I had the chance to fast-forward through a documentary that I hope to sit down and view all the way through within the next few days. Owning the Weather, a 2009 film by Robert Greene, looks at the queasy science of geoengineering, in which scientists and charlatans attempt to modify the earth’s weather.
As one cautionary tale the films presents the story of rain-maker Charles Hatfield who was hired by my city of San Diego in 1916 to bring it rain after four years of drought. Hatfield set up his apparatus on the eastern edge of town and got to business seeding clouds. Within a month it had rained 35 inches and 14 people were dead in the ensuing flooding. [ Edit, April 28: This story might well be a case of a charlatan taking advantage of a natural weather occurrence. Whether this sort of weather modification actually makes a difference in practice is in dispute. ]
Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, is interviewed and gets some of the better lines in the film:
“One of the great sadnesses and proofs of the extent to which which we’ve let global warming get completely out of control is [these geoengineering proposals] don’t sound quite as crazy anymore…
“The 20th century taught us a lot of things. And one of them is that scientific hubris can get us in a hell of a lot of trouble. Any sort of solution that we could introduce that was actually going to lower the temperature of the world several degrees—you know, whatever geoengineering solution—is inherently a big scale scary as hell.”
Interestingly much of the film is shot indoors, where there’s human-made weather, or looking out at the world from the climate controlled space of a car interior. All that reinforces one of the film’s points that we’re a culture that has cut ourselves off from what the environment brings us naturally.
I spend four days a week in a large, climate-controlled, open office. Some people are always cold, some always warm. No one can agree on the perfect temperature. Just extrapolate that out onto the entire earth and you can see that coming up with a scheme to modify weather so that everyone is happy is bound to be an impossible task.
What if Siberia decides it wants to grow tropical mangoes and geoengineers a frost-free climate? Or what if Dubai decides they want snow to ski on? What happens to the rest of the world?
The BBC is at it again. In 1981 they did a TV serialization of John Wyndham’s novel, The Day of the Triffids, a book featuring mutant carnivorous plants that develop a taste for the species that invented herbicides and lawnmowers. [ image source ]
According to a thought-piece on the BBC News Magazine site, the BBC is producing another treatment of this 1951 cold-war sci-fi novel. The piece muses how the first treatments of the novel came out of the same Cold-War hysteria that produced a spate of monster and end-of-the-world films. But the author, Finlo Rohrer, talks about how the plot might resonate differently in these days of global warming, where worries about destruction come less through war than through our wanton abuse of the earth through the release of greenhouse gases and genetic engineering.
“The idea of malevolent plant life has a certain appeal now, in a time where some people are increasingly concerned about the idea of genetically modified organisms,” Rohrer writes.
Several times in the piece he quotes Dr Barry Langford, senior lecturer in film and television at Royal Holloway, University of London. Lanford: “The triffids are perhaps to us a more potent threat than even in Wyndham’s time.”
All that’s well and good, but will this be a great show to watch with a bowl of popcorn and the lights turned down low? A nice disaster pic with lots of wonderfully cheesy BBC special effects? You might want to put your houseplants in another room. Wouldn’t want to give them any ideas…
Check out the Wikipedia entry for more information on triffids, including the other sequels and adaptations the book has seen (including the 1963 theatrical film).
This morning’s LA Times had a cover story on a groundbreaking study that offered some pretty dire projections for the future of California’s 5,500-plus native plant species should the current global warming proceed apace.
The findings by several scientists affiliated with universities in California and beyond were just published in PLoS ONE, one of the rare online scientific journals that allows everyone access for free. Here’s the abstract of the article:
The flora of California, a global biodiversity hotspot, includes 2387 endemic plant taxa. With anticipated climate change, we project that up to 66% will experience >80% reductions in range size within a century. These results are comparable with other studies of fewer species or just samples of a region’s endemics. Projected reductions depend on the magnitude of future emissions and on the ability of species to disperse from their current locations. California’s varied terrain could cause species to move in very different directions, breaking up present-day floras. However, our projections also identify regions where species undergoing severe range reductions may persist. Protecting these potential future refugia and facilitating species dispersal will be essential to maintain biodiversity in the face of climate change.
The authors (Loarie, et alia) say that the current species that can travel quickly from one generation to the next could move their ranges northward or uphill in response to warmer, dryer weather. That gives some hope for species as a whole, particularly those that have seeds that can travel on the wind or easily hitch a ride in the tire tread of a Hummer.
Left:Ancient bristlecone pine at Nevada’s Great Basin National Park. Photo on Gorp [ source ]
But what does that bode for individual plants like the ancient bristlecone pines that you find on mountaintops throughout the Great Basin, plants where some individuals are magisterial homebodies that have been estimated to be nearly 4,000 years old? Unfortunately, those single plants that were adults in Roman times and saplings in the days of Egypt’s Amenhotep the First will face a less certain future.
The authors offer hope that habitat preservation could help compensate for the forces of global warming. Still, I worry. How good a job have we done in the past to preserve habitat?
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