on Earth. In the Peruvian Andes, people are attempting to literally paint a mountain back to whiteness.
Licapa, at 4,200 metres up, is a village of people whose livelihoods are based around farming alpaca, the domesticated camelid of South America. This part of Peru, a hundred kilometres west of the town of Ayacucho, is one of the poorest in the country and was hit particularly hard in the 1980s and 90s during a decade of terrorism led by the Shining Path, a violent Maoist guerrilla group based here.
When I arrive at the village, below the Chalon Sombrero mountain peak, women are doing laundry in a small, grubby-looking pond, while a group of men repair one of the stone houses. These highlanders, who speak Quechua, the ancient language of the Incas, have spent the past twenty years trying to rebuild their broken communities, homes and lives, helped by various government schemes. But climate change is against them.
Salamon Parco, a young father, is fighting a personal battle against global warming. When he was the same age as his 5-year-old son Wilmer, he tells me, a river ran through the valley, watering the alpaca pastures. Women never used to wash in the pond, he says. But the glacier at Chalon Sombrero, 5,000 metres above sea level, disappeared completely twenty years ago, and with it the water. All that is left is a black rocky summit above a rocky channel where a river once ran.
Like Stakmo, it doesn’t often rain in Licapa, and what rain does fall is confined to January and February. The rest of the year, the high-alpine grasslands rely on glacial meltwater and, in its absence, turn yellow and die. More than 1,000 people have already left the village because they couldn’t feed their families, migrating to shanty settlements around Peru’s capital, Lima. Parco, with a wife and three young children, has considered the same. ‘But my home is here. What would I do in the city? I need to try and make it work here first,’ he says. Instead, Parco and his friend Geronimo Torres are spending every morning painting the black mountain white, hoping to bring back the glacier on which 900 people depend.
They began painting the mountain in May and by my visit in September, they have turned three hectares of black rock white. The remarkable experiment, backed by $200,000 in prize money from a 2009 World Bank climate-change adaptation competition, was conceived of by the rather eccentric and unlikeable Peruvian entrepreneur Eduardo Gold. The money, which Gold tells me he has yet to receive, is going to be used to build a factory in Licapa to produce lime paint for whitening the mountain.
The experiment is based on the principle that a black body absorbs more heat than a white one. By increasing the reflectivity of the black rocks using white paint, the mountain should be cold enough to retain the ice that forms on it – and eventually a glacier will be made. That is the hope, anyway.
There are plenty of sceptics, including Peru’s environment minister, who has said the money could be better spent on other climate-mitigation projects. And Gold, who has no scientific qualifications, has also been judged with some suspicion by agencies and public bodies.
Nevertheless, Parco tells me he is already seeing results. ‘In the daytime, the painted surface is 5°C, whereas the black rock is 20°C. And at night, the white surface falls to -5°C,’ he says. Ice has begun forming on the painted rocks overnight, although it has melted by 10.30 a.m.
The plan is to dig a small reservoir of water above the painted section and pump water up to it using a wind turbine, which would then be released during the night in a slow trickle over the paint, where they hope it would freeze. In time, the ice would build up and the process would be self-sustaining, because glacial conditions would be there: ‘Cold generates cold,’ Gold says. Parco and Torres have seventy hectares to paint in total, a job they had thought would take two years. They started the job with two other men, but fifteen days later, this other pair dropped out because there was no money to pay them.
‘We are still painting the mountain because it works, and because we have no choice,’ Parco says. ‘If there is no glacier, then there is no water for us and we will have to move away.’
I ask Lonny Thompson, an Ohio University glaciologist, who has been studying Peru’s glaciers for the past forty years, what he thinks of the idea. Painting the mountain may have some success in the short term in a local area, he tells me, but it is not feasible over greater regions. ‘Nobody is going to paint the entire Andean chain white,’ he says. What is needed now that the glaciers are disappearing, is man-made water storage to replace them. ‘This means a big programme of building dams and reservoirs, which is tricky in such an earthquake-prone zone, but necessary.’
It is unlikely that Parco’s remote village of Licapa will be prioritised for new waterworks in the next few years. Painting a mountain white may, however, produce enough ice in the next couple of years to buy the villagers time to adapt to a different livelihood.
Attempts to whiten the Earth’s surface to increase its reflectivity are also being considered on a far greater scale elsewhere. Methods to reduce the amount of the sun’s energy that heats the planet – called ‘solar radiation management’ – have the potential to rapidly counteract regional or even global warming. With global temperatures almost certain to exceed the 2°C of warming this century that scientists consider ‘safe’ for humanity, quick-cooling options look increasingly attractive. Deflecting the sun’s energy back into space would do nothing to counteract the ocean acidification effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide – which I’ll come to later – but it is a valuable way of buying time while societies decarbonise, adapt to warmer conditions and new climates, and figure out an effective and efficient way of removing the carbon dioxide we’ve put into the atmosphere.
Some engineers are proposing erecting Earth-orbiting space mirrors that would bounce sunlight back out before it even enters our atmosphere. Terrestrial proposals include whitewashing roofs of houses and public buildings, planting lighter and more reflective crops (perhaps using genetically modified varieties), and covering deserts or ocean in reflective materials. With enough paint and willpower, strategic mountaintops could be sprayed white from the air, perhaps.
Since the 1980s, Almería in southern Spain has developed the greatest concentration of greenhouses in the world, covering 26,000 hectares. Dubbed the ‘sea of plastic’, this Anthropocene landscape is remarkable not only because Europe’s driest desert now produces millions of tonnes of fruit and vegetables, but also because the greenhouses reflect so much sunlight back into the atmosphere that they are actually cooling the province. While temperatures in the rest of Spain have climbed faster than the world average, meteorological observatories located in the plastic expanse have shown a decline of 0.3°C per decade.5 It turns out that the plastic acts like a mirror, reflecting sunlight back into the atmosphere before it can reach and heat up the ground. At a local level, the plastic greenhouses offset the global greenhouse effect.
More controversially, filling the atmosphere with airborne particulates would also cool the Earth by shading it from sunlight. This happens naturally after a volcano erupts, such as Pinatubo in 1991, which lowered global temperatures by more than half a degree for two years after the event.6 In the deep past, supervolcano eruptions threw the planet into ice ages, causing mass extinctions. The same effect, albeit on a far lesser scale, can also be seen on shipping lanes because ships typically burn heavy fuels that issue smoky sulphurous emissions that seed measurably colder airstreams across the oceans. Sulphur particles – like the ones found in the Asian brown haze pollution – have a shading effect that reduces the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface by as much as 15%, and are masking humanity’s warming by as much as 80%.
No one would suggest increasing industrial air pollution as a solution to global warming, of course; instead, engineers are looking at other atmospheric ways of reflecting the sun’s energy. Injecting salt particles into low-level, stratocumulus clouds could make them brighter and more reflective, providing a local cooling effect. Clouds of perfect reflectivity and altitude for this occur naturally in semi-permanent sheets
