understand this next part, because it'll wear me out and I won't understand it completely anyway. I'll see if I can find the ppt. and post it.

In spite of myself, I'm getting the gist of this: it's a cycle system that simultaneously produces energy while cleaning up the ocean. But it has way too many components, each with a different process, for lay people to understand. A hard sell, b/c it's not easily understandable, like wind energy or wave energy.

Is this entertaining sf (no) or a useful tech?
further R&D needed

Discussant Margaret Fitzsimmons (UCSC environmental studies, "making ecology work" book)
Martha Kenney, not listed.

Margaret Fitzsimmons: addressing the question of global change. Issue of sf adds rich poss. of speculation blah blah blah.
Sf extremely useful in teaching. Rattles off list of books she uses, including Robinson, The Dispossessed, Woman on the Edge of Time, and C.J. Cherryh.
Do you guys know how often you say "we"? Who is "we"? Assumption that "we" have a problem is an immense assumption. Question asked in anthropological sf constantly. Reminds people of historical processes, geographical discovery, etc.
Engineering vs. gardening. Gardening, parliament of things, having to negotiate with other species. Ability to live or not with other forms of life.
Can I just say here: why does it have to be woman who says this?

Martha Kenney: Glad she didn't have to be token feminist. Feminist science and technology studies.
Speculation about guessing and making things up. Heard a lot of big stories here, scales are amazingly huge. All of past, future, planet, Mars, humankind. Stakes are very high. Engaging in speculation at this scale is exciting and scary. Seem to be all or nothing decisions.
Politics make her uncomfortable. Exclude people and possibilities, smaller scales and other ways of knowing.
Teaches article by LeGuin about power of origin story. "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction"
Not man as hunter, but man as carrier; not the spear but the carrier bag. Includes both sexes. Have heard the stories of poking tools, but not stories of containers.
Her question: how can we learn to tell stories that are smaller, more details, more complexity, join with stories of others? Stories that maintain the willies, but not triumphal or tragic?
Panel: which sf stories are we telling? Can we tell stories that are different from problem/solution? What kind do we want to tell?

Elliott: agricultural intensification is just one quick solution, not the whole thing.
Then he goes off to praise the feminist pov. Argh. It's true it's true! Rights for women are important!

Ira: we are getting to the point where the stories do get more nuanced.
Martha: what sf are you reading and having others read? How do stories affect policy decisions?
Ira: Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Vonnegut's Player Piano.

Greg: We're living in nonfiction tragedy. Feels there needs to be some action of some sort. Need to make some intelligent decisions. Requires experimentation on a small scale. Dude, you totally missed the point.
That's a particular concern here, size of scales needed to test these out. Smaller scales, relatively safe, much less invasive. We could include other opinions on how it's to be done. But we don't have a lot of time here. Wow, really missed the point.

Q&A

Q: Me, I'm a feminist. Technologies of humility? Huh? Uses Greg's examples of small scale experiments. Humility of working scientist. Another one who missed the point. Oh well.
Martha: didn't mean her response as critique to the papers that we've seen. What Greg said a second ago: the idea of a nonfictional tragedy, when tragedy has a specific fictional history. Tragic hero is a particular kind of story, as well as the one of salvation. Worry about largeness of scale and narratives that we're grafting our humble projects onto. get out of giant western stories that seem like reality b/c they're part of our shared culture. Hear hear.
Margaret: worried about coming across as feminist in under-womaned audience. Her department is natural science, interdisc. that is willing to work out misunderstandings about power and so forth. What she hears most often from scientists: We're doing the science, why can't you policy it up? She and Martha are trying to answer that question. Create a circumstance in which everyone can hear what other people are saying is urgent. She hears when ppl say climate change is urgent. Trusts a lot of the Cassandra concerns, why she's an environmentalist. We've gone in a direction that has taken us into difficulty and that's not natural. The root problems are humanist problems. We're all involved in the same project, tools used are very different. Study of processes of human institutions.

Q: Struck by two comments: what Robinson said yesterday about restoring planet to homeostasis. what Slawek said today about planetary scientists' main issue being stopping the use of fossil fuels. Sounds like trying to bail out a boat instead of plugging the hole. What Margaret said about gardening. We have a model of fixing the planet that's about to go into cardiac arrest. One side that wants to do a quadruple bypass, the other side says we should eat right, exercise, etc. the latter doesn't make as good a story. Solving a huge problem all at once vs. slowly.
Video: "the Story of Stuff" After showing a linear way of thinking about resource extraction, missing people and all kinds of stuff. So many points of intervention. Great way to encourage ppl,

Q: Thanks for the mammaries. Everything is up for revision. Vexed by need for reconfiguration, but the potential for violence of this reconfiguration. Thoughts about who will be included/excluded in these conversations?
Elliott: we're going to have violence. We see it in Africa, climate change leads to all kinds of violence, sexual violence. Important to realize that it's going to happen one way or another.
Margaret: now you see the violence inherent in the system. Need to get over the idea that bringing violence into the discussion is not objective or scientific. We need a more generalized sense of the purpose of science, that it is not focused on war. Many of the great scientific advancements come about as a result of militarization.
Ira: voices, here in our democracy, there are too many voices. really? Threat of violence can promote drastic action from the top.

Q: spend a lot of time fighting off ppl who are acting out of ignorance. Noise. Most scientists are strict prohibitionists (carbon prohibition) but economists say that's not possible. Aren't we moving towards a point where we will need to move fast in an emergency. You really can dither away your future.
Margaret: example: in 70s enacted environmental laws, concordance of ecology and economics. goal = zero discharge. Internalizing externalities. Then let the market decide if this tech is viable (within welfare economics.) Also the greatest intrusion into the decisionmaking of business since the 1930s labor laws. Reagan reversing agreements, been under attack ever since. Haven't done any more than protect those things put in place in the 70s. Partly a problem of language. Survey, evolutionary science most trusted theory among scientists and food safety the least.
Ira: Americans' attitudes toward different careers. Scientists second most respected careers. Don't think the lack of trust is true.
Martha: pubic dissonance out of ignorance. Who gets to say what is rational and what is ignorant? Ken Caldeira's emotional and rational brain. Can we reconcile these?

Q: If you use sf as technology assessment, how do you deal with the other goals embedded in sf? Advertising, politics, wish fulfillment etc?
Ira: you have to be careful. You have to educate. Develop a baseline of knowledge for the whole group. then introduce particular types of fiction. They are going to go back to the emotional state of their first experience with sf. Is there a way to bring in the passion of the sf community to work with scientists?

Q: Thanks for the mammary perspective. We really have to challenge the male dominated narratives. Reading Louis Mumford on the city. Wrote about cities as containers. Daniel Quinn, leavers and takers, we have become a culture of takers.
Lovely how he relates to this non-male-dominated challenge by referencing two white males.
Also comment on Joe's presentation.
Joe: films stopped being addressed to the public around Vietnam and Watergate. Consciousness of having lost the public trust. but there was still a program of public perception management. Skeptics and deniers - amount of money that goes into clouding and confusing debate.

This is going on so long because the lunch food delivery has been delayed. I'm checking out, even though they're still talking about Joe.

liveblogging: emerging terraformations: scenarios

welcome back to the second day of the Emerging Terraformations conference.

I have to say that, although very interested in what's been going on here, the emphasis on air, rather than earth, which is the basis of my fetish, has left me feeling a little ... unfulfilled. Call me single-minded. But I'm learning a lot and I imagine that's what really counts. I'm also starting to change my view, or my understanding, of what is encompassed by "earth" or "geo-" ... I suppose that, although I have very little interest in air as a symbol or element, it's part of the landscape. Not just as a force that shapes the landscape (I always found it singularly uninteresting as such, far less interesting than water) but as a force that enables the life that perceives landscape as necessary or sublime. Maybe that's a stretch. Still considering. But anyway.

We're about to begin, so I'm going to shut up now. Will post now and clean up later.

Scenarios

Jake Metcalf (post-doc fellow in science and justice)
How we can think of sci models and futures as fiction, as a way of coping with risk and hostile futures.

Chris McKay (NASA Ames, astrogeophysics, planning for future Mars missions, human settlements)
"Let there be life: a long term goal for astrobiology"
Mars: far away and ppl don't get upset when you talk about geoengineering on Mars
Provides context for considering it on Earth
Why consider these things? What's the point? On Earth it's survival. On Mars the point is not so obvious. His argument: the point is life.

Astrobiology: study of origin evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. Future is whatever we make of it. Element of human choice.
Propose that overall goal: enhance the richness and diversity of life in the universe.
Implied activities: search for and suport a second genesis of life on other worlds and expand life from Earth.

Implications:

• search for a second genesis-biologically reversible exploration
• determine if life from earth can grown on mars
• determine if mars can be restored to habitability

Mars: don't send humans because they will contaminate Mars before we have a chance to determine if it has life and its potential for life. First have to sort out this logical mess. But we've already contaminated Mars. Viking and previous missions were sterilized, but since then they no longer needed to sterilize spacecraft. WHY? Each carry on average 100k Earth bacteria. We know where all these pieces are and know that they haven't contaminated. Survives only inside the craft where untouched by UV

3 possibilities for past life on Mars

• no life on Mars, no worries
• realted to Earth life, common origin, few worries
• was a second genesis unrelated to Earth, could be worries

All earth life shares genetic common ancestor. Alien doesn't share common ancestor. Used to mean from a different planet. No longer the case. Now it doesn't share our genetic and biological unity.

Why preserve a second genesis?

• fundamental ethical principles realated to the value oflife and value of diversity in life
• utilitarian benefit from direct study of second genesis
• restoring life and a biosphere to a dead world is a worthy goal for a space-faring people. (looks good on our resume?)

Should microbes have standing: no brush your teeth and wash your hands. On Earth, no. But yes if they're the only reps of a second genesis of life.

Assigning moral status:

• Moral agents are rational - self assigna nd unitary
• moral status is variable and assigned by moral agents based on pain, complex behavior and communication; membership in a set
• examples of set thoery human beings that ar not ration have th same moral stauts as ration humans but they ar enot moral agents, life is sacred.
• two current sets: human, life

Now there are three sets: human, life, life2

Biologically reversible exploration: must continue that.
Do it on the Moon first.
Keep contamination on Martian surface where it's bathed in UV light

Can we restore water on Mars? Fundamental problem to warm up the planet - but we know how to do that. Greenhouse effect.
Could warm it in 100 years, could produce O2-rich atmosphere in 100K years.
We don't know if Mars has the resources to make a habitable biosphere. Probably water and carbon, but maybe not nitrogen.

Two new ethical questions:

• Second genesis
• Life is better than no life?

ON earth life=nature but not on mars
Assigning to Life "intrinsic Worth"
Trying to create another biosphere helps us understand Earth.

Slawek Tulaczyk (Earth and planetary science UCSC, glacial geology)
"Halting Glacial Retreat"
Reason we study ice on Earth is to control it - but this idea is badly received by physical scientists.

1. Why he wants to talk about subject
2. Evidence from recent geologic past that warmer climates birg higher sea level
3. some glaciers melt but he biggest ones lose mass by sliding into the ocean and melting at the ice-ocean interface
4. there are specific actions that may help slow down global sea level rise.

Why I study nature: love nature
historically we study nature to control it

What happpend during the last global warming? 20K - 15K years ago.
Sea level rise when planet warmed by 5 degrees C. Rose by 4 cm/year.
120k years ago, last time planet was temp it will be soon. Global sea level is 8 meters higher than it is now. We'll lose major ice sheets.

We don't really know how ice sheets behave under warming conditions.
To get the real sea level rise you have to affect the poles.
So are glaciers melting? Some are (the small ones) but the polar ones the effect is minor. Doesn't lose mass by melting on surface. Ice gets pushed into the ocean and gets warmed by water. That's how it really loses mass.
Most of mass lost at ocean boundary in small areas - valleys and fjords

Globally:

1. 1/3 o glacial ice lsot o surface melting
2. 50-60% slide into the ocean or is melted by ocean heat

much of recent acceleration is because of increase in 2.
                                        
If you can stop glacial sliding and melting from ocean heat. So how can you do this?
Ice flow in ice sheets organized into flows like rivers. Under ice sheet, water streams. Carry snow toward oceans. If you can slow down pathways you can slow down the melt. Streams sometimes naturally shut down. So maybe we can do that. How?

Specific actions:

• drill bore holes through ice and pump liquid nitrogen (what happens when this melts?)
• build underwater dams where warm water has access to the ice sheets -- in discrete places

Easier than managing CO2

• vulnerable parts of ice sheets are small
• interventions are reversible with limited long term consequences
• relatively deserted regions - limited impact on cultures and biology

Take home points:

• most ice is lost due to iceberg calving and ocean melting, not melting on surfaces
• if we can dam up internal rivers of ice and shut ocean melting o fice then ew could slow down sea level rise by up to 3 feet in 100 years
• things that could be done (see above)
• can we afford to do it? can we afford not to do it?
• Easier than management of CO2

Joe Masco (Anthro, U of Chicago, book on cold war)
"Nuclear futures"
Projects that coordinate human activity (nuclear technology), coordinating academy, science, economics, politics, can this be done with climate?
How do we think about potentialities?
Walk back to mid-20th and look at ways we've actually done it.
Nuclear weapons changed temporality, ways we thought about future:

• Possibility of no future
• Possibility of utopia, control nature on all scales from subatomic to planetary

US nuclear complex involved in global engineering: atmospheric nuclear tests in 50's and 60's - planetary events (were they intended to be?)
Nuclear contamination created permanent dystopian spaces
Film clips:

1. Disney speculation about future tech 1959: countering negative images of nuclear tech with positive images, militarized response to control weather.
2. ABC projects mid-60s, project reports: excavating with nuclear explosives, plowshare program
3. Canal project elsewhere in Central America, with nuclear explosives

Plowshare program, atoms for peace, during nuclear test moratorium, positive spin on nuclear tech, clean nuclear device.
Imagination for doing large scale engineering has been with us for a while
Power narratives deployed: diff btw scenario, thought experiment, advertising campaign, etc.
Promotional culture apparent - energized science, also a created backlash as ppl understood limitations of these projects.

Changed the way americans think about deep future

• immediate future
• oversold promises of nuclear science - already utopian scenarios before it was achieved

Tech optimism is now left to corporations as a result of all this

If this optimism can be restored?
A terraforming project is happening whether we acknowledge it or not, how can we make a public narrative around it?
If narrative precede public mobilization: what kind of nonmilitarized vision of geoengineering can we produce? what would work?
Have to overcome legacy of these campaigns, skeptical public, when our ideas about tech and future become so naturalized that we can see outside them anymore.

Wow, this conference is a total sausage factory. Bratwurst.

Discussants:
Jamie Wetmore (Science Studies ASU)
Peter Alagona (Environmental History, UCLA)

Jamie:
to McKay: skeptical of scientist who can do ethics, but impressed that McKay gave a standing to microbes.
One talk doesn't change the world. Ethics of astrobiology will be created by groups. Everyone has ethics, inherent in decisions made.
Are you alone in this or are there conversations about ethics? Is it informal or formal? What role does the public play?
McKay: presented his own view. Astrobiology community has engaged in discussion, partic over past 10 years. Dates back to 1997 NASA HQ issued call for papers about the future, ppl formed committees and created symposia, etc. Ppl with backgrounds in ethics, religion, sociology involved. This is informed by a broader discussion. Point that ethics created collectively. Committee on space research, space treaty, planetary protection.

to Slawek: Why aren't UCSC's climate scientists here? If they can't get into sf, what will they get into? Do they see geoengineering as dangerous or fringe?
Slawek: considers self planetary scientist. Minimal perception, minimal commitment of funding. Why climate scientists aren't here? Only one acceptable solution among climate scientists is to stop driving cars/using fossil fuels. Modify lifestyles. Anything else is seen as a detraction from this, not just a waste of time but an enemy. Grew up in communist system, hates self-censorship.

to Joe: Loved the videos. Reaction of audience is laughter because the vision is terrifying. Images aren't as vivid when ideas are presentd today. Was this an image that the scientists bought into or were those scientists also a little fearful. Has an image of individuals with no humility. today, even the most vociferous proponents of geoengineering will express their fear of it.
Joe: Laughter. We have actually wreaked havoc on the planet. Laughter is complex. Awareness, nervousness from a wider understanding of our impact on the planet. Important thing but also nervous thing. Represses thinking about militarism.
(God, the way this guy talks is so humanities! About half his words are jargon that don't need to be there. "organize thinking" "privileged" "craft narratives" "national imaginary" etc.)
50's is era of narrative, but also the era where we start accumulating data sets. What's the diff betw marketing program, scenario, science fiction?

Peter: doesn't have a problem with scientists talking about ethics, but rather with ethicists ignoring the povs of others. Wants to talk about unintended consequences. Environmental History: doom and gloom = declension narrative. Unintended consequences are inevitable and likely to be severe.
Eg.: city on river, constructs levees to protect from floods, then buys increasingly expensive solutions, muddled by weak governance. When the flood eventually comes, it will be worse, and more people will be in its way.
Bathroom break. Missed how this turned out.

Q&A
Jake Metcalf: Missed his question
McKay: How can we manage a biosphere b/c we'll never know everything? Unintended consequences. Doctor treating himself. Blah blah, saying obvious things. Terraforming Mars expectations lower. What would be a success? Maybe create something that's not like Earth but has its own value.
Slawek: unintended consequences, conversation stopper. So what? Everything we do has unintended consequences. Are these manageable?
Joe: Openness is crucial, secrecy deforms project over time. Funding moved out of Homeland security and into NSA.
Jamie: today is a product of cross-discipline discussions. Much of this is needed. Duh. UCSC, not only are disciplines in different buildings, but they are protected from each other by miles of forest.
Peter: history itself is unintended consequences. ??

liveblogging: emerging terraformations: kim stanley robinson

and finally ...

Intro Kim Stanley Robinson
one of most eminent sf writers: Mars trilogy; Science and Capital trilogy; Galileo's Dreams. Changes his genres all the time.

Kim Stanley Robinson
Quick history of geoengineering and terraforming as words. Begin with science fiction. not unusual. Many modern sciences being as notions in fiction. Sf since Shelley has represented the thought as fact. Among the best entertainment that we have and also one of our best tools for understanding the future. ppl who don't read sf are often spectacularly behind the curve on what ppl have been thinking about the future. immense vertical reach from sublime to ridiculous.

Begins with Verne, Invasion of the Sea. Explains the premise. Basic dichotomy in sf: Verne and Wells. Verne is technical guy, Wells is a utopian writer, better society. Many "goods" of 20th cent. were accomplished by people steeped in Wells' ideas. His ideas came out of Bellamy, the Fabians, the utopian tradition, not original. Trying to put Vernian technological innovations into the social moment.

Jack Williamson 1938 invented word "terraforming." 50 year career. Just a notion until Sagan and Viking results from Mars. Detailed discussions of terraforming came when we got a great candidate for it in Mars. They had Mars, Venus, adn Earth for comparative planetology.

Terraforming: taking a dead planet and making it livable for human beings. Joke that they're terraforming Earth is bitter. The hubris of geoengineering is that it's being overemphasized by analogies to a bomb, etc. This has gone wrong in the past. It's being suggested in a way of creating homeostasis. James Hansen diagram of CO² levels. Scary image. Where the impetus for geoengineering comes from. Also 2002 Greenland ice core. Quick climate change, warm wet climate to cold dry climate in 3 years. "Abrupt Climate Change." Tipping points. Human industrial processes could be inserted at a point to be tipping point.

Go to Sept 2009 paper from Royal Society, graph of proposed methods of CO² reduction and solar radiation managment, you can download for free brings you right up to speed.

Couple of odd features as complications: Global dimming. Aerosols (black carbon) in atmosphere causing 4% less sunlight. Can't fully be explained. As air gets cleaner, global dimming is less. Things we can do to create goods that cut across other things. Unintentional? Cross cuts of effects.

Ocean acidification. Solar management doesn't reduce CO². A lot of it ends up in oceans. Acidification has been measured, we've done something significant to it. Creatures at bottom of food chain have carbonate shells, could go extinct. That layer could be filled by other creatures that can handle the carbon. But this needs to be studied. We get a third of our food from oceans. If bottom of food pyramid disappears, we're screwed. If this happens, there will be hoarding, which will cause our food supply chain to collapse. You can't deacidify oceans. Chalk cliffs of England couldn't do it, not enough. Royal society has said that there's no geoengineering method that will fix this. We HAVE to do carbon emissions reduction.

Problems with geoengineering:

• Moral hazard: if we know we have a solution, we won't reduce. Well actually, that's not the usual response. If they're really thinking about doing this, then we're really in trouble.
• Hubris: humans shouldn't be trying to do something to Mother Earth. It's okay for us to trash Earth but we can't fix it. Intellectual incoherence in this argument. Comes from Frankenstein and Dr. Faustus. The laws of untintended consequences (not actually a law. A fancy way of saying "shit happens.") Murphy's law in action. like a lot of common sense, only good at certain scales.
• Elitism: don't want elites making decisions. Fear of arrogant elites wrecking commons. Fear of government. Reign of Thatcher moment, gov't as problem and not solution. Bitching about government is a way of stabbing ourselves in the back. Keynesian economy, forces are seen as in opposition. Zero-sum game. Two forms of human organization that resemble each other. Biz is residual feudalism, Gov't is remnant of power system. Geoengineering falls into a political battle attacked for what it represents not what it does. Gov and Biz as Manichean opposites.

Royal Society definition of geo engineering: A deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth's climate system to address global warming.

Anything we do affects climate. Population is a climate control issue. Population stabilization is a powerful geoengineering method. Then you've pulled the string on the fabric of culture. China's one-child policy is a geo-engineering method. Thailand and Indonesia massively expanded rights of women. Justice is geoengineering. Stretching the definition? Need to look at methods that are immediately applicable. Pull a more humanist approach into geoengineering, about improving people's lives.

Landscape: methods of land use less carbon intensive. Green revolution food productivity. Decarbonize agriculture and increase health of topsoil. Return of wetlands. Assisted migration: moving plants into a new zone before they go extinct. Discrepancy between rich and poor is bad for environment. Rich consume too much, poor are cutting down forests. Richest and poorest are having the hardest impact on environment. Reducing this discrepancy is geoengineering.

Economics is geoengineering. Our economics are not properly calibrated to long term survival on the planet. two ways to talk about it:
False pricing. We have never charged ourselves properly. Everything costs a lot less than it should because we have shifted off costs to future generations. Charge less for something than it costs to make it = predatory dumping. Who are we predating on? Generations of the future. Can't defend themselves. Imagine them as little babies underfeet, imagine us beating them, that's what we're doing. Imagine each generation as equal to us in economic value. We've systemically undervalued future generations. Geoengineering: properly pricing things. Post-capitalism.

A portion of this population will call that a tax. Immediately thrown back into framework of our economy. Political opposition, intense avoidance of economical environmentalism. Pro-carbon party. Will always be controversy. Biz won't like it b/c it's not profitable. Paradigm buster. We claim to have an economy that can put a price on everything. There are religious fundamentalists who won't like it: thinking about Earth as a planet in a secular, scientific world view. Global changes will never be visible to individual senses. With the exception of ice. (My note: that's not true. Increasingly hot summers and warm winters are really easy to perceive.) You have to trust science to believe it. Science is often attacked as a stand-in for government, as atheist thing. Culture of anti-intellectualism and anti-science. Discrepancies and incoherences involved. Should be much more effort made to show that sciences are conciliate, you can't cherry-pick. It will always be resisted and controversial b/c it requires a trust of science.

How bad does it have to get before we can pull ourselves together to do it? Food crisis? Polar ice cap pulling away and Washington D.C. flooding. Desperate people do desperate things? What is desperate? Is insurance desperate? Is CPR desperate? Is geoengineering desperate? The CPR moment is desperate, but the action is meticulous and calm. The response is not desperate, but the situation is.

Sokoloff diagrams show that we have to try everything that's ever been put on the table. Is it okay to bring it up? You bring up science as a paradigm. Government as a community. Bring up the idea that we're on a planet, global managers. Climate change is a metonymy for environmental destruction. Imagining climate change fixed is easy, but all the other factors are in play. Let's talk about the total picture and how desperate we are. Santa Cruz cliff houses cantilevered over the ocean, cliff is eroding, beams are eroding. We're adding beams, but we should also have plans for moving the whole house back. There might be one strong beam that will give us one extra generation to solve the whole problem. Is that a silver bullet? Positive: value of discussing geoengineering.

Interview by Colin Milburn (??)

C: proposes theme: can literature be a technology of geoengineering? Social functionality of literature in the world. Goes off on a very nerdy explanation of golden age of sf. Talk about your history with sf, discovery of, and sense of self within.
K: grew up in Orange County. Started out as orchards, which got torn out at a rate of 5 acres a day during his childhood. Had a future shock moment. Systematic child reader, alphabetically. Got to Verne in high school. Were just being translated. Went to sf and went alphabetically, started with Asimov. Tokenized him. Found another sf writer that was great and thought it must all be great. At that point was an English major at UCSD. Early 70s new wave was saying future would be complex and screwed up and there would be no simple engineering solutions. Golden age sf is poor at modeling real science. A lot of people are recommended this stuff and never come back. Scientists don't read sf anymore, or any fiction, cut themselves off. But also humanists who don't know any science. (Risk assessment or exponential scale, for example.) Sf is the bridge between two cultures.

C: What writers were you reading that were addressing these issues?
K: 70s environmentalism began to intrude. Werner Stand on Zanzibar. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, Delany, Gene Wolfe. Anything between 1965 and 1975. Moment when genre and culture collide. There have also been times since then that sf is the best way to describe the culture that we live in. Started in the 50s with Philip K. Dick and Damon Knight. JG Ballard's inner landscape is expressed in environmental disasters. The world falling apart is a story that needs to be told over and over.

C: C.P. Snow are we still in this situation of two cultures that can't talk to each other?
K: Still problematic, sees misunderstandings all the time. Unnatural divide between progressives who have an anti-science bias. Science is praxis in a Marxist sense. Designed to create power over illness, reduction in suffering, more comfort in the world at large. "Medicine still at the heart of it. Science is a utopian politics that is poorly theorized by scientists themselves and by the humanists who live with them." Scientists are being blamed for everything. Scientists have a gun to their heads, and the guy with the gun is an economic system that is a remnant of feudalism. Warped utopian effort, warped by money power, military etc. Nailing his flag to the idea of science as an ... etc.

C: Missed it
K: Scientists want science to be clean and pure and not part of the grubby world around it. Hostility on both sides.

C. You never shy away from making bold arguments from humanities. Is there an unfamiliarity of the tools that you use?
K: No nature of the claims. Blah blah blah about Royal Society. Need to add humanist education into science, and would offer intellectual tools etc. I'm checked out, a bit exhausted now. He's talking about the math of ecology. Soft sciences wanting to be able to quantify everything.

The conversation turns to specifics about specific books. Losing me here. Of course, I'm just tired, too, after five solid hours of live-blogging. My shoulders are insanely tight and so are my hands.

Check back in when he starts talking about the Antarctic Artists and Writers program.

liveblogging: emerging terraformations: planetary-scale interventions

will clean up later.

Tragi-comedic Planetary-scale Interventions: Stories and Histories

Research presentation by James Fleming (Prof. of Scence, Tech, and Society, Colby College author of Fixing the Sky: the Chekered Hisoty of WEather and Climate Control.)
seems to address history, overview, and cultural implications of science.

Most history books are heroic, but here the protagonists are amusing, overreaching. Telling some stories grounded in historical facts. What counts as knowledge? Where does history fit in to contributions we can make to this kind of discussion? We need all of our talents to address challenges we're facing.

Often only historian at policy meetings, trying to tell policy makers not what to do but what has been done. so not everything is unprecedented.

What's wrong with climate engineering? from Alan Robock

• who has the moral right?
• what" a global thermostat?
• reduce incentives to mitigate?
• unknown side effects?
• once begun, can we ever stop?
• could it be commercialized?
• why is the military so interested?
• what if nations or companies do it unilaterally?
• does it violate existing treaties?
• will it alter fundamental human relationships to nature and to each other?

Highlighted the last one b/c we've already generated conflicts around all these issues. We'd also have to have world governments controlling these conflicts.

Used to fly into cumulus clouds. Police brought them to hangar b/c someone had thrown molotov cocktail into hangar, ppl thought they were stealing the cloud. People were shot at in weather modification wars of 50s.

Stories: Phaeton, Verne, "The Air Trust"
Phaeton son of Helios, asked Helios to drive his sun chariot. Helios says keep to the middle path. Lost control of horse, went off the middle path. Sun chariot almost burns the Earth and Zeus has to shoot him out of the sky.
article "Phaeton's Reins" need to learn more about climate change so we can take up Phaeton's reins. Irony.

"Indians" shamans are chose by the rain, not the other way around. Need international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary discourse. He's a humanist, not a technocrat.

Jules Verne: Purchase of the North Pole. Mineral rights. Why? Frozen. change Earth's tilt to unfreeze it. Using a cannon. Short adventure story. Maybe online (find link.) If you move the Earth to zero, you can simply move to whatever latitude you want. Populace likes it. But wait, big cannon shot will flood ocean basins, but only affects global south, so who cares? Big geo-engineering novel.

The Air Trust (1915) George Allan England. Two industrialists try to corner the world oxygen market. Build a big plant by Niagara Falls. Sucking machines taking air away from world. Adventure story.

A lot of such stories.

Histories
Langmuir, weather warfare, and Pacific basin-scale experimentation.
Irving Langmuir, Nobel laureate. Could have been on Manhattan Project. Worked in smoke-screens and aircraft icing and de-icing studies.
Vince Shaffer, dry ice for clouds; Felix ? Vonnegut invents something else. Silver Iodide.
Develop new field of "cloud physics." Trying to make snow and rain. Some experiments would cut hole in cloud but no robust results. Too potentially litigious so GE shuts it down. Gave project to Air Force.

Firs thing they did was tried to sock dry ice into Hurricane King. Storm went right onshore and destroyed Savannah GA. Cancelled press conference. Irving could keep his mouth shut. Got the idea that a-bomb and storm have same energy. Idea of weaponizing clouds. dropping Time-seeding balloons into clouds. Balloons explode on nimbus clouds, loading them with biological, chemical, nuclear agents, where they precipitate on enemy. Altruism cut both ways.

Langmuir proposed to do this out in Pacific, where nobody with a lawyer lives downwind. Wanted to see if he could rock the basin. Where weather mod ramps up to that scale.

von Neumann and wexler, GCMs and the Bromine bomb.
50s thought experiments
numerical weather prediction using computers; but it's really weather control. Perfect weather forecast Oct 1945 (Dworkin?) If you knew where a nascent hurricane was brewing you could bomb it. Weather intervention patrol. Not just National weather service with prediction, but also control. Pretty soon began to realize the mathematics of storm mirror sound waves. Trouble stabilizing things. von Neumann: once it happens, it can be exploited and lead to serious problems and conflicts. "Can we survive technology?"

Harry Wexler important architect of world weather watch. Worried about dumping rocket exhaust in stratosphere. Bromine could be weaponized, cause devastation of ozone layer.

End with a picture of James Van Allen. Celebrated as discoverer of van Allen belts. Participation of a bomb explosion in space. Knew the bombs would put in a known amount of particles into atmosphere. Disrupt the magnetosphere to create a giant EMP through these space explosions.

Interview with David Winickoff (lawyer who became sci, tech and policy person, @ Berkeley, governance of geo? research?, etc.)

Have to step out to bathroom. Missed a bunch.

D: weather system is complex, but climate system is meta and maybe less complex. Easier to mess with?
J: Grand narrative, our climate change story is becoming a grand narrative. Likes the individual stories better.  Confessional space statement: belief about climate change. He's not into that. Presents stories to policy-makers. Different modes of how to be relevant historians. If history isn't represented then policy goes forward without knowledge.
D: some of your work based in historical past. In this one interest in fictional stories and myth. Where doe sthis come from. New? A departure for you?
J: had no myths in previous books. Not in history dept. in interdisc, science department. Involved architecture, art, interventions. Reinventing yourself. Come a long way. Was at air and space museum. Was at the Wilson ctr. for a year (public policy) Having done all that wants to bring in medical historians/environmental historians to discuss atmosphere from lungs to cityscapes to planetary processes. All the people the process needs.
D: Making science studies relevant or bringing social studies of science into policy. You do it well (stroke stroke). You gave a presentation to congress on geoengineering. How did it go?
J: can't self-evaluate. Taht's why he said inter this and inter that. Controlling the worst climate: can we do it, should we try? half and half. The second half was a robust rejoinder. Not against speculation or controlled lab experiments. What can it do for us, what can it do to us?
D: "Geo" relates to the Earth and emphasis here is the sky. What is distinct or special about the sky? Why is that a potent site for us? As opposed to ocean or earth.
J: Air essential. sky gods. portentious nature to the sky. Ocean covers 70% of Earth's surface, but the sky covers everything. Brings sky back into environmental discourse. Maybe too many concerns are focused on climate, but if the environment changes, we'll have problems as well. Doesn't have to be global conflict, climate conflict, or sky conflict, just something that has to be brought back into environmental studies.
D: god, act of god is a weather event. Push you to be prescriptive, policy-wise. Climate engineering is flawed and speculative. That's serious. Against people who want to engineer now or against ppl who want to do experiments?
J: not just against ppl who want to engineer now. Not attacking anyone, research is needed. Keep it indoors between consenting adults. Hype gets ahead of reality. Claims are not real. Robust efficiency, adaptation, mitigation. pushing for these. Doesn't think the social side has been considered enough. Wind turbines in Appalachians. If they're reducing carbon good, but if they're increasing energy, then not good. Because they're ugly.
D: okay, we also need ethical legal sociological work. What would go into a social science?
J: robust research program with humanities, conferences. have built networks. Expand those, meetings with anthropologists, meteorologists. They can't get enough money. Basically more money and more of what's already talked about.

Q & A period

Q: Speculation on role of sf in shaping future. Did Verne have a significant impact on reality?
J: Yes. Had a student investigate how STar Trek demanded certain things of the future: cell phones. What's the relationship: sf has a well-defined moral core to it. Writers are carrying forward a message. World Weather Syndicate. All the voices of moderation are female voices (1910.) Fiction does a lot more than predict the future. Early Verne was a science fan. Later Verne much more suspicious about technology. Took rhetorical turn. Clarke asked Wexler to speak in 1954 about a weather satellite. Used an artist to create an image of it.

Q: Imaginary thinking that is about today? (not past or future.) What about social scientists or humanists that aren't sf writers?
J: Doesn't have any expertise on prescriptive or imaginary sociology. Colleague working on Shelley and the "franken" ing of everything. Edward Bellamy, utopias, 100 years later year 2000. But he was writing about his own social turmoils by moving the site into the future. Like Star Trek commenting on race with aliens. Another plea for interdisciplinary talk. Government policy people go down a list of technical people and big university people.
D: ethics, legal ppl don't like to socially engineer. Endeavor of building something and being a dreamer, not as good at that. Thinking productively with scientists about an architecture would be a great result.

Q: Marx. How do these questions fit into broader questions of technological sublime (or supply?)? In the 70s these questions get sundered from the main issue. Huh? Did he ask what I thought he did? Couldn't really hear.
J: Marquetti? The sublime, a fascination with big things. Major things to think about. Some of ppl are same ppl in nuclear winter debates. Biosphere. Teller, hubris. Sprawl so cities can survive nuclear weapons, peaceful engineering uses of nuclear weapons. Sublime coming out of transcendentalism. But also horror, if we get hit by asteroid, how can we protect ourselves. Themes like Sublime are great to work with. Huh? How is this all the sublime?

Q: Are we inviting greater harm by avoiding some field experiments? We can only go so far with models.
Q: Shift from military applications to more civilian interest. Talk more about why military interest went away. Did defense worry about climate change?
Q: Wind tunnels in certain cities. Architect of future inevitably a climate engineer.
J: Geoff Manaugh BLDGBLOG has become a climate imaginer. Serious about imagining the future. Green roofs, underground cities. etc.
Going back to the military: documentary "Owning the Weather" Westmoreland, Johnson, only ppl who knew we were cloud seeding in Vietnam, led to treaty on environmental modification. Everybody wants to know what the military is doing, and what they think about climate change. Nobody knows, too high clearance. Grants all come from defense. Survival strategies. Still are very interested, but making it more secretive.
Experimentation gets close to the line of commercialization or weaponization. Small experiments: no robust result; big experiments: slippery slope.

Q: Hubris and sf. The Matrix, darkening clouds and taking over humans. How do you interpret this vision?
J: Sf warning, pushback. We're going way overboard with digitization. Experimentation with online classrooms. Good dystopian sf needs to be recognized as well.

Q: In fiction, move toward future always transformation. Sociologically we don't always transform into future. More than one narrative (Mexican indigenous person) about climate change. 1) deforestation, 2) global climate, but also 3) not maintaining ritual. Other kinds of imagination seem to matter a great deal.
Note: there's a lot of use of "imaginary" as a noun, which I vehemently oppose.
J: Rachel Carson. Al Gore brought all three of these things together in his narrative, created environmental studies as a contemporary religion. Goes into his fascination with the indigenous and the nonwestern. As incomplete and vague as it is.

Q: Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, perception of climate change, they're being acted upon by the rich world, wholistic way, colonialism. In the narrative of adaptation, where farmers get to make material changes in their own life, more appealing for them, because they get to come up with their own solutions. Admirable to include them but your project precludes them from the start. A dilemma you can't really do much to solve.
Q: Dominant narrative is that geoengineering might impose on rest of the world. Most of developed world is in a position to resist climate change, as opposed to ppl in sub-Saharan Africa can't.
J: Sentiment of "they did it to us." Also with genome mapping. Doesn't know how the network would grow. Wants a much larger conversation that's worldwide. Not a rich/poor dynamic. this is why Geoengineering is so problematic. Doesn't just want the big technologies that are expensive. Everyone needs to think about their contribution.
D: Huge challenge. (Duh.) Geoengineering can become another site of inequality. Can't do it without meaningful conversations, but it could be an opportunity to invent a new kind of conversation. That's why some of us are involved in project.

liveblogging: emerging terraformations: geoengineering

continuing today's proceedings ...

Note: I'll be posting this now and cleaning it up later.

Jenny Reardon (bio)
Speaking too quickly about her credentials, so I didn't pick up on who she is.

Intro: Ken Caldeira (Stanford Scientist in Dept of Global Ecology) Geoengineering Sicence: State of the Field and Future Directions

Map of temperature of first decade of millenium. Increased by one degree celsius over Europe
Map of where summers will be hotter than hottest on record. Another at the end of the century shows that every summer is hotter than the hottest on record so far. Need to look at a broad range of possible options
Another diagram, range of temperature trajectories.
No way for emissions reduction to reduce temperatures, only stop the rise of temperatures.
What can we do if there is a climate emergency?
Diagram of temperature cooling as a reult of volcano eruption. (putting dust in stratosphere)
I'm going to need ot see if they post these powerpoints
Definition of Geoengineering:no commonly acccepted def. But typical elements in def.

•  intentional
•  large scale
•  involves alteration of natural systems
•  novel or unfamiliar
•  attempts to diminish climate change impacts

Family of definitions or usages. There's a cycle diagram, with the steps in the cycle being:

1. desire for improved well being (leads to)
2. demand for goods and services (which leads to)
3. demand for energy (etc.)
4. CO2 emissions
5. CO2 in atmosphere
6. climate change and ocean acidification
7. impacts on humans and ecosystems

There are mitigating elements or a countercycle:

1. conservation
2. efficiency
3. low carbon energy
4. CO2 removal
5. climate engineering
6. adaptation

energy systems
sun radiates energy, absorbed by atmosphere
reflected by surface

Two ways to address:

1. carbon dioxide removal
2. solar radiation management

CO2 removal options

• are slow
• are either expensive or not scalable
• do not introduce new kind of environmental risk
• do not introduce new governance issues
• address the root causes of the problem (excess CO2 in environment)

solar radiation management options

• act quickly
• inexpensive and scalable
• intro new kinds of environmental risk
• do not address root causes of the problem

CO2 removal

• land use and forestation
• biomass energy with carbon sequestration
• biochar- combusting biomass
• enhance weathering - oceans
• ocean fertilization - stimulating plankton
• space based methods - satellite to reduce sunlight

Solar radiation management

• surface albedo (human settlement)
• surface abldo (desert)
• marine cloud whitening (similar to sulfur out of ship smokestacks - spray of seawater produces similar effects reduce 10% of warming)
• stratospheric aerosols

Focusing rest of talk on Stratospheric aerosols

Sunlight most powerful at equator and high latitude blah blah huh?
Map: he didn't really explain what he is modeling, but he's showing the results of the model (temperature effects of doubled CO2)
Climate models indicate, deflection of sunlight can offset most climate change in most places of most of the time. Precipitation: higher CO2 levels increases precipitation in some places and decreases in others
Can the pattern of aerosols ... okay quick-changey, what the hell are we looking at?

Missed a bunch in here b/c of struggling with scribefire ugh!

Unanticipated Outcomes
Any time you intervene in a complex system you really can never test full system response. eg. interstate highway system -- didn't understand the whole spread of suburbia: strengthen our dependence on oil, conribute to Gulf wars
Benefits and harm that come from this that weren't planned
Basically talking about cultural adjustments, not sure that's appropriate to this part of the discussion.

Desperate people do desperate things - James Cascio
If we do come to a sitch where there are widspread famines, we'll do desperate things
Important for us to do research now, dangerous for ppl to believe these systems will work when they won't and just deploy them. If there's potential for this research to save ppls lives, we should do it.

OLIVER MORTON interviews KEN CALDEIRA

OM energy and environment editor at the Economist, also science writer, Eating the sun: how plants
power the planet, and Mapping Mars: science, imagination, and the birth of the world.

O: how did you come to be doing this work?
K: two things: heard about geo engineering a number of times 1990 soviet
climatologist who proposed salting aerosols, blah blah lots of names
meeting and working with each other blah atomic bomb blah, can't trust
social institutions, blah hydrogen bomb, blah peacekeeper, blah star
wars defense missile, blah blah, late eighties started thinking about
global warming blah Edward Keller, salting stratosphere with aerosols
blah blah david Keith, this will never work, blah simulations worked
really well
O: at Laurence Livermore, Rodiko's lab, involved in
hisotry as covert player
K: he wasn't in darkest most secure part of
the lab but rather in the pinko part of the lab. In 80s starting putting
money into energy and environment in early 90s (why? diversify?)
O:
small group at your U
K: Marty Hoff? scientific mentor, strange guy,
aerospace engineering background, at the time K working on Wall Street,
patterns analysis, studying at night, had no prerequisites, smart,
couldn't go to Harvard or Cambridge or whatever
O: Earth Systems
Group were operating, working on Gaia, had an sfnal feel to them, Marty
read out an sf novel
K: Marty sf fan, worked on terraforming Mars,
thinking about mass extinctions, celestial interference with human
functioning
O: do you also have sfnal imagination
K: yeah, well,
like thinking on global scales, big scales appeal to him, doesn't worry
bout whether the things he thinksa bout are applicable but whether they
are fun.
O: Did you want ??'s talk to be rubbish?
K: his intent in
doing first simulation on reflected sunlight was to prove that it
wouldn't work (but proved the opposite)
O: value laden beginning,
where hav your values shifted?
K: of course we all have values, in
science paper try to squeeze out as much presciriptive and value laden
stuff as poss. but questions posed try to be value free
O: like
looking at things that are conceptual
K: run a bunch of climate
models, but if baisc physics cna't be on back of envelope thn he doesn't
believe in it. what? WTF? first digit and second digits? Huh?
this
is why OM is the science WRITER
O: apparent assymetry in debate:
ppl against geoengineering per se, some who are for research, veyr few
who want to actually DO it. A way that people who are doing it are
listed as proponents
K: He's taken as a propoonent, emotionally
against it, but wrestles with rational self, which thinks we need to
research it for desperation reasons. important, fun and intersting, but
emotionally doesn't want to be in a position to deploy it. Hitting
models with hammers.
O: how does climate science comm think about
geoengineering?
K: first ignoring it, then phase of opposition: this
is crazy, how can you despoil our profession by getting hands dirty. Now
shifted to most thinking we need to do some research and arguing over
scope and scale. Overlay of economics. Hadley ctr. UK climate ctr. will
just take money away from someone else, but as new resources open up
their attitudes turn around.
O: Is fight about research a proxy for
fight about geoengineering itself?
K: yes, if you do the research,
slippery slope to deployment
O: you've been in those discussions on
CO2 sequestration research
K: yes blah blah blah lost me here in
the story of departmental politics
O: activist community?
K:
plan for an experiment in Hawaii, hadn't thought through public
communication (mostly engineers) didn't interest biologists. Acitivst
community saw this as the leading edge of slippery slope, others thought
experiment itself was dangerous. Got village elders to oppose it, and
experiment never happened. Signal to program management to take no risks
DOE. Avoid doing aything that somebody might take note of.
O: what
does that tell you?
K: computer simulations, indoor lab experiments
are doable. Guy developing nozzle in lab couldn't actually test it on
ocean. Prob opposition to field experiments will be so great, it could
prevent these. If we get to desperate times, hard to see how politicians
could resist.
O: Why do you think ppl don't see climate change as a
crisis now?
K: part of our evolutionary process, we don't think
globally, we think about saving up nuts for the winter. Emotional
structure. Rationality is a recent overlay.
O: why is it so hard to
make that connection. Is Geoengineering a cop out?
K:No the reverse:
after hearing about geoengineering, ppl more willing to put more effort
into it: if they're doing such extreme things, ti must be serious.

Q
& A
Jenny Reardon Q: Need to construct a broader imagination. Is
anyone doing that? Obviously sf writers, but who specificially?
O:
he's been thinking about this himself. focusing on middle and upper
stratosphere, for which we have no imagination. Who speaks for the
stratosphere? Almost a creation of the 20th century, we have no feeling
of it. James Lovelock, Earth as a system, Gaia. 1970s discussion of
terraforming Mars comes out of Viking pictures giving us an idea of
Mars. Lovelock might do that for the Earth.
K: Lovelock is closely
involved in aerosols. Study showed that "The Day After Tomorrow" had
more impact than "An Inconvenient Truth."

Audience
Q: Carbon
Sequestration, good example on what can happen. Bill that went down last
year assumed we'd be able to do blah blah blah, no idea what he's
talking about. Ugh, this is one of those comment/questions, not question
questions.
K: Scale of transforming our energy system so much
bigger ... politicians have no framework to understand it, no real
analysis.
O: IEA has model for 30 carbon sequestration/yr, cost is to
replicate the entire global operation of Exxon per year. Tangentially,
to some extent junk pile category, when it starts being taken seriously
and practiced, it stops being "geoengineering".
K: If we weren't
talking about it, it wouldn't be a big deal. CA has small-scale seeding
for half a century but no one talks about it.
O: Blah blah blah blah
K:
blah blah blah
Lost track of what they're talking about for a
minute and can't pick it up again.

Q: a lot of models
presented assume the goal of evening up temperature. When will we see
models of when ppl want to geoengineer expressly in their own interest
rather than for the good of the planet? Field trials out of various
other places?
K: already seen Russian field tests. More likely
outside of U.S. regulatory environment will be more permissive.
Optimizing locally: to what extent would people really want to do this?
Comparing to subprime mortgages, we're all connected. would Californians
really want to optimize climate? We all have an interest in keeping
global economy going. Blah blah, lots of idealist, unrealistic stuff
about how we're going to pull together. Hunh?
O: makes point
about how we live in one of the most pleasant climates. (hints that he
means that economically as well.) in the long term we're reaching this
discussion about it becoming accepted that we will set co2 levels by
international agreement. Taking climate intervention as inevitable. 20
Reasons Why Geoengineering is a Bad Idea. Some areas will be very badly
hit. Seems to frame question as who wins more and who wins less?

Q:
??
K: blah blah blah

totally lost me. Some idiot has "I've got a feeling" as a ringtone
and it keeps going off and the idiot keeps not turning the ring off.
Argh. I'm done with geoengineering for now.

Something about popularization of concepts.

They don't seem to realize that you can be partially heard by an
audience if you're using regular words; the audience can fill in what
you're saying. But if you're using scientific terms, it's really
important that every syllable be heard.

K: how we talk about things affect how people see them (duh.) Scientists
try to be value-free. Insert Obvious point here.



Q: Terraforming term captures the content that is antithetical to
geoengineering, at least in sf, in that it means making a place like
home. "Ecoforming" more recent term. Purpose of that transformation is
what?

Q: How do you make money available for geoengineering, politically? And
do we want sf writers involved in that process?

Q: What is strategy? Do we need further R&D on Geoengineering? Who's
supporting that and what's the strategy?

K: Insert obvious observation about how politicians work here.
Getting ideas out into popular mind and having ppl discuss them is of
critical importance. Mm hm. And? blah blah along these lines. In
the real world ppl don't read anything that's not on their computer
screens. (really?) Maybe sf movies. Assumed that film 2001 was
showing him the future. Assumes that NASA keeps everything white to
imitate the movie - creates a conception of alternate realities. blah
blah.

O: Was a movement w/in academic science to replace terraforming with
ecoforming? Blah blah. It's really hard to understand what he's
saying b/c he's holding his mic about a foot away from his mouth.
For a long time adaptation (vs. mitigation) was not discussed, but now
they've managed to make it more front and center. And your point is?

K: language is very important. For science need value-free language?

O: talk to ppl in biodiversity regret calling "nature conservation"
"biodiversity" b/c now there's a lot of confusion about what they're
actually doing.

K: "Anthropocene" or "Homocene"?



Q: Ken struck by literary quality of your imagination. Thinks carefully
about words. Who gets to think about these things? Instead of
concentrating on who produces CO2 but rather who's consuming the
products whose production produces co2? Who gets to inhabit these
models?

K: frustrated novelist. Our imaginations eventually lead to some kind of
future. Read a lot of sf as a teenager. His early papers were also very
end of the earth. If there never was any sf would he be thinking in
these terms?

live blogging: emerging terraformations: intro and goals

hello there!

I'm in Santa Cruz, on the University campus, getting ready to liveblog at least part of the

Emerging Terraformations: Climate Change, Geoengineering, and Science Fiction

conference. Yay! Very exciting. My lovely cousin Mike Light is presenting at the end of the conference tomorrow, and he hooked me up. (I think it's free, actually, but who knows?) Aside from the general atlas(t)iness of the topic, I'm here for the Oliver Morton, Kim Stanley Robinson love. There's more: one and a half solid days worth of more. But I won't detail it. Here's the schedule.

I think I'll make a different post for each event bloc. This one will be for the brief intro and goals part, then I'll start a new one for the geoengineering part.

Andrew Matthews (organizer) is now speaking (not closely enough to the microphone):

Conference arose out of terraforming of Mars in sf. Let's take this project seriously. Conference is about the power of imagination. Conf backers: UC Humanities Research Inst. (stories about how the world might be), Kresge College (hall and money), Crown College, Oakes College, UCSC departments: Humanities, Social Sciences (too many for me to care about.) Also individuals: Shelley Arrington, ??

Three panels this afternoon: Presentation 20 min. public interview Open Q&A session

Note: I'll put my comments in italics. And I'll post stuff asap and clean up later.

sources of white stress

just another quick drop-in here: the somewhat controversial Village Voice article "White America Has Lost Its Mind" (quick aside: love that the title is declarative rather than interrogative, as most such articles are) had the above map of the fearful white mind included. Kinda fun.

mapping stereotypes

via Woffy, this hilarious collection of maps showing how Europe looks to various Europeens. Not a new idea, but still a funny one. Fortunately, this all doesn't really require commentary, but you might be interested to know that this is all the work of one UK-based designer.

Below is the map of how Europe looks to the U.S. Enjoy!