I see that Ezra Klein is reading my mind today:
Should We Dim the Sun? Will We Even Have a Choice?
That’s the central theme of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future.”...In my conversation with her on my podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show,” I wanted to focus on one [subject] that obsesses me: solar geoengineering. To even contemplate it feels like the height of hubris. Are we really going to dim the sun? And yet, any reasonable analysis of the mismatch between our glacial politics and our rapidly warming planet demands that we deny ourselves the luxury of only contemplating the solutions we would prefer.
Fifteen years ago my view on climate change was conventionally liberal: we needed bold policies to fight global warming. This included things like carbon taxes; federal initiatives to spur investment in solar and wind; regulations to reduce power consumption, and so forth. One of my earliest magazine pieces for Mother Jones represents this kind of thinking. You can read it here.
For fifteen years I waited for evidence that the world would make even the mildest efforts to enter this fight. But this is a global problem that demands a global response, and on that score we've gotten almost nothing. We all signed the Paris Accord, but compliance is voluntary and few countries have any real hope of meeting their goals. Extraction of fossil fuels continues apace in virtually every country where it's possible: Canada has oil sands, Norway has offshore oil, the United States has fracking, Germany has coal, China has coal, and even Britain, which gave up mining coal years ago, is now set to open a new coal mine. No matter how green a country claims to be, it will extract all the fossil fuels it can if it means generating a few more jobs or making a small dent in its balance of trade figures. In the meantime, carbon levels in the atmosphere continue to rise like a metronome:
A couple of years ago I finally gave up on this: It was obvious there was no hope for an adequate global response in anywhere close to the necessary time frame. I now believe that our only option is to invest massive amounts of money in technology solutions, hoping against hope that enough of them succeed to reverse warming before it destroys the planet. You can read all about that here.
But there's one more thing. Technological progress may be our best hope right now, but how likely is it to work? Since it requires no big personal sacrifice other than trainloads of cash—which can be put on national credit cards if push comes to shove—it could gain enough public support. And since it will produce technology that everyone can use, other countries might well pitch in. And finally, since it does nothing one way or the other about the Uighurs, even China might get on board. It has a legitimate chance.
By "legitimate," however, I mean that my personal guess is that it has maybe a 10% chance of panning out. If you're an optimist, you might give it 20%.
Which brings us to this: what do I predict will happen? The answer is that I think around 2040 or so we will collectively conclude that we're screwed. Global temps will already be 2ºC above the historical average and we'll be on an irreversible path to 3ºC. The future will look so horrific that we simply have no choices left. And so we will shoot gigatons of aerosols into the atmosphere. This will dim the sun's heat just enough to halt, and then reverse, global warming.
This is not the only possible form of geoengineering. There are lots of others, many of them fascinating and some of them far better, in theory, than aerosols. But all of them are pipe dreams right now, and even in the future will probably be prohibitively expensive and intrusive. Aerosols, by contrast, are surprisingly well understood and surprisingly cheap.
They're well understood partly because every few years a volcano dumps a huge load of ash and aerosols into the atmosphere, which has given us a chance to study their impact. And they're cheap because, well, because they are. Roughly speaking, all it takes is a fleet of about a hundred aircraft spraying loads of sulfate aerosols 24/7. The cost would be in the range of $5-10 billion a year, which is peanuts, and it would lower the temperature of the earth by about a twentieth of a degree per year. We would slowly get back to a manageable level, and then continue spraying to keep temps steady.
Do I think this is a good idea? Absolutely not. For one thing, it doesn't solve all the problems of climate change. Ocean acidification, for example. For another, different areas of the planet have different ideal temperatures. Who's going to decide what our global goal should be? And what's to stop any country from spraying its own aerosols if it thinks temperatures should be even lower?
So of course it's not a good idea. It's a terrible idea. But is it a worse idea than warming of 3ºC? Nope. And it's not even close.
The things we're doing now will probably have an impact by 2040. That's good, since the less spraying we have to do the better. But they most likely won't be anywhere close to what we need, and the pressure to adopt a cheap, fast, and decently understood second-best solution will eventually become irresistible. And so we'll spray.
Pinatubo solutions.
Some people (Krugman among others) claim that non-fossil energy is now cheaper or soon will be. Others (Xi Jinping) disagree and have decided to continue investing in coal. Anyway there is a possibility that non-fossil energy will actually be cheaper and will be preferred by private enterprise as well as governments. It may be important to get the alternate energy industries large enough in terms of jobs as well as capital to have political clout.
There is still a possibility that some practicable type of CO2 sequestration will be found.
I don't have a great understanding of climate science, so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that the issue isn't simply one of future carbon emissions but that we have already passed several tipping points. I.e., the stuff we did or didn't do in the '80's and the '90's and the '00's and the '10's already guarantees a whole bunch of global warming, so we are screwed even if we drastically reduced carbon emissions now.
So assuming we do anything at all about it, Kevin's assumption that the world may try for some sort of technological solution after things get super-bad is very plausible.
I guess the tipping points can be tipped back, it's just harder to do that than it would have been to stop before tipping. Instead of just cutting back how much CO2 we're dumping into the air, we have to work on ways to get CO2 out of the atmosphere.
CO2
And it's not like engineering solutions have ever had unintended consequences. No siree Bob.
One wonders what astronomers will have to say about having to deal with more crap interfering with their observations -
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-resources/transparency-and-atmospheric-extinction/
- especially when a new study suggests that aerosols are less effective at cooling than we thought:
https://phys.org/news/2021-01-aerosol-particles-cool-climate-thought.html
That's what I used to think, but now I think we'll also do a massive build-out of air capture CO2 systems to grab it out of the air, even if it has to be publicly subsidized. It'll reduce the need to spray aerosols to cool the temperature down (big money for anyone who owns stuff that can be used for enhanced weathering to store all that captured CO2 as well).
I do think we need to be studying, modeling, and experimenting with this particular kind of geo-engineering right now. We need to know its downsides as soon as possible, so we can work to immediately mitigate them if things get dire enough to need it. We know how it works from the volcanic eruptions, but we're not so sure on the downside effects - the Mt Pinatubo eruption lowered temperatures but also may have caused both massive rainfall in the US and a major hit to the Ozone Layer.
I don't agree at all. Climate engineering is deeply irresponsible. First because to even think of it takes the pressure off, and virtually ensures not enough will be done to drive emissions down. Second, and more importantly, it's just wrong to come with a solution that will last, say, a few hundred years (and that's being optimistic). The more you pump aerosols in the atmosphere, the more people and governments and companies will feel free to pump C02 too. At a certain point there's enough of it to warm the planet not by 3° but by 6°C, and only the aerosols keep it down. What then happens when there is a war, another president Trump, or a downfall of civilization altogether? This: life on Earth will end.
If we make the survival of the planet dependent on the survival of a certain political and socioeconomic system, all hope is lost.
Agree.
I wonder how this will play here in Wisconsin. One of my dark hopes is that my property values will skyrocket from all the Texans moving here.
Also, it's getting down to about -15 this week. I'm ok with it. But how many people in Wisconsin - even in 2040 - are going to want to hear a politician tell them we need to make it colder?
Ezra Klein, ugh -- the John Scalzi of journalism. In any event, 'geo-engineering' has been employed many times in the past to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. In fact IIRC, the formation of the Himalayas (formed by the collision of the Australian and Eurasian tectonic plates) was associated with immense reductions in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.
Weathering is your friend. And eco-friendly too!
As much as I wish it weren't true, I think Kevin's right. Our addiction to fossil fuels, particularly in the third world, isn't breakable in a timeframe necessary to meaningfully fight global warming at this point. Billions of lives and the global economy are at stake if we don't get this under control. I'm also cynical about our ability to actually scale up wind and solar power to the degree necessary to actually effectively displace fossil fuel energy on a national, much less global, scale. Unless state and local govt's declare all-out war against NIMBYism, where are you going to put all those windmills and solar farms? It seems like we have a lot of empty land in this country, but once you start actually looking for suitable sites where people will agree to let you build, there's a lot less than you think. Not to mention all the transmission lines, battery storage facilities, etc. There are a couple of modestly-sized solar arrays in the California desert, and environmentalists have fought them tooth and nail every single step. Same with various wind farms, geothermal projects, etc.
I pretty much agree -- if the world were serious about global warming, we'd be working on much safer nuclear designs, and be pouring more money into battery research to be able to store wind and solar power to use when demand is high and the sun isn't shining / wind isn't blowing.
But that's not happening in most areas, and it's definitely not happening fast enough.
And it is far from a US-only problem. See this graph, where you can see even if you cut our emissions by 50%, China and India will still ensure that CO2 emissions grow uncontrollably.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/global-carbon-project-coronavirus-causes-record-fall-in-fossil-fuel-emissions-in-2020
Is it a dangerous idea -- definitely. Have I seen *any* other idea that has any chance of actually reducing rising temperatures? No, not really.
One of the reasons we haven't made more progress against climate change already is the belief that what we can do, and are doing, is futile. The problem is so great that all our collective efforts will come up short. The battle will be lost. We are doomed. That's long been the conventional wisdom, even what smart people consider the smart take. To wit:
The conventional wisdom among climate scientists has long been that if we stopped all carbon emissions today, the climate would continue to warm for decades or even centuries. Think of climate change as a really big oil tanker. Even after the engines are shut down, its forward progress continues for miles and miles. That has led many people to throw up their hands in despair and choosing to continue doing what they have always done because if we are doomed, at least let’s have some fun while we still can. It’s like the band playing Nearer My God To Thee on the fantail of the Titanic as it slipped beneath the waves but if the message is that there is no hope, why not?
But that dire assessment is not what science is telling us today.
“It is our best understanding that, if we bring down CO2 to net zero, the warming will level off. The climate will stabilize within a decade or two,” Rogelj told Berwyn. “There will be very little to no additional warming. Our best estimate is zero.” He adds the notion that decades or even centuries of additional warming are already baked into the system as suggested by previous IPCC reports was based on an “unfortunate misunderstanding of experiments done with climate models that never assumed zero emissions.”
...The actual lag between halting CO2 emissions and halting temperature rise will not be 25 to 30 years as previously thought but “more like three to five years.”
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/01/04/net-zero-emissions-stabilize-climate-quickly-uk-scientist/
Maybe in 20 years we won't be waving the white flag and spraying aerosols into the atmosphere. We could be much closer to the goal of zero emissions, close enough see a real and lasting solution within reach.
The sooner we stop believing that the goal is unreachable, the sooner we'll be to actually reaching it.
That would be great if it holds.
They worked with a number of models, and all show a drop off of CO2 in the atmosphere once emissions stop. Rates vary, and depending on other feedbacks, the temperature falls, stabilizes, or still goes up. The average of the results show temperature stabilization fairly quickly, with a bit of error. Better constraints on the feedbacks are needed.
link to article:
https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/17/2987/2020/bg-17-2987-2020.html
If that happens what happens next? Every idiot on Earth will think problem solved and it's a green light to re-double every effort to extract fossil fuels.
"https://www.businessinsider.com/china-floating-solar-farm-coal-mine-renewable-energy-2018-1"
Not so sure China does not recognize the bad effects of climate change. No update to my knowledge but at least a start several years ago.
Another approach being thrown around is to create an "solar umbrella" to reduce the incoming amount of solar radiation. The idea anyway has some appeal; gets the space force something to do, coverage might be somewhat adjustable, the public might like it (the romance of Space!) and might be possible to generate some energy (getting earthward is still a problem tho). I'm sure there are others
Trainloads of cash? What are we going to do, atomize the cash and spread it in the atmosphere as aerosols?
Labor, materials, equipment I'd believe. Trainloads of cash no.
Kevin may be right; like him, I gave up hope long ago that humanity would do anything serious to reverse global warming. It's deeply depressing that most of the millenials who are going to cop it in the neck seem less interested in the issue than the boomers, most of whom will be dead before things start to get really bad.
One thing I can fearlessly predict is that attempts to engineer a solution will have unanticipated consequences that may prove even worse than global warming.
What I think is going to happen?
We're extinct. We just don't know it yet. I cite as evidence the inability of SETI to turn up any signs of intelligence whatsoever, especially now that we know planets are abundant. Evolution works entirely on short term rewards. Short term rewards when you can change your own environment motivate leaving the tragedy of the commons for someone else later on to solve.
Let's face it -- intelligence is not a long term survival trait for a species. It leads directly to extinction through destruction of your own planet. For us, it has lasted at best a few millenia, and really only about 4 centuries. If that is typical, then there really is no one out there and soon there will be no one here either.