Scientists start studying geoengineering

A few weeks ago, Katherine Ricke, a professor of sustainability at the University of California, San Diego, turned to a room of attentive scientists at the American Geophysical Union. In any other year, she would have broken one of the biggest taboos in climate science.

Geoscientists are now very clear, she said, that solar geoengineering is a poor substitute for reducing emissions. So the next question is, Is solar geoengineering complementary to mitigation measures?

She then argued that the answer was yes. While reducing greenhouse gas emissions may cool the planet in the long term, it won’t happen immediately, she said. But spraying sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere is fairly cheap and could quickly help ease the planet’s fever. Solar geoengineering has a rapid but temporary impact on global temperatures, while the effects of emissions reductions are delayed but long-lasting, she said.

Rick then asked if the economics of solar geoengineering make sense and its risks. Will it deprive research funding of other important work? Probably not. Will it encourage people to delay cutting emissions? may be.

However, the most surprising thing about the presentation, for those who have thought about this issue for a long time, was that no one in the audience of normal climate scientists gasped. No one kicked Rick out of the room or told her that her speech did not belong at a conference dedicated to net-zero emissions, the climate issue. alleviate, Reduce carbon pollution, not eliminate its impact.

To find out what America’s climate scientists are talking about, you could do worse than attend the AGU’s annual fall meeting, where more than 20,000 scientists gather to present new research and gossip about their superiors. This year, AGU is held at San Francisco’s cavernous Moscone Center. The arrival of tens of thousands of people immediately broke the city’s post-epidemic bustle; Starbucks had sold out of breakfast sandwiches, and all restaurants within a quarter-mile of the meeting location were packed ahead of the 8:30 a.m. meeting. .

For some ridiculous reason, AGU almost always takes place around the same time as the annual United Nations climate conference, and the two events have a lot in common: they’re both fairs, free events, part salon, part trade show, and every bit as Too big for anyone to see.However, by paying keen attention to sounds and signals, one can discover a atmosphere In these two activities. The vibe at AGU this year was clear: geoengineering is here to stay.

This genuine interest in geoengineering and climate change is representative of a broader shift in climate science from observation to intervention. It also represents a sea change for a field that used to consider any interference with the climate system, short of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, off-limits.People are increasingly aware of [solar radiation management] Dan Visioni, a professor of climatology at Cornell University, told me that this is no longer a taboo. NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and national laboratories are increasingly taking an interest in this area that was not seen a year ago.

At the highest level, acceptance of geoengineering shows that scientists have begun to seriously imagine what will happen if humanity fails to meet its goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Why is geoengineering suddenly popular? That’s partly because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has grown increasingly insistent that carbon removal is critical, opening the door to other once-taboo ideas.

But the other part is that the climate catastrophe seems to be getting worse every year, and humanity seems increasingly wary of it, but no country has plans to reduce emissions fast enough to mitigate the near-term dangers of global warming. 2023 will be the warmest year in modern human history, but the temperature targets of the Paris Agreement are still far away.It has been clear which emission reductions should be kept below 1.5 [degrees Celsius] It won’t happen in any real situation, but people always believe that just saying it will do the trick physical Chances are, Visioni says, this will inspire people to take some kind of action. The situation in 2023 shows otherwise.

Perhaps another reason is that, for better or worse, geoengineering is already happening. Economists have long argued that stratospheric aerosol injections are so cheap that someone will eventually try them. Last year, Mike Iseman, a 39-year-old former employee of startup accelerator Y Combinator, claimed he conducted rogue experiments in western Mexico, using weather balloons to pump reflective sulfur molecules into the atmosphere. It’s unclear whether this fast-moving, rule-breaking effort actually reflects any meaningful sunlight back into space. What it did do was awaken the Mexican government to regulatory arbitrage. In response, it banned solar geoengineering.

However, more serious attempts have been made to bring geoengineering into the mainstream. In September, the Overshoot Commission, a panel of current and former world leaders that includes an influential Chinese adviser and a former Canadian prime minister, recommended that the world start taking a serious look at solar geoengineering. Congress recently authorized the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to study the technology, although reports from the office suggest scientists are still proceeding with caution. It has a very interesting title: Report on Congressional Mandated Solar Radiation Modifications.

Shuchi Talati, a Penn State scholar and former Department of Energy official, said the way broader climate interventions are beginning to enter the mainstream is alarming.If you look at AGU four or five years ago, if there was [solar radiation management] She told me it was novel. But this year there were more panel discussions and private conversations than ever before. You can feel it in the air that people are more interested.

Rickes wasn’t the only geoengineering talk in San Francisco this year. At the packed lunch, AGU President Lisa Graumlich led a plenary session to discuss a draft proposal for how the organization could ethically research climate intervention. Are we trying to play God? Do we have the right to do this? What risks are we willing to accept?or we have the right no arrive? Cynthia Scharf, a former United Nations consultant who helped lead a Carnegie Foundation project to study how the world might manage geoengineering, told attendees via video conference. Audience members were not really rewarded for participating: After each member of the group completed their introductions, the audience only had time to ask two questions.

Across the hall, more than 60 people were discussing another type of climate intervention. Scientists have known for years that the stability of some West Antarctica glaciers could mean the difference between quasi-manageable sea level rise this century and rapid, catastrophic sea level rise. So a small group of glaciologists are now asking whether those specific glaciers, such as Thwaites Glacier, which holds four trillion gallons of water, more than the state of Florida, could be designed or modified to slow their collapse big.

Perhaps a berm could be built on the seafloor in front of each glacier to prevent warm water from eroding them. Or maybe holes could be drilled into the glacier to allow heat from underground to escape to the surface. Glacier scientists have held two meetings this year at the University of Chicago and Stanford University to begin discussing the idea.

Another approach, which was the subject of several events, uses ships to spray seawater into the atmosphere to brighten clouds and reflect more sunlight into space.Research by one academic, Chih-Chieh Jack Chen, suggests that brightening just 5% of cloud cover on the ocean surface could cool the Earth enough to meet world temperature targets, but doing so could also have a climate knock-on effect Increase Temperature increases in Southeast Asia are even greater than those caused by global warming alone. Others have presented research suggesting that cloud brightening could unexpectedly shut down the planet’s westerly trade winds or even quiet the Pacific El Niño oscillation.

Then there are the carbon-removal crews, dozens of them coming, who appear to have graduated to planes that are less controversial (and probably better paid) than geoengineering. Most scientists seem to have accepted that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) needs to happen at least to some extent. CDRs are a given. Visioni told me that people don’t even think of it as geoengineering anymore, which is what the CDR people always wanted. A new Department of Energy report released during the meeting concluded that by 2050, the United States could absorb 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year at a cost of only $130 billion, creating 440,000 jobs. In other cases, and not just with federal funding, the United States appears likely to become the cornerstone of the global carbon removal industry, with its vast geological capabilities and fossil fuel expertise giving it a competitive edge.

Unsurprisingly, venture capital and public sector money have poured into the carbon removal space, creating a crop of CDR startups that have one foot in the earth sciences and the other in Silicon Valley. Their employees are also at AGU and are fully cooperating. What’s interesting, Talati told me, is how many industry researchers and even company heads there are in the company. I never really experienced this at AGU. Employees from Lithos, Heirloom, Carbon Direct, Stripe and Extra Ventures all registered for the meeting; scientists and technologists sipped cappuccinos and ate pastries at an early morning meeting at the Salesforce Tower, a few blocks from the official conference site. , this may be a first for AGU. Visioni said AGU is not a place where you would expect to find these types of people, even just CDRs, so their presence is interesting.

The whole thing is a stark contrast and inevitable mirror to COP28, where oil lobbyists roamed the streets. Some environmentalists complain that the U.N. climate conference has been transformed from a diplomatic meeting into a trade show. But perhaps there is now so much funding, interest and public attention that any large climate-related rally will take on a commercial tone. There are a lot of wealthy people with huge amounts of money who want to help fight climate change. At the same time, the U.S. government looks less and less like a reliable long-term partner in climate research. Sooner or later someone will try to do more serious geoengineering than releasing a few balloons in Mexico. Scientists are already preparing for this day. Is this smart? I have no idea. But this seems like a better strategy than pretending not to know where we’re going.