June 2010www.clivehamilton.net.au
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr Strangelove was the unhinged US general who risked nuclear apocalypse by ordering a first strike against the Soviet Union. The character was modelled on Dr Edward Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb”. In the 1990s, Teller and his colleague at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lowell Wood (a weapons researcher nicknamed “Dr Evil”), were among the first to advocate responding to global warming by transforming the chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere. Taking control of the climate by injecting sulphur particles into the upper atmosphere sounds like science fiction, but there is now a powerful alliance of scientists and venture capitalists backing the idea. It’s endorsed by climate deniers in conservative think tanks, but the public remains mostly in the dark. This paper explores the strange politics of geoengineering.
