From sunshades to man-made sulphur-shooting volcanoes, schemes to save the planet are under a microscope

Seth Borenstein
Sun

WASHINGTON — Crazy-sounding ideas for saving the planet are getting a serious look from top scientists.

There’s the man-made volcano that shoots sulphur high into the air. The “sun shade” made of trillions of little reflectors placed in space between Earth and the sun, slightly lowering the planet’s temperature. The forest of ugly artificial “trees” that suck carbon dioxide out of the air. And the “Geritol solution” in which iron dust is dumped into the ocean.

“Of course it’s desperation,” said Stanford University professor Stephen Schneider. “It’s planetary methadone for our planetary heroin addiction. It does come out of the pessimism of any realist that says this planet can’t be trusted to do the right thing.”

NASA has mapped out rough details of the sun shade concept. One of the premier climate modelling centres in the United States, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has spent run computer simulations of the man-made volcano scenario and will soon turn its attention to the space umbrella idea.

Last month, billionaire Richard Branson offered a $25-million prize to the first feasible technology to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the air.

The proposals, which represent a field called geoengineering, have been characterized as anywhere from “great” to “idiotic,” says one NASA researcher.

These approaches are not an alternative to cutting pollution, said University of Calgary professor David Keith, a top geoengineering researcher. Some scientists have worried that such schemes might distract attention from reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Here is a look at some of the ideas:

THE GERITOL SOLUTION

Planktos Inc. of Foster City, Calif., last week launched its ship, the Weatherbird II, on a trip to the Pacific Ocean to dump 50 tons of iron dust. The iron should grow plankton, part of an algae bloom that will drink up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The idea of seeding the ocean with iron to beef up a natural plankton and algae system has been tried on a smaller scale several times since 1990. It has both succeeded and failed.

Small experiments “showed unequivocally that there was a biological response to the addition of the iron,” said an international climate report released in 2001. Plankton uses the iron to photosynthesize, extract greenhouse gases from the air, and grow rapidly. It forms a thick green soup of all sorts of carbon dioxide-sucking algae, which sea life feast on, and the carbon drops into the ocean.

However, the climate report also cautioned there could be ecological consequences. For example, large-scale ocean seeding could change the crucial temperature difference between the sea surface and deeper waters and have a dramatic effect on marine life globally.

Russ George, CEO of Planktos, doesn’t want his plan lumped in with geoengineering. He says his company is just trying to restore the ocean to “a more ecologically normal and balanced state.”

“We’re a green solution,” George said.

Planktos officials say that for every ton of iron used, 100,000 tons of carbon will be pulled into the ocean. Eventually, if this first large-scale test works, George hopes to remove three billion tons of carbon from the Earth’s atmosphere.

Planktos’ efforts are financed by companies and individuals who buy carbon credits to offset their use of fossil fuels.

MAN-MADE VOLCANO

When Mount Pinatubo erupted 16 years ago in the Philippines it cooled the Earth for about a year because the sulphate particles in the upper atmosphere reflected some sunlight.

Several leading scientists have proposed doing the same artificially to offset global warming.

Using jet engines, cannons or balloons to get sulphates in the air, humans could reduce the solar heat, and only increase current sulphur pollution by a small percentage, said Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

“It’s an issue of the lesser of two evils,” he said.

The results of an NCAR climate model using this method — which involves injecting tens of thousands of tons of sulphate into the atmosphere each month — weren’t cheap or promising.

“From a practical point of view, it’s completely ridiculous,” said NCAR scientist Caspar Amman. “Instead of investing so much into this, it would be much easier to cut down on the initial problem.”

Both this technique and the solar umbrella would reduce heating but wouldn’t reduce carbon dioxide. So they wouldn’t counter a side effect of global warming, a dramatic increase in the acidity of the world’s oceans, which harms sea life, especially coral reefs.

Despite that, Calgary’s David Keith is working on tweaking the concept. He wants to find a more efficient chemical to inject into the atmosphere in case of emergency.

SOLAR UMBRELLA

Last fall, University of Arizona astronomer Roger Angel proposed what he called a “sun shade.” It would be a cloud of small Frisbee-like spaceships that go between Earth and the sun and act as an umbrella, reducing heat from the sun.

“It really is just like turning down the knob by two per cent of what’s coming from the sun,” he said.

The nearly flat discs would each weigh less than 30 grams and measure about a metre wide with three tab-like “ears” — controllers sticking out just a few centimetres. Rockets would be used to deploy them in space.

About 800,000 of the discs would be stacked into each rocket launch. It would take 16 trillion of them — that’s 16 million million — so there would be 20 million launches of rockets.

It would cost at least $4 trillion over 30 years.

“I compare it with sending men to Mars. I think they’re both projects on the same scale,” Angel said. “Given the danger to Earth, I think this project might warrant some fraction of the consideration of sending people to Mars.”

ARTIFICIAL TREES

Scientifically, it’s known as “air capture.” But the instruments being used have been dubbed “artificial trees” — even though these devices are about as tree like as a radiator on a stick. They are designed to mimic the role of trees in using carbon dioxide, but early renderings show them looking more like the creation of a tinkering engineer with lots of steel.

Nearly a decade ago, Columbia University professor Klaus Lackner, hit on an idea for his then-middle school daughter’s science fair project: Create air filters that grab carbon dioxide from the air using chemical absorbers and then compress the carbon dioxide into a liquid or compressed gas that can be shipped elsewhere. When his daughter was able to do it on a tiny scale, Lackner decided to look at doing it globally.

Newly inspired by the $25 million prize offered by Richard Branson, Lackner wants to develop a large filter that would absorb carbon dioxide from the air.

Another chemical reaction would take the carbon from the absorbent material, and then a third process would change that greenhouse gas into a form that could be disposed of.

It would take wind and a lot of energy to power the air capture devices.

They would reach about 60 metres high with various-sized square filters at the top. Lackner envisions perhaps placing 100,000 of them near wind energy turbines.

A filter the size of a television could remove about 25 tons of carbon dioxide a year, which is about how much one American produces annually, Lackner said. The captured carbon dioxide would be changed into a liquid or gas that can be piped away from the air capture devices.

Disposal might be the biggest cost, Lackner said.

Disposal of carbon dioxide, including that from fossil fuel plant emissions, is a major issue of scientific and technological research called sequestration. The idea is to bury it underground, often in old oil wells or deep below the sea floor. The U.S. government, which doesn’t like many geoengineering ideas, is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on carbon sequestration, but mostly for power plant emissions.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

As rural areas decline, B.C. has become the most urban province in Canada

Frances Bula, with files from Peter O’Neil
Sun

We think of ourselves as living in a province of forests and fish, mines and ranches, with towns and cities to match.

But we’re really city and suburban people surrounded by mostly empty mountains, according to the census snapshot from Statistics Canada.

B.C., which has broken the four-million mark in population, is the most urban province in the country, according to the 2006 census statistics released Tuesday.

Only 15 per cent of its population now lives in rural areas, and residents are draining steadily away from the former thriving resource towns of the northwestern B.C. and the central coast.

The province has grown by 5.3 per cent, thanks mainly to immigrants from outside Canada, since B.C. has the lowest birthrate in the country.

However, those immigrants, along with younger people from the declining northern towns, are going almost exclusively to B.C.’s growing urban regions, with places like Kelowna and Abbotsford among the fastest-growing cities in the country.

The result is that most of the people in this huge province are increasingly shoehorned into a few valleys along major highways: The Greater Vancouver region, which has now gone over the two-million mark, the Central Okanagan, and the Vancouver Island east coast from Victoria to Nanaimo.

The Yamashitas of Terrace see that story played out in their family.

Their ancestors came to B.C. at the turn of the century, settling in Port Essington near Prince Rupert with other Japanese immigrants to fish the Skeena River.

Tosh Yamashita, a child of the post-war generation, worked in Terrace as a planner for the past 25 years.

Now, his three boys, all in their 20s, are living in the Vancouver region: Jason is studying law; Kasel is working at a lumberyard; and Kory, the youngest, is finishing his engineering degree.

Only Kory plans to return, wanting to live where the traffic and house prices are reasonable and where he knows everyone in town.

But he’s an anomaly, says his brother.

“People don’t go back because there’s no jobs there. The pulp mill is suffering, the sawmill is closed,” says Jason, now 28. “The vast majority of my graduating class is in Prince George, Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Toronto.”

That’s a story being told throughout the north, with Kitimat, Prince Rupert, Quesnel, Terrace and Williams Lake showing the biggest population losses of all mid-size cities in Canada.

University of B.C. geography professor David Ley says that north-south divide in B.C. is the most striking story in the statistics.

“This is quite a novel demographic moment,” said Ley, noting that cities have seen striking changes, with Prince Rupert losing 12 per cent of its population and Kelowna gaining 10 per cent.

“These are big numbers in a very short time. It does tell a tale about job loss in the resource industry. There’s quite an inequality between the two regions.”

One area of northern B.C. that is bucking the trend is the northeast corner, where population grew slightly because of jobs in the oil industry. That likely helped, in part, reverse the trend that showed up in the 2001 census, which saw B.C. losing population to other parts of the country.

This time, B.C. went back to its traditional pattern of attracting people from other provinces.

The trend of population movement toward cities is prevalent across Canada.

Canada’s six largest cities — Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa-Gatineau, Calgary and Edmonton — are home to 14.1 million people, or 45 per cent of the total population.

Just over two-thirds (68 per cent) of the population lives in Canada’s 33 census metropolitan areas.

But B.C. is slightly more urbanized than the national trend, with 85.4 per cent of people living in urban areas here compared to an 80-per-cent average for the country.

That’s likely due to the province’s geography, economic context and its immigration pattern, experts suggest.

B.C. is more dependent on overseas immigrants than any other part of the country, says Ryan Berlin, an analyst with the Urban Futures Institute.

“We’re not seeing immigrant families going straight to Kitimat,” said Berlin. Instead, they are clustering in particular sectors of the Lower Mainland.

Statistics Canada noted that “between 2001 and 2006, an average of 25,000 immigrants a year settled in the Vancouver area. Because of international immigration, Vancouver continued to experience a higher population growth rate than the provincial average in the 2001 to 2006 period (6.5 per cent versus 5.3 per cent).”

As well, B.C.’s mountains produce a different population distribution.

People here aren’t spread out on the kind of farmland that southern Ontario or the Prairies have.

“We are seeing all the growth being concentrated along the Trans-Canada Highway corridor and the Island Highway,” says Berlin.

Finally, rural cities and towns have always been more dependent on the fluctuations of the resource industry, rising and falling with the ups and downs of mining, forestry, fish and oil.

The northeast sector is booming now. “But if oil falls back down to $30 a barrel, there’ll be an exodus,” said Berlin.

The Greater Vancouver region saw 6.5-per-cent growth, lower than in Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto, but higher than the national average.

Its growth was uneven, however, with suburbs like Port Moody and Surrey gaining population at Calgary-like rates, while others — Delta, West Vancouver, Langley city, Coquitlam, and North Vancouver — showed little or no growth.

Like the province, its growth is shaped by its geography and transportation lines.

“The urban spread in Vancouver is uniquely influenced by our terrain and the SkyTrain and West Coast Express,” said Jerry Page, the director for Statistics Canada’s western region.

B.C. GAINERS

Biggest gainers in actual population

2006 2001 Change % change

Surrey 394,976 347,820 47,156 13.6%

Vancouver 578,041 545,671 32,370 5.9%

Kelowna 106,707 96,288 10,419 10.8%

Richmond 174,461 164,345 10,116 6.2%

Burnaby 202,799 193,954 8,845 4.6%

Abbotsford 123,864 115,494 8,370 7.2%

Langley 93,726 86,896 6,830 7.9%

Chilliwack 69,217 62,567 6,650 10.6%

Maple Ridge 68,949 63,169 5,780 9.2%

Nanaimo 78,692 73,000 5,692 7.8%

B.C. DECLINERS

Biggest decliners in actual population

2006 2001 Change % change

Prince Rupert 12,815 14,643 -1,828 -12.5%

Prince George 70,981 72,406 -1,425 -2.0%

Kitimat 8,987 10,285 -1,298 -12.6%

Terrace 11,320 12,109 -789 -6.5%

Port Hardy 3,822 4,574 -752 -16.4%

Quesnel 9,326 10,044 -718 -7.1%

Mackenzie 4,539 5,206 -667 -12.8%

Fort St. James 1,355 1,927 -572 -29.7%

Lillooet 2,324 2,741 -417 -15.2%

Houston 3,163 3,577 -414 -11.6%

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

Paul Luke
Province

Yankee, please don’t go home.

Canadian hotels will emerge from red ink this year but will continue struggling with a drop in U.S. visitors, the Conference Board of Canada says.

The industry will make a modest profit of $236 million this year, bouncing back from a loss of $87 million in 2006, the board said yesterday.

“Most of the improvement in profitability will be the result of growth in demand for travel both by Canadians and by foreigners travelling to Canada,” the board said.

But profit margins will remain thin this year and profits will shrink in 2008 as U.S. passport requirements expand to cover anyone travelling to or from the U.S. by land or sea, the board said.

Stephen Pearce, Tourism Vancouver’s leisure travel vice-president, said the U.S. and Japanese markets will remain challenging for the Greater Vancouver industry this year.

U.S. and Japanese overnight visits are expected to fall by one per cent each in 2007, Pearce said.

The strong loon has hurt Canada in those markets, coupled with U.S. passport rules and growing Japanese interest in Asian destinations, Pearce said.

Canada is losing its share of outbound U.S. business because it is being outgunned by other global destinations willing to spend more on marketing, Pearce said.

Still, overnight visits in the Vancouver area should grow by two per cent this year, thanks to strength in the Canadian, Chinese and Mexican markets, Pearce said.

“It’s reasonable to think we’re going to be capitalizing on interest in the Olympics a little sooner than we thought originally,” Pearce said.

Last year, Greater Vancouver posted 8.7 million overnight visits, up from 8.6 million in 2005.

In a vote of confidence in Vancouver, Los Angeles-based Kor Hotel Group said yesterday it will soon launch the $35-million Loden, the first new hotel in downtown Vancouver in five years. The 14-storey, 130-room hotel in Coal Harbour opens in late summer.

© The Vancouver Province 2007