Don’t monkey with my sun

It would seem that someone (more than once!) has had the hallucinagenically-induced idea to control global warming by building mirrors in space that would partially reflect the suns rays.  To paraphrase Babbage, I am unable to apprehend the state of mind that would provoke such an idea.

I have a long-standing issue with people who believe that the solution to an environmental problem of whatever scale and magnitude is to make a counter-balancing change in some other aspect of the environment.  More often than not this has proven to be a disastrous proposition.  Consider the following examples:

• Cane Toads introduced to Australia in 1935 to control a beetle, instead have eaten everything else in their path and are now an infestation that threatens or has already demolished nearly every native Australian ecosystem.
• DDT used by the World Health Organization in Borneo in the 1950’s to ‘solve’ the malaria problem by killing all the mosquitoes resulted in a host of new problems.  Each new problem invited another new solution by the people intent on fixing things, completely turning the local ecosystem upside down until the final and sadly comical insult of dropping crated cats with parachutes out of airplanes to kill an infestation of rats.  The rats had gotten so out of control as a result of the well-meaning antics of the WHO that residents of Borneo were now contracting not malaria, but instead typhoid fever and, yes, Bubonic plague.

We as humans are but ignorant bugs when it comes to tinkering with the inner workings of nature.  We have such a facile grasp of the interconnectedness of things that we most often have no idea of the real consequences of our actions until our actions break something.  And, as J.R.R. Tolkien put it, “One who breaks something to find out how it works has left the path of wisdom.”

I can only hope that at this stage of our dim awareness of the complexity of ecosystems, when faced with something like the Borneo problem today, our scientists and engineers would shrewdly guess that something eats mosquitoes and that that thing (or things) might be negatively impacted by the extermination of those mosquitoes.  Mosquitoes do not live in a void unto themselves, free to be plucked from the ecosystem without consequence.  Hence, it might nowadays be possible to arrive at the conclusion in advance of committing to any action that removing the mosquitoes could potentially be unwise.

I had hoped that that were true, but this article about placing mirrors in space to reflect sunlight in order to “control“ the warming effect of greenhouse gases shatters that hope.  Have we learned nothing at all from our myopic past!?

But it is not only that the idea has been accorded with some merit that makes me shiver.  The bigger problem from my perspective is the sheer scale of the effect that this misguided solution has the potential of inducing.  Name for me one living thing that does not require sunlight in order to function.  Now name one living thing that would not be affected in some way by the reduction of that sunlight.  Name one.  You may dismiss this implication by saying “Well, it’s only a little reduction of sunlight.  Nobody/nothing would even notice it.”  Not so fast!  You might not notice it at first but you may rest assured that something — many things — would.  Maybe not at first, but soon enough.  And when that thing  becomes affected, the things that depend on that thing or that are preyed upon by that thing will start to become affected.  And the beat will go on, up and down the chain at an ever-accelerating rate.  And once we all finally agree over our bickering that something really is wrong, we will attempt in our own meagre and again misguided way to ‘correct’ the problem by changing something else and then, well, where does it end?  This wouldn’t be some isolated experiment on the island of Borneo, where the change-makers could sit thousands of miles away and make decisions knowing the effects on themselves would not be felt.  These decisions would be of global consequence.

I am relieved that the models that were used to test the mirror hypothesis were complex enough that the results show that it would not have the desired effects.  Still, the possibility of being able to avoid committing to real emission reductions by floating an alternative technological solution could be tantalizing to certain politicians and industrialists for reasons that have nothing to do with solving the problem.  We can only hope that saner and less greedy minds will prevail.