Conversations

00:01 What if the most ordinary things in your life aren't ordinary at all? A toothbrush, the pockets in your jeans, even a gravestone. Someone designed them, shaped them, argued over them and got it so right you've stopped noticing. The everyday is full of hidden ingenuity and on By Design with me, Anthony Burke, we pull it all into the light. Search for By Design on the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. 00:30 ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. 00:37 The ancient world was full of tales of great kings and leaders who could bring down the rain, part the oceans and change the course of mighty rivers. 00:50 And then, in the modern era, suddenly humans had the technology to actually do some of these kind of things, or at least attempt to do them. 01:01 Tim Flannery, paleontologist, explorer and former Australian of the Year, is back on Conversations today. Today, Tim is giving us a grand survey of the dreams of bold men who wanted to bring water to the desert, or to drain the Mediterranean for farmlands, or to simply make Russia a nice, cosy, warm place to live in. 01:22 These schemes have involved blowing up the polar ice caps, putting mirrors in space. 01:27 One guy even wanted to nuke the moon. 01:32 I'm pleased to say Australia has punched well above its weight in coming up with some of these heroically dangerous schemes. Some of them even came true. 01:40 And now, such as the state of the rapidly warming planet, that people are at work right now on new, gigantic geoengineering solutions to forestall disaster. 01:53 Tim Flannery's written a book with Emma Flannery, and it's called A Brief History of Climate Folly. Welcome back, Tim. Thank you very much, Richard. It's great being with you. Geoengineering is something that's been talked about for a bit now. I've been sort of picking up the vibes of it. Can you just explain what we mean by geoengineering? Sure. 02:10 Look, geoengineering refers to a basket of technologies and methods, really, that offer to put a band-aid over the global warming crisis, if you want, to do something like create a shade for the earth using chemicals or particles so that not as much sunlight, for example, reaches the surface. So that cools things down. The CO2 is still there, of course, in the acidifying oceans, but it offers a brief respite. 02:36 And people hope that that brief respite will then give us time to reduce the emissions to the point of sustainability. 02:42 Band-aid approach. But often these schemes have all these unintended consequences, don't they, Tim? 02:47 Well, yes. 02:49 To say the least. Let me rephrase that. They always have unintended consequences, don't they? 02:53 Well, the extraordinary thing about these approaches is each one has its champion. You know, George Soros believes that one particular approach is fantastic. There are corporations around the world that have set up systems to start creating geoengineering and to charge people cooling credits for them. Not carbon credits, but cooling credits. Now, if you're stupid enough to buy such a thing, well, I don't know what to say, but these things exist in the real world. And my fear is that as the climate crisis gets worse and worse... we will start grasping at these solutions without properly evaluating them. 03:27 So here we are. Has the fossil fuel industry run out the clock? We've really well and truly run out the clock. You know, back in 2009, when I was chairing the Copenhagen Climate Council, I'm trying to get some sort of resolution to this. That was about the last time when we had an easy glide path to a kind of emissions future we need to have a sustainable planet. Since then, emissions have built and built and built for the last 16 years. Till now, we're way, way over the limit. And we do need to buy ourselves some time somehow. You know, we should be cutting emissions hard and fast. 03:58 We should be planting forests, taking care of the ocean and everything else. But there'll still be a deficit. And it's that deficit that geoengineering offers to fill, really. And, you know, I can see why people are grasping at geoengineering as a solution. But the fact it's done in the absence of any global approach, any real science behind it is terrifying. 04:18 So the three approaches we have to cooling the planet or arresting the warming, I suppose, is a better way of putting it. Emissions reductions, we know all about that. Then there's these other things, drawdown and geoengineering. 04:30 What is drawdown? Drawdown is really, they are systems or methods or approaches that help the planet heal itself. Right. in the way it's always done in the past. So one good example of that would be storing carbon in soils or storing carbon in rocks. It's another system that over the long term restores the balance between carbon in the atmosphere, the oceans and the lithosphere, as it's called, or the rocks of the planet. Another one is just growing forests. Forests are full of carbon. So if we let the forest grow or even encourage them to grow, we'll be storing significant amount of carbon that weigh in the balance. 05:06 They don't solve the whole problem because the problem is now so very large, but they do help. 05:10 So these are first best solutions, the drawdown solutions, but they're slow, aren't they, Tim? 05:15 They are very slow and... 05:18 We are running out of time. This is a problem. Nature's natural healing process takes time. And that's why people are talking about band-aids, these almost instant solutions. So with geoengineering, for example, if you put sulfur up into the stratosphere, the lower stratosphere, it has an instant cooling effect. Like a volcano does, in other words. Yeah, exactly. And that's how we know about this. 05:40 People have studied volcanoes and put a lot of sulfur into the stratosphere. History is full of stories of when a supermassive volcano in Iceland loses its head. Much of the world is thrown into starvation from crop failure from a planet that's very suddenly cooled. 05:54 Well, exactly. And can you imagine the legal consequences if a country just decides that it's in their interest to cool the stratosphere, put that Band-Aid on, and then every other country on the planet or even select other countries have very adverse consequences? 06:09 I mean, that's a trigger for war. 06:11 So you're saying we're very likely going to need some form of these neo-geoengineering solutions. 06:18 But how are people approaching this right now? Well, at the moment, it's the same as it's always been since the first prophet said that he could ask God to bring rain. 06:28 It is one self-styled great man with the money who says, this is the solution, let's go for it. 06:36 And sadly, we have no global treaty on this. You know, in the US, if you wanted to do some geoengineering in the US, or Elon Musk wanted to do it, the only requirement under the law is that you give 10 days notice to the EPA that you are going to do this. We're living on the Wild West of these technologies and their applications. 06:55 Right from the beginning of human life on this planet, we've tended to place a weather god, right? a storm god, right at the top of the pantheon of gods that various human cultures have created. Traditionally, how have people associated a disastrous new climate, like a mega drought or a mega pluvial event, with human behaviour, with our good deeds or our sinful deeds? 07:17 Well, look, it varies across culture, but there's always been some intelligent person who've said, well, actually, I can be the intermediary between you and God. I can't do what God does. I can't change the weather, but I can ask him to bring rain, you know. And if you do some nice things for me or do the right prayers and formula, then maybe we'll get rain. And occasionally it does rain. And so those people's status is reinforced. You know, the Old Testament prophets are very much like that. Elijah the Tishbite is perhaps the great example, you know, who pleads to God for rain at the right season. 07:49 And when it comes, of course, he's a great man. You know, Australia is the ultimate land of drought and flooding rain. And when the pastoralists came into Australia, they often resorted to Aboriginal weather makers to bring rain. And there's a tremendous story told from Queensland, which was observed by a meteorologist of a pastoralist in the middle of a drought going to a very senior Aboriginal man and saying to him, "'Can you bring some rain?' If you can fill my water tank by tomorrow night, I'll give you half a bullock and half a ton of flour and some tobacco and whatever else. 08:20 So the Aboriginal bloke says, yeah, I can do that for sure, you know. So he sets to work doing his magic and lo and behold, it rains that night, you know, and the water tank fills. LAUGHTER And he gets paid. The guy who's recording the story, the meteorologist, said, you know, us Europeans, we've got our weather-making magic as well, he said. And often we'll all go to church and we'll pray for rain, but we have so little faith in our own magic, we don't even bring our umbrellas. 08:46 So it's just lack of faith that stops the rain from coming down. I wonder if this also reflects like a desire. You know, we're tiny individually. We're quite tiny specks on the face of the earth. 08:58 We are at the mercy of so much of what the natural world will bring to us. I wonder if this is a way of pretending we have more agency in the world than we ever can possibly have. 09:09 I think you could make that argument, and that would suggest that it's mentally healthy to pretend you have such powers. Maybe that's right. I don't know. But it's very characteristic of every human culture, really, across time. 09:21 Tell me about an Australian from the 1890s named Frank Melbourne, who became known as the Rain Wizard. 09:28 Well, Frank was great at doing these mystical things. And things, I suppose, making concoctions, you'd call them, which he'd burn and create special smoke and so forth to bring rain to parts of the Western US where rain was short. He was an Australian. He had a great list of credits that he'd drag around saying, here's a letter from the city of Australia. 09:49 Wherever Smokane, you know, where I made it rain and it was all great. 09:53 And here's another letter from someone. And he'd asked for money then to make rain. And what was making the rain? Oh, well, he said it was his concoctions and the smoke and the effluvia into the atmosphere and so forth that I think was his argument. 10:06 And if it worked, it worked. And if it didn't, he could go, oh, something's wrong. The precautions aren't right or, you know, come back next week and have another go. And he did really well with this, did he? He did really well. 10:15 He did. It made a fortune. And finally, someone caught up with him in his later years. I think it was in Chicago and interviewed him. And he said, no, it was all just total bullshit. He said, no, it was true. He said, you know, the thing you've got to understand about people is the bigger the lie, the greater the chance it'll be believed. Yeah. 10:35 I like how he had to go to America to make it really work for himself, though. 10:38 Exactly. The even more amazing one, I think, is Charles Hatfield because he was an American rainmaker who really believed that he could do it. And he went to San Diego in the middle of the worst drought that they had ever had. The local reservoir was going on dry, you know. And he said to the local city council, if you give me 10,000 bucks, I'll make it rain. Anyway, before they signed the contract, he got to work on the edges of the reservoir and he set up 30 towers and made these concoctions with different, I don't know how many dozens of ingredients in them that apparently smelled like stinking Limburger cheese when he lit them all. 11:14 And so the day he lit them, a gentle rain began to fall and Everything was looking tremendous. You know, people were so grateful. He was going to get his money. But the rain just didn't stop. And finally, the local river was a mile wide. An entire town was washed away. Hundreds of people killed, cattle destroyed, farms destroyed. 11:35 Stop! People were writing letters to the paper saying, make him stop. 11:39 Make him stop burning this Limburger cheese stuff. 11:43 Anyway, finally, the city engineer who was supposed to pay him said, look, we will pay you if you accept liability for all the damages. 11:51 And, of course, he never got his money. 11:53 Now, one revelation for me was I'd heard of the Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. I knew about his strange sexual theories and his ideas about Orgone. What I didn't know was his interest in making rain. Tell me about his adventures as a rainmaker, please, Tim. 12:11 Well, look, as his orgasm machines, as he called them, started to kind of lose favour, he thought he'd branch out. So he developed a thing called the Cloudbuster, which looked like a gigantic organ apparently, these great big pipes reaching skyward, which he would sort of play, and then the rain would fall. 12:30 But he was arrested, unfortunately, because of his organ machine before he could really fully implement his rainmaking scheme. 12:36 Right, these are the orgasm machines, right? 12:38 The orgasm machines. Yeah, yeah. 12:58 Well, look, the real moment when all of this stuff stopped being mystical, really, and started to be science-based, began with a man called Svanti Arrhenius in about 1903. He was a Nobel Prize winning scientist. He was the one who did the calculations that showed that a certain amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would lead to a certain amount of warming. 13:21 Massive calculations. Today we use very big, large frame computers to do them, but he did them by hand. Apparently, he was seeking refuge from a very unhappy marriage and was happy to spend 18 hours a day in his laboratory doing calculations by hand for months at a time, which he did and was able to show that a doubling of CO2 would lead to, I think it was three degrees of temperature increase, which is about where we are today, you know, the same understanding. Was he warning the world of the dangers of this? 13:48 strangely, he wasn't. 13:51 His basic message was, we aren't burning enough coal. He said, at this rate, at the rate we're burning now, he said, it'll take 3,000 years for Stockholm to develop a temperature as clement and nice as that of Rome. He said, maybe we should burn a bit more. And it's a recurring theme of all of these maniacs who are doing stuff, that they are very Northern Hemisphere-centric and high-latitude-centric. They're not thinking about people living on the equator. They're thinking about people living in the cold. 14:18 What would have been the actual effect of burning as much coal as he wanted to burn to warm up the planet? 14:24 Well, it wasn't very long before a man called Henry Lamont Abbott, who was head of the American Engineers Institute, tried to encourage people to do just that. He said, we can't be niggerly with burning coal. He said, we've just got to keep on burning as much as we can. He said, we should just set fire to coal seams in the ground. He said, and if we can do that, we'll put 3,000 parts per million of CO2 into the atmosphere, and that'll really get things moving. Now, I mean, that is so extreme that people don't even bother modelling that level of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. 14:55 You'd get a cooked planet, though, basically. 14:57 Right. Unliveable. And I wonder if you make Stockholm as warm as Rome. What does that mean for Rome? 15:03 What's it mean for Cairo, Darwin? Exactly. So there's a fundamental failure. Even though they're thinking big, there is still a fundamental failure here to see the big picture, Tim. 15:13 Well, there was. And what is truly amazing is that with all of this talk about warming a planet, no one put two and two together to understand that as you warm the planet, you'll melt the ice. And as you melt the ice, you'll rise sea levels. That understanding only came about in the 1970s. 15:29 So people are thinking in these small compartmentalised boxes, they're not using whole system thinking to understand the true implications of what they're suggesting. 15:38 So come the 1920s, we get this scheme, and this is my favourite of all of these schemes, Tim, I must say, from an architect named Herman Sorgel, and his scheme he called Elantropa. Have I pronounced that right? That's right, Elantropa. Elantropa. Tell me about the scheme. What did he have in mind? 15:53 Well, he was not a small thinker, Herman. 15:57 At that stage, people had drilled into rocks around the Mediterranean basin and realised there was salt in the rocks, which suggested that the Mediterranean was lower or even dry at times in the past. So he said, aha, we can build a very large dam, he said, across the Straits of Hercules from Gibraltar through to Africa. Right between Morocco and Spain. Yes, just a little largish dam, but we have to be the world's largest, Richard. But for Herman, that wasn't a problem. But there was a whole lot of subsidiary issues came up. And people said, well, if we do that, what about the Bosphorus? 16:29 He said, oh, we'll build another dam across the Bosphorus. And what about the Suez Canal? Oh, well, we could have a series of locks. Sluices or something. Sluices, yes, to get the boats down and up. And someone said, but what about Venice? And he said, oh, we'll put in special conditions for Venice, keep the water up in the canals. But it's this madness. Why did he want to do that? Well, it would create Lebensraum for the Europeans. Well, it would drain the Mediterranean, would it? It would. We know it's drained in the past. There are times when the Mediterranean has been totally dry and Mind you, the temperatures we now understand in the lowest parts of the Mediterranean at that time got up to 80 degrees Celsius, something you just don't see on the surface of the planet today. 17:08 So when you say in the past, you're talking like a million years ago, in other words. Five million years ago. Five million years ago, the Mediterranean was a land basin, in other words. 17:15 Yeah, just a great salt lake, great salt plain. 17:17 Right. 17:18 So, nonetheless, I'm sure calling it Lebensraum would have pricked up the ears of Adolf Hitler. Was Hitler interested in this? Well, he gave it an endorsement. 17:26 He thought it was fantastic. So, and you can imagine the view, all of these Europeans, they're fighting, all they need is Lebensraum to stop fighting. And he said, and we could have African labour. Very colonial thinking, but imagine all of these Africans we could use to grow our rice and our wheat and things across this shared thing. But... It went on, actually, Richard, because he wanted to divert the Niger River in Africa. 17:48 Okay. So let me just take stock here. He wants a huge dam between Morocco and Spain to fence off the Atlantic Ocean from the Mediterranean. He wants another one at the Bosphorus, where Istanbul is at the moment or thereabouts, and some kind of complex sluice gate system in the Suez. Yes. And another dam in the middle of the Mediterranean to keep the lower bit full. Make sure Wonderwall would happen if the Nazis had won the war, doesn't it? 18:10 If Hitler was into it. But you know something? These mad plans survived the war. 18:16 There was actually a kind of a group of people who were promoting this right through to the 1960s. 18:22 Tim, can we possibly project what would have happened if this mad scheme had somehow been implemented? 18:28 It would be the end of that base and presumably we get extremely high temperatures. I think the dam would have had to be knocked down pretty quickly. 18:37 In Australia, there have been many putative schemes to irrigate our dry interior by diverting the great rivers inland. The broadcaster Alan Jones used to talk about it all the time, I think, this great dream of sending Australia's great Murray-Darling system, I suppose, inland to irrigate the dry interior. Now, John Bradfield... The engineer behind the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Brisbane's Story Bridge, he had an idea in this regard. What was his idea, Tim? 19:04 Well, his great passion really was to turn the rivers of Queensland into the inland. They're all short flows from the eastern side of the Great Divide. 19:15 into the Great Barrier Reef catchment and further south. They carry a reasonable amount of water and he just did a calculation and said if we put all of that to the west of the divide, we could have these rivers full of water and we could be planting rice in Lake Eyre. It was a massive inspiration for people for decades. Alan Jones was not alone. Premier Beattie of Queensland was a great promoter of it. There are still people, you know, if you go to Western Queensland today, who believe that this is a fantastic idea, despite the fact the entire concept has been totally debunked. 19:48 The water calculations were wrong. There isn't enough water. No one took into account evaporation rates. The costs were grossly underestimated for doing all of the works that were required to do it. It just makes no sense whatsoever. And yet still that scheme has its backers. 20:04 Maybe that comes from when you look at maps of the United States and a map of Australia. The United States has that lush irrigated interior, irrigated by the Mississippi and other rivers as well. And then Australia is this big and dry and you go, well, why can't we be like America? I wonder if the United States has been the inspiration for that, wanting us to be like the United States. 20:23 Well, maybe. They had their own scheme, mind you, to take water and irrigate the West. They were going to take it from Canada, and that became a bit of an issue between the two countries. 20:34 But this kind of looking at the map produces this megalomania, I would call it, in certain kinds of people. They're invariably men, they're wealthy, they're influential, and they are prone to megalomania. 20:47 Something like this was tried in North West Australia with the Ord River Scheme in WA. Huge project resulted in Lake Argyle, which is somewhere near Kununurra on the WANT border. What was the intent with that scheme? 20:59 Well, look, the very first attempt to use that for the Fitzroy River was going to be to create a home for the Jewish people after the, well, just around the time of the Second World War. 21:08 That's right, yes, yes. I think some people came out, actually, to check it out and went away. 21:12 They did, yes, and probably said thanks, but no thanks. Yeah. 21:16 But the Ord River scheme is, again, that was a great scheme to create irrigation, to create hydroelectric energy and everything else. But all of that has failed to a large degree, despite repeated government influxes of money. It was then going to become the perfume bowl of the nation when sandalwood was going to be planted all through it. That's collapsed now. Someone else has got an idea. We'll go back to sugarcane and try sugarcane again. But these schemes rarely die. People take public money, they take your taxpayers' money, my taxpayers' money, put it into a scheme like that, and some people hope to benefit, and probably those who build the infrastructure do benefit. 21:53 How does that affect the things like the local fisheries, though, up in that area? Well, you know, in the north, particularly prawns, it's very well understood that the wet season water flow is directly proportional to the prawn yield. So the more water you get down the rivers in the wet season, the greater the prawn yield. So, you know, our prawn fisheries have to be balanced against anything you can do on land, even just to start. You know, is the value of the sugarcane greater than that of the aquaculture, the fisheries off the coast? And that's a question people just don't seem to want to ask, who are the promote these schemes? 22:25 Right. 22:25 I remember the old Superman cartoon described him as a man who could change the course of mighty rivers, Ben Steele and his bare hands and who in his disguise as Clark Kent, dot, dot, dot. But is there some fundamental flaw behind this idea of wanting to change the course of a mighty river to do this or that? 22:45 Look, I do think so. I do think that we never ask the right questions. We always start with that kind of man beats nature and conquers nature and tames the world and supposedly makes it better for us all. But it doesn't end up that way. 23:03 It's hard to think of any schemes that have really worked long term. I guess if you're looking at it, one would be the Chinese canal system to allow transport right through inland China. The Dutch, of course, with their polder system, you know, has produced some usable land. But with sea level rise today, who knows where that's going to end up. I think we need a different philosophy. And to realise that we need to sit down and consider rather than follow the Superman beating his chest saying we can make all of this work. 23:32 But I wonder if we thought that way, if we did have a different velocity, we wouldn't have something like the Panama Canal, for example, which is a gigantic feat of engineering that cut a canal between the two continents of North and South America. 23:43 Well, that's true, and the Suez Canal. Yes, you wouldn't have that. And that makes you think, yes, maybe there are some circumstances where we should think about doing this. But when it comes to geoengineering, which is about changing the metabolism of the entire planet, we've got a different prospect. Changing something which will change everything. Because on Earth, everything's interconnected. 24:05 The former Soviet Union, under Lenin and then Stalin, was big on these heroic kind of schemes. What was the philosophical approach of the Communist Party to remaking the world like that? 24:16 Look, it's a fascinating thing, Richard, that Soviet experience, because in the late 19th century, the Soviet geographers were world leaders in understanding how the Earth system worked. The first projects in the Soviet Union started off with just tree planting, which we'd all applaud a great thing to plant trees. But the objective behind it was to change the climate of the drier parts of Russia, to let the trees transpire moisture and bring rainfall. Now, that's a far more questionable outcome if you just plant trees. 24:49 But it soon metamorphosed or metastasised is probably a better word as Stalin came to power. And he wanted great things. And so the whole of that work once great Soviet scientific series of institutions, was bent to the will of the dictator and started to talk about doing appalling things. There was one, I think Borisov was his name, one Russian geographer, who said, look, we can actually melt the Arctic ice cap, you know. He said, all we need to do is dam some rivers and move this kind of warmer water around and then put a dam across the Bering Strait. 25:24 Like a dam across the Bering Strait, like between Alaska and Siberia. 25:30 He was another big thinker, Richard. Right. 25:32 Here's another big thing. And someone said, well, this is actually a massive project. Why don't you just blow a hole in the Thompson and Wyville Ridge in the North Atlantic? Because that would have the same effect. It would bring the current through into the Arctic. So Borisov was very keen on that for a while, but then he thought, actually, there's 5,000 or 5 million cubic square kilometres of rock needs to be moved to the depth of two kilometres below the surface. Big job. 25:58 So nothing came of any of it. When you say big job... That mine would have reached for nuclear weapons at that point, surely, or nuclear devices to explode that out of the ground? 26:06 By the 1950s, they were. And as far as I know, the Russians today are still the only people who used nuclear weapons to try to geoengineer a new world. How did they do that? They were using bombs to create connections between river systems to divert water into the drier parts of the Soviet Union. And to their great surprise, first of all, the bombs didn't blow as much rock as they were hoping and in the direction they were hoping, but also radiation. The region's uninhabitable and kills the wildlife. 26:38 Exactly. So they used three bombs and they realised they'd need 800 or something to do the job and the whole Soviet arsenal only had 250 at that stage, so the project was abandoned. 26:48 But they actually started... 26:50 Meanwhile, in the United States, there was this guy, Harry Wexler, who was the chief of the Weather Bureau in the post-war years. He had another big idea for that part of the world. First of all, tell me a bit about this guy, Harry Wexler, please. I would have loved to have met Harry Wexler. 27:05 He was such a daring dude character. He was a sort of a test pilot, I think, for flying planes and doing crazy things. And one of the craziest things he ever did was to fly a fighter plane, Second World War fighter plane, into the heart of a hurricane. No one had ever done anything like it before. And, you know, you wouldn't expect to survive yet, but Harry did. 27:26 He survived. Such was his commitment to meteorology. Exactly. He was ready to fly into a hurricane. That's right. So he's crazy brave, this guy, right? 27:34 Crazy brave. When he was young, totally crazy brave. And I think anything was possible for Harry. Amazing man. But he was then made head of the US Weather Bureau. Yeah. And funny, Arthur C. Clarke wrote to him saying, you know, if we could get some satellites up there and have some weather stay, we could predict the weather better. And Harry was crazy enough to think this is a great idea. And that's how we started with our modern weather service was Arthur C. Clarke and Harry Wexler doing this stuff together. So he was an amazing man. That's for sure. Now, what scheme did he have for the Arctic ice cap? 28:06 Well, you know, I guess inspired by the Russians in the 1950s, he said, he did the calculations and said, look, if you just give me 10 hydrogen bombs and we detonate them. 28:16 Hang on. If you just give me 10. Just 10. Just 10, all right. 28:20 Only 10, not 800. It's not unreasonable. It's not unreasonable. No, not unreasonable. 10's all right, you know. He said, we'll just set them off at strategic places across the Arctic ice cap and we can melt the Arctic ice cap. Why does he want to do that? Oh, to warm the planet, you know, to warm up this terrible northern cold climes. 28:39 What, so Massachusetts would become like Rome now? Is that the idea? 28:42 I think so. 28:42 I think that was generally. But look, Harry lived long enough. 28:45 He lived into his 50s and he, I think, started to see the error of his ways. You know, he died just before he was going to give a really keynote lecture, I think at Harvard or MIT, where he was going to discuss CFCs in the ozone hole. And he was one of the very first people to realise we had a problem with the declining ozone hole. 29:06 So I suspect by then he'd given away his ideas about blowing up the Arctic ice cap and become a more mature person. But for someone to hold that amount of power... in the US system and to be able to even think about such schemes tells you something about the times. 29:21 I detect a bit of a, I don't know, there's a mentality here, I suppose, that's in awe of the wonder of the power of the atom here that's been displayed so powerfully at Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War. We have this godlike power in our hands now in nuclear fission. Let's look at these things we can do. But then this idea of let's nuke parts of the north so that we can warm up Siberia or the northern United States. What about places like Australia and Africa that are perfectly warm enough already? Thanks very much. 29:51 Well, this is part of this insular thinking that just dogs the whole debate. 29:56 until very recently people are not seeing the holistic view they're seeing self-interest and their little part of the world benefiting and the rest of the world can go to hell could you imagine if we woke up in australia one day in the 1950s picked up the paper to see the united states had blown up the arctic ice caps to warm up their part of the world and by the way things might not pan out so well for us could you imagine what that would have done no no we'd be living in a different world The whole let's warm up Russia thing at some point moved into space. 30:24 Tell me about this project called Project Znamya in the late 1980s. 30:29 Well, yeah, late 1980s, but this is, isn't it crazy? We're still talking about this in the late 1980s. Late 1980s. So the Russians believed that if they could just duplicate the moon... and the reflectivity of the moon, it will bring light to a terribly dark Russian winter. You know, how much better it would be to have a bit of brightness in the winter. So they actually did put a satellite up there, which only, it only cast light over an area of about, I think five square kilometers. I think that was about- It's still pretty big. It's still pretty big, yeah. But they wanted like a moon, right? 30:59 They wanted everything. Right. Yeah. And the satellite was reflecting sunlight as it should across a narrow band through Europe and- As it's orbiting around the Earth. Yeah, exactly. Right, and it's heating up what a 5K patch as it's circling around the Earth. That's right. 31:12 What happened? 31:13 I think it all became too expensive and the Soviet Union, as we know at about that time, was facing its own internal difficulties. So thank heavens the idea was dropped. But the moon, for whatever reason... 31:26 certain people have become obsessed by it. And the Russians were one, but the Americans were not immune either. 31:31 Yes, this was all weak tea compared to a scheme from a professor of mathematics at Iowa State University who thought the moon was a really bad thing. Why did he think the moon was a really bad thing, Tim? 31:41 Well, he thought that it had tilted the Earth off its axis and that it was the cause of various problems, I don't know, the tides and various other things. 31:49 No, no, hang on, hang on. It wasn't... It didn't... Isn't the Earth... Doesn't the Earth's axis tilt because it was hit by another planetary body that then blew off a chunk that became the moon? Isn't that what happened? Yes. And in fact, the moon stabilizes the Earth's orbit to some extent. But isn't this like blaming the victim? It is. 32:08 And the fact that the moon is this sort of female entity in our mythos. Oh, it is too. 32:12 It's always female. The sun is always male. The moon is always female. Yes. 32:16 And so he had the idea that if we just got this great big drill and drilled into the moon, kind of... and inserted a gigantic nuclear weapon into the moon, we could blow it up and we'd all be better off. And this is over 30 years this guy was propagating this idea and taking on all comers, everyone who debated him about the value of it. 32:36 All right, Tim, let me ask you. Were there any flaws in his plan to nuke the moon? 32:40 I think the whole thing was totally bloody mad. Could have destroyed, would have destroyed the earth if we could have afforded to do it. How would it have destroyed the earth if he could have done it? Well, can you imagine the fragments of the moon flying towards the earth as we'd blown it up? 32:54 Even that alone. You know, it only took one asteroid, what was it, 20 kilometres across to cause the extinction of the dinosaurs. We'd have dozens of them floating towards the Earth if we tried to blow up the moon. 33:06 And one nuclear weapon? I mean, what would it really take to blow up the moon if we were really going to do this? 33:12 Well, if you had a really, really big one, I think, was his argument. LAUGHTER 33:16 The moon's pretty big. It's huge, I know. We wouldn't even notice it, I don't think, if he did that. I can't justify these mad things. I'm trying to get into his head. I have to ask. I don't mean to be mean, but was he okay? He seems to be. 33:30 This was the terrible thing about it. He seems to have been okay. He was coherent. He was a professor of mathematics and was, you know, publishing great mathematics apparently, but he had this obsession. Yeah. 33:42 Meanwhile, back in Australia, another fun idea emerged. And I think this is a genuinely fun idea. And it came from all people, from your father-in-law. Tim? Geoffrey Holden. Tell me about this man. 33:55 Well, Geoffrey Holden is one of the few real geniuses that I've ever known. He taught himself how to read hieroglyphics to speak Greek. He built one of the first computers ever built in Australia. Yeah. And his day job was with the Department of Environment in Victoria in the 1970s. And he was an atmospheric chemist, so he was studying air quality. And I know I'm going to get this wrong, Jeff, but I have to say it. 34:21 One of the big problems was nitrogen oxide, I think it was, as a pollutant around the city. It was building up as a result of car exhausts and so forth. And he... 34:32 had realised that if you can add a catalyst to this pollutant, you can turn it into nitrous oxide, which is laughing gas. Laughing gas. 34:40 Yes, yes. And we'd have a happy Melbourne. You wouldn't need a comedy festival then, would you? No, you wouldn't. Or you could do it at the same time as the comedy festival. Yeah, you could, exactly. Well, look, the idea is probably worth pursuing even today. It sounds like great fun. So was he being provocative with this? It sounds like a lot of fun. Well, he was. He was. 34:58 Being a naughty chemist. 34:59 Yeah. 35:00 It all fell apart, though, when he realised that nitrous oxide has a warming potential 270 times greater than CO2. 35:06 Oh, what a shame. I know. What a fun plan that would have been. Never mind. 35:11 You say, though, having outlined these weird and wonderful schemes, that the great dream that so many of these men had is actually coming true anyway. 35:18 Yeah. 35:19 Thank you. 35:36 And, you know, we are seeing greenhouse gas emissions now at stupendously high levels that will have terrible consequences into the future. But the thing that gets me about all of this, you know, you look at the conspiracy theorists who are so onto, you know, very weird conspiracies. They haven't twigged to the idea that the greatest conspiracy of all is happening under their noses and they haven't got onto it, that the fossil fuel industries are poisoning our world. 36:04 Why is it the conspiracy theorists haven't realised that that is the great conspiracy? Do you know, Richard? I wonder. There's something wrong with the conspiracy theorists. 36:12 I don't know what it is. Many of the CEOs of fossil fuel companies are engineers or former engineers, and perhaps they believe that, well, if it gets bad, we'll just build a thing to fix it. Maybe that's the mindset there. 36:25 Maybe so, but we've left it very late in the day if we were going to build a thing to fix it. And, you know, if you're going to build a thing to fix it, given it's global, surely you'd be promoting a global treaty or a global unified approach to at least looking into this sort of stuff. Wouldn't you be backing the best science to do it? That's not what we're seeing, Richard. Instead, what we're seeing is the great man getting up, spouting his solution and expecting the world to fund it and to live with it. 36:53 And that's a disaster. 36:55 We all know about the efforts to reduce emissions. You were talking before about the idea of drawdown, which is the better but long-term and slow, slow solution to the heating of the Earth's climate. You say it's essential right now. Who's actually doing the work here right now? 37:10 in terms of drawdown. 37:12 Look, that is being done, most of it, at a kind of very local community level, actually. People are planting trees. Indigenous communities are protecting their forests. There's some good legislation in place and financing to help that happen. What about reforestation? Reforestation, well, the great country to do that is China. You know, China has gone in the last 20 years from, I think, I forget what the figures are exactly, but 4% forest to about 18% forest as they regrow their forests and they realise that it's absolutely essential. 37:44 They're very interesting people, the Chinese. They take a holistic view of things. 37:49 One of the problems that Beijing has had in terms of air quality is the encroaching desert and the dust coming in. 37:54 Yeah, I remember visiting Beijing for the first time in 2001, I think it was, and one day the Gobi Desert blew into Beijing and covered the whole city with yellow powder, effectively. That doesn't happen anymore. 38:05 No, it doesn't, because people have planted these forests all around the margins of that desert area. And also, of course, they've improved their air quality in every way. Every single factory, every single point source of emissions has been dealt with. And it wasn't fast. It's taken 15 years to do that. But it's been very, very effective. If you go to Beijing today, you'll see blue skies. 38:27 What effect do you think the Iran war is going to have on the acceleration of renewable energy, the use of renewable energy sources? 38:34 Well, look, I think we should all thank Donald Trump for being a great champion of clean energy because by prosecuting this war, he's destroyed confidence in the future of the fossil fuel system and raised prices very substantially. And you can see it globally in terms of the return to clean energy, to electric vehicles, to all the things we need. So he's done more single-handedly than anyone I can think of. 38:59 The regime in China seems to have appreciated the connection between... 39:04 national security and energy independence through renewable energy way ahead of anyone else, don't they? 39:09 Well, they did. And I was very fortunate, Richard, some years ago I was making a film in China and the Australian High Commission contacted me and said, the Chinese Academy of Engineering Scientists wants you to go over and meet them. So I turned up, they had a banquet going on. And the head of the academy said, I just wanted to thank you. He said, I'm a nuclear physicist by training and trained in Russia. He said, I didn't understand the full implications of climate change until I read your book. So it's funny the way the world works with that sort of stuff. 39:41 So the Chinese, once they got onto the idea that climate change was a real threat, they really fundamentally reorganized themselves. And that Academy of Engineering Sciences in China is enormously influential in terms of doing that. 39:55 The geoengineering schemes we were speaking about right at the beginning offer a hodgepodge of different solutions to forestall global heating. 40:05 They're not great, but they would be quick, as you say. What do you see as some of the better schemes on offer, or the least worst, if you like? 40:12 Yeah, well, do you know, my overall approach is that I really hesitate to to speculate in the absence of really good science. 40:24 But among the group which seem at least least potentially harmful are the kind of things the Australian government's doing, the experiments we are doing with the Great Barrier Reef at the moment on cloud brightening. What are we doing there? We're trying to brighten clouds to reflect sunlight away from the planet. How do you brighten clouds? You take seawater, particulate it and pump a very fine mist of seawater and hope that it reaches the clouds. And when it does, it causes a change in the nucleating process that gives you brighter clouds. 40:56 Has research shown this to be efficacious? Are there signs that this might work or does work? 41:02 In part, people have been able to create the particles. Do they waft up to the clouds yet? We are not yet certain about that. and we're not yet certain about the full outcome. But it is one form of geoengineering. It sort of almost mimics the natural process that, you know, that algae at the surface of the ocean and wind and waves create. So that sort of thing, you know, I'd say, well, we need to do more work on it and understand better how it works. 41:29 Some of the other schemes, though, are really... 41:32 are much further down the way so you know the the sulfur in the stratosphere scheme until we understand how that affects the the whole planet if done through aircraft that that looks to me dangerous it does but we do know it works though don't we because we've seen it work we do from volcanic eruptions that's what's so tempting about it and it's also relatively cheap And you can turn it on and off fairly quickly because the sulfur only lasts for a matter of weeks in the atmosphere. And this is why I really worry that some country will actually do this unilaterally and it will lead to enormous conflict. 42:07 How about geoengineering the warming oceans of the world? Are there schemes in mind to address that? 42:13 Look, there have been some schemes, including some ideas by James Lovelock, but I would say that none of them are practical because the oceans are so enormously large. 42:26 People don't understand that the mass of the oceans is 500 times greater than the mass of the atmosphere. So we're dealing with a real juggernaut here. It's the great controller, in fact, of the Earth system in the medium term. And I just think we interfere with that at our peril. 42:45 Inertia is a factor here too, isn't it, Tim? Because even if suddenly immediately the planet stopped using immediately all forms of fossil fuel, stopped burning them, would this process of climate change still continue onwards for quite a while? Can you stop the car by slamming the brakes on or is it going to still keep careening on down the road for a while? 43:03 Look, it's got enormous inertia because that greenhouse gas that we put into the atmosphere, so the CO2 I'm putting into the atmosphere now as I breathe, that will... continue warming the planet for a century, right? And there are ways that the earth has to rid itself of excess CO2 in the atmosphere. And that includes the exposure of certain kinds of rocks to the atmosphere, the silicate rocks. That's one of the great regulators, but it works over millennia. rather than over years or decades. 43:34 The growth of forests, that works over centuries rather than years or decades because trees start small. 43:40 They need to grow big to start dragging in lots of CO2. 43:44 There are options such as seeding the oceans to try to make phytoplankton bloom, but again, highly speculative and far from certain. 43:55 What did it feel like to write this book? Because exploring these schemes is kind of fun, but there's the bad news at the end of it. 44:02 Yeah, look, it was an interesting experience researching the book. I felt that I was dealing with a very fundamental human psychosis that I recognise in some of our politicians and some of our very, very wealthy people who try to rule the roost. And ultimately, it came back to me that... You know, power and money corrupt, and they can corrupt absolutely. 44:26 And they destroy people's social capital, their friendships, and give them a sense of power, which is totally unreal. It's illusory. You know, so it was interesting. It was much of a psychological thing. adventure for me as it was a scientific one. 44:42 There's an idea that's inherent to the three great monotheistic religions of the world, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, that humans are given dominion over the earth by God. We're kind of kings of this world. It's not like that everywhere in the world, though, is it? There's other different philosophies have emerged in different places. 45:00 So many different philosophies, yeah. And, you know, I think those philosophies are the result of really the kind of herding You know, the agriculturalists and the people with their great herds and flocks who control the lives of those animals, absolutely, in a way. 45:19 You think it emerges from that, that kind of a mindset of the people who were once herders of Canada? 45:24 I do think so. 45:25 I do think so. And what about the hunters and gatherers, though? 45:28 Well, they don't recognise a single deity as such. The deity reflects the big man, the powerful man who can monopolise resources, and the god is a reflection of that. Whereas hunter-gatherers don't. They recognise usually the ancestors and the forest, and they see themselves as part of this greater whole, which I think is much more real. I mean, Richard, when you ask yourself, what are we? We are performances at the end of the day. We're not things. We know that from looking at a dead body. 45:58 It's not us. We are a performance. Starts as a little baby and ends as an old person, you know. 46:06 And if you take that view, then the world that we perform in and the society and the families that we perform in all become very important. 46:17 It's fascinating speaking with you as always, Tim, and thank you so much. Thank you, Richard. Tim's new book, co-authored with Emma Flannery, is called A Brief History of Climate Folly. 46:27 Music 46:46 This is Conversations with Richard Feidler. 46:55 Hear more conversations anytime on the ABC Listen app or go to abc.net.au slash conversations. 47:25 Today's conversation with Tim Flannery was made on the lands of the Gadigal people. The producer was Maggie Morris. The executive producer is Nicola Harrison. I'm Richard Feidler. 47:34 Thanks for listening. 47:40 You've been listening to a podcast of Conversations with Richard Feidler. 47:46 For more Conversations episodes, head to ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.