Think Climate Change Is Messy? Wait Until Geoengineering - WIRED

This is the idea behind a solar geoengineering technique known as stratospheric aerosol injection, only instead of a pigment, engineers would spray a sulfate that bounces some of the sun’s radiation back into space, an attempt at cooling the planet.

“If you do it in one place, it's going to affect the whole planet,” says climate scientist Kate Ricke, who studies the intersection of geoengineering, human behavior, and economics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

While it’s not likely that someone will colorize the atmosphere anytime soon, it's getting increasingly likely that someone will decide it’s time for stratospheric aerosol injection.

This anthropogenic geoengineering might trigger unintended effects, like droughts in certain regions and massive storms in others.

And that's part of the reason why you can't do stratospheric geoengineering over just one area. ?

KR: It's not benign—it's the same stuff that comes out of power plants.

But, in terms of the scale, the amount you need in the stratosphere is way, way smaller than what we emit from power plants, and it's spread out over the planet. .

WIRED: Say a country unilaterally says, ‘We're going to do this.’ They want to cool down their own country by spraying the stratosphere, and it doesn't matter if it's going to wrap around the planet.

KR: Legally, it's complicated, because countries own their airspace up to space, basically.

I'm having a hard time seeing how we're not going to do it at this point, actually, because it's so inexpensive?

KR: If the program got disrupted, and we were blocking a lot of warming with stratospheric geoengineering, you would get this really rapid warming if someone stopped doing it.

There's things that humans do that we need to keep doing, or it's catastrophic. .

The technology's not so complicated that we would need just the person who developed the technology to be the one to keep doing it.

But it's not like nuclear weapons or something like that. .

KR: There might be some technical experts, like me or other people who have worked on this, that would say: ‘Yes, I've seen enough to believe it.’ But in order to have collective decision-making at the global scale, you need science that's viewed as legitimate by everyone?

And we're not there, by a longshot, with geoengineering.

And we need more diversity of who's doing research and where, because the results are going to need to be viewed as legitimate by a much broader group of people.

And people just don't automatically trust a small group of elites like that.

It's actually important that the ministry of the environment in Bangladesh has someone who's Bangladeshi talking to them about geoengineering science.

You can look at certain areas of climate science and you see we're saying the same thing over and over and over again.

KR: We're not there where we can have global consensus about geoengineering, not by a longshot.

KR: The moral hazard is a totally valid concern, and it's a big one

But the risk is that if things get bad enough with climate change, people are going to do geoengineering anyway, and we're not going to be ready to do it