Forget about a future filled with wind farms and hydrogen cars. The Pentagon’s top weaponeer says he has a radical solution that would stop global warming now — no matter how much oil we burn

JEFF GOODELL Posted Nov 03, 2006 9:40 AM | Link

Illustration by Jonathan Barkat

Last summer, an elite group of scientists, economists and government officials gathered at Snowmass ski resort near Aspen, Colorado, to contemplate the end of the world. The weeklong “workshop, held in the shadow of 14,000-foot-high peaks at the Top of the Village lodge, was organised by the Energy Modeling Forum, a group of academics and industry leaders affiliated with Stanford University. A few months earlier, Stanford professor John Weyant, the director of the group, had asked participants to consider a nightmare scenario: It’s 2010, and global warming is not only happening, it’s accelerating. The Greenland and western Antarctic ice sheets are melting at an exponential rate, leading to predictions of a twenty-foot rise in sea levels by 2070. In this scenario, southern Florida vanishes, New York City becomes an aquarium, London looks like Venice. In Bangladesh alone, 40 million people are displaced by the rising waters. Droughts cripple food production, leading to widespread famine. If you need to put a “sudden stop” on emissions of carbon dioxide, Weyant asked, how — short of shutting down the global economy — would you do it?

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