The Idiotic And Dangerous Plan To Dim The Sun
The whole idea is barmy, but more to the point, why is a penny of taxpayer money being spent on it?
On April 9th, The Telegraph reported:
Geoengineering schemes may hold the key to reversing global warming, but risks abound and many remain sceptical.
Ian McEwan’s recent novel, What We Can Know, is set in a semi-underwater Britain in the year 2119. A few decades on from a climate catastrophe, things are pretty dire. If you want to get from the Chilterns to the South Downs, you have to travel by boat.
What saves humanity from total wipeout is, ironically enough, nuclear explosions in the Middle East. Detonations in the desert in the 2040s send gigatons of dust and sand into the upper atmosphere, where they begin to filter out the sun’s harsh light – and reverse global warming. “Over the graves of millions, the earth began to cool,” our narrator tells us. Over time, the cooling encourages “a new spirit of optimism”.
As sci-fi as all this may sound, the scenario is grounded in scientific fact. What McEwan is describing is a particularly brutal form of geoengineering – that is, modification on a planetary level – and specifically, “solar radiation modification”, or SRM. In other words, turning the dimmer switch on the sun. The good news is we don’t need a nuclear apocalypse to do this. It is, theoretically, entirely possible for humans to cool the planet by reflecting more sunlight back into space.
“When you run the numbers, there’s just no way to avoid global warming without geoengineering,” says Dr Hugh Hunt, deputy director of the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge University, who has been studying this for the best part of three decades.
“Increasingly, that’s what anyone who really sits down and thinks about it comes to believe. If you stop the sun’s rays from reaching the surface of the Earth, it’s kind of obvious, it’s cooler – as it is on a cloudy day.” He points to the so-called “napkin” diagram, which charts predicted temperature rises in various scenarios: business-as-usual, mitigation (i.e., the outcome if we switch to renewables), carbon removal and SRM. The mitigation helps, but it is only with SRM that the temperature actually falls. Again, theoretically.
Proposed techniques vary from the surprisingly lo-fi – painting city rooftops white to reflect more sunlight, say – to the Thunderbirds-esque. Some have suggested using balloons to send artificial clouds made of aerosols into the sky; others have proposed fleets of planes circling the Earth and spraying sulphur dioxide aerosols into the upper atmosphere.
Last year, a US-Israeli start-up named Stardust, whose co-founder and chief executive, Yanai Yedvab, was once the deputy chief scientist at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, announced it had raised $60 million to develop a “full-stack solution” to climate change, promising “a safe, measurable, adjustable, and fully reversible system to stabilise Earth’s temperature” (in other words, the deployment of particles, and bells-and-whistles monitoring). Another US start-up, Make Sunsets, founded by two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, is banking on making artificial clouds.
To say that these companies are controversial is an understatement. Indeed, shortly after making its announcement, Stardust was accused by the Center of International Environmental Law of “accelerating a reckless race that threatens to put humanity on a path of no return to perpetual dependency on this extreme technology”. It comes with risks: acid rain, or climate becoming a new vector of warfare.
Stardust, co-founded by Amyad Spector and Yanai Yedvab, promises ‘a safe, measurable, adjustable and fully reversible system to stabilise Earth’s temperature’.
Nevertheless, the fact that the climate is heating faster than anyone predicted has sharpened minds. Dr Shuchi Talati, director of the newly formed Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, says she was shocked when she first learnt about SRM technology. “And then I was appalled. And then it became jarring to me that we have no governance mechanisms around it.”
She set up her organisation to try and ensure that any geoengineering we do attempt is done for the benefit of humanity – and particularly those worse affected by climate change – as opposed to just, say, some venture capitalists and start-up guys. “Ultimately, that outcome will depend on how we make decisions about it. Who has power? Where is the money coming from? Will it be used for the public good – or the corporate good?”
Make Sunsets co-founder Luke Iseman has punchy words for critics of private-sector SRM companies, however: “We have been geoengineering the world for hundreds of years with our carbon emissions. A bunch of Ivory Tower bureaucrats spewing hot air about their grave concerns will not stop us from continuing to deliver Cooling Credits [a carbon offsetting ‘credit’ that people can purchase] for our 1,077 customers,” he says.
“In an ideal world, we’d have some competent international body robustly overseeing all environmental factors: meaningful price on carbon, increasing Earth’s albedo as needed, etc. But, we live in the real world. The only thing worse than private companies cooling Earth is nobody doing it.”
A spokesman for Stardust said: “The moral urgency of addressing climate crises and a warming planet is why we started Stardust,” and added that they have made sure their “investors are aligned with respect to our mission statement and ethical values. And they understand that in order for them to see a return on their investment, governments will ultimately have to make the decision to deploy.”
Against this febrile backdrop, it may be surprising to learn that Britain has stepped forward as the leading national funder of geoengineering research via the Government’s £1bn “moonshot” division, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA). Last year, ARIA announced it will conduct 22 different experiments under a £57m geoengineering programme – including five controlled “outdoor experiments”.
If this sounds far worse than the current attempts to control the weather to ‘save the planet’ that’s because it is.
The first two comments on the Telegraph article sum it up nicely:
I couldn’t agree more!!
See more here notalotofpeopleknowthat
Header image: The Guardian