Environmental Issues

Edward Teller Advances Global Warming Cure

Nuclear physicist Edward Teller says that the jury is still out on whether or not greenhouse gases are leading to global warming, but that contemporary technology offers considerably cheaper options for addressing any global warming effects than politicians and environmentalists are considering.

  • One approach, first proposed by theorist Freeman Dyson in 1979, would counteract any warming effect of greenhouse gases by diminishing by about 1 percent the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface.

  • This could be done by deliberately introducing fine particles -- such as those thrown up naturally from volcanoes -- into the upper atmosphere to scatter sunlight and heat back into space.

  • Such a solution might cost as much as $1 billion a year -- or just $100 million if technologically advanced options were employed.

  • That would be between 0.1 percent and 1 percent of the $100 billion a year it is estimated would be required to price-ration fossil fuel usage down to 1990 levels in the United States alone.

Teller says that cooling caused by volcanic eruptions shows this technique would work. For exmaple, the erruption of Mexico's El Chichon in the 1980s cooled the Northern Hemisphere by about one-quarter as much as the average prediction for global warming expected by 2100.

According to Teller, the director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program's Coordination Office has been promoting such geoengineering for three decades, and one National Academy of Sciences report a few years ago commented on "the relatively low costs at which some of the geoengineering options might be implemented."

Teller and his colleagues presented their proposal for geoengineering at the 22nd International Seminar on Planetary Emergencies in August 1997.

Source: Edward Teller (director emeritus, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), "The Planet Needs a Sunscreen," Wall Street Journal, October 17, 1997.

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