The Long History of Geoengineering – Summary

Geoengineering is perceived by many to be risky, dangerous, nascent, and immoral. Academic findings say hypothetical modeling of geoengineering strategies suggests risks to regional weather patterns, ozone depletion, and if abruptly stopped, we could suffer from termination shock where masked warming is revealed resulting in who-knows what effects that are literally not present in our scientific knowledge or modeling. This fear of the unknown is ubiquitous with geoengineering because it is perceived to be something never anticipated before. It has become rationalized because of immoral perceptions of cooling without emissions elimination. But what is geoengineering? What is this poorly defined phantasmic thing that has become such a frightening prospect in our climate culture? Merriam-Webster defines “geo” as a prefix that means earth, ground, soil. Engineering of course is the application of science and mathematics to solve problems. One would therefore think that geoengineering would involve applying science and mathematics to our solid earth with the intent solving problems or bettering some aspect of our world.

The term geoengineering has literally been taken out of context to describe deliberate altering of our climate and atmosphere so as to reduce our climate’s temperature and ameliorate the effects of climate warming. In this virtually ubiquitous concept, geoengineering does not refer to its linguistic origin of engineering earth, ground or soil, but of engineering our atmosphere to adjust our climate. The vast majority of discussion on the topic however, is centered on stratospheric aerosol injection to cool our climate using the same process of aerosol cooling found in volcanic eruptions. If we view geoengineering as global-scale actions involving Earth systems that betters humanity, a different understand of the term is revealed. The burning of fossil fuels then, using geology to better humankind, precisely fits the definition, but it has come with an unintended side effect of rapid human-caused planetary warming. Pollution from burning fossil fuels has killed untold millions with 8 million mortalities per year today from respiratory disease caused mostly by sulfur and nitrogen oxides. These oxides also have another unintended side effect of being global cooling pollutants, literally cooling Earth a half degree C below what temperature would be expected from existing excess greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. But human’s geoengineering of our planet in history and prehistory goes much farther back than just the time we began to burn fossil fuels some 200 years ago.

This revelation of the commonness of geoengineering processes in our past, that humankind has been implementing for thousands of years, adds needed robustness to the geoengineering discussion. Geoengineering is not just about purposefully manipulating our climate to mitigate for climate change, it is about the geoengineering humans have done to degrade our planet and create global warming in the first place. It began about 8,000 years ago when humans started clearing forests for agriculture, emitting the carbon stored in forests and eliminating their sequestration of more greenhouse gases, and it includes rice cultivation emitting methane from flooded fields. Geoengineering is what sodbusters did to cause the Dust Bowl in the Great Plains of North America, and it is what caused upwards of a half degree C of cooling from air pollution that masked warming during  and after WWII because of increased fossil fuel burning with the war machine, and post war reconstruction and prosperity. Geoengineering is not the unknown alien space technology that many fear. We have been implementing it for thousands of years and up until we started burning fossil fuels, it has quite likely been responsible for 1 degree C of warming – in addition to warming caused by excess greenhouse gases from our rapidly expanding population for the last 200 years.

Below in the details of this page, we explore the realities of how humans have engineered our planet for millenia and how these actions have changed our climate. These revelations lead to a reality today that geoengineering, of temporary emergency actions to cool our climate with engineered solutions, is not geoengineering at all. These are solutions to reverse the inadvertent side effects of geoengineering over the last 8,000 years, that stabilize Earth systems degradation, so as to provide a safe future for humankind. Read more about how our trusted engineers can restore our climate here.

The Long History of Geoengineering

The Early Anthropocene

The Early Anthropocene Hypothesis starts about 8,000 years ago as atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) began to slowly rise at the dawn of agriculture when humans first started clearing forests in a large way. This happened at the same time that Earth’s orbital cycles began to change enough to cause Earth to begin to cool. Early Anthropocene greenhouse gas emissions warming balanced out with orbital cycle cooling resulting in no temperature change. Then about 5,000 years ago, methane (CH4) began to rise with the discovery of rice flood agriculture. The concentrations of CO2 and CH4 should have both been falling by this time due to orbital changes but Early Anthropocene warming continued to balance out Earth’s temperature. For nearly 8,000 years, warming from the rising levels of CO2 and CH4 counterbalanced cooling by orbital cycles and our climate appeared stable. William Ruddiman is the father of the Early Anthropocene Hypothesis that explains the early geoengineering of our planet. Ruddiman tells us, “The consequences of these surprising rises [in CO2 and CH4] have been profound. Without them, current temperatures in northern parts of North America and Europe would be cooler by three to four degrees Celsius—enough to make agriculture difficult.” (1)

Ruddiman goes on, “The estimated warming caused by these early gas emissions reached a global-mean value of ∼0.8 ◦C and roughly 2 ◦C at high latitudes, large enough to have stopped a glaciation of northeastern Canada predicted by two kinds of climatic models.” He also suggests causes for the slight warmings and coolings of the last 1,000 years with the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and etc., “CO2 oscillations of ∼10 ppm in the last 1000 years are too large to be explained by external (solar-volcanic) forcing, but they can be explained by outbreaks of bubonic plague that caused historically documented farm abandonment in western Eurasia.” Farm abandonment allowed forest regrowth, which served as an additional sink for CO2 causing climate cooling as CO2 concentrations fell.

Modeling of our climate without these extra greenhouse gas inputs, with cooling in northern parts of North America and Europe of 3 to 4 degrees C (5.4 to 7.2 F) would have caused, “an incipient ice age—marked by the appearance of small ice caps—would probably have begun several thousand years ago in parts of northeastern Canada. Instead the earth’s climate has remained relatively warm and stable in recent millennia” Ruddiman tells us.

In 2019 a mega study by Stephens et al., shows significant support for the Early Anthropocene Hypothesis. From the abstract, “An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 BP to 1850 CE reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists by 3,000 years ago, significantly earlier than land-use reconstructions commonly used by Earth scientists. Synthesis of knowledge contributed by over 250 archaeologists highlighted gaps in archaeological expertise and data quality, which peaked at 2000 BP.” (2)

Stephens et al., also pushes the Early Anthropocene window back another 2,000 years to 10,000 years ago because of widespread Earth systems disruption caused by hunter gatherers: “Biotic communities around the world through transport and propagation of favored species, extensive early land use by hunter-gatherers may also indicate widespread use of fire to enhance success in hunting and foraging. Systematic burning has implications for the global carbon cycle through increased greenhouse gas emissions, for water-cycles through changes in vegetation and evapotranspiration, and for temperatures through changes in albedo.”

Ruddiman’s latest is a review of recent science on the Anthropocene Hypothesis since his first publishing on the subject. He reports that methane emissions from rice flood agriculture beginning 5,000 years ago is now fairly settled in the literature, but CO2 remains a debated and complex issue. Ruddiman has this to say about CO2, “Scientists who work in fields that explore direct ground-truth evidence of human activity (archaeology, paleoecology, etc) tend to favor the hypothesis, while those who rely on geochemical indices of environmental proxies are less positive. Because this is one of the most multi-disciplinary topics imaginable, the debate is unusually complex. As this paper will show, however, a clearer picture of the late Holocene CO2 rise has now emerged.” (3)

Ruddiman 2003 estimated that 300-320 gigatons carbon emissions were created from vegetation cleared prior to the Industrial Age, or 21 to 23 ppm CO2. Other work of the time showed far less emissions from vegetation removal at around 50 gigatons. Since 2011 however several findings have reported between 310 and up to 357 gigatons emissions from vegetation removal (4, 5, 6).

One study, Erb 2018 (5), is particularly insightful. They tell us six studies have found Earth’s potential natural vegetation at the beginning of this most recent recent interglacial period was 900 billion tons as carbon give or take, and the current vegetation was about 450 billion tons as carbon for a total removal of about 450 billion tons as carbon (1.6 trillion tons as CO2). During the Industrial Era, removal has been about 156 billion tons of vegetation as carbon of which there remains 310 billion tons that was removed prior to Industrial Age, or 21 to 23 ppm CO2, just as Ruddiman hypothesized in 2003.

“This analysis of evidence of the Early Anthropocene Hypothesis (EAH) has shown that: large and abrupt population increases occurred in Europe and China 7000-5500 years ago, coincident with the first anomalous early Holocene rise in atmospheric CO2; pre-industrial carbon emissions from human activities totaled 343 Gt (equivalent to an anthropogenic CO2 input of ~24 ppm); and burial of roughly 300 Gt of terrestrial carbon in peats during the last 7000 years canceled most of the anthropogenic deforestation signature in the oxygen isotope record. Ocean feedbacks of anthropogenic origin supplied enough additional CO2 to bring the total anthropogenic contribution to the observed atmospheric CO2 rise to ~40 ppm the resulting prevalence of oceanic carbon in the oxygen isotope record. These feedbacks also boosted the anthropogenic total very near the 40-ppm anomaly proposed in the original EAH. In addition, the closest natural orbital analog to the Holocene (MIS 19, 770,000 years ago) shows a downward CO2 trend very near that proposed in the EAH for interglaciations without anthropogenic overprints. Finally, burial of organic carbon in Arctic peat was a major factor in natural CO2 decreases during interglaciations prior to this one.”

The Manipulation of Earth’s Geo – Not A Space Alien Concept

Geoengineering, in its true form, is something our human culture is deeply familiar with. Even the bubonic plague in the 14th century caused significant changes in our geo as it killed between 100 and 125 million people or 20 percent of our human population. (Direct deaths attributed to Covid were 6 million globally.) The result of the Black Death’s toll was not just reduction in human emissions like with covid, but farmland regrew forests, increasing sequestration.

The Dust Bowl of the Great Plains in North America

The North American Plains are no stranger to drought. Vegetation stabilized dune fields that predate the 1930s Dust Bowl cover large parts the region encompassing Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota, Colorado and Kansas with activity covering much of the Holocene, or the last 10,000 years, the last period during the Medieval Warm period 7900 to 1,300 years ago. Until the 1970s, these periode were warmer than today, and the periods of shifting sand were caused by natural climate fluctuations. (7)

Humans, bearing the name of “Sodbusters” changed all this with the Homestead Act of 1862, granting westward immigrants 160 acres of land if they lived and farmed on it for five years. Thousands of Americans and immigrants staked their plots every year as the Great Plains was advertised as a farming Eden. In the 1920s there was a marketing ploy by promoters and farm equipment dealers to mechanize agriculture on the Great Plains. Then a major drought in the 1930s caused widespread crop failures. The heat and dryness from loss of the great grasslands caused a drought feedback that and sodbusters primitive “plow all” farming techniques literally caused the precious topsoil to blow away. The dust increased the heat even further. (7,8) The Dust Bowl worsened the Great Depression and 3.5 million people migrated away from the plains to escape their inadvertent geoengineering. Five gigatons of carbon as CO2 were lost from soils in the Great Plains between 1880 and 1940, mostly in the 1920s and ’30s. (10)

World War II and Post War Recovery and Industrialization

The mid-20th century cooling anomaly was a geoengineering effect caused by the World War II, the war machine industrialization, and post war industrialization into the new era of modern human lifestyle. Smoke from Europe, Russia and Japan filled the skies and blocked sunlight the incredible industrialization of the War machine emitted cooling sulfur pollution in quantities not before seen, with no air pollution regulations. Then the rebuild period after the war, combined with post war prosperity industrialization to burn even more fossil fuels with zero sulfur regulations creating even more global cooling sulfates  that cancelled out warming and actually caused about net 0.1 degree C cooling.

Post war prosperity continued on through the 50’s and ’60s until air pollution becomes so bad that air pollution regulations went into effect in the West and Europe. The total delay in warming was as much as 0.5 degrees C, that rapidly returned in the ’70s as the air pollution regulations went into effect.

The smoke cooling is still contested, but not aerosols. Northern Hemisphere cooling and Southern Hemisphere warming bear out the northern Hemisphere concertation of increased industrialization. This hemispherical difference is because sulfates, especially lower atmosphere sulfates, do not last long in the atmosphere and are rained out or chemically neutralized before they can spread to the Southern Hemisphere. (11)

Early academic works was confused about aerosols’ implications until Wilcox 2013 demonstrated that indirect aerosol cloud effects played a major role (brightening and making clouds longer-lived). Prior work was modelled without indirect cloud effects and did not reconcile well with observed temperatures.  When modelled with indirect cloud effects, results better reproduces observed temperature response in the mid-20th century. (12) There was also cooling attributed to both World War I and II and the Great Depression from lower carbon dioxide emissions. (13)

Most Epic of all Geoengineering: Fossil Fuels

Burning ancient sunshine is of course the main reason we are in this climate pollution emergency. The geo-process of natural production of fossil hydrocarbons requires about 196,000 pounds of plants to produce a gallon of gasoline. It takes 40 acres of plants, roots, stalks and leaves, to go 20 miles in the average car. Jeff Dukes, published a paper in the journal Climatic Change, describing how much ancient plant matter had to be buried millions of years ago to produce one gallon of gas. Dukes calculated that the total amount of plants burned as fossil fuels in 1997 came from 44 quintillion grams of plant carbon (18 zeros), or about 400 times the annual primary productivity of all plants on Earth. This means that (in 1997) we burned 400 years worth of plant growth across the entire planet that had been stored in the geo for millions of years. The amount of plants that went into the fossil fuels we burned since the Industrial Revolution began (in 1750s), up until 1997, is equal to all the plants grown on Earth over 13,300 years. This ancient solar energy is normally emitted back into the environment over millions of years. We are literally releasing this carbon millions of times faster than it is naturally. In 1997, the fossil fuels we burned created 315,000 petajoules of energy. In 2023 we burned fossil fuels equal to 504,000 petajoules of energy, with renewables at 51,000, and hydro and nuclear at 65,000 petajoules. (14, 15)

Our clever engineers have geoengineered our entire world to run on this most incredibly compact and convenient form of energy. Their geoengineering has allowed Earth’s population of humans to increase from one billion to eight billion, and life expectancy to increase from 35 years to 79 years, and in the process advanced numerous other geoengineering strategies that are meaningful to our global culture.