Solar geoengineering is often portrayed as a sort of emergency brake. Something along the lines of Pull in case of climate emergency to scatter light-reflecting particles to bounce sunlight out of the atmosphere and cool the planet.
But it might be less like a simple brake and more like a complicated, entirely unsolved puzzle.
Some researchers are starting to look into how nations or companies would go about trying to cool the planet—and there’s a lot to figure out. My colleague James Temple dug into these engineering challenges in his latest feature story. My biggest takeaway? This all might be a lot harder than I thought.
I’ll admit, I’ve always thought of geoengineering as a relatively low-tech solution. That’s partly because over the years we’ve seen some companies do their own low-cost guerrilla “experiments,” tossing balloons up into the atmosphere and claiming to have made some small dent in climate change.
But to actually actively cool the planet in a significant way, and to make sure we understand exactly what effect we’re having, there’s a lot that researchers still need to learn.
First, there’s the problem of getting up into the atmosphere. Generally, the target for solar geoengineering efforts is the stratosphere, since the air there is drier and more stable, so particles deposited there would stay aloft and move around the planet, lowering temperatures over a wider area and for a longer time.
You can release the particles in balloons, but balloons may not go where you want them to. And at a large scale, you’d be leaving a lot of litter all over the planet. That leaves aircraft, but conventional planes aren’t suited to fly around in the stratosphere. (Commercial aircraft generally fly at around 12 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, while geoengineering would require reaching roughly 20 kilometers.) The air is thinner higher up, so aircraft with massive wings would probably fare better than more conventional designs.
One design, from a startup called Iris Aero, shows just how much rethinking of our current flight technologies might be needed—the plane is almost unsettling in its proportions. Its wings are so long, on a stubby little body. It reminds me of a water strider, those bugs that have super-long legs to scurry around on a pond’s surface.
And that’s just the beginning. There’s also the question of what, exactly, would be best to scatter up in the stratosphere. The idea behind geoengineering comes from volcanoes—after an eruption, sulfuric acid ends up floating around in the atmosphere, and it can temporarily cool the planet. But that chemical is sticky and would be heavy to carry, so scattering some sort of precursor to sulfuric acid would probably be better. Researchers, including some at the University of Chicago, one of the leading institutions in this field, are working to figure out the best formula.
I’m struck by how complicated this turns out to be, and I’m also left with a big question: As research turns from modeling and simulations to the practical aspects of this incredibly controversial technology, what does it mean to be doing this work?
There are major concerns about what effects might come from large-scale attempts to cool the planet. The effects could be positive for some parts of the globe and negative for others. Established weather patterns, like the monsoon season in South Asia, could shift. There are major questions about what the governance for the use of geoengineering should look like, and who gets to decide whether to go ahead.
Experts who champion research in geoengineering often draw a line between a desire to support learning more about the technology and a call to deploy it. Many would argue that we should understand it better, so we can make informed decisions.
But to me, there’s a clear difference between atmospheric modeling and detailed engineering work on an aircraft. If there’s public research that essentially amounts to a set of practical instructions, I can’t help but feel like it could enable any number of individual actors or nations to take geoengineering into their own hands. It also might normalize the idea of using the technology.
Some experts shared concerns along these lines with James, arguing that the shift to practical engineering work requires more oversight. Some called research in this area dangerous.
One alternative perspective I found interesting came from Shuchi Talati, executive director of the nonprofit Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering.
Rather than further practical research making a slippery slope slipperier, it could have the opposite effect, she told James. “The actual practice of R&D will be a sticky slope, because there will be more real-world problems that come up that we haven’t even thought of yet,” she says. Engineering research could challenge the “idealized notions” of how easy the technology would actually be, she adds.
It’s hard to argue against better understanding potential tools to address climate change. But if we draw a map towards a potential future, it might become difficult to control who follows it.
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