Democrats Control U! (and the weather)

Before you kill yourself, consider reading this fun and informative snippet from America's finest unknown work of nonfiction.

In honor of the obscene weather control conspiracies swirling around the hurricanes in Florida, I thought I would share one of my favorite sections from my book China Lake. This is the “famous” (my friend Steven liked it), insane section in which I travel to Stanford to meet Dr. Ken Caldeira, Bill Gates’s personal climate advisor, and then perhaps the preeminent scientist in the world studying geoengineering, which many Republicans are blaming today for the natural disasters unfolding in Florida.

It is weird that in the midst of my writing this faltering Substack series “The Heights of Weird,” a series that has made frequent reference to China Lake, the core topics of that strange book—weather control, climate change, and geoengineering—are suddenly splashing across national headlines.

The Atlantic published on it an hour ago, NBC did earlier, so too CBS, BBC, Rolling Stone, Reuters, Politico, et al.

My thoughts go out to everyone suffering from these natural disasters. Consider buying a painting from my artist friend Amy, whose livelihood was recently upended in Asheville, NC. And please share Dumpster Fires and China Lake, whose full title speaks to the present moment in which Republicans are saying weather control is real while climate change is fake. That sure makes sense! No contradiction whatsoever.

“The Heights of Weird” continues soon with my longest and most important post yet, a post that will—finally—reveal the freaky connection between China Lake & Santa Susana, clarifying why that latter actually constitutes a sequel, and why I cannot let it go…

Coniuratio Incipit

Beyond the motel blinds, far above the mountains, like a handprint on swollen smacked skin, the red autumn light drains from the sky, leaving behind a pale bloodless twilight.

She stares at the ceiling as I lower her head to the mattress and turn the lamp to dim. I glance at the door chain again before I return to the desk chair, lift the hydraulic knob, and I sink down, no longer hiding my e-cig. But the tip starts to flash. I unscrew the cartridge and plug the battery into the USB port on my laptop and continue clicking.      

Anthony Barrett writes: “YOU KEN AND YOUR SO CALLED SCIENTISTS, ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF GODS WEATHER PATTERNS ON GODS EARTH YOU SIR ARE THE MOST EVILIST HUMAN GOING IF YOU ARE A HUMAN WHY WOULD A HUMAN KILL HIS ONLY PLANET TO LIVE ON…”

In the YouTube comments posted below the lectures of David Keith and Ken Caldeira, thousands of people seem to want their heads. Nobody understands the logic. You have to kill the thing you love the most, the thing most sacred and synonymous with yourself.

Jack Handle: “YOU BASTARD. DAVID KIETH IS A MASS MURDERER. HE PRETENDS HES NOT DUMPING ALUMINIUM ON US ALREADY. BURN IN HELL.”

SheepleAlert writes: “This guy is a Fucktard!  So are any others who believe we should further pollute our air for the alleged sake of helping…”

Jana Murray: “Climate Engineer Ken Caldeira playing god with our military industrial complex.”

“Are you sure you’re not hungry?” I ask my mom.

“No. Thank you.”

She doesn’t open her eyes. She’s lying flat on the bed with her socks on, hands folded at her chest. Her wedding ring floats up and down with her heavy rhythmic breaths.

“You don’t need anything?”

“No. Thank you.”

Click, click. Below another video, Laura Eisenhower, new age guru and great-granddaughter of the former president who warned of the military-industrial complex, advises how to survive Ken and Keith’s plans: “I focus on Sacred Union and Mother/Father God... Right now with our alignment with the galactic plane, we are connecting to the Mother Womb where everything was birthed from. Mother and Father – get that! Both! I am leading people back to the primordial parents – the androgyny that exists in Source. I have 12 hours of material... The inner work of connecting to Source is not wrong. Stay in duality by encouraging the inner work and connection to Gaia.”

ChicagoDreamer5 to Laura: “Wonderful, brilliant presentation. I can and have made chemtrails go away, just by commanding them to go away. ‘Go away chemtrails/clouds, I disagree with you.’ I make sure to say chemtrails, because I don't want to banish our Gallactic Family.”

Dana Horochowski writes to Laura: “FUCK–WHAT A VAMPIRE QLIPPOTH WHORE SELLOUT for the BLACK SUN NAZIS,  BURN BITCH.”

“Text your dad and tell him we’re not gonna be home tonight,” my mom says.

“You mean Craig?”

“Text your step-father.” 

I ask if she’s sure she doesn’t want to go to the hospital.

“No. Thank you.”

Eyes closed, face pale, mouth drawn. Hands folded at her chest, her body rigid… she looks like a vampire, or at least that’s what I tell myself. She’ll never die. She’ll always bounce back. Ever since I was a little kid, her back’s gone out. It’s happened dozens of times over the years. She just needs a day to rest. She says she doesn’t want anything but I bring her a glass of water anyway.

“Sit up,” I say.

She lifts her eyebrows into question marks.

“Yo,” I tell her.

“Mmmhh?” she groans, popping her left eye open. 

“Here,” I say, “It’s Coso Sour Water… America’s Wonder.”

“You’re stupid.”

I hand it to her. “Cures everything, from constipation to VD, high blood pressure, and degenerative disc disease.”

She lifts her neck slightly to drink. 

“I think I liked Sonoma better,” she says.

“You mean Sedona? Is your headache gone?”

She says she can’t feel it at the moment.

I set the water down on the bedstand and start picking at the metal cap of a warm beer with the car keys. The bottle hisses as the cap rolls across the carpet. I send my step-dad the text. “Craig, mom’s tired. The vortex didn’t work. We’re gonna stay in Ridgecrest. Love you, home tomorrow.”

Pulling on the sliding glass door, I step out onto the motel balcony. Faraway, Venus floats alone like a belly ring pierced in space. Dogs howl after sirens up the highway. Beneath the mountains, the steel power poles stretch silhouetted through the sand. The poet and essayist John Daniel, once a teacher of mine, didn’t know that the shamans of China Lake were trying to make rain, but he says what I want to say better than I can at the moment. In his book The Trail Home, Daniel writes: “Anthropomorphic figures are common in rock art, and we too have created many. Ours are of the colossal scale that characterizes many of our marks on the west, standing in perfect straight lines across flats and over mountains, each one identical to the others, continuous lengths of high-tension cable passing between them. Like the Indian anthropomorphs, these are related to the power of nature, but to a different kind of power. They are not made in humility, to connect the makers with the spiritual powers of Earth. These are made to carry away the power of rivers, extracted by dams, and the ancient power of the sun, extracted in coalmines and burned in gargantuan plants whose smoke turns the clear desert distance to haze. These towers made in our image carry the captured life of nature to distant cities – they carry it one way only, out of the land and into the widening mouth of our human craving.” And yet, John Daniel may be a bit sentimental. I don’t think the shaman created his images in perfect humility. The trail home is more complicated, more twisted.

My mom tells me to plug in the phone.

“Don’t let it die,” she says.

“Are you sure you don’t need anything?”

“No. Thank you.” 

A toilet flushes behind the wall and someone starts coughing. I stare at a hole punched in the drywall beside the bathroom then refill the water and set it on the bedstand. Heavy footsteps thunder down the overhung hallway outside our door.

Youtube user almanulinux writes of David Keith: “I would say that the best this guy should do if he is a bit interested in this planet is to buy a gun and kill himself.”

Someone named crudhousefull writes: “Oh my god. Kill me before these idiots do.”

Rick Ish writes of Caldeira: “I feel a bit sorry for the people wielding all this power—how do they look each other or anyone in the eye? Any sane person with an ounce of humanity would die of guilt being so narcissistic; they have a lot to answer for.”

Ria den Breejen writes: “Ken Caldeira lies even more and dares no second to look straight into the camera.”  

Anthony Barrett writes, again, to Caldeira: “I HOPE YOU AND YOUR UNSCIENTIFIC SCUM MATES HAVE A NICE TIME IN HELL.”

When I met Ken Caldeira at Stanford, I found him to be a shy quiet man somewhat impaired when it came to making eye contact, and I wasn’t particularly surprised. Among a handful of geoengineering scientists, I wanted to meet Ken because of a particular striking statement he’d made. Namely, that his work represented, chiefly, “an expression of despair.” Outside a few of the most misanthropic and bleak metal bands, I hadn’t heard too many people summarize their job in such terms. Needless to say, I was impressed, and I didn’t expect to greet the most sanguine individual. But I had to ask, “Should I despair as well?” and I thought I had to truly look him in the eye, to meet him face to face, in order to know the answer.

Caldeira walks like any man might if forced to bear some portion of total human failure. He looks like my stepfather except his back’s a bit more bent, his thinning hair fizzes out a little farther, and when he stands, the slight hunch keeps his gaze focused on the sidewalk two feet in front of his sandals instead of six. I supposed, at first, that his body had simply adapted itself to long hours crouched over keyboards while supercomputers cranked out their month-long climate models, but it seemed an odd posture, especially for someone supposedly studying how to inject sulfur aerosols 100,000 feet into the stratosphere. But Ken occasionally glances up, and when he does his grin is mostly warm, and his words ring calm, yet still you can see inside his eyes that his mind never stops working, and while we walked across the Stanford campus, while he kept his hands clasped behind his back in thoughtful professor pose, I couldn’t help thinking the entire time that he looked like a prisoner in handcuffs.

“Is there more to it than irony?” he asked when I told him about China Lake.

It was Friday. Caldeira had dressed casually. A salmon colored Tommy Bahama button down, faded blue jeans, and leather sandals. He camouflaged well with the sunny Spanish Colonial architecture, the geometrical stands of palm trees, the general privileged, monastic calm that permeates one the world’s top research institutions.

“I was hoping you could tell me. Native American shaman and the US military chose the same place to make rain. It didn’t work for either.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Well primitive cultures were always concerned with modifying the weather.”

I was surprised he’d agreed to meet me, considering all the death threats on YouTube and my essential anonymity. When I pulled my rental car into the Carnegie Institute parking lot and left it unlocked without a permit in front of a Tow Away sign standing beside a dumpster and started hurrying past the rows of green houses, my army surplus rucksack slung over my shoulder, eyes darting in every direction, I could have easily been any random psycho embarking on the final college campus killing spree. But I was already three minutes late. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t want to miss him. And in reality, anyway, geoengineering isn’t yet high on the radar of the common man. And as for the chemtrail people, most seem too caught up in sideline conspiracies involving aliens, Illuminati symbols, and imaginary wire systems implanted under their skin to probably ever focus long enough on a decision making process that might result in destroying anything other than themselves. But when geoengineering becomes a true political choice, some scientists might find themselves keeping tighter security.

One of the first things Caldeira told me when I met him was that he planned to quit the subject.

“The bulk of my work on geoengineering is probably done.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, really, I’m not that interested in it anymore.”

He said, as I knew, that he did a lot of the initial SRM computer modeling. When he started, he never intended to enter the field. He’d earned his PhD studying under Marty Hoffert at NYU in 1991. Hoffert was one of the most vocal, apocalyptic, and partially poetic scientific voices calling for global climate change mitigation. His diatribes against fossil fuel corporations painted dismal pictures of a future “feudal agricultural economy in high latitude lands still fertile for crops and habitable in climate,” or in the worst case scenario, “hunter-gathering capable of supporting perhaps a million or so humans worldwide.” He spoke of Carl Sagan, and the Fermi Paradox. He said the short “lifetimes of technological civilizations,” such as our own, was the “reason for the absence of intelligent life in our Milky Way galaxy.”

Needless to say, Hoffert’s words sounded extreme, not many listened, and Caldeira moved on to better projects. Three years after graduating NYU, Caldeira started running models behind the barbed wire black budget fences of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, just south of San Francisco, a laboratory with “near-mythological status as the dark heart of weapons research.” Caldeira worked alongside Lowell Wood, protégé of Edward Teller, the man who built the hydrogen bomb and inspired, if that’s the right term, Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Wood supposedly still enjoyed the “Dr. Evil” moniker christened by his Cold War critics; Caldeira, however, a former anti-nuke activist, did not enjoy all his research at Lawrence Livermore. “We sat around the room thinking of ways to manipulate geophysical systems to use it as a weapon.” During one project, they tried to determine if the US could shoot tidal waves across oceans by detonating hydrogen bombs underwater. In another, they studied spreading lethal pathogens through clouds. It wasn’t cheerful work. And when Caldeira ran the first sophisticated geoengineered climate model in 2000, it was largely to discredit the belligerent pronouncements of his veteran colleague Lowell Wood who had argued for bypassing “the bureaucratic suppression of CO₂,” that “mitigation wasn’t going to happen,” and that the US government should simply go ahead and begin geoengineering for “instant climate gratification.” According to Wood, it was simply common sense, no different from anything we’d already done: “We’ve engineered every other environment we live in – why not the planet?”

Strangely, much to Caldeira’s surprise, he found in his initial model that Lowell Wood was basically right. Sulfur aerosol injections did actually appear to cool the planet.  

“That was exciting, and we’ve learned a lot since then,” Caldeira told me, “but I want to do new research and identify new problems. That’s what keeps me engaged as a scientist.”

I wondered if he wasn’t speaking offhand, proffering the academy’s eternal dictum—Fiat Lux! “Let there be Light!”—the command to discover and illuminate new frontiers as some sort of excuse to duck out of the current territory, a broad tableland which seemed to me still awash in shadow, and if not altogether unexplored, at least worthy of more thorough mapping.

“Is it possible that you’re quitting now because you no longer want to be identified with the technology? You don’t want your name on it if it comes to deployment?”

He lifted his head and smiled.

“No. That’s not it. It’s just not exciting to me anymore. The field has sort of plateaued. The party has arrived.”

I found him upstairs in the Global Ecology Research Center, a long two-story building adorned with lateral planks of giant redwood. A stone tower rises from the southwest corner. It looks like it should hold a church bell but it catches the coastal wind and cools the building without wasting power. I had expected locked gates, a receptionist, security, someone to beep me in, but no one came. I stood alone in the concrete lobby, beneath hip glass garage doors pinned back on their tracks, and listened while water dripped down the hollow cooling tower. The fat plops ticked off the seconds, dropping and bursting on a grate of rusted iron while a breeze blew through the open entrance, lifting magazine pages from a coffee table made of recycled residential doors.

Above the threshold at the back wall, I noticed a camera.

The best option seemed up.

I climbed the stairs and continued down a long hallway. Grey caps of industrial carpet reflected skylights fogged from distant rain and seagull shit. “You must be looking for lunch,” Caldeira said, opening the door after I’d paced another minute outside his office, glancing through the chickenwire glass, certain I’d found the face from YouTube.

He ordered food on his computer¹ while I glanced around his office.  He had some woven tapestries, bright stuff with a lot of maroon – Stanford colors – brought back from South America it seemed.

“We’re enemies.”

He stopped typing and gave me a sudden worried look. His office door was closed, the building quiet.

“Enemies?”

I told him I did my undergrad across the bay at Berkeley.

“Oh,” he said, sort of laughing. “Go Bears.”

He stood then and we started down the hallway, back out toward the lobby. A colleague and two students joined us outside. We walked behind them for a quarter mile to a central quad surrounded on one side by a food court. Heavy old oak trees made shade for picnic tables hewn from the same wood. Ken opened a compostable take-out box to reveal a kale and quinoa salad tossed in olive oil and balsamico. I watched the dappled bands of sunlight filter through the trees, glittering over the dark leaves while he stabbed them.

“SRM has the problem of eroding political will,” he said, “but it also gave conservatives this idea of a quick fix, forcing them to look at SRM’s science, and when they did and recognized its dangers, they were basically looking at the reality of climate change.”

I tore the tinfoil from the blunt end of a grilled chicken burrito while one of Ken’s students – a pretty girl dressed in a yellow pleated chiffon dress – sat down beside me with a smoothie. She never spoke or removed her Ray-Bans, and no one ever introduced her. The same was true for the Chinese graduate student who sat across from me. He looked about my age.

“By a roundabout,” Caldeira covered his mouth while he continued chewing, “SRM has made some climate deniers reconsider a business as usual strategy.”

I stuck out my teeth, bit down, and several black beans fell from the burrito and bounced across the table. I wondered how fast I could chew without looking like I was starving to death, insane, or high on meth. It seemed a pitiable waste of time to clog my face with bits of chicken breast when I could fire off questions at one of the world’s most influential scientists. But Ken seemed happy to talk. And after his eyes roamed around the table, flitting over the oak branches, past the pale blank faces of pedestrians, students and strangers, they eventually settled on mine. Perhaps all Caldeira needs to convince the world of his good intentions is a tossed kale salad.

He took another bite.

“You should read Alan Robock’s article,” he told me.

There was nothing smug or stiff about him, and if his students remained silent, I figured it was because they’d heard all this before.

“It lists all the potential reasons why solar radiation management might be a bad idea. I think there are twenty-five, or something close to that. I’m not sure.”

The only problem was that Caldeira also wasn’t telling me anything I hadn’t already heard. Of course I’d read Robock’s article. Every academic paper I’d read on the subject eventually said the same thing: solar geoengineering offers a fast, cheap and fully imperfect solution to climate change. That was why I needed to talk to him. I wanted to know just how fast and how flawed. Behind all the computer models, academic papers, and cautious pronouncements, what did the scientist really think—what did he see when he imagined the future?

“Yeah, I’ve read Robock. I think he’s actually up to 28 reasons now.”

Caldeira’s colleague sat down beside me then, across from Ken, and pulled out a whitebread sandwich. It fit perfectly inside the Ziploc bag, and I watched his fingers pick through it carefully, peeling back the zippered plastic like a surgeon stretching tweezers toward a sterile alcohol swab. I wondered if his wife had made it and if she used mayonnaise.          

Caldeira asked him the name of the Robock article.

“I’m not sure,” he said.

He told me I’d find it online. 

I took a bite of the burrito and chewed fast, repeating all my questions like a Buddhist mantra—questions I’d written down the night before in my notebook and then rewritten an hour before sitting in a crowded Palo Alto cafe, narrowing them down to the ten essential that I thought I could memorize—while Ken’s colleague started talking about another paper he had to write and Ken advised him not to devote too much time to it.

I cut in at the first pause but didn’t ask anything planned.    

“Ken it’s not clear to me why you want to stop researching SRM.” I moved my tongue over the roof of my mouth, scraping off the stuck tortilla. “We won’t begin to see the planet start to cool this century unless,” I said, swallowing, “we engage in Solar Radiation Management. Right?”

“Yes. That’s basically right.”

“So why do you want to quit?”

Wasn’t this the most pressing topic a scientist could study? What could be more exciting than potentially saving the world? Or were we too far gone, had despair finally overwhelmed him? Or if he thought the technology might actually stave off the future, wasn’t he at least concerned about his own personal safety? I knew that David Keith had already officially reported two death threats to police.

It was strange to realize and hard to believe at first but the reason Ken Caldeira wants to quit researching Solar Radiation Management is because he actually is bored. There’s nothing really exciting, nothing more substantial that we can actually learn.

“More small-scale research is necessary,” he said, “but basically, we won’t know what will happen until a full-scale deployment.”

I asked if that meant that he disagreed with his friend David Keith, who argues that field tests are a crucial component of any rationally managed SRM program.

David’s correct that the technology is basically simple and fast-acting, but field tests won’t tell us much. We won’t actually know what will happen until we’re full scale.”

If Caldeira isn’t lying, then the CIA funded geoengineering study probably isn’t either when it says, “There are no field tests planned for this study.” They claim to be looking at how the public might react – the “social response” – and beyond that, the moral, historical, and political precedents that might illuminate the complexities of any actual deployment. They’re doing social science. Gathering intelligence. No testing.

“Well, I know some scientists have called for a US geoengineering research program on the scale of the Manhattan or Apollo projects. Do you think…”

He smiled again and cut me off.

“A Manhattan-like project is unnecessary. The US government doesn’t need to spend forever researching and developing. There’s already a company – Aurora Flight Science – that says they could do it for $8 billion annually.”

I knew this already. David Keith managed the Aurora study and Bill Gates’ FICER fund paid for it.*

“So if the US government really wanted to deploy an SRM system, how soon could they start?”

“We could have a full-scale operation ready to go in one year.”      

Jesus, I thought. He balanced the quinoa on his plastic fork while the girl in the chiffon dress rubbed her finger across the face of her cell phone.

Caldeira’s colleague then said something very strange. Perhaps he was merely testing me, baiting me to see if I’d grab at the conspiracy hook and destroy whatever small credibility I had in their circle. Perhaps he was merely joking. Perhaps he was serious. He spoke of the SPICE experiment attempted in Britain, the one that protestors shut down in 2011.

“The SPICE experiment was a failure but it did prove one thing,” he said. “The public will be dead set against the technology.”

He stared across the table at Caldeira.

“If I was going to do it,” he said, “the research has to be top-secret, and you deliver the aerosols in secret. Otherwise, the public will never allow it to happen.”

The thought crossed my mind that if the technology could be ready to go in one year, maybe that year was last year. If it was so cheap that any determined billionaire could feasibly deploy it rogue, maybe a government 18 trillion dollars in debt with a history of unilateral preemptive action could also go rogue if it really believed in the possibility of rapid and catastrophic climate change, if it really wanted to block, as Princeton’s Stephen Pacalla called it, “the monster behind the door.”

I asked the two men if they thought that the US government should go ahead and begin sulfur aerosol injections in secret.

Caldeira’s colleague had made his point.

He stared at Ken, and Ken sat pokerfaced, and I watched his eyes sift through his skull, the gaze rubbing along the table’s woodgrain, past the handle of the plastic fork that had fallen into the salad until he blew a sigh, made a grimace, and scratched the hair behind his wristwatch.

He stared back at the colleague.

“I don’t really think people are going to be that much against it,” he said.  

Sitting there, it occurred to me that David Keith’s strategy of gradual field tests would work brilliantly as public distraction. We could do a few tiny insignificant trials, squirt a few drops of sulfur from a weather balloon, and after five or ten so-called experiments, in which nothing whatsoever could be learned, scientists and government alike could concur that the technology didn’t work, or that it was far too dangerous, or still too early to take any levelheaded steps. With the public so soothed, the spraying could commence, or continue, in secret. 

“Mining operations in the United States have put so much barium in the air progressively over so many years,” Caldeira said, “that the levels today are astounding. But nobody said anything as it was happening, because it occurred gradually. The same could work with geoengineering. People might not say anything because the initial effects could appear negligible.”

I asked him if the sky would turn white. 

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “Alan Robock…”

He cut me off and continued again.

“Whatever whitening may occur will probably be negligible to the human eye. You wouldn’t likely notice any difference.”

“What about the stars?”

He said the same. “You’d still be able to see the stars. You wouldn’t detect any noticeable change.”

“Alan Robock says the sky will turn white and we’ll lose the stars.”

“Does he?”

I asked Ken if he thought it was possible that Robock might be overstating the aesthetic impact because he didn’t want to see the technology ever go to deployment.

“It’s possible,” he said. “I think Alan Robock and I disagree about the importance of the social response,” he said.

“What about the termination problem?”—the idea that if the system ever shuts down temperatures might rise fast enough to turn our species and all others to toast.

“The termination problem gets too much attention and is far overstated.”  

I asked him if he thought we’d actually do it.

“There will have to be a climate emergency.”

This was one of the questions I had memorized.

“What exactly will constitute a climate emergency?  I mean, given the natural variability of the earth’s climate system, isn’t it impossible to pin a single weather related event on climate change? Even with computer models, it would take decades, maybe hundreds of years of data to definitively attribute a single specific event to climate change. Right? So how exactly will we know when we’ve reached an emergency?”

I stared at them.

Ken and his colleague burst out laughing.

I looked around the quad thinking that someone must have tripped and fallen. Perhaps two squirrels stood embattled above us on the arm of an oak bough.

But they were staring back at me.

The girl in the chiffon dress wrapped her lips around the smoothie straw.

I sat smiling, waiting shamefaced for some loud censure of my futility. It was as though the entire conversation had been resolved by a statement spoken beyond the bounds of absurdity. I hoped they’d clarify the joke, or at least answer my question, but no one ever did explain my stupidity.

It was disconcerting. But I think now that perhaps the objective caution, the practiced detachment which urges scientific minds away from stating what they might actually think, or imagine – or truly hold in their hearts – found a sudden accidental expression. Scientists like Ken Caldeira don’t earn their daily bread confessing their emotions before bed in a diary. They don’t win lifetime research positions at Stanford by painting blurry pictures of recurrent dreams. Their imagination does not get paid until it produces something practical. They make good money and forge solid careers upon highly crafted computer models, from which they export expert data, and they interpret their numbers in peer-reviewed papers carefully – conservatively – if they want to appear reasonable, and remain reputable, and comfortable, on the academic job market.

But what happened at that moment, what their laughter spoke to, I think, was the absolute poverty of my own imagination. I couldn’t see what they’d seen. For me a “climate emergency” was still an abstraction, just some vague platonic-like ideal of perfect destruction, but they’d been there a long time, circled around the world, sorted through the endless monotony of recurrent climate simulations, and they’d gathered enough good, solid, reputable data to convince themselves they’d seen something concrete inside it all, an impeccable picture developing in the dark rooms of their brilliant minds, clarifying as they carried it across the continents, decades, and carpeted halls of government, growing steadily into a reality that so violently outstripped the bounds of all natural variability that only man or God could have created it, and now they couldn’t shut it out, now it had arrived complete and luminous, it came bounding through their lips in a sudden bright burst of terrible hilarity, a booming laughter that was itself an expression of staid wonder, stored grief, and familiar boredom, a boredom born from the fact that here they sat supposedly talking to some sort of writer, a creative-type, and not even he had permitted his mind to picture it—but I could hear it—the monster behind the door, the calamity we’d carelessly fed and religiously furthered for far too long, so long now that if it broke down the door we could only, possibly, buy time by poisoning ourselves with a solution so brutal, ugly, and unsophisticated that it could only constitute an affront to their genius.

I suppose it was hilarious. The icesheets of Greenland don’t slide out to sea several times a season like monsoons in South East Asia. Such an unprecedented catastrophe defies imagination, and yet it had already begun. Ken and his friend were laughing for all of us, I guess, laughing as Nietzsche says, “in order not to die of the truth.” And what was the truth? They were trapped. They were scientists. Not poets. And neither could change the world. If they painted a metaphoric picture more complex or disturbing than the platitude of monsters, if they spoke of their nightmares and visions, if rather than laugh they started screaming insults and empirically-based prophecies, people still wouldn’t see, and of course they wouldn’t believe. They would only end up discrediting themselves. They and others like them had already presented the data, and in spite of all the evidence, emissions continued to rise.

No wonder Caldeira was bored. No wonder he laughed. 

And yet, “I think we’ll muddle through it, or at least the rich will make it okay,” he told me, sitting beneath the oak trees that Leland Stanford had planted with the cash leftover from the railroad. The railroad he persuaded Congress to pay for and that made him billions in his day. The railroad that finally closed, in the American mind, the imagination of a limitless frontier, the narrative that you could leave everything behind, forget your past, and carve a new life in the wilderness of the west.

“Adaptation is a non-elective course,” Caldeira said.

He closed his lunch box, threw it away, and I followed him down a path different from the one we’d come in on. I struggled to recall my mantra of questions. For some reason I kept picturing the painting from my childhood bedroom, Emanuel Leutze’s 1861 “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way.” The original, a brazen twenty by thirty foot congratulation of America’s manifest destiny, depicts the head of a pioneer wagon train as they gain the summit over the Sierra Nevada to gaze at the promise land, El Dorado – California – and its far off fabled entrance, the Golden Gate, and towers over the western staircase of the House of Representatives where several years ago Caldeira, then advocating for more geoengineering research, asked Congress: “What if we were to find out that parts of Greenland were sliding into the sea, and that sea-level might rise 10 feet by mid-century?” 

I wondered if he’d glanced at “Westward” before he spoke and what he’d thought of it at the time. Did he see the long-suffering woman still sitting at the center of the painting staring off cross-eyed in the wrong direction?

“What if rainfall patterns shifted in a way that caused massive famines?”

Did he see the birds, strangely outgrown, flying like griffins to devour the tiny men at the summit’s platform?

“What if our agricultural heartland turned into a perpetual dustbowl?”

Did he see the dramatic evening sky? The scattered clouds lending the texture and patina of pyrite, a scarred quality to something that should be so soft and yet seems ready to topple?

“And what if research told us that an appropriate placement of tiny particles in the stratosphere could reverse all or some of these effects?”

I wanted to ask him.

“We do not want our seat belts to be tested for the first time when we are in an automobile accident,” Caldeira told Congress. “If the seat belts are not going to work, it would be good to know that now.”

Did he see the barren hills of Berkeley, the future site of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, rising misted at the bottom border of the painting?

There is the “potential,” he told Congress, “that direct intervention in the climate system could someday save lives and reduce human suffering.”

The title of Leutze’s “Westward” refers to the final lines of a poem written by the philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, a poem which, years ago, in college, I used to recite silently, almost unconsciously at times, while I sat between classes on a brick stairway beneath the campanile listening to the late afternoon bells toll as Tool blasted on my headphones.

Westward the course of empire takes its way.

The four first Acts already pass.

A fifth shall close the Drama with the day.

Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

Berkeley wrote his poem in 1726 as an ode to America, the continent where he’d hoped to establish a prestigious new university, but his daughter died and funding dried up. Things didn’t work out. At least not initially, not while he was alive.

For a time, I thought the university still subscribed to his theory of immaterialism. “To be is to be perceived” Berkeley wrote. He’d argued against John Locke that reality was made up solely of minds and their ideas, that the body, as an external substance, and all of its physical surroundings—trees, mountains, man and animal—did not really exist. Apparently, as an undergraduate himself, Berkeley decided he wanted to experience non-existence firsthand. He told his friend to cut him down only after he’d passed out… then he hung himself from a rope. I guess George Berkeley was pretty metal. Perhaps the blackout served as inspiration for his later philosophical works. I remember thinking it obscene on several occasions that for $15,000 a year I couldn’t take a proper piss when I wanted one. In reality, though, it wasn’t Berkeley’s philosophy that had inspired the university’s founders but his famous poem and the library bathrooms were often locked that semester not because anyone suspected that our bodies weren’t real but rather that they were—and so too a few minds with certain ideas. That same spring a kid at Virginia Tech pulled a Glock 19 out from his backpack, killing thirty-two people before turning the gun on himself, and security was tight.

But there were still plenty of bushes and fountains and a few scattered redwood groves. For a school with over 30,000 students, you could always find an isolated place to reflect or relieve yourself in silence. It wasn’t just a large campus with a pretty view. It was lonely, and inspiring, very badly inspiring, especially around sunset. Especially late in the spring of 1866—one hundred forty years after Berkeley’s poem and five years after Leutze’s “Westward”—when the future University of California trustees stood gazing west through the Golden Gate out to the Pacific Ocean. Inspired by the burning sunset, the intersection of sea and land, heaven and earth, hard work and inheritance, the trustees honed in on a name that would pay tribute to the college as the culminating institution of an age-old process of westward expansion and gradual enlightenment. They named the school after the philosopher, poet, and theologian Bishop George Berkeley, settled on the motto Let there be Light, and began clearing the dense stands of redwoods.

The grizzly bear, shot nearly to extinction, became the school’s mascot.

Ornate buildings rose up among the hills, each aligned so that one could look straight through the bridgeless headlands of the Golden Gate out over the final plane of expansion, the Pacific, and it was this view I’d contemplate in the afternoons beneath the concrete obelisk of the campanile whose hollow carapace housed the bones of tyrannosaurs and buffalo* and beside which stone grizzlies the size of guinea pigs sat on carved benches, their heads hung low in remembrance not of themselves but the brave sons of California that died during the Great War, and before that the Philippines, and then later the Second World War, their bodies shipped back across the Pacific during that century when military training was still compulsory on campus, and sitting on the red brick steps, fact and myth wrestling for footing, it was this same sea that the pilgrims painted in Leutze’s “Westward” saw like the glittering eye of God as they stood agape upon mountain peaks, and it was this sea that lay reflecting the molten dusk everyday beside the stalagmite projection of downtown San Francisco skyscrapers while the smog hovered like campfire fumes above the city and the cars honked their way across the bridge and the subway slithered down beneath the brown bay water, part of a panorama that filled me at once with awe and dread and a vague inspiration as the final lines of Berkeley’s poem droned inside my brain, like some sort of secret encoded across time, something that might allow me to trust the absurd sense of freedom and possibility I felt here as a freshman over the pessimism I’d armored myself with since childhood, if I could only figure out what Berkeley meant by “Time’s Noblest Offspring is the Last,” if only today it didn’t sound somehow so cynical, so mocking from every angle, if only I could turn it around again, somehow, unlearn something I didn’t yet know I already knew and haven’t understood still, but I couldn’t and probably won’t and it was Berkeley’s poem, the words “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” that inspired the university’s trustees, and it was this poem––On the Prospect of Planting Art and Learning in America, it’s called––that I wanted to ask Ken Caldeira about now as we turned and continued down a narrow path tunneled through the grove of pepper trees that led back to Stanford’s Carnegie lab.

I decided to rephrase the question.

“Scott Barrett of Columbia University has called climate change ‘The most difficult collective action problem in human history.’ As Americans, what are we learning about ourselves in the course of confronting this massive problem? Are we sadistic, bent on destruction? Is it human nature to procrastinate?”

“If Congress had put huge taxes on carbon emissions,” Caldeira said, “the economic incentive would have been so great that we already would have had carbon capture and storage and we wouldn’t be in this position.”

I wondered how long this position could last and if it wouldn’t end up worse after more men like Caldeira generously volunteered their expert opinion before Congress. But I couldn’t really blame him. I think he was really trying to help––he’d always foremost recommended mitigation. Nonetheless, be it the oil lobby, the fetish of the growth economy, or the innate hubris of humankind, our government had not taken the supposed rational steps necessary to prevent against climate change.

Caldeira was like a doctor still prescribing exercise after diagnosing cancer. A doctor who could only console the future with the promise that chemo was cheap.

“What are we learning?” Caldiera said. “I like to think of something my friend Marty Hoffert says. The reason we haven’t solved this collective action problem is because we basically still have these cave man brains leftover from prehistory. In a nutshell, we’ve built a technologically globalized world that our brains are no longer adapted to. Most people can’t think in terms of some geographically isolated event or some scenario a decade away.”

We stopped to allow a gardener in a golf cart to pass. I pulled out my e-cig, cupped the tip, and inhaled.

“That’s why someone’s cute dog today gets more of an emotional response than news of havoc on some faraway continent.”

This was the basic premise of Berkeley’s philosophy.

Regardless of whether anyone takes the doctrine “To be is to be perceived” seriously, the idea contains a disturbing psychological truth. Things tend to not really exist until they disrupt our day, impose on our lives, and in doing so, enter firmly into consciousness. “Things that are temporally and spatially remote,” Caldeira said, “things we can’t directly perceive…” He went on for a while about the vision of his teacher Marty Hoffert but it’s better to let the man speak for himself:

Stepping back from the immediate moment, one could say that all this is implicit when naked apes with a big brain adapted to live short brutish lives of hunter-gatherers on the African Savannah stumble upon agriculture freeing some to develop writing and culture and eventually the scientific and industrial revolutions leading to their explosive growth, like a cancer, over the entire planet Earth. We invented the technology which extended our lives and changed everything about what we need to survive, but never adapted in a genetic Darwinian sense to the new global environment we created. Some might say this is necessarily a time bomb, that we have all the wrong instincts to live with our technology, and that climate change is the leading edge of a wave of destruction needed to restart the process. The fact that people aren’t willing to make the personal sacrifices to combat the climate change they created is interesting and true but it isn’t in my opinion the most important question. The most important question is whether Homo sapiens can adopt a narrative leading to the sustainable existence of high tech civilization on Earth.

In 2003, Caldeira returned to author a paper with Marty Hoffert. They both called for “A concerted Apollo-like program” that would “conquer the technical problems of global warming mitigation.” Caldeira and Hoffert found it “heartening that Apollo 11 landed on the moon less than a decade” after JFK declared it a national goal. Their article recommended “running a renewable energy theme exhibit at Disney World exclusively on solar and wind power…”  Unfortunately, however, Disney did not accept the advice, and needless to say, a decade after Caldeira and Hoffert’s paper the US and world have failed to institute any Apollo-like program that would transform their energy and transportation systems. Instead, Hoffert said later, “the US, China and India” forcibly built “the wrong energy infrastructure for the second half of the 21st century with their 900 new conventional coal electric power plants.” Policy makers “have no inkling how dangerous these plants will be.”

Today it is probably too late to prevent the planet from warming 2º Celsius, the threshold thought necessary to prevent the most severe effects of climate change. It’s probably too late to avert even worse warming.

Caldeira only sees irony at China Lake, but his teacher, Marty Hoffert, sees further. We are carving a primitive future for ourselves. We may soon begin making petroglyphs again.

If we fail, I can imagine a thousand years from now a small fragment of humankind barely surviving the new planetary climate huddled round a fire in some remote northern latitude observing the night sky, subsisting perhaps as hunter-gatherers on a vastly different and biologically depleted planet listening to a tale vaguely recalled in ancestral memory by the local shaman.

I stood with Ken in front of the Carnegie Institute of Global Ecology. The sun had swung around and it hovered behind the trees somewhere over the Pacific now.

“So basically, we won’t know if geoengineering will work, or what it actually might do until we have to deploy it at full-scale, and we don’t know if we’ll have to do it, and we don’t know how bad climate change is really going to be, but it might be bad. Is that right?”

Ken smiled. I could see he wanted to get back to his work. He’d talked to me for an hour and a half and I didn’t want to waste anymore of his time.

“Yes. I think that’s basically where we’re at,” he said.

I could hear the water dripping down the empty bell tower, plopping on the rusted wrought iron. 

“So everything is uncertainty?” I said.

I felt like I was eight years old again.

“You shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “That’s the human condition. It’s always been this way.”

I knew more than I had before and yet I still knew nothing at all. It was possible they were spraying now, possible they weren’t and would never have to, possible that, throughout my lifetime, the checkerboards carved by geoengineering could allow me to continue checking my laptop. It was possible we’d all muddle through it.

Other things were possible as well. 

“It’s all uncertainty,” Caldeira said. “You’ve read the existentialists.”

It was like talking to my father, the conversation we never had, him telling me to deal with it, be a man, I cannot help you, goodbye. 

“Do you have a girlfriend?” he asked me.

“Yeah.”

“Well, when I married my wife, I didn’t know what she’d be like in 20 years. You can never predict the future. But you have to continue living. It’s the human condition,” he said again.

“The human condition,” I repeated. 

I didn’t ask what his wife was like now, or if they’d actually spent 20 years together. I thanked him for his time, we shook hands, and he climbed the stairs. 

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1. Much to my embarrassment, Caldeira had to buy my lunch. I had no cash on me and in order to pay for my own chicken burrito, which we were going to walk to some cafeteria to pick up, I had to first create my own Stanford lunch account, which itself entailed filling out some interminable form, which I started on, sitting at Ken’s computer – a fact he seemed to like no more than the prospect of paying for my lunch – only to discover after five or so minutes of scrolling and typing – a rather counterproductive business since the point of ordering online, according to Caldeira, was “to skip the lines and save time” – that it would be impossible to create the account because I had to be an employee or a student… Later that summer I snail mailed Caldeira a postcard of some abandoned Anasazi dwellings at Chaco Canyon, along with a thank you note, $6.35 burrito cash, and a vintage NOTS China Lake sticker with a rabbit riding an “EXPERIMENTAL” missile through the middle of a question mark.