The prospect of managing the earth’s sunlight with stratospheric aerosol injections is an understandably horrifying proposition to some, and the risks aren't just ecological, but geopolitical. hollyjeanbuck reports on the case for solar geoengineering
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images One underappreciated, terrifying aspect of climate change is that the situation would be even worse if our air pollution weren’t cooling us.
Imagine a fleet of custom-designed aircraft taking off each day to release particles into the stratosphere. These particles — sulfates, or calcite, or something TBD — would reflect a fraction of incoming sunlight. They would circle around the planet, staying aloft for about a year. Every day like clockwork: new particles going up, old particles drifting down. The effect would be to cool the earth.
Other assessments suggest that China would be willing to deploy large-scale geoengineering, risking hostility with India. Or that solar geoengineering represents a national security tool that must be treated like nuclear weapons — a “coercive threat.” Or that there could be violent popular resistance to solar geoengineering. And so on.
Modeling research has consistently shown that solar geoengineering “could offset some of the effects of increasing” greenhouse gases “on global and regional climate,” according to the IPCC. Scientists have found that solar radiation modification — as solar geoengineering is technically known — could substantially offset temperature rise.
Critics of solar geoengineering dismiss it as ungovernable, given the difficulty of global political agreement. But is solar geoengineering more or less governable than the extremely complicated and conflict-rich problem of phasing out fossil fuels globally? Instead of fossil-fuel-producing countries dragging the planet into an existential death spiral, a truce could be accommodated in which solar geoengineering is used to smooth the transition.
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