The idea behind solar geoengineering is essentially to mimic what happens when volcanoes push particles into the atmosphere; a large eruption, such as that of Mt. Pinatubo, in the Philippines, in 1992, can measurably cool the world for a year or two. This scheme, not surprisingly, has few public advocates, and even among those who want to see it studied the inference has been that it would not actually be implemented for decades. “I’m not saying they’ll do it tomorrow,” Dan Schrag, the director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, who serves on the advisory board of a geoengineering-research project based at the university, told my colleague Elizabeth Kolbert for “Under a White Sky,” her excellent book on technical efforts to repair environmental damage, published last year. “I feel like we might have thirty years,” he said. It’s a number he repeated to me when we met in Cambridge this summer.

Others, around the world, however, are working to speed up that timeline. There are at least three initiatives under way that are studying the potential implementation of solar-radiation management, or S.R.M., as it is sometimes called: a commission under the auspices of the Paris Peace Forum, composed of fifteen current and former global leaders and some environmental and governance experts, that is exploring “policy options” to combat climate change and how these policies might be monitored; a Carnegie Council initiative of how the United Nations might govern geoengineering; and Degrees Initiative, an academic effort based in the United Kingdom and funded by a collection of foundations, that in turn funds research on the effects of such a scheme across the developing world. The result of these initiatives, if not the goal, may be to normalize the idea of geoengineering. It is being taken seriously because of something else that’s speeding up: the horrors that come with an overheating world and now regularly threaten its most densely populated places.

The question is more: what else would it do? On a global scale it could, at least temporarily, turn the sky hazy or milky (hence the title of Kolbert’s book); it could alter “the quality of the light plants use for photosynthesis” (no small thing on a planet basically built on chlorophyll—studies have shown that U.S. corn production increased as polluting aerosols went down in the wake of amendments to the Clean Air Act); and it might damage the ozone layer, which is only now repairing itself from our recent assault with fluorocarbons. (By way of comparison, the largest volcanic eruption ever recorded, at Mt. Tambora, in 1815, on an island that is now part of Indonesia, spewed a cloud of particles that temporarily caused the temperature to drop a degree Celsius. That change produced, in 1816, “a year without a summer” across much of the northern hemisphere. Lake ice was observed in Pennsylvania into August, and, in Europe, where grain yields plummeted, hungry crowds rioted beneath banners reading “Bread or Blood.”)

The most likely problems, though, would probably be not global but regional. Lowering the temperature, precisely because it would affect global weather patterns, would produce different and hard-to-predict outcomes in different places. I spoke about this tendency with Inés Camilloni, a climatologist at the University of Buenos Aires who is investigating the possible effects of geoengineering on rivers in South America’s La Plata river basin. (Her work is partially funded by the Degrees Initiative.) “What we found is that implementation of S.R.M. strategies could lead to an increase in the mean flow of the rivers of the basin, which means more water for hydropower energy, something that could be considered positive. Also an increase in the levels at low-flow times, which is a positive, considering these droughts we’re having,” she said. “But you also could experience an increase in the higher flow, and this could be associated in the rate of flooding in the rivers.”

In South Africa, a study by a University of Cape Town team, also funded by Parker’s group, indicated that S.R.M. could cut the possibility of drought in that coastal city, which, in 2018, came dangerously close to reaching a “day zero” shutoff of water supplies, as local reservoirs turned into dustbowls. But another team working from Benin, in West Africa, found that geoengineering would likely lead to less rain in a region that has suffered from calamitous desertification. Mohammed Rahman, working from an office in Bangladesh’s renowned International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, said his research showed that in some parts of Asia malaria would increase, and in others it would decline. “The result we had was on a coarse scale, like a continental scale. Here it gets better, here it gets worse,” he said.

A climate “solution” that helps some and harms others could spark its own kind of crisis. A Brookings Institution report last December began with a scenario—it’s 2035, and a country begins unilateral deployment of S.R.M.: “the country has decided that it can no longer wait; they see geoengineering as their only option.” Initially, “the decision seems wise, as the increase in global temperatures starts to level off. But soon other types of anomalous weather begin to appear: unexpected and severe droughts hit countries around the world, disrupting agriculture.” In response, “another large country, under the impression it has been severely harmed . . . carries out a focused military strike against the geoengineering equipment, a decision supported by other nations who also believe they have been negatively impacted.” This development, however, becomes even more devastating—with no one putting chemicals into the stratosphere, they decline rapidly in the course of a year, and “temperatures dramatically rebound to the levels they would have reached on their previous trajectory.” The result, they conclude, is “disastrous.”

I'd rather have them figure out the opposite in case we get a nuclear winter.

Play god with the planet. What could possibly go wrong?

I'd rather have them figure out the opposite in case we get a nuclear winter.

Play god with the planet. What could possibly go wrong?

This shit terrifies me ---- that they think they can actually 'fix' it --- even if it was real --- and not fuck it up more or in other ways..... Goddamn arrogant fuks.

.....

How are the solar panels that power their evo-cars gonna work?

God complex

Morons think they are smart enough to make everything right, given enough tax money of course

It's like anything the communists do. Doesn't REALLY matter if it works. What matters is that they are in charge.

I mean really. Name some of their successes since, say 1964.

It's like anything the communists do. Doesn't REALLY matter if it works. What matters is that they are in charge.

I mean really. Name some of their successes since, say 1964.