Can Dr. Evil Save The World?

Weyant, surprised by the "emotional and religious" debate over Wood's proposal, cut off discussion before it turned into a shouting match. But Wood was delighted by the ruckus. "Yes, there was some spirited discussion," he boasted to me a few days later. "But a surprising number of people said to me, 'Why haven't we heard about this before? Why aren't we doing this?' "

Then Wood flashed a devilish grin. "I think a few of them were ready to cross over to the dark side."

Global warming, as al gore put it recently, "is the only crisis we've ever faced that has the capacity to end civilization." The ultimate solution is no mystery: Among climate scientists, a consensus has developed that we must cut projected global emissions at least in half by the year 2050. But a few leading scientists have begun to suggest that reducing pollution simply can't be done fast enough to prevent a planetwide meltdown. "This is not a goal that can be achieved with current energy technology," says Marty Hoffert, a physicist at New York University. "I think we need to admit that and start thinking bigger."

According to Hoffert, the 850 coal-fired plants projected to be built worldwide in the next decade or so will emit five times more carbon dioxide than will be reduced under the Kyoto treaty on global warming. Add in 100 million newly rich Chinese road-tripping in their SUVs, and you can see why a growing number of scientists believe we are approaching a climate catastrophe faster than we think. Paul Crutzen, a respected atmospheric chemist who won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on ozone depletion, recently suggested that it is time to consider "last resort" options -- including the idea championed by Wood and others to shoot sulfate particles into the stratosphere.

To his colleagues, Crutzen's willingness to consider deliberate intervention with the planet's climate is a sign that the debate over global warming has changed. "Here is a guy who knows more about the Earth's atmosphere than anyone else alive, and he's telling us that the situation is so dire we need to think about intervening with the atmosphere on a planetary scale," one climate scientist told me. "That's frightening, of course -- but from a purely scientific point of view, it's also very interesting."

Until recently, discussion of geoengineering -- intentional, large-scale manipulation of the Earth's climate -- has been taboo among scientists. The pursuit is widely seen as not only a dangerous distraction from the serious business of figuring out how to cut emissions but also as borderline immoral. Lester Brown, one of the godfathers of the environmental movement and president of the Earth Policy Institute, sees geoengineering as "another step down the road of actively managing the planet -- something we've already proven we're not terribly good at. The whole idea of geoengineering is based on an assumption that we know how this all works, when in truth we haven't a clue." Burton Richter, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, also dismisses the idea, arguing that "piling one un-understood problem on top of another un-understood problem is not very smart." The point was driven home a few months ago when Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a supporter of geoengineering, attended a meeting with Al Gore and suggested erecting a giant sun shade in outer space to cool the planet.

"Gore looked at me like I was crazy," Brand recalls. "He snapped, 'Right, Brand. Let's do an experiment with the entire planet.' "

But of course, we're already running an experiment with the entire planet -- it's called civilization. To keep this civilization going, we dump billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, the impact of which we're just beginning to understand. "In effect, we're already engineering the climate," says Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford who collaborated with Wood on the "Save the Arctic" proposal. "We just don't want to admit it. You can argue that the only real difference between what we're doing today and what geoengineering advocates are proposing is a matter of intention. And frankly, the atmosphere doesn't care about what's going on in our heads."

Many scientists who support the idea of actively managing the Earth's climate believe that it's simply too late to rely on a more gradual approach to global warming. James Lovelock, who coined the Gaia hypothesis of the planet as a single living organism in the 1960s, compares geoengineering to chemotherapy. "There is only a small chance to save the patient, but we have to try it," Lovelock says. "It is a survival strategy, a leaky lifeboat."

Wood, whom Lovelock praises as a "man of great invention," understands how ethically fraught his idea is, and how it raises anew a fundamental question about our relationship with the world we live in -- are we the caretakers of the Earth, or the masters of it? Indeed, the very subversiveness of geoengineering may be one reason why Wood champions it. "Lowell enjoys playing the role of Dr. Evil," says Caldeira, whose own politics are solidly enviro-lefty. "But he also happens to be brilliant. And he's one of the few people I know who is thinking about the nuts and bolts of how to actually manage the Earth's climate. I don't really think of him as a scientist -- he's a planetary engineer."

Lowell wood was a rocket boy, a child of the American West's postwar optimism. The son of a real estate investor, he grew up in the suburb of Simi Valley, north of Los Angeles, just as the old walnut ranches were being bulldozed to make way for tract homes and the air was filled with sonic booms from military jets. He devoured books about rocketry and space exploration, such as Willy Ley's classic Conquest of the Moon. For Wood, it was not a distant dream. Nearby was the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a government facility where the engines that powered the Apollo rockets were tested and the famous German rocketeer Werner von Braun sometimes worked. "Boys are seemingly 'doomed' by their Y chromosomes to be hikers and climbers and explorers," Wood says, "so I not infrequently hiked a few miles to watch the big rocket engines test-fired." After high school, he majored in math and chemistry at UCLA, where he met the man who would change his life: Edward Teller.