FIXING THINGS

Dick Pountain/08 September 2006/12:30/Idealog 146

I've always enjoyed dismantling things, even when I couldn't fix them (I'm typing this with burned thumb from failing to solder the lid back on a Moroccan teapot). As a child I used to dismantle broken clocks and watches, and far from fixing them would be unable to get all the bits back together again. In adulthood, carburettors have sometimes provided a similarly sobering experience. In our relentlessly boosterish, positive-thinking culture, such an admission won't be admired: "don't boast about failures, don't be a Loser...". But I've actually come to value such experiences, because they teach you something important about the world, namely that though you can control and subdue some parts of it, there remain parts that are complex beyond your competence and best left alone.

We're living through times when this lesson really needs to be learned fast, by everyone from scientists to politicians to mere citizens. The successes of our current technological revolution are so impressive that they induce hubris, that feeling that we've totally cracked it, that we now control nature. A rather striking example came up recently when Nobel-prize winner Paul Crutzen suggested an ingenious solution to global warming. Crutzen won the 1995 chemistry prize for working out how the ozone layer is formed and destroyed, so he knows an awful  lot about atmospheric chemistry. His solution is to artificially inject sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere using rockets, balloons or even huge artillery shells. Released at 10km high the sulphur dioxide would be oxidised to tiny sulphate particles that form an opaque white cloud that reflects sunlight back into space - the mechanism via which past volcanic eruptions, like Tambora in 1815, have caused 'global winters'. If the right amount of sulphur dioxide is injected (Crutzen estimates 5 tonnes per year) it could be made to exactly counteract the greenhouse warming due to increasing carbon dioxide levels. This is a fiendishly cunning technical fix, and it would probably work, up to a point.

The problem is that planet Earth's climate system is even more fiendishly complex, and so as George Monbiot pointed out in a recent Guardian leader, the scheme has several downsides. Minor ones are that it might make the sky white, and slightly reduce the thickness of the ozone layer. A bigger one is that atmospheric sulphates can act as switches for patterns of rainfall. Various papers in journals of climatology and geophysics suggest that the droughts that caused famine across North Africa in the 1970s and 80s may have been in part the result of airborne sulphate pollution from European and North American industry (it works by lowering sea-surface temperatures and reducing evaporation). In other words, here's a broken clock that Crutzen is proposing to dismantle without any surety that we can put it back together: his solution might achieve the objective of stabilising average temperatures at the cost of disrupting rainfall patterns all over the world. And despite all our advanced technology, we still ultimately depend on plant foods that are watered by rain: Kurt Vonnegut's Chicken Little is not yet on the menu.

 Then a lecture Stephen Hawking gave in Hong Kong caught my eye, where he repeated a claim he made after 9/11 that the human race won't survive another thousand years unless it colonises other planets: "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of." Hawking knows a lot about maths and astrophysics, but not it would seem about biology. The human race is intimately linked to many other lifeforms on this planet, and frankly the chance of us en masse colonising a lump of rock without an atmosphere or liquid water are about the same as a snowball's chance of colonising a bonfire. Very clever people throughout history repeatedly fall for this fallacy, that mind is all-powerful and matter is dumb and can be dominated or ignored. The problem is, such fantasies offer the greedy and the lazy an excuse to carry on ruining this planet (which so far as we *know*, rather than speculate, is the only place life has ever existed) in the expectation of getting a new one.

A third, heart-breaking story arrived in today's Guardian. Doctors have communicated with a 23-year-old woman who's in a vegetative state after suffering terrible brain damage in a traffic accident. Cambridge researchers repeatedly asked the patient to imagine playing tennis or walking into the next room, while using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor her brain activity. There was indeed activity in her pre-motor cortex: her mind was still alive and rehearsing moving her limbs in a tennis game, exactly like healthy volunteers asked to imagine the same task...

Our minds are as intimately entangled with our bodies as our species is entangled with the rest of life on this planet, not in any mystical way but grossly and physically. While science and technology are extraordinarily powerful and can affect, sometimes even control, certain of the forces of nature, never forget that the systems we're embedded in - the weather and even our own bodies - are still way more complex than our understanding of them.