.billmckibben writes about the risks of solar geoengineering, which some scientists see as a last resort to combat the climate crisis.
If we decide to “solar geoengineer” the Earth—to spray highly reflective particles of a material, such as sulphur, into the stratosphere in order to deflect sunlight and so cool the planet—it will be the second most expansive project that humans have ever undertaken. The idea behindis essentially to mimic what happens when volcanoes push particles into the atmosphere; a large eruption, such as that of Mt. Pinatubo, in the Philippines, in 1992, can measurably cool the world for a year or two.
It’s likely, in other words, that conditions may force a reckoning with the idea of solar geoengineering—of blocking from the Earth some of the sunlight that has always nurtured it. Andy Parker is a British climate researcher who has worked on geoengineering for more than a decade—first at the Royal Society and then at Harvard’s Kennedy School—and now runs the Degrees Initiative. He told me, “For the whole time I’ve worked on this, it’s been like—always a few decades away no matter when you ask.
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 last potential development, which scientists call “termination shock,” has been widely researched; Raymond Pierrehumbert, a professor of physics at the University of Oxford, and Michael Mann, perhaps America’s best-known climate scientist after Hansen, have said that it is reason enough to avoid solar geoengineering. “Some proponents insist we can always stop if we don’t like the result,” Mann and Pierrehumbert wrote in the. “Well yes, we can stop.
It’s not clear what sentiment would or should prevail in an ethical contest: an Indigenous regard for untouched nature, or concern for the almost-certain-to-be-displaced inhabitants of islands like Kiribati. What is clear is that both those ideas play, at some level, symbolic roles in this fight, without the actual political power to decide one way or another. Another party with a clear interest, however, possesses enormous influence, and that’s the fossil-fuel industry.
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