Lyndon Johnson and the 50th Anniversary of Geoengineering

                                                        LBJ's Great Society didn't include Geoengineering


The idea of Geoengineering was first proposed 50 years ago.  In 1964 Manabe and Strickler first noted that intentionally injecting "freezing nuclei" into the upper atmosphere would create more clouds and reflect solar radiation back into space.  Just one year later in 1965 a report on the environment commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson noted the work of Manabe and Stricker, and said:

This potential method of bringing about climate change needs to be investigated as a possible tool for modifying atmospheric circulation in ways that might counteract the effects of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The report commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 is a remarkable document to see 50 years later, because it lays out many of the consequences of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere that we are facing today.   The 1965 report starts out by warning that significant global warming will inevitably occur if CO2 emissions aren't curtailed, and goes on to note that this will cause glaciers and ice sheets to melt, sea level will rise dramatically, and the ocean and other waters will become warmer and more acidic.

LBJ was probably too busy with the war in Vietnam to personally read this report, but his administration responded to the suggestions of scientists that geoengineering needed to be investigated as a way to counteract global warming in the same way that all subsequent presidents have done---he ignored it.  Even today when the global warming issue is much much more prominent then it was 50 years ago, there is almost no research support for geoengineering.

Its interesting to note that the 1964 report says nothing about reductions of CO2 emissions---the authors assumed that CO2 emissions into the atmosphere were inevitable in the modern global economy.  However, since the 1980s the main effort to combating global warming has gone into voluntary efforts to reduce fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions like the Kyoto Accords.  These are well-meaning efforts, but after decades of this approach its clear that this approach has failed to reduce global CO2 emissions.  In fact, the data shows that global CO2 emissions have actually increased significantly since the Kyoto accords were adopted in 1992.    These facts suggest that now, on the 50th anniversary of the idea of geoengineering,  its time for the federal government to reassess and to begin to investigate various kinds of geoengineering concepts as "possible tools ... that might counteract the effects of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide."