geoengineering

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

by Oliver Morton  · 26 Sep 2015  · 469pp  · 142,230 words

earth system or might seek to have in the future.” —Tim Kruger, University of Oxford THE PLANET REMADE Oliver Morton The Planet Remade How Geoengineering Could Change the World PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton and Oxford Published in the United States and Canada in 2016 by Princeton University Press, 41 William

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Two: Substances 7 Nitrogen 175 The Making of the Population Bomb 184 Defusing the Population Bomb 189 Far from Fixed 195 How to Spot a Geoengineer 201 8 Carbon Past, Carbon Present 209 The Anthropocene 219 The Greening Planet 229 9 Carbon Present, Carbon Future 243 Ocean Anaemia 251 Cultivating

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wherewithal to commission studies on subjects they are interested in from commercial aircraft makers. But Keith, probably the single most influential researcher in the climate geoengineering field, is not a typical professor. Among other things, he and his friend Ken Caldeira, an earthsystem scientist at the Carnegie Institute, have for

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broad-ranging and politically engaged climate modeller called Stephen Schneider. Schneider had a taste for things that would provoke debate; he engaged with ideas about geoengineering more than any other leading climate scientist of his generation. While Marchetti imagined ocean-floor lakes of carbon dioxide, Freeman Dyson, a mathematical physicist with

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, suggested that, if the world needed cooling, aircraft burning sulphur-enriched fuel might be sufficient to the need. By the 1980s Marchetti’s term ‘geoengineering’ had come to encompass all such technological schemes to counteract human intensification of the greenhouse effect, whatever specific technology they might employ. When, in 1988

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made the cover of the prestigious journal Nature in 1992 – but from 1991 to 2001 it published not a single scientific article mentioning climate geoengineering. What distinguished geoengineering from those other ideas was that it had to do with something that actually mattered. There were no asteroids on impact courses that the

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increasing number of conferences and conference sessions devoted to the topic. Reports on the subject – including the most influential one, the Royal Society’s 2009 ‘Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty’ – would typically have Keith, Caldeira and some other members of the clique among their authors. The clique was

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GeoMIP, was and is resolutely sceptical about the idea that stratospheric veils are a promising intervention. His most widely read article on climate geoengineering is ‘Twenty Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea’. Clive Hamilton, a philosopher and public intellectual from Australia whom I first met at the Copenhagen conference,

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occasional flashes of genuine rancour. The constituency for debate has expanded steadily since the early days of the geoclique; the first international academic conference on geoengineering research, held in Berlin in the summer of 2014, attracted about four hundred.* GeoMIP has brought in a number of early-career natural scientists.

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Germany, which has a number of well-funded interdisciplinary projects looking at the natural science, social science and policy implications of various approaches to climate geoengineering. Germany is also home to the world’s most ambitious strategy for moving away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy, the Energiewende. Even if

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obstacles may prove insurmountable, what risks unacceptable, and how research can be governed responsibly. Such expansion would be a fine consequence of bringing discussion of geoengineering into the mainstream of climate politics. It is not the only outcome imaginable, though. There is, as always, the fear of the superfreak pivot –

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the title of a conference. When Caldeira, one of the organizers, heard of their concerns, he responded in partial jest that they should just replace ‘geoengineering’ with the dreariest management-speak circumlocution they could come up with – ‘something like “solar-radiation management”’. The term stuck and, abbreviated by the initials

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the mechanisms at work within clouds. This, their proponents hope, could win them support from a broader community of scientists than just those interested in geoengineering – as happened with iron-fertilization experiments, and could happen with the experiments in the stratosphere that David Keith and others plan to propose. Experiments

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aimed at understanding earthsystem processes as well as possible geoengineering approaches seem much more likely to be acceptable to scientists – and to civil-society organizations – than those geared towards simply looking at the feasibility

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willingness of General Pete Worden, the begetter of the Clementine mission and until recently the head of NASAs Ames Research Center, to host meetings on geoengineering, there has been little close involvement. But the deep links between the military, weather modification, climate control and nuclear-power Prometheanism are undoubtedly worth

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of the planet too.* There are, though, a few possibilities for weaponization that should at least be mentioned. One is sometimes called ‘counter-geoengineering’. If a strong solar geoengineering programme were enacted unilaterally, it would be possible for other powers to counteract its effects by temporarily strengthening the greenhouse effect. Difluoromethane is

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current asteroid-diversion technologies, a damaging asteroid strike would, in many parts of the world, be blamed on America. * A third option – if they geoengineer, you should geoengineer even more – is explored in a remarkable 1947 novelette by Gerald Heard, a friend of Aldous Huxley, whom we encountered championing the sublime power

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response to climate change. And it seems to me that the possibility of linkage between mitigation and veilmaking strengthens the case for such an approach. Geoengineering has attributes that inadvertent climate change lacks, and they make coming to agreements about who should do what easier. International agreements on climate change

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effects. There are clear responsibilities and prompt effects, and that would seem to make the problem inherently more tractable. Developing a governance approach to climate geoengineering that yokes these characteristics to the harder question of governing mitigation could give you a more workable system. A certainty? Of course not; as

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) Orion Press Badash, Lawrence (2009) A Nuclear Winter’s Tale: Science and Politics in the 1980s MIT Press Bala, Govindasamy and Caldeira, Ken (2000) ‘Geoengineering Earth’s Radiation Balance to Mitigate CO2–Induced Climate Change’ Geophysical Research Letters, 27 2141–2144 Bala, Govindasamy et al. (2007) ‘Combined Climate and Carbon

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Land Use on Climate: Model Simulations of Radiative Forcing and Large-Scale Temperature Change’ Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 142 216–233 Bipartisan Policy Center (2011) Geoengineering: A National Strategic Plan for Research on the Potential Effectiveness, Feasibility, and Consequences of Climate Remediation Technologies Blackbourn, David (2006) The Conquest of Nature:

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Jennifer A., Davis, Steven J., and Lobell, David B. (2010) ‘Greenhouse Gas Mitigation by Agricultural Intensification’ PNAS 107 12052–12057 Cairns, Rose C. (2014a) ‘Climate Geoengineering: Issues of Path-Dependence and Socio-Technical Lock-In’ WIREs Climate Change doi: 10.1002/wcc.296 Cairns, Rose C. (2014b) ‘Climates of Suspicion: “Chemtrail

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the Nineteenth Century MIT Press Crook, Julia, Jackson, Lawrence and Forster, Piers (2015) ‘A Comparison of Temperature and Precipitation Responses to Different Earth Radiation Management Geoengineering Schemes’ Journal of Geophysical Research (in press) Crookes, William (1898) ‘Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science’ Chemical News 78 125

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Forest to the Mount Pinatubo Eruption: Enhanced Photosynthesis’ Science 28 2035–2038 Hale, Benjamin (2012) ‘The World that Would Have Been: Moral Hazard Arguments Against Geoengineering’ in Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management ed Christopher J. Preston, Lexington Books Hamblin, Jacob Darwin (2012) Arming Mother Nature: The

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Fetish: Marx, Latour, and the Cultural Foundations of Capitalism’ Theory, Culture and Society doi: 10.1177/0263276413488960 Horton, Joshua (2015) ‘The Emergency Framing of Solar Geoengineering: Time for a Different Approach’ Anthropocene Review (in press) House, Joanna I., Prentice, I. Colin and Lequéré, Corinne (2002) ‘Maximum Impacts of Future Reforestation

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‘Human Effects on the Global Atmosphere’ Annual Review of Physical Chemistry 35 481–505 Jones, Andy, Haywood, Jim and Boucher, Olivier (2009) ‘Climate Impacts of Geoengineering Maritime Stratocumulus Clouds’ Journal of Geophysical Research doi: 10.1029/2008JD011450 Jones, Andy et al. (2013) ‘The Impact of Abrupt Suspension of Solar Radiation Management

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(Termination Effect) in Experiment G2 of the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP)’ Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres doi: 10.1002/jgrd.50762 Keeling, Charles D. (1998) ‘Rewards and Penalties of Monitoring the

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sons Klein, Naomi (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate Simon & Schuster (2014) Kravitz, Ben et al. (2013) ‘Climate Model Response from the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP)’ Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres doi: 10.1002/jgrd.50646 Kravitz, Ben et al. (2014) ‘A Multi-Model Assessment of Regional

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Hot Air UIT – See also the excellent associated website http://www.withouthotair.com/ MacMartin, Douglas G. et al. (2012) ‘Management of Trade-Offs in Geoengineering Through Optimal Choice of Non-Uniform Radiative Forcing’ Nature Climate Change doi: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1722 Maddox, John (1972) The Doomsday Syndrome: an Attack on Pessimism

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(documentary film, directed by Paul King), BBC Mazower, Mark (2012) Governing the World: The History of an Idea Allen Lane McClellan, Justin et al. (2010) Geoengineering Cost Analysis (AR10–182) Aurora Flight Sciences McCormick, M. Patrick, Thomason, Larry W. and Trepte, Charles R. (1995) ‘Atmospheric Effects of the Mt Pinatubo

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The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy Princeton University Press Pongratz, Julia et al. (2012) ‘Crop Yields in a Geoengineered Climate’ Nature Climate Change, doi: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1373 Poole, Robert (2010) Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth Yale University Press President’s Science Advisory

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‘Regional Response to Solar-Radiation Management’ Nature Geoscience doi: 10.1038/NGEO0915 Ridgwell, Andy et al. (2009) ‘Tackling Regional Climate Change by Leaf Albedo Bio-Geoengineering’ Current Biology 19 146–150 Robinson, Kim Stanley (1993) Red Mars Harper Voyager Robinson, Kim Stanley (1994) Green Mars Harper Voyager Robinson, Kim Stanley (1996

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Fall Meeting poster U43A-0043 Rosenfeld, Daniel et al. (2008) ‘Flood or Drought: How Do Aerosols Affect Precipitation’ Science 321 1309–1313 Royal Society (2009) Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty Ruddiman, William (2005) Plows, Plagues and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate Princeton University Press Ruddiman, William (2013

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paper Vernadsky, Vladimir (1989) The Biosphere (revised and annotated by Mark McMenamin, translated by David Langmuir) Copernicus Victor, David G. (2008) ‘On the Regulation of Geoengineering’ Oxford Review of Economic Policy 24 322–326 Victor, David G. (2011) Global Warming Gridlock: Creating More Effective Strategies for Protecting the Planet Cambridge University

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), Harvard University Press – further expanded online at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm Weisenstein, Debra K. and Keith, David W. (2015) ‘Solar Geoengineering Using Solid Aerosol in the Stratosphere’ Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions 15 1179–1185 Weitzman, Martin L. (2012) ‘A Voting Architecture for the Governance of

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Free-Driver Externalities, with Application to Geoengineering’ NBER Working Paper 18622 Wells, Herbert George (1898) The War of the Worlds Heinemann Wells, Herbert George (1914) The World Set Free: A Story

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of Mankind Macmillan Westbroek, Peter (1992) Life as a Geological Force: Dynamics of the Earth W.W. Norton Wigley, Tom (2006) ‘A Combined Mitigation/Geoengineering Approach to Climate Stabilization’ Science 314 452–454 Wilcox, Jennifer (2012) Carbon Capture, Springer Williams, Rosalind (2013) The Triumph of Human Empire: Verne, Morris

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and Stevenson at the End of the World University of Chicago Press Williamson, Phillip et al. (2012) ‘Ocean Fertilization for Geoengineering: A Review of Effectiveness, Environmental Impacts and Emerging Governance’ Process Safety and Environmental Protection 90 475–488 Winebrake, James J. et al. (2009) ‘Mitigating

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– for example, Ken Caldeira, David Keith and Alan Robock – maintain full online archives of their publications. Some other useful websites include: The Oxford Geoengineering Governance Program – http://www.geoengineering-governance-research.org/cgg-working-papers.php Climate Engineering, hosted by the Kiel Earth Institute – http://www.climate-engineering.eu/home-35.html

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veilmaking afforestation see trees Africa: aerosols over, 297; and colonialism, 178; early humans in, 230; and global warming, 116; Kilimanjaro’s glaciers, 344–5; potential geoengineering effects, 121–2, 371; prehistoric climate, 241–2; see also Sahara Desert; Sahel; South Africa agreements see air pollution: agreements; climate negotiations and agreements; nuclear

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exajoules, definition, 211 Exeter, University of, 240 exosphere, 41 experiment: earthsystem as subject of, 42–44, 91, 137, 253–54, 340; case for in geoengineering research, 169, 288 explosives, 189–90, 193 extinctions, 25, 321–2, 328 extraterrestrials, 324 farming see agriculture and farming fertilizers, synthetic: environmental problems caused by

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William, 192 GCMs, 314, 317 Gellner, Ernest, 211 General Electric research laboratory, 268–70 genetic modification, 289–90 ‘geoclique’, 157–8, 163, 286 geoengineering, climate see climate geoengineering geology, 40, 321–2 GeoMIP, 113–20, 122, 158 George, Russ, 254–5, 256 George C. Marshall Institute, 154 germ theory of disease,

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129 Germany: explosives industry, 190; geoengineering research, 159; nuclear industry, 17, 358; renewable energy (Energiewende), 19, 20, 106, 159; scientific research, 182 Gernsback, Hugo, 243 glaciers and ice: Arctic melting,

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

by Stewart Brand  · 15 Mar 2009  · 422pp  · 113,525 words

agriculture, preparing for masses of climate refugees, and keeping resource warfare localized. And amelioration is adjusting the nature of the planet itself through large-scale geoengineering. Civilization is at risk, but civilization is the problem. The key positive feedback in the current Earth system is us. Accelerating wealth (especially in

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distrusted and now need to embrace, plus one we love that has to be scaled up. The unwelcome four are urbanization, nuclear power, biotechnology, and geoengineering. The familiar one is natural-system restoration, which may be better framed as megagardening—restoring Gaia’s health at every scale from local soil to

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. . . . A record not made is gone for good.” The idea of adjusting Earth’s climate directly is anathema to most, for good reason. All geoengineering schemes look like attempts to sow the wind that are sure to reap the whirlwind. The dangers are certain, enormous, and inescapable. The imagined benefits

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and unproven theory. Surrendering to such shortcuts is the height of irresponsibility, we tell each other. But the tenor of the discussion is changing, and geoengineering is being taken seriously, sooner than expected, because of emerging realizations. Realization 1. The stupendous cost, disruption, and time required to build a low-

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Arctic have gone up over 4°C since 1950. The suddenness of a self-accelerating phenomenon invites proportionally immediate response. Realization 5. Some forms of geoengineering, expensive as they are, may be a hundred to a thousand times cheaper than building Renewistan, and some of them would have an instantaneous effect

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on climate rather than one delayed by decades. As soon as climatic conditions become frightening and urgent, geoengineering schemes will suddenly jump from “plausible but dangerous” to “dangerous but we have no choice.” The cost is low enough that a single nation

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or even a wealthy individual could set in motion a geoengineering project that would affect everyone on Earth. (A growing number of work-shops are addressing the specter of unilateral

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geoengineering.) • Any one of those realizations is sufficient; in combination they are overwhelming. Geoengineering schemes will be in high demand shortly, but what exactly is on offer? Here’s the catalog as of

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that’s a paltry list, considering the potential need. But examining these will give a sense of the ingenuity, daunting scale, and potential hazards of geoengineering strategies. Employing stratospheric sulfates is the first choice of most climatologists because it has already been proven to work. In 1991 a volcano in the

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the idea couldn’t work; instead his models suggested it might work very well, with relatively few side effects. Caldeira became a convert to geoengineering and began cowriting papers with Wood. In 2006 Paul Crutzen published an essay in Climatic Change that signaled a major shift in scientific opinion. He

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amplify the cooling effect by reflecting even more sunlight. It could be, editor Oliver Morton wrote in Nature, “as low-impact an option as the geoengineer’s toolbox offers.” • Even more attractive, in terms of the ability to turn it off easily, is the idea of a fleet of oceangoing

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potential adverse side effects than the stratospheric aerosols, it should be tried on a sufficient scale to assess its worth.” • So far, the most controversial geoengineering proposal has to do with feeding iron to the ocean’s carbon-fixing algae (also called phytoplankton, diatoms, and coccolithophores). Vast regions of the ocean

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protest, quoting an environmental lawyer from South Africa’s Center for Biosafety: “We do not believe our country should be aiding and abetting these controversial geoengineers in breaking the global moratorium. We have formally asked our Environment Ministry to compel the ship to return to port and offload its cargo of

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“Most of the research has been at the hobby level.” Environmental scientists Thomas Homer-Dixon and David Keith wrote in the New York Times that geoengineering “is so taboo that governments have provided virtually no research money.” They urged that we should begin with “real-world tests of various technologies that

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thing is to get scientists, environmentalists and global-warming skeptics alike out of the nonsensical all-or-nothing dichotomy that characterizes much current thinking about geoengineering—that we either do it full scale, or we don’t do it at all.” So test the ideas we have, and keep thinking

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, not cause unacceptable environmental damage, and be economical.” • How does the current roster of notions stand up to criticism? Oliver Morton reported in Nature: “Geoengineering, many say, is a way to feed society’s addiction to fossil fuels. ‘It’s like a junkie figuring out new ways of stealing from

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in three ways to head off climate change. It is a genuine natural negative feedback process that moderates global warming. As the Earth heats up, geoengineer Ehux responds by fixing more carbon and brightening the ocean’s albedo, which helps Earth cool. Get this organism a grant. (Once the ocean

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probably have to do something radical to alter what the Earth does with sunlight—dim it or reflect it. • There remains a larger issue. Suppose geoengineering works technically. How can it work politically? Who decides to do it? Who runs it and balances its various forms? Who pays for it?

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Who accepts responsibility? Who compensates those who are harmed by it? Who decides which claims for compensation are valid? Does taking responsibility for climate geoengineering also mean taking responsibility for climate refugees? It’s easy to govern a negative. No one has to take responsibility for global warming because it

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was brought about by damn near everyone, and unintentionally. But geoengineering is intentional, an act of commission. Everything it accomplishes and fails to accomplish and inadvertently causes and is accused of causing has an identifiable human

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-change issues. Here I’ll draw mainly on a 2008 paper he wrote for the Oxford Review of Economic Policy titled “On the Regulation of Geoengineering.” People imagine, Victor says, that what is needed is a “legally binding regulatory treaty” like the Montreal Protocol governing harm to the ozone layer.

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But he thinks that “most treaties on geoengineering will be useless or actively harmful because, at present, experts and governments do not know enough about the scope and hazards of possible

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geoengineering activities to frame a meaningful treaty negotiation.” He especially worries about treaties that would make geoengineering taboo, because “a taboo is likely to be most constraining on the countries (and their subjects)

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who are likely to do the most responsible testing, assessment, and (if needed) deployment of geoengineering systems. A taboo would leave less responsible governments and individuals—those most prone to ignore or avoid inconvenient international norms—to control the technology’s

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fate.” Because the cost of some geoengineering schemes is so low, Victor predicts, “A lone Greenfinger, self-appointed protector of the planet and working with a small fraction of the Gates

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bank account, could force a lot of geoengineering on his own.” The way to head off unilateral geoengineering and premature treaties, Victor suggests, is with a growing body of norms rather than rules:Meaningful norms are not crafted

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an intensive process of research and assessment that is probably best organized by the academies of sciences in the few countries with the potential to geoengineer. . . . Most likely . . . is that the impacts of global climate change will have reached such a nasty state by the time societies deploy large

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-scale geoengineering that some side effects will be tolerated. The . . . systems they deploy will not be a silver bullet but rather many interventions deployed in tandem—

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the central disease and others to fix the ancillary harms. To my mind, a useful role for Greenfinger entrepreneurs might be to jump-start serious geoengineering research while national academies of science are spending years making up their minds to act. Then the privately funded researchers could bring real data to

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all, but if it has to be used, it must be done effectively and minimally, and if possible, for a limited period. Like abortion, geoengineering should be “safe, legal, and rare.” That still leaves the question of who runs things—“whose hands will be allowed on the thermostat,” as David

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Organization provided oversight and funding, and the Smallpox Eradication Unit, led by Donald Henderson, did the work. In Victor’s formulation, norms and leadership for geoengineering will emerge from an intensifying sequence of conferences, research projects, data sharing, and brainstorming. The most effective early players will determine the play, and funding

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will determine the pace. Geoengineering is government-scale infrastructure; it will need government-scale money. Once one nation commits, I suspect, other nations will join in, lest they be left

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out. If China says, “We’re going to geoengineer,” the United States, Russia, the European Union, Japan, Brazil, and India are not going to say, “Fine, let us know how it works out.”

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gravitationally close to an asteroid and drives gently in the desired direction, drawing the asteroid with it.) Schweickart says that asteroid deflection is similar to geoengineering for climate change, “only much simpler, better understood, and cheaper.” As with climate, you’re taking global action on a global problem, based on

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excellent online source for environmental news: Environment 360—“Opinion, Analysis, Reporting & Debate”—run by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. There was significant geoengineering news. A step toward asteroid control was taken by the Obama administration. While canceling a return to the moon by NASA, the president proposed that

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“would demonstrate once and for all that we’re smarter than the dinosaurs and can therefore avoid what they didn’t.” Two good books on geoengineering finally arrived: How to Cool the Planet (2010) by Jeff Goodell and Hack the Planet (2010) by Eli Kintisch. Both writers talked to most

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Victor. One new scheme has been put forward by Harvard’s Russell Seitz to brighten parts of the ocean by aerating the water with microbubbles. Geoengineers gathered in cautionary mode at the Asilomar Conference Center in California, echoing the recombinant DNA gathering there back in 1975. Environmental organizations were invited, and

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so was I. The conference adopted terminology from an influential report by the Royal Society, noting that geoengineering comes in two major forms—solar radiation management (SRM) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). The view emerged that carbon dioxide projects would necessarily be slow

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the “Oxford Principles” first proposed in a 2009 memorandum to the British Parliament by Steve Raynor from Oxford University:• Geoengineering regulated as a public good • Public participation in geoengineering decision-making • Disclosure of geoengineering research and open publication of results • Independent assessment of impacts • Governance before deployment In other words, one way

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thorough field research distinguishes this account of what life gets up to as soon as humans step away. It is a fascinating read. GEOENGINEERING How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate (2010), Jeff Goodell. Hack the Planet: Science’s Best Hope—or Worst

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(2010), Eli Kintisch. The books overlap; I slightly favor Goodell’s as the more thorough. Both authors spent time with most of the major early geoengineers—Ken Caldeira, Lowell Wood, John Latham, Stephen Salter, Russ George, David Keith, James Lovelock, David Victor—and share their view that real-world research

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on the various schemes must go forward soon and at scale, or half-baked geoengineering projects desperately deployed could wind up having worse effects than what they attempt to fix. Geoengineering research will tell us a great deal about how climate works. Up to now we have never

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the Balance (Gore) Earth Day Earth First! Earth Liberation Front Earthrise (Poole) E. coli ecological inheritance Ecologist Economist Eco-pragmatism (Farber) ecosystem engineering see also geoengineering ecosystem services ecotechnology Ecotrust Ehrlich, Paul Eighth Day of Creation, The (Judson) electric power nuclear power and elephants Elmqvist, Thomas EMBO Reports Empty Cradle, The

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generation of stories related to synthetic biology and violence and Genetic Glass Ceilings (Gressel) genetic inertia genetic use restriction technology (GURT) gene transfer genome, human geoengineering asteroid deflection and biochar and carbon-fixing algae and cloud machines and criticisms of governance and ocean water piping and space mirrors and stratospheric sulfates

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Long Emergency, The (Kunstler) Longman, Phillip Long Now Foundation Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Angeles Times Losey, John Love, Stanley Lovelock, James genetic engineering and geoengineering and nuclear power and Lovins, Amory genetic engineering and nuclear energy and Lu, Edward Luckey, T. D. McClure, Michael McIntyre, Joan McKibben, Bill McKnight Foundation

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Organization, Canadian nuclear weapons Nuffield Council on Bioethics Obama, Barack oceans Odling-Smee, John oil Omnivore’s Dilemma, The (Pollan) OnEarth “On the Regulation of Geoengineering” (Victor) “Organic Agriculture Requires Process Rather Than Evaluation of Novel Breeding Techniques,” organic farming Organic Gardening and Farming Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Orion

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions

by Greta Thunberg  · 14 Feb 2023  · 651pp  · 162,060 words

Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. Simone Gingrich / Assistant Professor, Institute of Social Ecology, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. 4.8 What about Geoengineering? Niclas Hällström / Director of WhatNext?, President of the ETC Group, and senior affiliate at Centre for Environment and Development Studies, Uppsala University. Jennie C. Stephens

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forests should be left alone and considered a ‘bridging technology’ – buying time for other sectors to decarbonize. 4.8 What about Geoengineering? Niclas Hällström, Jennie C. Stephens and Isak Stoddard ‘Geoengineering’ is the intentional technological manipulation of the Earth’s atmosphere and ecosystems at scales so large that it would interfere with

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and alter global climate systems. Most geoengineering technologies are still only speculative ideas, yet they are extremely controversial. Geoengineering is not intended to reduce production of fossil fuels or emissions of greenhouse gases, the root causes of global

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the sun, either by reflecting some of its radiation back into space or by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and somehow storing it. Solar geoengineering includes widely contested proposals to fly fleets of aeroplanes around the globe to continuously spray large quantities of sun-blocking aerosols into the stratosphere, or

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to cover extensive areas of Arctic ice with glass beads. Carbon dioxide removal at geoengineering scale includes suggestions to fertilize swathes of the ocean to cause massive algal blooms, or to convert enormous land areas to tree plantations with the

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intention of burning the wood and capturing the CO2. All geoengineering approaches involve huge risks, some to the point of threatening both ecosystem and societal breakdown. Many impacts would be irreversible and impossible to predict and

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would exacerbate existing injustices. This is particularly the case with solar geoengineering, where the injection of aerosols into the stratosphere could disrupt monsoons, intensify droughts and threaten the livelihoods of billions of people. Worse yet, if this

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adaptation and driving a catastrophic ‘termination shock’. Many scholars, experts and activists have concluded that such technologies cannot be managed equitably and safely. Advancing solar geoengineering assumes the existence of stable global systems of governance that could function without failure for hundreds or thousands of years – an impossible requirement. Allowing the

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climate systems. Around the world, there are growing calls for an immediate international ban on the advancement of solar geoengineering technology (see www.solargeoeng.org), and many are working to strengthen the existing geoengineering moratorium under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Attempts to advance real-world research and experimentation on solar

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geoengineering are consistently met with fierce resistance from Indigenous peoples, scientists and civil society organizations, who warn that humanity must not head down the slippery slope

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of normalization (see www.stopsolargeo.org and www.geoengineeringmonitor.org). Attempts at repackaging the contested term ‘geoengineering’ into new, less tarnished terms, such as ‘climate intervention’, ‘climate repair’ and ‘climate protection technologies’, shows the ways in which certain actors are attempting to

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obfuscate the discourse around these controversial technologies. All geoengineering schemes are attempts to manipulate the Earth with the same domineering mindset that got us into the climate crisis in the first place. The implications

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of vested interests mainstreaming the idea of geoengineering by discussing it as if it were a viable option may be as dangerous as the impacts of actually deploying

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geoengineering. Suggesting that geoengineering is a ‘plan B’ provides convenient excuses for the fossil fuel industry, tech billionaires and other promoters of these ideas to delay and derail the

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fundamental societal transformations that are urgently needed. Geoengineering is not an option. Intensified climate disruptions and injustices call for something very different: a focus on sufficiency and well-being, curbing emissions at the

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, 154; cars/personal mobility and, 274–5; colonialism and, 315; consumption-based emissions accounting approach and, 257; desire to look away from issues of, 218; geoengineering and, 233–4; Indigenous peoples and, 177; intergenerational, 172; material consumption levels and, 269; meaning of, 396–401; nationally determined contributions (NDC) and, 308–9

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, 239, 266, 280, 291, 306, 307, 310, 311, 311, 331–2, 375, 376, 382, 406 generational amnesia, 18 genocide, 19, 42, 387, 389, 394, 417 geoengineering, 233–4 geopolitics, 167, 181, 229, 315–17, 400 geothermal energy, 225, 229 Gerhardt, Sue: The Selfish Society 335 Germany, 5, 27, 62, 110, 145

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; colonialism and, 162, 387–8, 399–400, 411; COP26 and, 204; ‘divest-invest’ strategies, 412; drought and, 399; environmental philosophy, 420; front-line communities, 392; geoengineering and, 234; as land defenders, 49; land management of, 107; Lumad, 401; rewilding and, 351; Sámi see Sámi individual action, 5, 278, 283, 284, 324

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permafrost; temperatures, 100; topsoil, 340–41; trees and, 75, 302; waste and, 290, 297; water evaporation from, 88, 91, 97, 192; women protecting, 404 solar geoengineering, 233–4 solar power, 28, 56, 60, 164, 220, 222, 224–5, 225, 226, 227, 228, 280, 329, 335, 346, 376, 431 soot, 119, 290

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World

by Gaia Vince  · 22 Aug 2022  · 302pp  · 92,206 words

especially acute towards the end of the century, when some of the southern places made uninhabitable by climate change may become once again liveable through geoengineering innovations that reduce global or regional temperatures, through carbon dioxide removal and technological interventions that can cool large areas cheaply. Truly, this is the century

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the planet, fewer people would be forced to migrate, and those who have been displaced could return. However, the methods for doing so, known as geoengineering, are mostly untried and controversial. One way to do this is to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is difficult to

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millions of people need to move, or whether to wait for some later crisis, such as back-to-back heatwaves that kill thousands, before deploying geoengineering techniques. This effort to limit global temperatures requires an unprecedented political, social and technological response. The stakes could not be higher. For if the world

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prospect for reducing global temperature by sucking up carbon dioxide than much of the planned, unfeasible terrestrial tree-planting, yet it is currently classed as ‘geoengineering’ and thus regarded as too risky an intervention and not sanctioned apart from small-scale scientific experiments.10 One of the fears with ocean fertilization

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we will start deploying tools to reflect the sun’s heat away from Earth to maintain global temperatures at safe levels. Today, this form of geoengineering – deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system – remains taboo in a way that increasing temperatures via emissions is not. Let’s

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-scale land-use change, vast atmospheric pollution, the release of massive stores of fossil carbon that heats the atmosphere and oceans … these certainly amount to geoengineering even if it is not labelled as such. In our attempts to restore the planet to a more liveable state, we should be using all

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save potentially thousands of lives during heatwaves in the coming decades, and could prevent millions from needing to migrate. The taboo over this kind of geoengineering has prevented even the most trivial tests being done in a transparent way, so we rely on modelling studies. Nevertheless, the chemistry and physics of

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of global climate change is to reduce the surface temperature – studies show this is more important than rainfall. In fact, cooling the planet with solar geoengineering would be more beneficial for crop yields than reducing carbon emissions, a 2021 study found,19 because carbon dioxide is useful for plants during photosynthesis

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, but it lacks authority and has no clear mandate.23 There are those who believe that if we take the ‘easy’ option of cooling by geoengineering, we won’t put in the same effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. There is certainly no shortage of emitters trying to avoid or delay

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decarbonization commitments using carbon offsets as a tactic, so regulators must take precautions that geoengineering is used in addition to, not instead of, emission reduction. There is also a moral queasiness from some sectors about using technology to fix the

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much more willing to impose very large societal changes, with all the discomfort that entails, than make changes to the Earth’s ‘natural’ state through geoengineering. This to me feels morally questionable, but that’s the thing with morals, it’s all subjective. For me, the morally right thing is to

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to 400 parts per million, northern regions will lose the benefits of hotter temperatures, while the global south will become less hazardous and more pleasant. Geoengineering offers us the ability to choose the temperature of our planet – and we may not agree on what that ideal temperature is. People living in

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climate-proof its buildings’, The Guardian, 19 August 2021. 13. One Norwegian town, Rjukan, built in the shadow of mountains around a hydropower complex, has geoengineered a way around the problem, by erecting large rotatable mirrors that beam precious sunlight into the town, extending the day. 14. Alex Nowrasteh and Andrew

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the next five years’, Met Office website, 27 May 2021. 18. https://www.arcticiceproject.org 19. Yuanchao Fan, Jerry Tjiputra, Helene Muri, et al., ‘Solar geoengineering can alleviate climate change pressures on crop yields’, Nature Food 2:5 (2021), pp. 373–81. 20. Phoebe L. Zarnetske, Jessica Gurevitch, Janet Franklin, et

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Earth’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118:15 (2021). 21. Peter Irvine, Kerry Emanuel, Jie He, et al., ‘Halving warming with idealized solar geoengineering moderates key climate hazards’, Nature Climate Change 9:4 (2019), pp. 295–9. 22. Katherine Dagon and Daniel P. Schrag, ‘Regional climate variability under model

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simulations of solar geoengineering’, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 122:22 (2017), pp. 12–106. 23. The SRMGI is a partnership between the UK’s Royal Society, The World

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of; decarbonizing measures; effect on crop growth; emissions cut by building from wood; emissions from farming; emissions from human energy systems; emissions from urban buildings; geoengineering to remove; during last ice age; Miocene Era levels; new materials made from; ocean release of; released by wildfires; tree-planting as offsetting method; in

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as hugely important; replacement of inefficient heating/cooling systems; zero-carbon new-builds see also biodiversity loss/ecosystem collapse environmentalists; negative growth advocates; opponents of geoengineering equatorial belt Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Europe: 2003 heatwave; depopulation crisis; eighteenth/nineteenth-century shanty towns; impact of climate emergency; medieval barriers to

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improvement in yields; nutrient and drip-irrigation systems; pre-twentieth-century methods; relying on new forms of; Russian dominance; salt-tolerant rice; smallholder; and solar geoengineering; solar-powered closed-cycle; urban vertical farms; use of silicates; and water scarcity; wildflower strips in fields see also livestock farming Fiji Fires fish populations

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gender: heat related inequalities; physical/sexual danger for female migrants; women in domestic service in Europe; women rejoining workforce genetic modification genetics, population Genghis Khan geoengineering; artificial sill proposals; cloud-brightening idea; as controversial/taboo; and ideal temperature question; possible unwanted effects; proposals for dealing with ice melt; to reduce atmospheric

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justice; and demand for cooling; despair and anger of ‘left behind’ natives; and environmental destruction; and European colonialism; as failure of social/economic policy; and geoengineered cooling; global disparities in access to nutrition; and global food prices; global income gap as rising; heat related; and impact of flooding; increased by ancient

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regions; need for speed; negative emissions technologies; ocean fertilization; paying communities to protect ecosystems; regenerative agriculture; replanting of vegetation; solar radiation reduction tools, see also geoengineering retail services rice; SRI cultivation process rivers: drying out of; fed by glaciers; heavier rainfall as increasing flows; lack of in Gulf region; pollution discharged

Climate Change

by Joseph Romm  · 3 Dec 2015  · 358pp  · 93,969 words

meeting the 2°C target be? What happens if we miss the 2°C target? Can we adapt to human-caused climate change? What is geoengineering and can it play a major role in reducing the impact of climate change? 5 Climate Politics and Policies What climate policies are governments around

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for minimizing/avoiding dangerous climate change. It will take a big-picture perspective on how to avoid the worst impacts—including discussions of adaptation and geoengineering. What is the biggest source of confusion about what humanity needs to do to avoid the worst climate impacts? Perhaps the biggest source of confusion

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, we move into an unrecognizable world where we will need a different word entirely than “adaptation.” What is geoengineering and can it play a major role in reducing the impact of climate change? Geoengineering is not a well-defined scientific term. The broader definition is, “the large-scale manipulation of the Earth

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-caused global warming.” The term is so ill-defined and potentially misleading that the U.S. National Academy of Sciences decided to reject the term “geoengineering” entirely and split its comprehensive peer-reviewed 2015 report on the subject into two: a 235-page report on “Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration

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Earth. The best studied of these is injecting vast quantities of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to mimic the cooling effect of volcanoes. Instead of geoengineering, the Academy panel settled on “climate intervention,” because “we felt ‘engineering’ implied a level of control that is illusory,” explained Dr. Marcia McNutt (editor-in

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of climate change, and concurrently to reduce ocean acidification.” That is the same conclusion as a 2009 assessment by the UK Royal Society, which found “Geoengineering methods are not a substitute for climate change mitigation.” Capturing carbon dioxide from coal plants and storing it permanently is currently very expensive, as I

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order to better “understand” it. That said, leading experts explained in the journal Science in 2010, “Stratospheric geoengineering cannot be tested in the atmosphere without full-scale implementation.” In the article, “A Test for Geoengineering?”, researchers explained that “weather and climate variability preclude observation of the climate response without a large, decade

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well-known advocate for research into albedo modification and one of the Academy’s panel members. They reported, “Caldeira doesn’t believe any method of geoengineering is really a good solution to fighting climate change—we can’t test them on a large scale, and implementing them blindly could be dangerous

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potential that socio-political risks could outweigh climate benefits.” However, as Caldeira adds, “Of course, the system will not work as advertised.” In that sense, geoengineering is akin to a risky, never tested, course of chemotherapy prescribed to treat a condition curable through diet and exercise—or, in this case, GHG

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deluges or severe precipitation related to, 48–51, 49f, 50f droughts effects of, 42–45 extreme weather and, 31–72 first use of term, 19 geoengineering in reducing impact of, 163–169 global warming vs., 19–20 health impacts of, 103–107 heat waves effects of, 40–42, 42f human activities

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deniers “Climate Extremes Index” of NOAA, 53, 54f climate forcing. see also forcing(s) described, 12 human-caused in global warming variations, 23 “climate intervention” geoengineering vs., 164 climate policies, 171–191 types of, 171–172 climate politics, 171–191 climate science basics of, 1–30 deniers of, 188–191 on

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–243 fuel efficiency vehicle, 223 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, 199 fusion in GHG emissions reduction, 220–221 General Motors Chevrolet Volt, 230–231 geoengineering, 163–169 “climate intervention” vs., 164 defined, 163–164 National Academy of Sciences on, 163–169 in reducing impact of climate change, 163–169 geothermal

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and Space Administration (NASA) National Academy of Sciences, 2–3, 10–12, 15, 27–28, 142, 239. on deluges or severe precipitation, 48–49 on geoengineering, 163–169 on hydrogen cars, 235 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 101–103 on weather extremes, 40–42, 42f, 187 on ice sheet collapse

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meeting the 2°C target be? What happens if we miss the 2°C target? Can we adapt to human-caused climate change? What is geoengineering and can it play a major role in reducing the impact of climate change? 5 Climate Politics and Policies What climate policies are governments around

Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming

by Mckenzie Funk  · 22 Jan 2014  · 337pp  · 101,281 words

Bangladesh Problem 10. SEAWALLS FOR SALE: Why the Netherlands Loves Sea-Level Rise 11. BETTER THINGS FOR BETTER LIVING: Climate Genetics 12. PROBLEM SOLVED: Our Geoengineered Future EPILOGUE: MAGICAL THINKING PHOTOGRAPHS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES ON SOURCE INDEX INTRODUCTION The contract had called for either a boa or an anaconda, whichever would best

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for inevitable climate driven events such as massive migration, disease, and epidemics,” and research means to reengineer the global climate to our liking, known as geoengineering. In one two-month period in the spring of 2007, Schwartz would publish a second report (for an unnamed agency), the Senate would direct the

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talked, a renegade mosquito alit on his neck, and he mindlessly swatted at it. It was old-fashioned but deadly effective. TWELVE PROBLEM SOLVED OUR GEOENGINEERED FUTURE Nathan Myhrvold’s new laboratory was unmarked and, from the outside, unremarkable: a 27,500-square-foot former Harley-Davidson service center in an

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1990s, Wood and Teller were among the first to seriously study planet-scale engineering to reverse climate change, which has come to be known as geoengineering. Their idea, described in a paper submitted to the Twenty-second International Seminar on Planetary Emergencies, was to mimic volcanoes. Find a way to

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aftermath of 1991’s Mount Pinatubo eruption: The particles would shade the sunlight, and the global temperature would drop. That Intellectual Ventures had begun patenting geoengineering technologies—methods to stop hurricanes, refreeze the Arctic, and engineer the climate back to “normal”—was mostly speculation at the time of the lab’s

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one of the researchers in the General Electric lab run by Irving Langmuir, the chemist and Nobel laureate, accidentally invented cloud seeding, the forebear of geoengineering. He dropped a piece of dry ice into a cloud chamber, and the cloud was instantly transformed into ice crystals. “Control of Weather,” scrawled Langmuir

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physicists or material scientists, and most would be multidimensional, polymathic types, like Lowell and Nathan.” Three or four sessions a year had been dedicated to geoengineering—which had interested Myhrvold almost from the moment IV was founded, Tegreene said—and perhaps another ten a year touched at least tangentially on the

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Cornell, and the University of Texas, which managed money for future generations, not just today’s. Big trends were more important than quick gains, and geoengineering was not out of place among the inventions IV was developing and patenting: advances in nanotechnology, semiconductors, nuclear energy, medical devices, and agriculture whose payoff

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hand in lining the All-American Canal. Myhrvold had noticed mounds of sulfur, a by-product of tar sands mining—and the main ingredient in geoengineering schemes then being patented by IV. “There were big yellow mountains of it, like a hundred meters high by a thousand meters wide!” he

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sulfur mountains, you could solve the whole global warming problem for the Northern Hemisphere.” The official line at IV was that they were not pursuing geoengineering for profit. “Intellectual Ventures invents new technology as its main business, but we do not expect or intend that our climate technology inventions will make

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money,” read an FAQ posted after its interest in geoengineering became publicly known. That morning in Tegreene’s office, before the flicker attacked the window again, he described what happened to inventors’ ideas once

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series of four conference calls every week, with patent attorneys, business-development people, and support staff. We’ll say, ‘Okay, we’re looking at geoengineering ideas. Here’s idea number one. Is it better than the first idea already in the stack? No. Is it better than the second? No

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on it.” Knowing all the steps involved, I still found myself wondering why they had gone to the trouble of filing for geoengineering patents. • • • ADVOCATES OF GEOENGINEERING, or at least of geoengineering research, tend to fall into three categories: scientists deeply afraid of runaway climate change; free-market advocates deeply afraid of mandated

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coined the term “ocean acidification.” On the opposite side of the political spectrum from Edward Teller and Lowell Wood, he was dead set against geoengineering when the cold warriors proposed their Pinatubo option. Then he ran some numbers. More aware than almost anyone of what climate change would do to

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a related climate patent, he promised to “donate 100% of my share of the proceeds to non-profit charities and NGOs.” Official acceptance of geoengineering was growing in step with global carbon emissions. After Barack Obama was elected came the first top-level scientific panels, starting with the Royal Society

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in the U.K. and the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. Then came geoengineering hearings in the U.K. House of Commons and the U.S. House of Representatives, closed-door sessions led by DARPA (the Defense Advanced

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Center in Washington, and a place in the 2014 IPCC report. Across the papers and panels and symposia, the majority opinion was not that geoengineering should be deployed—just cautiously studied. The most promising scheme was still the Pinatubo option, part of a set of ideas now known as solar

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albedo. A greater portion of the sunlight hitting the tops of these clouds would bounce back, and the planet would cool. The second category of geoengineering advocate, free marketeers who often ignored scientists’ careful distinction between research and deployment, I also found around Washington, D.C. “The underlying struggle between

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climate science as a taxpayer-funded scam. “What we’re fighting over is engineering the culture—that’s mitigation—versus engineering the environment. That’s geoengineering.” Newt Gingrich, before his 2012 presidential run, echoed the sentiment. “Instead of imposing an estimated $1 trillion cost on the economy,” he wrote in

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a letter to supporters as he tried to sink a climate bill in the Senate, “geoengineering holds forth the promise of addressing global warming concerns for just a few billion dollars a year. Instead of penalizing ordinary Americans, we would have

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against the Kyoto Protocol, and offered scientists $10,000 for papers undermining the IPCC. But climate change was real, the co-director of AEI’s geoengineering program told me in 2009. Now there were two questions: Do you want to do something? How much are you willing to pay? “There’

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going to do a lot of adaptation. But what also follows is that adaptation is limited. So we’re going to need grand-scale adaptation—geoengineering.” I was again witnessing the subtle shift in conservative thought: To fight over climate science was becoming less tenable. To fight over what to

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was not. In Washington State, Seattle had not only Intellectual Ventures but the University of Washington, reason for big names in the emerging field of geoengineering to visit for lectures and seminars, and it also had Bill Gates: a funding source. Through Nathan Myhrvold, Gates had met Lowell Wood, and

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—and to date it has given out $5.1 million for assorted meetings and research projects. Gates money paid for a turning point in recent geoengineering history. A series of private dinners at the margins of the 2008 American Geophysical Union conference, attended by Caldeira, Wood, one of the AEI

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it?’ and ‘Should we do it?’ to the much more focused ‘How do we do it?’” writes the journalist Jeff Goodell in his book about geoengineering, How to Cool the Planet. That year, Caldeira and other top scientists also tackled the “how?” question at a workshop convened by the Novim

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altitude may not be quite high enough for SRM. It could require a new model of airplane. Soon, there was another Seattle name in various geoengineering panels and reports: Boeing. The company was represented by its chief scientist and the vice president of its Illinois- and California-based Phantom Works,

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shirt was half tucked in, and he was wearing socks with his Teva sandals. Myhrvold was just beginning to talk publicly about his company’s geoengineering inventions. “The reason this stuff works is interesting,” he began. “The sun radiates an average 340 watts per square meter on Earth. What’s

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the Arctic, where temperatures were shooting up fastest and thinning ice was leaving a planetary bald spot—the yarmulke method, as it was known in geoengineering circles. In order to reverse worldwide warming from a doubling of CO2, climate modeling suggested that 2 to 5 million metric tons of sulfur

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literature by Ken Caldeira, who works here. But before I get into that, I should tell you about our hurricane suppressor.” At an early geoengineering meeting at Stanford put on by Caldeira and Wood, Myhrvold explained, Stephen Salter had shown up, and soon he was recruited to work with IV

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patent a new insurance policy for the global-warming age—Firebreak’s basic business model, only applied to hurricanes, not wildfires. • • • MYHRVOLD AND IV’S geoengineering ideas were first introduced to the world in the pages of SuperFreakonomics. The authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s take on climate science and

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support for geoengineering as an alternative to emissions cuts seemed to suggest they had spoken to few scientists but those at IV, and criticism of the book

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at our last meeting. “They have the one solution—which is to cut back and go renewable and so forth. They hate the idea of geoengineering to death. They have an ideology of conservation, of living lightly, that is in some cases very antitechnology. And if you have that ideology,

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long time. Here is a heaven-sent opportunity—God’s punishment against gay people or drug users or the promiscuous.’” Some environmentalists’ ideological response to geoengineering proposals, he said, was “very much like the pope’s position on HIV. The pope said that condoms are not the answer. Well, with

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all been window-dressing bullshit. Now, you tell me, where’s the optimism?” He took a swig of his Coke Zero. “We got interested in geoengineering,” he said, “because once all is said and done, more is said than done.” Without prompting, Myhrvold answered the question I had after the

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meeting with Tegreene: If IV was researching geoengineering for the good of the world, why the patents? “It’s a little bit of a crazy area,” he began, “because we invent for,

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patent-infringement suits openly, under its own name, trying to shake money from no lesser targets than Motorola, Symantec, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard. The geoengineering invention sessions eventually stopped; IV had dreamed up what it could, the patents were pending, and now it seemed to be up to the world

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not IV was secretly hoping to turn a profit—whether or not its assertions that it did not “expect or intend” to make money off geoengineering were as misleading as its assertions about patent lawsuits. If one of Myhrvold’s inventions could save the planet, it was beside the point

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that he might get richer in the process. • • • I DID NOT fully understand what might be saved by geoengineering until one January afternoon in Seattle, on a day that was warmer than average, but not abnormally so, and rainier than average, but not abnormally

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Washington. A bald and bearded Rutgers professor with a brooding look and one too many buttons unbuttoned on a striped shirt, Robock focused on a geoengineering problem that went largely unmentioned by AEI, unmentioned by Myhrvold: Fix the temperature, and you don’t necessarily fix the rain. Use SRM to

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to “normal,” and you cannot be sure that precipitation patterns will follow course. Supercomputer climate models suggested that there would be a trade-off: If geoengineers wanted a certain temperature, they might twist the planetary thermostat in one direction; in some cases, for some regions, if they wanted a certain amount

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of rainfall, they might twist the dial further, or twist it in the other direction. Geoengineering advocates claimed that volcanoes were proof of concept, Robock said—that they showed that there could be cooling from sulfur aerosols and that it was

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permanent drought. It would destroy the African monsoon, turning Senegal and much of the Sahel into a band of brown, achieving through carbon emissions plus geoengineering what might otherwise be achieved through emissions alone. But SRM, in this model, also promised to restore preindustrial temperatures and rainfall in most of North

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water in every direction. In the summertime, there’s nowhere in the world I would rather be. I could guess which way the two Washingtons’ geoengineers would twist the dial. It was then that I knew for sure that everything, for some of us, would be just fine. EPILOGUE MAGICAL

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gone; they had been eaten. A century later, Edward Teller, fresh from nuclear-test triumph in the Marshall Islands, still years from proposing to geoengineer the climate, arrived in Point Hope. He was determined to find a civilian purpose for the atomic bomb, and he had decided that a site

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Paul Epstein and Dan Ferber (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). I was an early (and always silent) member of a lively Google Group discussing geoengineering that was started by Ken Caldeira, which gave me insight into the characters and motivations that would birth two excellent books as I was wrapping

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James Rodger Fleming (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) offered anecdotes and a much-needed reminder that we have always wanted to control the weather. Geoengineering lectures I attended in 2010 and 2011 at the University of Washington attracted some of the nascent field’s best scientific and ethical minds: Fleming

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Hale, and Michael Robinson-Dorn. Often in attendance was University of Washington professor David Battisti, who gladly discussed both the science and the intrigue of geoengineering with me. Stephen Gardiner, a philosophy professor who organized the lecture series, is also the author of A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of

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–45, 247, 250–53 opponents of, 246 patents on, 246 production facilities, 248–53 reengineering humans, 252 RIDL, 242–44 suicide genes, 236 genomics, 247 geoengineering, 30, 258–59, 262–81 Gerrard, Michael, 215, 217 Gershonowitz, Yitzhak, 92, 93 GEUS, 69–71, 73, 74 Ghoramara Island, 19 Gingrich, Newt, 267

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein  · 15 Sep 2014  · 829pp  · 229,566 words

research, Kahan and others argue, environmentalists should sell climate action by playing up concerns about national security and emphasizing responses such as nuclear power and “geoengineering”—global-scale technological interventions that would attempt to reverse rapid warming by, for instance, blocking a portion of the sun’s rays, or by “

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this approach is that rather than challenging the warped values fueling both disaster denialism and disaster capitalism, it actively reinforces those values. Nuclear power and geoengineering are not solutions to the ecological crisis; they are a doubling down on exactly the kind of reckless, short-term thinking that got us

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quo extended indefinitely. It is climate-change-fueled disaster capitalism—profiteering disguised as emission reduction, privatized hyper-militarized borders, and, quite possibly, high-risk geoengineering when things spiral out of control. So how realistic is it to imagine that the climate crisis could be a political game changer, a unifier

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1971. “I was a criminal,” Branson writes of his jailhouse revelation in his autobiography. 8 * * * DIMMING THE SUN The Solution to Pollution Is . . . Pollution? “Geoengineering holds forth the promise of addressing global warming concerns for just a few billion dollars a year.” —Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the U.S

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prepare a technological Plan B. In a report published in 2009, it called upon the British government to devote significant resources to researching which geoengineering methods might prove most effective. Two years later it declared that planetary-scale engineering interventions that would block a portion of the sun’s rays

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reducing global temperatures quickly in the event of a climate emergency.”3 The retreat in Buckinghamshire has a relatively narrow focus: How should research into geoengineering, as well as eventual deployment, be governed? What rules should researchers follow? What bodies, if any, will regulate these experiments? National governments? The United

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Nations? What constitutes “good governance” of geoengineering? To answer these questions and others, the society has teamed up with two cosponsors for the retreat: the World Academy of Sciences based in Italy

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invited to the wood-paneled library. There, about thirty scientists, lawyers, environmentalists, and policy wonks gather for the opening “technical briefing” on the different geoengineering schemes under consideration. A Royal Society scientist takes us through a slide show that includes “fertilizing” oceans with iron to pull carbon out of the

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injecting particles into the atmosphere in order to reflect more sunlight back to space, thereby reducing the amount of heat that reaches the earth. In geoengineering lingo, this is known as Solar Radiation Management (SRM)—since these methods would be attempting to literally “manage” the amount of sunlight that reaches

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available to rapidly reduce temperature rises and counteract other climatic effects,” he wrote.11 Crutzen created some space for preliminary research to take place, but geoengineering’s real breakthrough came after the Copenhagen summit flopped in 2009, the same year that climate legislation tanked in the U.S. Senate. Soaring

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one sentence pretty much sums up the tone of grim resignation that has characterized the steady stream of conferences and government reports that have inched geoengineering into the political mainstream. This gathering at Chicheley Hall is another milestone in this gradual process of normalization. Rather than debate whether or not

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not just of inevitability but general banality, the organizers have even given this process a clunky acronym: SRMGI, the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative. Geoengineering debate generally takes place within a remarkably small and incestuous world, with the same group of scientists, inventors, and funders promoting each other’s work

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as legal ethicists, experts in international treaties and conventions, and staffers from several green NGOs, including Greenpeace and WWF-UK (Greenpeace does not support geoengineering, but WWF-UK has come out in cautious support of “research into geo-engineering approaches in order to find out what is possible”).19 The

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with some measure of regulation? I spend the morning eavesdropping on the different breakouts and before long a pattern emerges. The scientists already engaged in geoengineering research tend to categorize their positions somewhere between “regulate” and “promote,” while most everyone else leans toward “prohibit” and “regulate.” Several of the participants

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more.III27 As Martin Bunzl, a Rutgers philosopher and climate change expert, points out, these facts alone present an enormous, perhaps insurmountable ethical problem for geoengineering. In medicine, he writes, “You can test a vaccine on one person, putting that person at risk, without putting everyone else at risk.” But

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States, say, or the precise extent to which drought will impact crop production in India or Australia. This uncertainty has allowed some would-be geoengineers to scoff at findings that make SRM look like a potential humanitarian disaster, insisting that regional climate models are inherently unreliable, while simultaneously pointing to

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preparing food aid immediately, “allowing society time to plan for and remediate the consequences.”39 So how, given all this readily available evidence, could geoengineering boosters invoke the historical record for “proof of harmlessness”? The truth is the mirror opposite: of all the extreme events the planet periodically lobs our

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would almost surely be in an atmosphere of collective panic with scarce time for calm deliberation. Its defenders readily concede as much. Bill Gates describes geoengineering as “just an insurance policy,” something to have “in the back pocket in case things happen faster.” Nathan Myhrvold likens SRM to “having fire

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of Sciences copublished a controversial report titled Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming. To the consternation of many climate scientists, the document included a series of geoengineering options, some of them rather outlandish, from sending fifty thousand mirrors into earth’s orbit to putting “billions of aluminized, hydrogen-filled balloons in

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influence the environment.”50 And notably, it was BP’s chief scientist, Steven Koonin, who convened one of the first formal scientific gatherings on geoengineering back in 2008. The gathering produced a report outlining a decade-long research project into climate modification, with a particular focus on Solar Radiation Management

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inconvenient opinions about how they should be used and who should benefit from their development. This lethal amensia is once again rearing its head in geoengineering discussions like the one at Chicheley Hall. It is awfully reassuring to imagine that a technological intervention could save Arctic ice from melting but,

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official sessions are exempt from these rules.) II. It’s particularly troubling that within the small group of scientists, engineers, and inventors who dominate the geoengineering debate, there have been a disproportionate share of big public errors in the past. Take, for instance, Lowell Wood, co-creator of Myhrvold’s

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“Star Wars” missile defense program, widely discredited as expensive and reckless. III. That said, we would be wise to anticipate even small amounts of geoengineering unleashing a new age of weather-related geopolitical recrimination, paranoia, and possibly retaliation, with every future natural disaster being blamed—rightly or wrongly—on the

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, my longtime research assistant, regrettably had to leave this project in 2012. Before she did, she made enormous contributions, particularly to the sections on geoengineering, messianic billionaires, and climate debt. She also helped train Rajiv and Alexandra. She is one of the great collaborators of my career and I miss

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Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1903), 70. 35. Clive Hamilton, “The Ethical Foundations of Climate Engineering,” in Climate Change Geoengineering: Philosophical Perspectives, Legal Issues, and Governance Frameworks, ed. Wil C. G. Burns and Andrew L. Strauss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 58. 36.

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Human Events, June 3, 2008. 2. William James, The Will to Believe: And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans Green, 1907), 54. 3. “Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty,” Royal Society, September 2009, p. 62; “Solar Radiation Management: the Governance of Research,” Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, convened

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by the Environmental Defense Fund, the Royal Society, and TWAS, 2011, p. 11. 4. Environmental Defense Fund, “Geoengineering: A ‘Cure’ Worse Than the Disease?” Solutions 41 (Spring 2010): 10–11. 5. EXPERIMENTS: Patrick Martin et al., “Iron Fertilization Enhanced Net Community Production

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2013): 871–881; “The Haida Salmon Restoration Project: The Story So Far,” Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation, September 2012; PEER-REVIEWED PAPERS: GeoLibrary, Oxford Geoengineering Programme, http://www.geoengineer ing.ox.ac.uk; SHIPS AND PLANES: John Latham et al., “Marine Cloud Brightening,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 370 (2012): 4247

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HOSES: David Rotman, “A Cheap and Easy Plan to Stop Global Warming,” MIT Technology Review, February 8, 2013; Daniel Cressey, “Cancelled Project Spurs Debate over Geoengineering Patents,” Nature 485 (2012): 429. 6. P. J. Crutzen, “Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?” Climatic Change

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GPS, CNN, December 20, 2009. 14. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, SuperFreakonomics (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 194. 15. “A Future Tense Event: Geoengineering,” New America Foundation, http://www.newamerica.net. 16. Eli Kintisch, Hack the Planet: Science’s Best Hope—or Worst Nightmare—for Averting Climate Catastrophe (Hoboken

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(Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005), 54. 25. Petra Tschakert, “Whose Hands Are Allowed at the Thermostat? Voices from Africa,” presentation at “The Ethics of Geoengineering: Investigating the Moral Challenges of Solar Radiation Management,” University of Montana, Missoula, October 18, 2010. 26. Alan Robock, Martin Bunzl, Ben Kravitz, and Georgiy L

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American Association for the Advancement of Science, February 20, 2010; Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 2. 29. Robock, Oman, and Stenchikov, “Regional Climate Responses to Geoengineering with Tropical and Arctic SO2 Injections”; K. Niranjan Kumar et al., “On the Observed Variability of Monsoon Droughts over India,” Weather and Climate Extremes 1

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potentially harmful impacts on the global water cycle and regional precipitation patterns. Notable recent examples include: Simone Tilmes et al., “The Hydrological Impact of Geoengineering in the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP),” Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 118 (2013): 11,036–11,058; Angus J. Ferraro, Eleanor J. Highwood, and Andrew

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J. Charlton-Perez, “Weakened Tropical Circulation and Reduced Precipitation in Response to Geoengineering,” Environmental Research Letters 9 (2014): 014001. The 2012 study is: H. Schmidt et al., “Solar Irradiance Reduction to Counteract Radiative Forcing from a Quadrupling of

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New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre, 2009, p. 38. 32. Ken Caldeira, “Can Solar Radiation Management Be Tested?” email to the Google Group listserv “Geoengineering,” September 27, 2010; Levitt and Dubner, SuperFreakonomics, 197. 33. Ibid., 176. 34. Personal interview with Aiguo Dai, June 6, 2012; Kevin E. Trenberth and

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Aiguo Dai, “Effects of Mount Pinatubo Volcanic Eruption on the Hydrological Cycle as an Analog of Geoengineering,” Geophysical Research Letters 34 (2007): L15702; “Climate Change and Variability in Southern Africa: Impacts and Adaptation Strategies in the Agricultural Sector,” United Nations Environment

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18, 1992. 35. Dai interview, June 6, 2012; Trenberth and Dai, “Effects of Mount Pinatubo Volcanic Eruption on the Hydrological Cycle as an Analog of Geoengineering.” 36. Volney’s full name was Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf, count de Volney. “WEAKER THAN NORMAL”: Personal interview with Alan Robock, October 19, 2010;

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(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 10, 54. 41. Trenberth and Dai, “Effects of Mount Pinatubo Volcanic Eruption on the Hydrological Cycle as an Analog of Geoengineering.” 42. Ed King, “Scientists Warn Earth Cooling Proposals Are No Climate ‘Silver Bullet,’ ” Responding to Climate Change, July 14, 2013; Haywood et al., “Asymmetric

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American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 170–172; Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary (New York: Penguin, 2009). 60. Leonard David, “People to Become Martians This Century?” NBC News, June 25, 2007. 61. “Richard Branson on

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www.eia.gov. 63. Kenneth Brower, “The Danger of Cosmic Genius,” The Atlantic, October 27, 2010. 64. Christopher Borick and Barry Rabe, “Americans Cool on Geoengineering Approaches to Addressing Climate Change,” Brookings Institution, Issues in Governance Studies No. 46, May 2012, p. 3-4; Malcolm J. Wright, Damon A. H.

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peoples, 387, 388–99, 408 seen as politically toxic, 414 Climate Depot, 32, 45 Climategate, 41 climate justice, see climate debt climate manipulation, see geoengineering climate movement: coming of age of, 11–12 deregulated capitalism and, 20 economic justice and, see climate debt growing power and interconnectedness of, 451–52

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Royal Society conference on, 256–61, 263–67, 280–81, 284–85, 451 as shock doctrine, 276–78 see also Pinatubo Option; Solar Radiation Management “Geoengineering: The Horrifying Idea Whose Time Has Come” (forum), 263 geologists, economic, 46 Geophysical Research Letters, 329 George, Russ, 268 Georgia Institute of Technology, 432

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, Canada, 313 Montreal, Maine & Atlantic railroad, 333 Montreal Protocol on ozone depletion, 220 moose, disappearance of, 26–27 Morales, Evo, 180–81 moral hazard, geoengineering and, 261 moral imperative: in abolition movement, 462–63 in climate movement, 336, 386–87, 464 divestment movement and, 354–55 in social movements, 462

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/11, 6, 63 Nixon, Richard, 125 Nixon, Rob, 276 Nompraseurt, Torm, 321 nonbinding agreements, at Copenhagen, 12, 13–14, 150 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 362 geoengineering and, 264, 280 Norgaard, Kari, 462 Norse Energy Corporation USA, 365 North Africa, 274 North America, 182 emissions from, 40 program cuts in, 110 wealth

Escape From Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It

by Erica Thompson  · 6 Dec 2022  · 250pp  · 79,360 words

thirty years’ time global mean temperature will be higher than this year, conditional on there being no major volcanic activity, nuclear war, or implementation of geoengineering by solar radiation management. Sometimes the conditions are all lumped in together, as when the output of a model is provided directly as a forecast

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similarly limited motivation, would no doubt look at the system and conclude that the most efficient solutions are large-scale technical and coercive possibilities like geoengineering, population control, virtual reality environments and rationing by price. The models for climate policy which assume that individuals are financial maximisers, and cannot be expected

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now seeing that global temperatures continue to rise, so the plausible next step in this depressing series is the replacement of carbon dioxide removal with ‘geoengineering’ by solar radiation management – usually meaning a large-scale project of spraying aerosols into the upper atmosphere to cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight. Again

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that deliver 1.5C or even 2C as carbon budgets are consumed, it seems highly likely that modellers will have little choice but to include [geoengineering by solar radiation management] in the next generation of models. All of these can-opener technologies contain a problem of ‘moral hazard’ – the difficulty that

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fix, less effort is put into actually solving the root problem. Moral hazard is here reinforced by model hazard: as soon as solar radiation management geoengineering is programmed in to any of the Integrated Assessment Models, it will immediately become a go-to technology and a key pillar of the climate

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policy pathways that are deemed to be politically and economically feasible. Unfortunately, in purely financial terms, a very basic implementation of stratospheric aerosol geoengineering would be relatively cheap and therefore highly attractive in cost-optimising models. If the target of climate policy remains couched in the terms of global

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average temperature, then stratospheric aerosol geoengineering seems to me to be now an almost unavoidable consequence and its inclusion in Integrated Assessment Models will happen in parallel with the political shift

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to acceptability. As I write this, geoengineering is still a somewhat politically and socially unacceptable concept, and therefore it is not in the models despite being a technical possibility. But as the

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and impacts of climate change become more visible and more immediate, the realisation that greenhouse gas emissions have already dangerously geoengineered our planet may make the prospect of deliberate intervention more palatable. Geoengineering is increasingly featuring in near-future climate fiction by bestselling authors like Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson, and

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and diplomatic relations strong enough for the challenge of working out what to do when a nation suffers terrible climatic events the year after the geoengineering programme begins? If we are very lucky, the best-case scenario is that climate models will be able to show confidently that most regions will

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experience a net beneficial change in climate relative to a non-geoengineered world. But due to the rapidity of current change and the normal year-to-year variability, we have to expect that extreme weather events – possibly

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after climate interventions have been deployed. It would be a huge scientific and political challenge to navigate the complexity of responsibility for the effects of geoengineering, and we are not yet anywhere near a solution to the smaller and still-colossal scientific and political challenge of responsibility for the effects of

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel

by Kim Stanley Robinson  · 5 Oct 2020  · 583pp  · 182,990 words

.” “Yes, I just saw it this morning,” she said. “Have they given us the details of their plan?” “They came half an hour ago. Our geoengineering people are saying that if they do it as planned, it will equate to about the same as the Pinatubo volcanic eruption of 1991. That

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when some petty war criminal gets caught and everyone decides to look virtuous.” Mary nodded unhappily. The Indians’ flouting of the Paris Agreement with their geoengineering, not much different legally than the general disregard for the Agreement’s emission reduction targets, was just the latest example of this kind of behavior

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. Prone to despair. Elena Quintero, agriculture. Buenos Aires. She and Estevan joke about Argentina-Chile rivalry. She cheers him up very skillfully. Indra Dalit, Jakarta. Geoengineering. Works with Bob and Jurgen. Dick Bosworth, Australian, economist. A card. Taxes and political economy. Our reality check. Janus Athena, AI, internet, all things digital

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this up at the session today? It was about this acceleration of glaciers.” Slawek quickly shook his head. “Not my thing. A scientist gets into geoengineering, they’re not a scientist anymore, they’re a politician. Get hate mail, rocks through window, no one takes their real work seriously, all that

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what you might call apprehensive. Pete, this might turn out to be another fantasy solution, one of my postdocs said to me. One of those geoengineering dreams of redemption. Silver bullet fix that just shoots us in the head kind of thing. I sure hope not, I said. I like the

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beach. Hey, someone else said, geoengineering isn’t always just a fantasy. The Indians did that sulfur dioxide thing and that worked. Temperatures dropped for years after that. Big deal, someone

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, monsoonwise. Why no graph? Staff peck around a bit and bring up graph. Monsoon rain indeed fluctuating more through last two decades, and after their geoengineering maybe a bit more so. Second year after application particularly low, semi-drought, especially in the west. Another problem, C points out. Monsoon not the

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locals. Aggressive pride. Don’t tread on me. No outsider gets to tell India what to do, not anymore. Never again. Post-colonial anger? Post-geoengineering defensiveness? Tired of the Western world condescending to India? All of the above? 35 We came into Switzerland on a train from Austria. Austria was

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sea level rise problem gets solved. Beaches still in existence. So, someone asked tonight in the mess tent, is what we’re doing down here geoengineering? Who the hell knows! What’s in a word? Call it Glacier Elevation Operations, Based on Estimates of Godawfulness Gobsmacking Interested Nations’ Goodness: GEO-BEGGING

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the road a century, not bad compared to not kicking it at all. Emergency definition, in effect. Indra: This is part of why geoengineering no longer a useful word or concept. Everything people do at scale is geoengineering. Glacier slowdown, direct air capture, soil projects like 4 per 1000, they’re all

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geoengineering. Mary: But solar radiation management is definitely geoengineering. Indra: Sure but so what? The American heat wave has brought that one back again for sure

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all ways carbon drawdown could be quantified and confirmed, in ways that would allow for carbon coins to be created and paid to individuals. All geoengineering, all good. The word itself needs to be rehabilitated. Mary: Good luck with that. Dick, what’s going on with finance? World still in Super

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of ice to the northern horizon, was yellow. Naturally this looked awful, like some vast toxic spill; in fact it was geoengineering, no doubt the most visible act of geoengineering ever, and as such widely reviled. But the solar heating of the Arctic Ocean when there was no ice covering it might

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.47 for yellow water. The amount of energy thus bounced back out into space was simply stupendous, the benefit-to-cost ratio off the charts. Geoengineering? Yes. Ugly? Very much so. Dangerous? Possibly. Necessary? Yes. Or put it this way; the international community had decided through their international treaty system to

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, he said, “You could come with me again. Be my celebrity guide. We could make a tour of all the greatest landscape restoration sites, or geoengineering projects.” “God spare me.” He laughed. “Or whatever you like. Your favorite cities. You could be a guest curator or whatnot.” “I’d rather just

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today

by Jane McGonigal  · 22 Mar 2022  · 420pp  · 135,569 words

they can’t afford to refuse: any country that wants access to their humanity-saving technology must first completely dismantle its nuclear arsenal. Want this geoengineering solution that safely reverses the local effects of climate change? First get rid of your bombs. Want a vaccine for this deadly, uncontrollable virus? Disarm

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woke up in an upside-down future where we faced global wintering instead? Imagine it: in this future, the world has access to a breakthrough geoengineering technology that can partially block the sun’s rays and cool the planet. It could potentially reverse decades of global warming. It could give the

…

be the end of our climate nightmare and the beginning of climate healing. But who should have the legal and moral authority to make extreme geoengineering decisions like this? What voice should ordinary people have in the process? How can the science be communicated to the public—and will it be

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. Refresh. There it is: “YES.” So that’s it. We’re really doing this. The world voted yes. Yes to dimming the sun. Yes to geoengineering our way out of the climate crisis. In 2016, there was Brexit. In 2029, there was Calexit. And now, in 2033, the Sun Exit. It

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high temperature will be the previous average low temperature. That’s a swing of potentially twenty degrees. It’s a much more dramatic intervention than geoengineers were talking about earlier in the twenty-first century when the field was first getting underway. But ultimately, it’s what all the most powerful

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Department of Energy’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model. It won’t be a permanent winter, thank goodness. It will end, hopefully, sometime in 2043. Geoengineers will stop seeding the clouds with sulfate as soon as the planet recovers from its mega-drought, extreme heat, and endless wildfires—all of which

…

faster, in the early 2030s than even the most dire climate forecasts had predicted. If it had been even just a little less severe, maybe geoengineering would still be off the table. But, “it’s this or Mars,” or so went the popular joke leading up to the Sun Exit vote

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new planet 234 million miles away. In the meantime, humans still have to get their sustainability act together. As you’ve heard a million times: “Geoengineering is not an alternative to cutting carbon emissions. It’s a way to buy precious time.” And the YES campaign has promised to use that

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of the future: What everyday object might exist in this scenario that doesn’t exist today? Maybe it’s an informational flyer explaining how solar geoengineering works (you can easily download and print one online today), with a handwritten message across the top: “Science is real! Vote YES on Sun Exit

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a list of what people will need and want during a ten-year winter. As society adjusts to its new reality, and the effects of geoengineering are felt worldwide . . . What new problems will be common? What help or support will people ask for? What mental health challenges will people have? What

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, or to a family member or loved one, your town, or the whole world. What do you want them to know about life on a geoengineered planet? How would you encourage them to prepare for a future like this? What words of wisdom or advice can you share from the year

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? Let’s look at some of the signals of change and future forces behind “The Ten-Year Winter.” Geoengineering, once considered a fringe idea, is becoming a serious scientific discipline. The Oxford Geoengineering Programme defines it as “the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change

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.”3 In the past five years, more than 13,500 peer-reviewed scientific papers on geoengineering ideas have been published.4 Proposals include sending a giant mirror into orbit to reflect sun away from the earth; using genetically engineered E. coli

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so that they become just a little bigger and brighter, enough to cool specific areas of the planet while leaving the rest unchanged.5 The geoengineering idea that’s furthest along, with the biggest potential impact, is solar radiation management (SRM), in which sulfate particles are injected into the atmosphere—just

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, Engineering, and Medicine recommended that the US government establish a $200 million federal research program to investigate solar geoengineering.6 The Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative is another signal: it promotes and funds geoengineering research in the most climate-vulnerable countries in the global south. Since 2018, it has funded half a

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countries: Argentina, Bangladesh, Benin, Indonesia, Iran, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, and South Africa.7 Meanwhile, Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s largest incubator, is requesting proposals from geoengineering-focused start-ups.8 And in the summer of 2021, IEEE Spectrum, the flagship magazine and website of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional

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potential.9 That said, governments are just barely beginning to try to figure out how to regulate and coordinate geoengineering efforts. In 2015, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity established a moratorium on geoengineering activities, with 196 countries signing on. It cited the moral hazard of one country acting unilaterally to change

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carried out on potential risks.11 The Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative (C2G), an advocacy group based in New York City, is working to have solar geoengineering discussed again at the UN General Assembly in 2023. It has an eye toward advancing a framework for approving and risk-mitigating larger, strategic experiments

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would, ideally, be closer to one to two degrees, not twenty. In that regard, the 2033 scenario is a significant and fantastical departure from what geoengineers think would actually happen if they could implement their desired plans. In a best-case scenario, SRM wouldn’t dramatically cool the planet. It would

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, you can dial back the drama of the scenario and imagine a much milder winterization effect. That’s the more likely future, as long as geoengineers continue to call for conservative climate intervention. But it’s certainly possible that SRM recommendations will evolve. In 2021, precedent-shattering flooding in Germany and

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that far out, it’s worth playing with the possibilities. How would scientists know when it’s finally time to undertake the kind of dramatic geoengineering efforts described in “The Ten-Year Winter”? The climate supercomputers mentioned in the scenario are real, and many more like them are being developed. They

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can expect these kinds of debates, alongside coordinated efforts from researchers and governments to increase supercomputer trust, to become commonplace in the next decade. Would geoengineering ever be put to a public vote, as it is in “The Ten-Year Winter”? I don’t know of any mechanisms in place yet

…

the planet we once knew also means we no longer have the lives we once lived.”19 Whatever the actual climate future holds, whether we geoengineer the results or not, it is essential that we practice pre-feeling that vertigo now. Imagining ourselves living through a dramatic scenario like “The Ten

…

find experts to follow on social media and discover new signals of change by investigating these search terms: “solar radiation management” “climate supercomputers” “global governance” “geoengineering ethics” You’ve just explored three possible versions of the year 2033: Trash becomes illegal, virtually overnight—and garbage removal as we know it is

…

a ten-year project to carefully, thoughtfully, and equitably move one billion people across borders to climate-safer homes. A global vote approves an unprecedented geoengineering effort, and the whole world voluntarily enters into a decade-long winter. No futurist would seriously predict these things—if by “predict,” we mean to

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/the-epic-volcano-eruption-that-led-to-the-year-without-a-summer/. 3 “What Is Geoengineering?,” Oxford Geoengineering Programme, accessed August 27, 2021, http://www.geoengineering.ox.ac.uk/www.geoengineering.ox.ac.uk/what-is-geoengineering/what-is-geoengineering/. 4 Based on a Google Scholar search for scientific papers published between 2016 and mid-2021

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with the keywords “geoengineering” and “climate change.” 5 Daisy Dunne, “Explainer: Six Ideas to Limit Global Warming with

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Solar Geoengineering,” Carbon Brief, September 5, 2018, https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-six-ideas-to-limit-global-warming-with

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-solar-geoengineering; Aylin Woodward, “We’re Altering the Climate So Severely That We’ll Soon Face Apocalyptic Consequences. Here Are 11 Last-Ditch Ways We Could Hack

…

the Planet to Reverse That Trend,” Business Insider, April 20, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/geoengineering-how-to-reverse-climate-change-2019-4. 6 Jeff Tollefson, “US Urged to Invest in Sun-Dimming Studies as Climate Warms,” Nature, March 29, 2021

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Can Disrupt Climate Change,” IEEE Spectrum, June 28, 2021, https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/engineers-you-can-disrupt-climate-change. 10 “Climate-Related Geoengineering and Biodiversity: Technical and Regulatory Matters on Geoengineering in Relation to the CBD; COP Decisions,” Convention on Biological Diversity, March 23, 2017, https://www.cbd.int/climate

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/geoengineering/. 11 Natalie L. Kahn and Simon J. Levien, “Indigenous Group Petitions Harvard to Shut Down Controversial Geoengineering Project to Block Sun,” Harvard Crimson, June 27, 2021, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/6/27

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