Can't Buy Me Love: How Romance Wrecked Traditional Marriage

Despite the fondness among certain politicians and pundits for “traditional marriage,” a nostalgic-sounding concept that conjures a soft-focus Polaroid of grandma and grandpa, few consider the actual roots of our marital traditions, when matrimony was little more than a business deal among unequals. Even today, legal marriage isn’t measured by the affection between two people, but by the ability of a couple to share Social Security and tax benefits. In reality, it’s the idea of marrying for love that’s untraditional.

For most of recorded human history, marriage was an arrangement designed to maximize financial stability. Elizabeth Abbott, the author of “A History of Marriage” explains that in ancient times, marriage was intended to unite various parts of a community, cementing beneficial economic relationships. “Because it was a financial arrangement, it was conceived of and operated as such. It was a contract between families. For example, let’s say I’m a printer and you make paper, we might want a marriage between our children because that will improve our businesses.” Even the honeymoon, often called the “bridal tour,” was a communal affair, with parents, siblings, and other close relatives traveling together to reinforce their new familial relationships. (...)

Though the murky concept known as “love” has been recorded for all of human history, it was almost never a justification for marriage. “Love was considered a reason not to get married,” says Abbott. “It was seen as lust, as something that would dissipate. You could have love or lust for your mistress, if you’re a man, but if you’re a woman, you had to suppress it. It was condemned as a factor in marriage.”

In fact, for thousands of years, love was mostly seen as a hindrance to marriage, something that would inevitably cause problems. “Most societies have had romantic love, this combination of sexual passion, infatuation, and the romanticization of the partner,” says Coontz. “But very often, those things were seen as inappropriate when attached to marriage. The southern French aristocracy believed that true romantic love was only possible in an adulterous relationship, because marriage was a political, economic, and mercenary event. True love could only exist without it.”

By the 19th century, the friction between love and money had come to a head. As the Western world advanced towards a more modern, industrialized society built on wage labor, emotional bonds became more private, focused more on immediate family and friends than communal celebrations. Simultaneously, mass media helped make sentimental inclinations a larger part of popular culture, with the flourishing of holidays likeValentine’s Day and nostalgic hobbies like scrapbooking.

Culturally speaking, love was in the air, and the union of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1840 only served to seal the deal. Though Victoria and Albert’s marriage was sanctioned by their royal families, it was also hailed as a true “love match,” cementing the new ideal of romantic partnership. Their nuptials also coincided with the proliferation of early print media, making the event visible to readers all across Europe and North America.

“With Victoria’s wedding, you had endless reporting and tons of illustrations,” Abbott says. “Between two and four weeks after Victoria was married, magazines reproduced every last aspect of her wedding. Queen Victoria chose orange blossoms for her wreath, and an elaborate, white dress with this ridiculously long train in the back, and every detail was sent across the ocean and read voraciously by women in ladies’ magazines. Her wedding became the model because everyone knew about it.” To this day, many stereotypical elements of American weddings are still drawn from Victoria’s, particularly the tradition of wearing a white dress.

by Hunter Oatman-Stanford, Collectors Weekly |  Read more:

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Doghouse Diaries
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Jonas Wood,  Shio Shrine, 2010
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Guy Harkness, Whangapoua Bach

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The Strange Mystery of the Cancer Anomaly

Here’s an interesting puzzle. The common conception is that your risk of cancer starts off small in early life and increases as you get older. So children and young people are less likely to develop the disease than somebody who is middle aged who in turn is less likely to develop cancer than a centenarian.

Not so. Epidemiologists have long known that the incidence of most cancers increases until it reaches a maximum at a certain age and then drops dramatically as people get older. The anomaly is well studied, found all over the world and true for many different types of cancer (see diagrams above).

That raises an important question: how come? After all, cancer is thought to start when a series of genetic alterations accumulate in a cell. These changes prevent ordinary cell functions such as DNA repair and so on and these malfunctions eventually trigger cancerous growth. Clearly, if these changes accumulate over time, the risk of developing the disease must also increase over time.

And therein lies the puzzle, one that has stumped oncologists and epidemiologists alike for years. What could possibly explain the discrepancy between the data and this entirely reasonable model of cancer development?

Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of James Brody a biomedical engineer at the University of California, Irvine. He shows that there is no discrepancy between the data and the model of cancer development provided that one additional assumption is true. This is that the population can be divided into two groups—one group that is susceptible to cancer and a much larger group that is not susceptible to cancer.

by Physics arXiv Blog |  Read more:

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The Hidden Technology That Makes Twitter Huge

Consider the tweet. It’s short—140 characters and done—but hardly simple. If you open one up and look inside, you’ll see a remarkable clockwork, with 31 publicly documented data fields. Why do these tweets, typically born of a stray impulse, need to carry all this data with them?

While a tweet thrives in its timeline, among the other tweets, it’s also designed to stand on its own, forever. Any tweet might show up embedded inside a million different websites. It may be called up and re-displayed years after posting. For all their supposed ephemerality, tweets have real staying power.

Once born, they’re alone and must find their own way to the world, like a just-hatched sea turtle crawling to the surf. Luckily they have all of the information they need in order to make it: A tweet knows the identity of its creator, whether bot or human, as well as the location from which it originated, the date and time it went out, and dozens of other little things—so that wherever it finds itself, the tweet can be reconstituted. Millennia from now an intelligence coming across a single tweet could, like an archaeologist pondering a chunk of ancient skull, deduce an entire culture.

Twitter’s Nov. 7 initial public offering marks the San Francisco-based company’s coming-out party, the moment when it graduates from its South of Market beginnings and takes its place as one of the Internet’s most valuable properties, without ever turning a profit. What’s perhaps most remarkable about Twitter’s rise is how little the service has evolved from the original core concept of the 140-character tweet—which is to say, not at all. It’s tempting to view tweeting as silly and trivial, and Twitter itself as overhyped and overvalued. But there’s some sophisticated, supple, and even revolutionary technology at work. Appreciating Twitter’s machinery is key to understanding how an idea so simple changed the way millions of people advertise their existences to the world.

by Paul Ford, Bloomberg Businessweek |  Read more:

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Rodrigo y Gabriela

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Duck Surf

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Orders of Grief

For weeks, nobody slept. On the first night after the shootings in December, Raul Arguello lay awake in his bed in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, listening to the sirens coming from the direction of his daughters’ school. His children, thank God, were warm and breathing under his roof, but the sirens reminded him that bodies—twenty of them first-­graders—were being taken from the building under the cover of darkness and brought somewhere, maybe the morgue. The next day, in their large, comfortable house on a high hill, Robert and Debora Accomando made meatballs and spaghetti sauce for all the families, feeling that it was the least they could do; one of the murdered boys had been on the same wrestling team as their son. Twenty minutes down the highway, in Waterbury, Lisa Brown was riveted to the cable news. Ten years earlier, her own daughter had died, suddenly, of an asthma attack, and now she felt the parents’ pain like a hole in her own heart. Lisa heard her daughter that first night telling her what to do: Raise $15,000 to buy a bronze angel, and donate it to the town in honor of the dead.

It was ten days before Christmas; the gift-giving ­season was in full swing. And so the outpouring began. The governor and the news crews came at once; the president arrived on Sunday. By the ­following Thursday, the town assessor, Christopher Kelsey, had an ­additional job, which was to sort, catalogue, and store all the stuff that well-wishers were sending, unbidden. The quantity was astonishing: 63,780 teddy bears by Good Friday; 636 boxes of toys; 2,200 boxes of school supplies. Backpacks, bicycles, and paper products, much of it tissues from Walmart. “Tissues seemed to be popular. There was a lot of crying going on. Tissues made sense.” Kelsey found a spare warehouse and, with the help of a crew from the Seventh-day Adventist church, led an army of sifters and sorters. Five hundred and eighty volunteers spent hour upon hour separating iTunes gift cards from Starbucks cards. Every item earmarked for the families went into huge, pallet-size boxes upon which victims’ family names were printed. Soto, Lewis, Barden, Hubbard. Books, cards, angels, Christmas-tree ornaments. Charm bracelets bearing a particular name.

Children have not been to school at Sandy Hook Elementary since the morning of December 14. The community recently voted to raze the school and erect a new one in its place—the demolition has begun—but this past December, it was where everyone wanted to be, and an enormous shrine grew up in the grassy space by the road, spreading down the main street and into the central intersection of Sandy Hook, by the Subway shop and the hair-cutting place, a seemingly boundless jumble of flowers and cards and signs and votive candles and more stuffed animals and more Christmas trees and more ornaments and angels. “Someone would put a teddy bear down, and all of a sudden there would be, I don’t know, twelve bouquets of flowers and a partridge in a pear tree,” David Brooker, a local artist, told me. A crew from out of town appeared one day with tents to erect atop the offerings, and Kelsey strung utility lights, so the constant pilgrims could at least see their way.

The residents of Sandy Hook were both overwhelmed by the world’s attention and infuriated by it. Shrines, news trucks, and tour buses filled with well-wishers clogged the town’s arteries so much the place became virtually unrecognizable. You couldn’t drive anywhere; you couldn’t park. The writer Renata Adler, who has lived in Newtown for 35 years, told me she got lost on the way to the post office.

“You’d pick up the phone,” says Patrick Kinney, a PR man on loan to manage the influx of offers, “and it might be a quilter in Appalachia” looking to donate a blanket she’d made with 26 appliquéd angels. “Or it might be Quincy Jones.” On the night of the shooting, Harry Connick Jr. drove to Newtown from wherever he was to keep company with the family of Ana Grace Márquez-Greene; her father, Jimmy, had played in Harry’s band. Giants receiver Victor Cruz paid a visit to the family of Jack Pinto, who had been buried in his Cruz jersey. James Taylor gave an invitation-only ­concert at a church in Bethel nearby; up front, as Taylor sang “Sweet Baby James,” sat the Mattiolis. James was the name of their 6-year-old son.

The goodwill of the world descended on Newtown, yet the people there received it in unequal measure. The Bethel church holds only 850, which in a town of 28,000 meant some who felt that the tragedy affected them were excluded from the concert. There were trips on Air Force One, but only for the family members who would lobby lawmakers for new gun laws; there were 4,000 free tickets to a July Yankees game, an amazing boon, but 4,000 is less than a fifth of the town. NASCAR memorialized the Sandy Hook victims with a special car at the Daytona 500, and the fire chief who had stayed outside Sandy Hook Elementary that morning had the honor of unveiling it, not the police chief, who had entered the school.

As grief settled on the town, so did money. Cash poured in from everywhere, arriving in envelopes addressed to no one. To Newtown. The town of Newtown. The families of Newtown. There were stories of cheerleaders, having sponsored fund-­raisers, walking around with $30,000 in their pockets. A guidance counselor at Newtown High School reportedly opened the mail to find $1,000 in cash. Around the country, people sold ribbons, bracelets, cupcakes, and sent in the proceeds, five and ten dollars at a time. The Davenport West honor society in Iowa sent in a check for $226.69, and the parents of a 3-year-old named Lillian sent $290.94, donations from her birthday party. According to the Connecticut attorney general, about $22 million has flooded the town since December 14, finding its way into about 70 different charities set up in the wake of the massacre. Very quickly, the matter of disbursing these funds became something else, a proxy fight over how to evaluate grief.

by Lisa Miller, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Christian Witkin

Eduardo Salles
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What Divides Democrats

New York–area voters had the opportunity this fall to cast their ballot for one of two Democrats who are divided by more than the Hudson River. Cory Booker, the Newark mayor, whom New Jersey’s electors sent to the U.S. Senate in October, and Bill de Blasio, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, personify two distinct futures for the Democratic Party.

Booker is a corporate Democrat—more precisely, a Wall Street and Silicon Valley Democrat—who praises the beneficent rich as sources of charitable giving and policy ideas that can lift the poor. De Blasio is an anti-corporate Democrat who condemns big business and the financial sector for using their wealth to rig the economy in their favor and at everyone else’s expense.

The divide between Booker and de Blasio matters because it defines the most fundamental fault line within the Democratic Party. Not so long ago, the Democrats generally agreed with one another on economics—hence the New Deal and Great Society—and fought with one another over foreign policy and the rights of minorities. Today, no national-security or social issue splits the party. Instead, economics now roils the Democrats. In 2016, the party’s presidential primaries will chiefly focus, as they have not in many decades, on the economic policy differences between candidates—that is, if there’s more than one candidate. If there’s only Hillary Clinton, her every economic utterance will be subjected to intense scrutiny.

The new Democratic comity on social issues culminates a 50-year transformation that began when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. As Southern whites fled the party, Democrats welcomed socially liberal financial elites who had rejected the GOP’s rightward turn on racial and gender issues. This mix of Wall Street bankers and high-tech entrepreneurs has become a major source of Democratic funding. Their perspectives have dominated the party’s economic policies, beginning with former Goldman Sachs CEO Robert Rubin’s tenure as Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary and continuing through the Obama presidency with such protégés as Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. During Clinton’s presidency, Rubin et al. deregulated the financial industry and crafted free-trade accords that decimated American manufacturing. The dot-com boom and low unemployment levels of the late 1990s convinced the Rubinistas that they had found the key to generating good jobs in a nation that had been losing them for at least 25 years.

The crash of 2008 consigned the Rubin model of prosperity to the rubble. Nonetheless, his acolytes were installed in the key economic policy positions in the Obama administration, where they sought, with some success, to mitigate the wave of regulation that followed the financial panic. Their resistance to stricter oversight and the greater emphasis they placed on protecting banks than on protecting homeowners upset congressional liberals. Most progressives, though, were generally unwilling to go public with their criticism until after Barack Obama won re-election. That constraint removed, this summer they successfully blocked the president’s expected appointment of Summers to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve.

These intraparty tensions will shape the contours of the 2016 presidential contest. Should Hillary Clinton seek the party’s nomination, she will have to decide whether, or to what extent, she should break with the economic policies and policymakers that held sway in her husband’s and Obama’s administrations. If she chooses not to run, the fight for the nomination will likely feature candidates identified either with the more populist and regulatory side of the party (Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, say) or with its more centrist and corporate side (Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, say). Whatever occurs, Wall Street’s role in the Democratic Party—a fait accompli for the past two decades, albeit one that Democrats seldom advertised—will be up for debate.

by Harold Meyerson, American Prospect |  Read more:

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Hannah Höch, Liebe (1931) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
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Lost in the Funhouse

Lolita contains, to a greater degree than most novels, a built-in awareness of the problems inherent in its own interpretation. The narrative is surrounded by several framing devices, the first a foreword from the novel’s ostensible editor, a vaguely ludicrous individual identifying himself as “John Ray, Jr., PhD” who purports to transmit Humbert’s story. J.R. Jr, a psychologist, dispenses questionable facts and platitudes and admits Humbert’s “moral leprosy”, while defending the narrative as “a great work of art”. In addition, we have Nabokov’s own commentary “On a Book Entitled Lolita”, originally written for the Anchor Review, which subsequently became an afterword to the book we read today. It is a strange, impressive and sometimes contradictory piece of work, seeming to swat away any foolish anxieties and misconceptions the reader may have with an arrogant wave of the hand as Nabokov defends the aesthetic function of fiction and declares morality to be irrelevant in art: “no writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual”. He claims that the novel is “fantastic and personal” and argues that “it is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information ... about the author”, but still makes sure to put some distance between himself and the narrator, assuring the reader that “there are many things” in which he disagrees with Humbert.

This pseudo-critical apparatus and defensive, distancing posturing cannot simply be put down to the prudery of an earlier time. Humbert Humbert is one of the trickiest narrators in all of literature, and the reader who opens the first chapter of Lolita will immediately be faced with his complicated wordplay:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

The magnificent opening passage contains the book’s technique in microcosm: the masterful prose style, with its elegant variations and irresistible alliterative lilt; the contrast between lyrical sensuousness and precise detail; the skilful implication of the reader in the story’s telling (try reading this passage without saying the name yourself); and the stealthy way in which disturbing, creepy hints (loins? four foot ten? school?) are threaded throughout the perfectly crafted sentences.

Not the least of the tricky questions facing the reader is this: what type of book is Lolita exactly? Is it a “poignant personal study”, as J.R. Jr promises us? We are teased at the outset with the prospect of a neat Freudian unresolved-childhood-issue case study as Humbert reminisces over his unconsummated love for a doomed childhood sweetheart (the origin, he claims, of his obsession with “nymphets”). Humbert refers to the narrative as his “sinister memoir”, and the book begins with pseudo-autobiographical reminiscences about his French childhood, but the odd glimpses of dark humour strike a different tone: “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.” Boyd observes that the book is structured as an inverted detective story: Humbert confesses to being a murderer in the opening pages – “you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” – and the suspense of the plot consists in identifying his victim.

Is the novel perhaps a satire on bourgeois American values, as we might begin to suspect during the comic fish-out-of-water situation that develops when reserved European Humbert unexpectedly finds himself lodging with a suburban New England mother and her prepubescent daughter? Much of the first third of the book is a very dark and very nasty joke at the expense of Dolores/Lolita’s mother, the unsuspecting and hopelessly aspirational Charlotte, described as “the rather ridiculous, though rather handsome Mrs. Haze, with her blind faith in the wisdom of her church and book club” (words which also hint at Nabokov’s contempt for bad or lazy readers). Indeed Charlotte fails utterly to “read” Humbert’s designs and soon we find him suffering his way through a sham marriage, contemplating murder in the midst of home improvements and dinner parties while the real object of his lust is away at summer camp (it is Humbert’s great success as a narrator that he portrays himself as a helpless victim “on the rack of joy” and manages to make his dilemma amusing and even sympathetic). Another freak accident – Charlotte runs in front of a car after reading Humbert’s shocking diary entries, an early sign of the powerful relationship between words and action that Nabokov would soon explore further in Pale Fire – leaves the narrator’s new wife dead and the road to realisation of his evil designs free of obstacles.

Humbert now finds himself as his stepdaughter’s sole guardian, and takes full advantage. After bringing her from camp to a hotel, another convenient twist of fate saves him from having to take responsibility for his plans. He insists that “it was she who seduced me” and in another uncomfortable inversion, portrays his child victim as his corruptor: “Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first lover.” The following portion of the book takes the form of a depraved road trip, as Humbert spends his days in “guilty locomotion” and enjoys his newfound power in a series of motels. The couple’s relationship oscillates between one of co-conspirators – Bonnie and Clyde on the run from the law – and one of terrorist and hostage. Their “extensive travels all over the States” could be read as a dark reflection of the classic American road narrative and their “wild journey” a sinister counterpoint to Kerouac’s On the Road, written and published more or less contemporaneously with Lolita. Humbert’s grip on reality seems to loosen here as his prose stretches into rhapsodic reveries and ecstatically aestheticised paeans to the “quick-silverish water and harsh green corn”, the “mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream ...”

Humbert, showing a creepily fastidious concern for his captive’s “formal education”, eventually decides to settle in a small college town where Lolita can return to school. There is more queasy domestic comedy here as Humbert plays the dual roles of jealous lover and disapproving dad struggling to prevent his increasingly assertive “daughter” from going on dates and taking part in the school play. Soon they decide to hit the road again, and this is where the plot really thickens; the novel mutates into an extended paranoid chase scene as obsessive, gun-toting Humbert, whose lust has by now deepened into an obsessive and doomed urge for control (Martin Amis described the novel as “a study in tyranny”), starts to become aware of a mysterious presence trailing, tracking and perhaps even pre-empting his movements. We sense that we may be leaving the expected confines of the realist novel here, and several questions begin to present themselves. Who is the enigmatic playwright Quilty, and why does he seem to have an almost supernatural status in the plot? Is Lolita making a break for her own freedom, or is this all the work of Quilty, who may be even more malign and depraved than Humbert? What do we make of the metafictional hints dotted here and there, and why does our narrator feel that he is a character in “the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty”? And why is Quilty in league with the enigmatically (and anagrammatically) named Vivian Darkbloom? As the mirror imagery multiplies and Lolita’s world fractures, we realise we have wandered into the centre of the funhouse.

by Tim Groenland, DRB | Read more:
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David Alan Harvey, Trinidad’s Folkloric Ballet 
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Ramblin' Man

If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium -- the title of a 1969 romantic comedy -- could now fit two intertwined phenomena: the madcap global travels of Secretary of State John Kerry and the nonstop journey of the latest revelations from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. In mid-August, there was Kerry in Brazil, lamely defending the NSA’s surveillance program, even as he tried to pacify local ire over reports that the agency was monitoring phone calls and emails on a mass scale there. (And this was before the news even broke that the NSA had hacked into President Dilma Rousseff’s emails and spied on Brazil’s major oil company.) “We're not surprised and we're not upset that Brazil would ask questions. Absolutely understandable," Kerry said at the time. “Brazil is owed answers with respect to those questions and they will get them. And we will work together very positively to make certain that this question -- these issues -- do not get in the way of all the other things that we talked about.” As it happened, no answers were forthcoming. A month later, Rousseff would cancel a long-planned visit to Washington and denounce the NSA’s spying at the U.N.

Skip two months to late October, and there Kerry was again, this time in France trying to pacify an angry ally over another revelation of a massive NSA eavesdropping operation. (“We will have ongoing bilateral consultations, including with our French partners, to address this question of any reports by the U.S. government gathering information from some of the agencies and those consultations are going to continue.”) Meanwhile, he was still trying to defend that agency's basic program in similarly foggy language. (“Protecting the security of our citizens in today's world is a very complicated, very challenging task... because there are lots of people out there seeking to do harm to other people.”) And then, in a no-rest-for-the-weary world, on he went to Italy, whose population had just been outed as the latest victim of NSA spying, and whose foreign minister was demanding “clarity” on the issue. With much of Europe up in arms over America’s expanding global security state, he once again resorted to his rope-a-dope technique, taking the local punches while offering public pabulum about our dearest allies and how much the Obama administration cares for them and how Americans nonetheless have to be protected from the evil doers, etc., etc. Only as October ended, two and a half months after his Brazilian trip, did the secretary of state become the first Obama administration official to admit that "in some cases, some of these actions have reached too far."

By now, Kerry’s act had all the charm of a clown fireman putting out a blaze at a circus only to set himself on fire. If this repetitive scene, in which the Snowden revelations stay just ahead of the eternally globetrotting secretary of state, doesn’t quite add up to a real life version of Batman and Robin, the dynamic duo, it still has to be the spectacle of 2013. Given the recent Guardian report that the NSA has listened in on at least 35 heads of state (and that’s only phone calls, not emails), Kerry could be an even busier man in the months to come. As TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren, former State Department whistleblower and author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, points out, Kerry’s already legendary global travels are matched by a legendary cluelessness that reflects a particularly twenty-first-century Washington state of mind.

by Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch | Read more:
Image: Aamir Qureshi/AFP via Getty Images/ Bloomberg

Optimists Beware!

Geoengineering – the idea of using a range of technological approaches to manipulate the Earth’s climate – is a contentious subject. So contentious in fact, that up until 2006 when the Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen published an article advocating research in this area, the topic was almost taboo.

This has all changed, and Clive Hamilton’s new book Earthmasters is the latest in a recent spate of academic and popular texts exploring the issue, including Eli Kintisch’s ‘Hack the Planet’, Jeff Goodell’s, ‘How to Cool the Planet’ and James Fleming’s ‘Fixing the Sky’ . This flurry of activity leaves one with the uncomfortable sensation that if the old adage ‘all publicity is good publicity’ has any grain of truth to it, these books (critical or otherwise) are all contributing in their own way to normalising a subject which really might have been better off left on the fringes. Perhaps it was taboo for good reason. But then, as others have observed, it’s a bit late to attempt to close Pandora’s box now: the debates around geoengineering aren’t going to go away, better therefore that critical voices are at least added to the mix. (...)

For those unfamiliar with the array of technological approaches currently labelled as geoengineering, Hamilton’s overview is a good place to start. Geoengineering approaches are typically categorised according to whether they attempt to reduce the greenhouse effect by removing carbon from the atmosphere (Carbon dioxide Removal methods), or whether they attempt to cool the planet directly by reflecting the Sun’s radiation back out to space (Solar Radiation Management methods, SRM). Dedicating a chapter to each of these categories, he describes the principles underlying the proposed functioning of each method, the suggested potential for either carbon dioxide removal, or (in the case of SRM methods) temperature reduction, the many practical/technical challenges each would face, and the complexities, uncertainties and ignorance that surround them. His summary provides an excellent counter-weight to any sense that these technologies might offer a simple way out of our climate predicament.

For example, ocean iron fertilization is premised on the idea that introducing iron dust into the oceans where it is currently lacking would stimulate plankton growth, which would absorb carbon dioxide, some of which would end up sequestered in the deep ocean. Hamilton draws attention to the limits of the technique: it seems there are only a limited number of ocean zones in which the technique might work (even in theory), and a full-scale iron fertilization deployment would need to cover one third of the surface of the southern ocean, and would only serve as a sink for one tenth of the world’s current excess carbon dioxide emissions – if it worked. Massive levels of uncertainty also surround the possible unintended consequences of the technique, particularly the issue of ‘macronutrient stealing’ which might result in biological productivity falling in other areas of the ocean.

In the SRM category, a prominent suggested method is the idea of spraying sulphate particles into the upper atmosphere. This is based on observations of the effects of particulates released by volcanoes, it assumes particles will act as a solar filter, blocking some solar radiation and, so theory goes, return the Earth’s temperature to pre-industrial levels. Again Hamilton does a good job of highlighting the huge levels of uncertainty that surround the idea, and the likelihood of unanticipated effects particularly on rainfall patterns. For example there is some modelling evidence that the Indian Monsoon might be seriously disrupted (p. 64), or that rainfall over the Amazon might decline by around 20%. His persuasive conclusion is that ‘trying to estimate the combined influence of warming and SRM (along with anti-pollution measures) is little more than educated guesswork’ (p.65). There are many objections to sulphate aerosol spraying: the ignorance about effects; the many potential geopolitical issues; the so-called ‘termination effect’ (whereby temperatures would increase rapidly if an SRM intervention were started and then stopped), to name but a few. But what Hamilton calls the ‘killer objection’ is the fact that it cannot be tested without full-scale implementation (p.67). Smaller scale tests would reveal almost nothing about the possible effects of full-scale deployment. So essentially at the point at which it would be deployed, sulphate aerosol injection would always be a gamble on an unprecedented scale.

Many of the issues raised by Hamilton are well covered elsewhere, but a particular strength of these chapters is the way in which he brings to the fore the issue of the enormous scale of the infrastructures that would be required to deploy any of these techniques. This dimension, particularly with regard to proposed carbon dioxide removal methods is often glossed over in the existing literature. He touches upon the phenomenon referred to by social scientists as ‘lock- in’, whereby physical infrastructures, institutions, and political and economic commitments often result in large technological systems becoming resistant to change even if negative impacts or inefficiencies are discovered (nuclear energy and reprocessing being an oft cited case). He also highlights the perversity of the idea of constructing such an immense industrial infrastructure to deal with the carbon emissions, when we could just stop burning fossil fuels from the immense industrial infrastructures we have already built (p.50).

Given that geoengineering represents an attempt to address the symptoms of a problem (climate change) without any effort to address the causes of that problem (unsustainable development patterns), and therefore does not require any of the more fundamental shifts that climate campaigners have long called for, it is unsurprising that these ideas have found enthusiastic advocates among certain free market ideologues. Indeed, Hamilton argues that ‘geoengineering is an essentially conservative technology’ (p. 120), appealing to those to whom any infringement of economic freedoms is anathema.

by Rose Cairns, BRB | Read more:
Image: Wikimedia Commons, CC Share Alike License