Gee wiz, solar geoengineering? ya don't say.
Dimming the Sun to Cool the Planet Is a Desperate Idea, Yet We’re Inching
Toward It
excerpt:
"Everyone studying solar geoengineering seems to agree that it’s a terrible
thing. “The idea is outlandish,” Parker told me. Mohammed Mofizur Rahman,
a Bangladeshi scientist who is one of Degrees Initiatives’ grantees, noted,
“It’s crazy stuff.” So did the veteran Hungarian diplomat Janos Pasztor, who
runs the Carnegie initiative on geoengineering governance, and said, “People
should be suspicious.” Pascal Lamy, a former head of the World Trade
Organization (W.T.O.), who is the president of the Paris Peace Forum, agreed,
saying, “It would represent a failure.” Jesse Reynolds, a longtime advocate of
geoengineering research, who launched the forum’s commission, wrote
recently that geoengineering’s “reluctant ‘supporters’ are despondent
environmentalists who are concerned about climate change and believe that
abatement of greenhouse gas emissions might not be enough.” Reynolds
speaks for this geoengineering community on this point. They are, to a
person, willing to acknowledge that reducing emissions by replacing coal,
gas, and oil represents a much better solution. “I think the basic answer is
moving more rapidly out of fossil fuels,” Lamy said. “I’m a European. I’ve been
supporting this view for a very long time. Europe is in some ways well ahead
of others.”
But these same people all say that, because we’re not making sufficient
progress on that task, we’re going to “overshoot” 1.5 degrees Celsius. (The
Paris Peace Forum’s project, in fact, is called the Overshoot Commission.)
So, they think, we had best investigate and plan for a fallback position: the
possibility that the world will need to break the glass and implement this
emergency plan. “My own simple answer is that we did not move rapidly
enough out of fossil fuels,” Lamy said. Carbon polluters still aren’t paying
enough for the harms that they “externalize,” or pass on to everyone else.
“And the reason for that, in a global market system which is run by capitalists,
whether we like it or not, is that the price of carbon, implicit or explicit, is not
at a level that would allow markets to internalize carbon damage.”
Lamy, it must be said, was the head of the W.T.O. from 2005 to 2013, crucial
years when CO2 output was soaring, and W.T.O. rules prohibit climate actions
that interfere with its free-trade principles. In this country, a large amount of
the research and advocacy for these interventions comes from Harvard, the
richest educational institution in the world, which only agreed last year, after
a decade’s efforts by students and faculty, to phase out fossil-fuel
investments in its endowment. Harvard’s research has been funded by,
among others, Bill Gates, formerly the richest man in the world. If you wanted
to build a conspiracy theory or a science-fiction novel about global élites
trying to control the weather, you’d have the pieces. However mixed these
groups’ records on addressing climate change have been, they are having an
effect now: the pace of publishing studies on geoengineering in scientific
journals has begun to pick up, and the National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering, and Medicine and other organizations have called for
accelerating research. These researchers say that we should be studying
both the science and the governance of solar geoengineering, with a focus
on two questions: what would happen if we put particles into the
stratosphere, and who would make the call? The enormous step of dimming
the sun could turn out to be very easy, at least from a technological point of
view. Filling the air with carbon dioxide took close to three hundred years of
burning coal and oil and gas, millions of miles of pipelines, thousands of
refineries, hundreds of millions of cars. That enormous effort, carried out by
just a fraction of the world’s population, has, with increasing speed, pushed
the atmospheric concentration of CO2 from about 275 parts per million,
before the Industrial Revolution, to about 425 parts per million now. It would
take only a tiny fraction of that effort to inject aerosol particles into the
stratosphere. (Sulfur dioxide is the most commonly discussed candidate, but
aluminum, calcium carbonate, and, most poetically, diamond dust, have also
been proposed.) A recent article in the Harvard Environmental Law Review
estimates that the “direct costs of deployment—collecting the precursor
materials for aerosols, putting them into the sky, monitoring, and so on—
would be . . . as low as several billion dollars a year.” Any country with a
serious air force could probably release sulfur from planes in the upper
atmosphere. You might not even need a country: it would cost Elon Musk,
currently the world’s richest man, far less to fund such a mission than it did to
buy Twitter—and he’s already got the rockets.
So the question is less whether geoengineering can “work”—as the Harvard
Law Review article makes clear, the scientific evidence suggests that it would
“likely produce a substantial, rapid cooling effect worldwide” and that it
“could also reduce the rate of sea-level rise, sea-ice loss, heatwaves,
extreme weather, and climate change-associated anomalies in the water
cycle.” The question is more: what else would it do? On a global scale it
could, at least temporarily, turn the sky hazy or milky (hence the title of
Kolbert’s book); it could alter “the quality of the light plants use for
photosynthesis” (no small thing on a planet basically built on chlorophyll—
studies have shown that U.S. corn production increased as polluting aerosols
went down in the wake of amendments to the Clean Air Act); and it might
damage the ozone layer, which is only now repairing itself from our recent
assault with fluorocarbons. (By way of comparison, the largest volcanic
eruption ever recorded, at Mt. Tambora, in 1815, on an island that is now part
of Indonesia, spewed a cloud of particles that temporarily caused the
temperature to drop a degree Celsius. That change produced, in 1816, “a
year without a summer” across much of the northern hemisphere. Lake ice
was observed in Pennsylvania into August, and, in Europe, where grain yields
plummeted, hungry crowds rioted beneath banners reading “Bread or
Blood.”)"
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