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Solar power is great for converting light energy into electricity. But what about harnessing light energy directly? After all, photons—discrete packets of light energy—exert force themselves, albeit on a pretty small scale.

In a new study, a team of researchers from Yale University and the University of Washington reports doing just that, also on a pretty small scale—vibrating a tiny mechanical object physically by shining light through it. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO

Light-powered mechanics could form the basis for nanoscale components such as switches and routers, all operating off the grid, so to speak. “We can use light force to replace electrostatic force,” says Hong Tang, an assistant professor at Yale’s School of Engineering & Applied Science and co-author of the study published today in Nature. “You don’t need to apply voltage, you just need to pass light through it.”

The group’s experimental setup confines laser light in an on-chip silicon waveguide. The waveguide routes the light through a narrow section, 10 microns in length and just 110 nanometers thick, that resonates ever so slightly as the light passes through. (A micron is a millionth of a meter; a nanometer is a billionth of a meter.) “It’s a little bridge, a nanomechanical resonator,” Tang says. “It’s the simplest resonator you can find.”http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG

Other approaches that have harnessed the force of light have primarily exploited the so-called radiation pressure force, a sort of direct hit that occurs when photons strike an object. But Tang’s team was able to move its resonator in a direction transverse, or crosswise, to the light’s path, using an effect called optical gradient forces. In other words, the horizontal flow of light through the resonator induces it to vibrate up and down. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET

Those vibrations are so tiny that Tang and his colleagues used a second laser to detect the motion. “When we talk about nanomachines, we cannot think of this nanomachine like it’s your hand moving around or some tools moving around—that’s the wrong picture,” Tang says. “Because they are small, the motion has to be small, too.” http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US

Tang calls this demonstration a proof of principle, adding that his group will seek to increase the frequency of the vibrations by more than 100 times. In this study, the bridge’s resonant frequency was in the neighborhood of 10 megahertz, or millions of cycles per second. Tang would like to be able to get a similar device vibrating at much higher speeds, above the gigahertz range—in the billions of cycles per second. http://LOUIS1J1SHEEHAN1ESQUIRE.US

Some observers see a bright future for such light-induced motion. “With this work, optical trapping ‘grows up,’” says Naomi Halas, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and of chemistry at Rice University. “Optical trapping has been so important in enabling new research approaches in atomic physics and biophysics, but with this work it gets implemented on a silicon chip, where it is clear … that it will prove to be a valuable approach in many technological applications.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

[PDF] IN THE SUPREME COURT OF PENNSYLVANIA MIDDLE DISTRICT LOUIS J …

While at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual meeting last month, I and several other writers toured northwest Vermont’s dairy land, home to many family-owned and -operated farms. Some enterprises milk as few as a dozen cows. Others handle more than 50 times that many. A number of the farms specialize in organic milk and specialty cheeses. Others deliver large quantities of typical supermarket milk. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US

All of these dairying operations have at least one thing in common: a challenge making ends meet. The reason, according to several farmers and an agriculture economist we spoke with, is that dairy products are just too cheap. The stagnant commodity price for milk in the United States makes it hard for dairy farmers to earn a living wage.
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SAY CHEESE. The 8,000 gallons of milk produced each day on this farm goes to make a nationally marketed cheddar cheese.© 2006 J. Raloff

The Blue Spruce Farm in Bridport is a prime example. It has 2,000 Holsteins and Jerseys and milks about half that number at any given time (the rest are calves, a few bulls, and cows that aren’t lactating).

Eugene and Marie Audet, Eugene’s parents, his two younger brothers and their wives, and all of their children pitch in to work a 2,200-acre farm every day, year-in and year-out. They send 8,000 gallons of milk daily to nearby Montpelier, where Cabot Creamery makes it into cheddar cheese. How much the Audets receive for their milk varies according to vagaries of the marketplace.

Unfortunately, observes Marie Audet, Eugene’s wife, the wholesale price of milk hasn’t changed in 25 years. Traded in 100-pound units known as hundredweights, milk has sold since 1980 in the narrow range of $11 to $14. Farmers receive only 28 percent of the product’s retail price; most of the money goes to wholesalers and retailers (see Milk Money).
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AUTOMATED CLEANUP. Cow droppings are mechanically collected and channeled into a waste digester as cows feed on Blue Spruce Farm.© 2006 J. Raloff

You don’t have to take the Audets’ word that they’re pinched by prices. The Washington, D.C.–based National Family Farm Coalition confirms that New England farmers are suffering from the lowest inflation-adjusted milk prices since 1980. However, feed costs have climbed steadily since then, as have the prices of building supplies, diesel fuel, veterinary bills, electricity, and living expenses. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US

Currently, Marie Audet says, Blue Spruce Farm is operating at a deficit. Producing milk costs her family $15 per hundredweight, yet the market is paying only $12 for that milk right now. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US

The dismal economy of dairy farming spurred the Audets to diversify their agricultural portfolio. Since January of last year, the farm has become a commercial electricity producer. The fuel: manure. Harnessing the energy in farm wastes illustrates one path that some milk producers are exploring to keep dairying alive as a sustainable enterprise.
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SLEEP ON IT. These mounds hold the solid debris left over after the manure digester has done its job. No longer foul smelling, this mulchlike material is recycled as bedding for the cows.© 2006 J. Raloff

Mining manure

Each adult cow produces some 30 gallons of manure per day, which the Audets’ collect and channel into a microbial digester, an underground concrete container. The temperature there is kept at 101°F, the same as a cow’s stomach. As bacteria nosh on nutrients in the manure, they generate methane.

The 3-week-long treatment process also sterilizes the wastes and kills weed seeds that would otherwise be spread around the farm. The Audets collect leftover liquid, by then nearly odorless, and later spread it on fields as fertilizer. The remaining compost-like solid wastes also have substantial value. The Audets use these solids, which include hay shards, as cow-barn bedding in place of the sawdust that the farmers used to purchase from local sawmills at a cost of more than $1,000 per week.
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FIRST OF MANY. Although Blue Spruce Farm is the first farm in Vermont to generate electricity for the local power company, a handful of other operations are slated to begin marketing power “crops” over the next year.© 2006 J. Raloff

However, the most important product of the new setup is methane, a greenhouse gas but also a combustible fuel. All methane produced in the digester is collected and piped into an engine that spins a generator and creates electricity. The Audets sell the power to their local electric utility, Central Vermont Public Service.

Each cow on the farm produces enough manure to keep two 100-watt light bulbs burning perpetually. Blue Spruce Farm’s total electricity yield last year was 1.2 million kilowatt-hours.

The Audets’ farm is the first in Vermont to sell electricity made from manure. A representative of the utility says that five other Vermont Farms could also be producing power by next year. These farms, each milking more than 500 cows, are individually expected to produce 1.2 million to 3.5 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year.

The utility’s customers are helping finance the dairy-waste digesters. In a program called Cow Power, any household served by Central Vermont Public Service can volunteer to receive from one-quarter to all of its electricity from farms, a choice that includes paying a 4-cents-per-kilowatt-hour premium. A homeowner opting for all cow power typically sees a $20 increase on the monthly electric bill. The utility passes on to farmers the going market price for any electricity they generate—plus the 4-cent-per-kilowatt surcharge collected from utility customers.

On Oct. 26, the day our journalists’ group visited the Audets’ farm, the utility announced that it had signed a contract making Green Mountain College Vermont’s first cow-powered educational facility. College Provost Bill Throop noted that 50 percent of the power for the school’s main campus in Poultney will be from farmers’ methane operations. That source will also power all of the school’s Killington Campus, the college president’s home, a campus farm, an inn, and an alumni facility. Overall, the college expects to use some 1.2 million kilowatt-hours of methane-based electricity per year.

While the electricity will cost the college substantially more per year than usual, Throop contends that “enrolling in … Cow Power will fundamentally change our environmental footprint.” And that’s something that Throop says is important for an institution “focused on sustainability at every level—from how we teach to how we use energy.”

The provost notes that the cow-power investment will reduce the school’s carbon emissions by approximately 3,500 metric tons per year, “or the equivalent of removing 758 passenger cars from use for a year.” http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US

Marie Audet says that the income from electricity is nice but hardly making her family rich. Currently, she notes, the farm’s power operation merely breaks even. She says her hope is that the family’s investment in power generation, “which remains a work in progress,” may turn a profit for the farm in about 7 years.

Books about literary friendships (James and Wharton, Kerouac and Ginsberg, Melville and Hawthorne) drop into bookstores with numbing regularity. Books about literary revenge are more rare and thus more interesting.

In 1998 Paul Theroux published “Sir Vidia’s Shadow,” a memoir about the crumbling of his long friendship with V. S. Naipaul, the great Trinidad-born novelist. Mr. Theroux’s book was a potent, carefully mixed cocktail, served ice cold. It laid bare Mr. Naipaul’s racism, misogyny, vanity, stinginess and (most distressingly) his emotional cruelty to Patricia, his first wife.

Now, 10 years later, comes “The World Is What It Is,” Patrick French’s authorized biography of Mr. Naipaul. It’s a handsome volume, jacketed in silver and black, with a disarming cover photograph of Mr. Naipaul stooping, with a gap-toothed grin, to tie a loose shoelace.

Flip Mr. French’s book over, however, and you confront this Voldemortian clump of words from Mr. Naipaul’s old nemesis, Mr. Theroux: “It seems I didn’t know half of all the horrors.” Cue the scary organ music.

Well, the reader thinks, here we go: Mr. French’s 550-page biography will be a long string of bummers, a forced march through the life of a startlingly original writer with an ugly, remote personality.

The good news is that Mr. French, a young British journalist, is certainly unafraid to face unpleasant facts about his subject. But the better news about “The World Is What It Is” is this: it’s one of the sprightliest, most gripping, most intellectually curious and, well, funniest biographies of a living writer (Mr. Naipaul is 76) to come along in years.

Mr. French is a relative rarity among biographers, a real writer, and at his best he sounds like a combination of that wily bohemian Geoff Dyer and that wittily matter-of-factual cyborg Michael Kinsley.

Even the cameos in Mr. French’s biography are crazily vivid. Here is his hole-in-one description of the editor Francis Wyndham: “Popular, gentle, solitary and eccentric, Wyndham lived with his mother, wore heavy glasses and high-waisted trousers, gave off random murmurs and squeaks and moved with an amphibian gait.”

It is to Mr. Naipaul’s credit that this crafty and inquisitive book exists. “He believed that a less than candid biography would be pointless,” Mr. French writes, “and his willingness to allow such a book to be published in his lifetime was at once an act of narcissism and humility.”

Mr. Naipaul gave Mr. French access to his archives , including journals of his first wife that he’d not yet read. Mr. Naipaul was allowed to examine the completed manuscript but requested no changes.

Mr. French indicates, early on, that he is not playing softball. On his book’s second page we read that Mr. Naipaul “said, or was said to have said, that Africa had no future, Islam was a calamity, France was fraudulent, and interviewers were monkeys. If Zadie Smith of ‘White Teeth’ fame — optimistic and presentable — was a white liberal’s dream, V. S. Naipaul was the nightmare. Rather than celebrate multiculturalism, he denounced it as ‘multi-culti,’ made malign jokes about people with darker skin than himself, blamed formerly oppressed nations for their continuing failure.”

“For a successful immigrant writer to take such a position,” Mr. French continues, “was seen as a special kind of treason.”

But Mr. French quickly and adroitly steps back to give us a wide-angled and morally complicated view of how Mr. Naipaul, knighted in 1990 and named a Nobel laureate in 2001, made his way in the world, how his greatest books were conceived and composed, how he became what he became: genius, loner, sexual obsessive, ogre, snob, provocateur and profoundly influential and controversial thinker on subjects like colonialism and belief and unbelief.

Born into an Indian family in Trinidad in 1932, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was raised in relative poverty. His hapless father, a sign painter and occasional journalist, was the inspiration for what may be Mr. Naipaul’s signal work of fiction, “A House for Mr. Biswas” (1961). Mr. Naipaul’s more animated mother, Mr. French suggests, inspired his literary voice: “bright, certain, robust, slightly mocking.”

A scholarship took Mr. Naipaul, at 18, to University College, Oxford, and he has lived in England ever since. When Mr. Naipaul’s first novel, “The Mystic Masseur,” was published in 1957, Mr. French notes, in typically vivid prose: “Like a tiger cub bringing home his first kill, he copied out extracts for his mother from the reviews.”

Mr. Naipaul’s dealings with women make up a good part of “The World Is What It Is.” You will often wish to cover your eyes. After a fumbling sexual encounter that reads like an outtake from Ian McEwan’s “On Chesil Beach,” Mr. Naipaul proposed to Patricia Hale, an aspiring young actress. They would remain married until her death in 1996, but it was often a twisted, withered, tenuous relationship. Mr. Naipaul criticized her remorselessly and regularly visited prostitutes; he also carried on a decades-long affair with a younger woman, Margaret Murray, whom he sometimes violently beat. For her part, Ms. Murray liked to entertain Mr. Naipaul by mailing him life-size drawings “of his erect penis, done in dark brown felt-tip; the penis wore sunglasses and a lime green cowboy hat.”

Though Patricia Naipaul frequently came along with her husband when he researched his travel books, she is rarely mentioned in them; she floated behind, a kind of ghost in his life. Later, when she was dying of breast cancer, he was angry she did not perish quickly enough. He wished to marry his current wife, Nadira.

Mr. French writes with wit and feeling about Mr. Naipaul’s books, and about Mr. Naipaul’s sense of his career. He was grimly determined not to be seen as merely a West Indian writer. “Like Ralph Ellison after the publication of ‘Invisible Man,’ he maintained that he was in a category all of his own.”

Mr. Naipaul was capable of racism. And his success sometimes brought it out in others. Evelyn Waugh, in a 1963 letter to Nancy Mitford, noted that Mr. Naipaul had won yet another literary prize: “Oh for a black face,” he wrote.

Mr. French details the off-and-on animosity between Mr. Naipaul and the Caribbean poet and fellow Nobelist Derek Walcott. Would people still praise Mr. Naipaul’s “nasty little sneers” against black people, Mr. Walcott has asked, if those sneers were turned on Jews? http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO

The final sections of Mr. French’s biography grow a bit deflated and sad; the book becomes a list of awards and obligations, and a compendium of Mr. Naipaul’s boorish behavior. (He dressed down Iris Murdoch while both were dining with Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street; he soured an evening at Francis Ford Coppola’s Napa Valley estate by disapproving of the food and by sneering at George Lucas: “I don’t know ‘Star Wars,’ I am not interested in films.”) http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO

“A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth,” Mr. Naipaul has written. “And that myth is in the keeping of others.” Mr. Naipaul was brave to allow this complicated parsing of his own myth into the world. You will finish “The World Is What It Is” wishing to reread Mr. Naipaul’s best books immediately. You will also be glad he is not your friend, neighbor, sibling, landlord or barista.

But what of it? Bad people write good books. And as Mr. Naipaul pointedly says here, “I remain completely indifferent to how people think of me.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. As energy visionaries contemplate greener routes for urban commutes, discussions frequently turn to electric vehicles — either gasoline-electric hybrids or dedicated electric-only cars. Sure, they’ll save on consumption of those precious fossil fuels and cut emissions of noxious air pollutants. What doesn’t usually enter into the discourse, however, are the likely trade-offs in another essential resource: water. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.BIZ

And big trade-offs there’ll be, according to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Carey W. King and Michael E. Webber tallied the water used to extract and refine oil. It comes to about a third of a gallon of water per vehicle mile traveled by gasoline-powered vehicles in the United States, they report in paper posted early online Feb. 20 in Environmental Science & Technology. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.COM

For comparison, they summed the water used to mine fossil fuels or uranium and then generate electricity. The latter fuels are used to generate almost 90 percent of U.S. electricity. The Texas duo calculated that plugged-in vehicles would consume almost three times more water per mile traveled than gasoline-powered ones. Each electric-car mile would also require the withdrawal of 17 times more water than a mile traveled using gasoline.

Water withdrawal refers to water taken from a lake, stream or other source, then used to cool electric-generating equipment. Because this water is eventually released to the environment, it’s not actually consumed, but this water’s availability is required to provide electrical power and to perform key industrial processes.

A switch from gasoline- to electric-powered vehicles could threaten local water resources, the authors argue. Indeed, they conclude: “Some relatively wet regions of the United States may be able to support more plug-in hybrid electric vehicles at lower cost than other relatively dry regions.” Think the arid West and southeastern states.

There are ways to get around the problem … somewhat. The Texas researchers recommend investing more in research on renewable energy for onsite recharging of electric vehicles; developing regional water-use plans that account for the growing water need of socially desirable electric transportation; and using reclaimed, saline or other water unsuitable for drinking for cooling equipment.

Bottom line: We Prius owners must not get smug. Resource economists remind us there are always trade-offs.

Water-cooler stats

* in 2005, U.S. motorists drove an estimated 2.75 trillion miles (57 percent in cars, the rest in vans and SUVs) LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO

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* that’s 80 billion miles per year more than just 2 years
* it took 4.6 million barrels of oil per day in 2005 to meet the demand for gasoline to fuel U.S. cars and another 4.3 million barrels of oil to power the nation’s vans and SUVs
* distance the average U.S. motorist drives on a weekday: 34.4 miles — or 20 percent more than on a weekend day LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO

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* up to 2.5 gallons of water are consumed to refine each gallon of gasoline
* domestic gasoline refining would have consumed between 125 and 316 billion gallons of water in 2005
* U.S. consumers buy 17 million vehicles per year (cars, vans and SUVs)

Last year, an eyelet ripped on a pair of $85 running shoes I had bought four months earlier. Suddenly, I couldn’t lace up the shoe.

There was no doubt in my mind what would happen. I would take the shoes into the store where I bought them and get an exchange. That’s sort of the norm in retailing these days, right?

Wrong, as it turned out. At the store, they told me they exchanged shoes only for the first month or so. Four months for a running shoe was ancient, they said. Some customers bought shoes every month.

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Nike shoes on display
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Nike shoes on display
Nike shoes on display

That was news to me. I typically keep running shoes — which I use for a regimen of walking and sprinting — for a year or two. And I had never, ever had an eyelet fail in any shoe, even ones that were completely worn out.

The shoe store directed me to contact the manufacturer, Nike Inc., one of the largest sporting-shoe makers in the world, which I was told was very good at taking care of customers. So I called Nike. Its response, from my perspective, at least, left something to be desired.

According to Stephen Hoch, a retailing expert at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, my assumption that the customer is always right is dated. “Most retailers don’t have that attitude anymore,” he says. As for a liberal return policy, “a lot of retailers think they’re not going to get credit” for having one, says Prof. Hoch. “And they leave themselves vulnerable to opportunistic consumers.”

There are still some holdouts, such as Costco Wholesale, the discount warehouse operator, that make it easy to return unwanted or defective merchandise. But even Costco was forced to rein in its no-questions-asked policy a year ago because so many people were returning televisions, computers and big-ticket electronics. The problem was that prices were dropping for these items, and a year-old TV was worth only a fraction of what it was sold for.

The chain was racking up losses of between $180 million to $200 million a year exchanging big-ticket electronics devices that had to be salvaged or destroyed for “cents on the dollar,” says Chief Financial Officer Richard Galanti. So in early 2007, it changed its policy so that electronics could be exchanged only within the first 90 days. (To offset that, it extended manufacturers’ warranties and added a service to help customers set up computers and big-screen TVs.)

Costco left the no-questions-asked return policy in place for other items. And it spends about $500 million a year exchanging items, says Mr. Galanti. The company has no plans to change that policy, which was forged when it was still trying to prove its concept to customers.

Nordstrom handles returns on a case-by-case basis. But a spokeswoman says the department store will sometimes replace items bought years ago to keep customers happy. “We really think a reason our customers shop with us is that we stand behind our merchandise,” she says.

Nike didn’t have that attitude. When I called its customer-service help desk, I was told to mail the shoes back to the manufacturer so they could be examined for flaws. How could a shoe where the eyelet failed not be flawed? So I spent $7 to mail the shoes in.

A few weeks went by, and I heard nothing. I called the shoemaker again. It had determined there was no manufacturing flaw. What about my shoes? They had been mailed back to me.

I was seeing red. Here, I had dropped $85 on shoes that were poorly made. Then I had been forced to spend another $7 only to be told, effectively, tough luck.

I spent nearly half an hour on the phone pretty much yelling at the Nike customer representative. I talked to her boss. That didn’t work either. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com/

When I asked Nike to comment for this column, a spokesman replied that the company had in fact been honoring return requests for the same model of shoe I had bought. “It appears that your recent claim should have also been honored,” he wrote. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com/

I’m glad to hear that. In my mind, you don’t have customers mail things in unless you’re going to accept them. The only exceptions should be customers who you think are scamming the system.

So, what about the shoes? I took a second look and jury-rigged an arrangement where I run the shoelace through the same eyelet twice. It looks odd but it keeps the shoe on my foot. I will wear the shoe until it wears out. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Scientists seeking to cool Earth’s climate by injecting millions of tons of sulfuric acid droplets high in the atmosphere might trim rising temperatures but could also destroy much of the ozone in polar regions, a new study suggests. http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan

Major volcanic eruptions spew large amounts of tiny particles, or aerosols, high into the atmosphere, where they scatter light back to space and significantly cool Earth for months to years (SN: 2/18/06, p. 110). Some researchers have proposed lofting tons of aerosols into the stratosphere to achieve the same result, but that process — often dubbed geoengineering — could have a number of detrimental side effects. Last year, for example, scientists noted that average precipitation worldwide dropped significantly in the 16 months immediately following the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo (SN: 8/25/07, p. 125).

Now, count ozone destruction among the drawbacks of geoengineering. High-altitude ozone helps block damaging ultraviolet radiation from reaching Earth’s surface. Ozone-destroying chemical reactions occur most readily on the surfaces of high-altitude ice crystals and droplets of sulfuric acid spewed by volcanoes, says Simone Tilmes, an atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

So, Tilmes and her colleagues estimated the ozone loss that would be triggered by two geoengineering scenarios, each designed to counteract the warming effect caused by doubling the pre-industrial atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, as expected to occur late this century.

In one scenario, scientists inject about 2 million metric tons of sulfur-bearing aerosols into the stratosphere each year, each droplet approximately 0.46 micrometers in diameter. The other scenario lofts only 1.5 million metric tons of sulfur each year but in the form of smaller aerosols, which are more effective at scattering sunlight back into space.

Ozone destruction estimates are based on observations gathered during the last couple of decades, says Ross Salawitch, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Maryland, College Park. Results indicate that over the next few decades, ozone loss high above the Arctic after a particularly cold winter — one that produced large numbers of high-altitude ice crystals — could approach 75 percent, Tilmes, Salawitch and their colleagues report in an upcoming Science.

The effects of sulfate-aerosol geoengineering would be smaller later this century than today, primarily because atmospheric levels of ozone-destroying chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons are now declining. Nevertheless, injecting sulfates into the atmosphere could delay the recovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica by 30 to 70 years.

Ozone loss due to geoengineering “is a real concern, but I don’t see it as a showstopper,” says Ken Caldeira, a climate modeler at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, Calif. Even in the worst case cited by Tilmes and her colleagues, polar residents would experience levels of ultraviolet radiation no higher than those routinely seen in San Diego today, he contends. There are several ways to address detrimental side effects of geoengineering, he suggests. For example, scientists could design the aerosols to drop out of the atmosphere before they reach polar regions, where they wreak most of their havoc.

Other researchers aren’t so sanguine. The new research is “a valuable first step that shows both the limits and the strengths of such analyses,” says Michael J. Mills, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “Climate is a complex system, and before we do something like this, a lot more modeling needs to be done.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

“It’s always been clear that geoengineering would have some detrimental effect, but this paper quantifies it,” says Bill Chameides, an atmospheric chemist at Duke University in Durham, N.C. Also, he notes, masking the planet-warming effects of carbon dioxide emissions rather than reducing them doesn’t do anything to reduce ocean acidification, another harmful side effect of burgeoning atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (SN: 3/15/08, p. 170). http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan

Among other uncertainties in geoengineering, it would be tough to fine-tune the lifetime, composition and size distribution of aerosols being injected into the atmosphere, says Adrian Tuck, formerly an atmospheric scientist at the Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. “Most of us share worries about geoengineering, which is seen as a cure-all to avoid having to bite the bullet about carbon emissions,” he adds. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire