Humanity has succeeded in stabilizing our carbon footprint, but it is not yet on the decline. It looks increasingly likely that we will emit enough emissions to achieve a warming of at least 1.5°C. We need to act quickly to avoid exceeding 2°C. There are alternatives such as geoengineering to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and reduce the amount of sunlight entering.
Of the two, geoengineering has the most unknowns, with a recent report from the National Academy of Sciences stating, “Scientific understanding of many aspects of solar geoengineering technology has expanded into extreme weather, agriculture, and natural ecosystems.” It is still limited, such as how it affects, or human health.”
So some Silicon Valley types naturally decided to go ahead and launch startups offering geoengineering for a fee. The company claims to provide a warming offset despite considerable unknowns about geoengineering. According to an MIT Technology Review article, the company has already started launching balloons into the stratosphere, but it’s impossible to determine if it’s actually deploying a payload.
Design the stratosphere?
Geoengineering is generally defined as manipulating the environment in ways that alter the climate. Given its definition, the widespread burning of fossil fuels is a form of geoengineering. But in the face of a steadily warming climate, most references to geoengineering now focus on ways to combat that warming. The most practical approach seems to be to loft reflective particles into the stratosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight the Earth receives.
The general concept has already been validated by volcanoes, which pump sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and can cause cooling in the years following the eruption. Placed in the stratosphere, sulfur dioxide drifted downward, cooling the Earth for about three years before coming out of the atmosphere as rain.
Sulfur dioxide is cheap, and with the technology needed to transport it into the stratosphere without the need for an eruption, it could be an attractive alternative to many of the costly downstream effects of climate change. “Maybe” mainly comes from the vast unknowns involved in pursuing it. Everything from plants to solar panels depends on sunlight reaching the earth. And while we know the approach works, we don’t yet know enough details to assign a specific cooling value to a specific amount of sulfur dioxide. generate. This could have environmental impacts if deployed at the levels required to alter the climate. I promise to continue doing so for as long as it takes.
For all these reasons, the scientific community has been very hesitant about this idea. The aforementioned National Academy report suggests that there are so many unknowns, and research on geoengineering must be designed in such a way that it is not easy to go ahead and pursue. “Deliberate field experiments involving the release of substances into the atmosphere should only be considered if they can provide important observations that cannot be provided by laboratory studies, modeling, or experiments on occasions such as volcanic eruptions. “There is,” the authors of the report conclude.
