Should humans try to dim the sun?

Jordan In case you haven’t noticed, humanity faces a number of problems right now, but here in the spirit of a new new year and new hope, perhaps 2022 can be about solutions. Take the climate crisis, for instance. We already know many ways to solve this problem. Renewable energy, carbon capture, prices on pollution, eating less red meat, driving fewer cars, and hundreds of other things from personal to society wide behaviour. But we’re not doing enough of any of them to fix this problem in the short term and in the long term, well, we might not have that much time left. So unless something changes, the clock will run out and we’ll need to do something drastic. Here is the happy and or terrifying part of that problem: we have some drastic options, even if some of them sound like they were cooked up by a supervillain.

The Simpsons Clip

Mr. Burns Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing: block it out.

Smithers Good God.

Mr. Burns Imagine it Smithers. Electrical lights and heaters running all day long.

Smithers But sir, every plant and tree will die. Owls will deafen us with incessant hooting. The town sundial will be useless. I don’t want any part of this project. It’s unconscionably fiendish.

Jordan There is research being done right now, and not by Mr. Burns on how we might safely dim the sun, or at least keep more of its light and heat from reaching us. Could this help to slow the warming of the Earth, allow polar ice to re-accumulate and reverse some of the damage we’ve done to the climate? Yes. Could it also backfire completely and lead to disaster that would eventually decimate most of humanity? Also, yes. But we’re studying it just in case one last question, if it becomes necessary, who on Earth, and I mean that literally, makes that call?

I’m Jordan-Heath Rawlings, this is The Big Story. Happy New Year. We’re back. Bob Berwyn is a reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. He has been looking into solar geoengineering for Inside Climate News. Hello, Bob.

Bob Hello. How are you?

Jordan I’m doing well. Thank you for joining us today.

Bob Absolutely. My pleasure.

Jordan I’m going to start with this, and I’m really not trying to be flip, but have you ever seen that episode of The Simpsons where Mr. Burns blocks out the sun from Springfield?

Bob I had seen it a long time ago, and after I got the email, I went back and watched a clip of it to refresh my memory and had a good laugh.

Jordan Okay, so how is solar geoengineering different from that? Not in terms of the science, but just on the scale of human hubris.

Bob Probably not all that different, unfortunately.

Jordan Let’s start just, when we use a term like “geoengineering”, when we’re discussing climate policy, what kinds of things broadly are we talking about?

Bob So geoengineering the climate, means taking some sort of large scale actions that can affect the climate on a regional or global level. And it can cover things like what we just talked about figuring out ways to try and reduce the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth’s surface. And very broadly, they include other things like affecting the way carbon dioxide builds up in the Earth’s atmosphere in different ways. And I always like to remind people that by heating the climate with carbon dioxide, we’ve actually already been geoengineering since the fossil fuel age started. Basically, that’s what we’re doing. We’re geoengineering the climate. We’re adding chemicals to the atmosphere that change the climate. So maybe more accurately, we should be talking right now about reverse geoengineering.

Other things, just quickly, include things like potentially trying to stimulate plankton in the ocean to take up more carbon dioxide by feeding them minerals, enhanced weathering of rocks. So, for example, putting certain types of rocks on beaches on a large scale, whereas they sort of swirl around in the water and get ground up, they would also take up more carbon dioxide. One of the most recent things I saw was trying to figure out ways to speed up the uptake or the amount of carbon dioxide that the oceans can absorb from the air by adjusting ocean currents. Things like literally building underwater barriers to prevent warm water from reaching the underside of ice shelves. So all pretty desperate ideas to try and slow this process of sudden climate change that we’ve triggered with our incredibly rapid build up of carbon dioxide.

Solar geoengineering is definitely the thing that has been talked about the most recently. Solar radiation management is another term that’s used, and that’s somehow trying to reduce the amount of solar energy that reaches the Earth’s surface.

Jordan The reason I asked you about The Simpsons to start off is because that’s kind of the specific form of geoengineering we’re talking today is the solar stuff. So maybe just as we speak now, how serious is the discussion about finding ways to dim or reflect the sun, how much work is being done in this space?

Bob So let’s describe that a little more closely. The most common idea would be to distribute some sort of particles, very tiny particles high in the atmosphere that would act as a shield to the Sun’s energy. Sulfur dioxide is one of the things that they talk about because we know that works from volcanic emissions. We know that when there are big volcanic emissions, the sulfur dioxide can cool the Earth’s temperature by a fairly significant amount for short term. And there has been a lot of research in that area. Six or eight months ago, there was an experiment scheduled to launch a balloon high into the atmosphere and distribute a tiny amount of material in the atmosphere to sort of study how it spreads and to try and get a sense of how it works on a really small scale, and that proved pretty controversial and was canceled. But it’s not completely off the table. And I do think that folks are still trying to pursue that to see if it has potential.

Jordan When we say folks in this sense, I mean, obviously in terms of the hands on research, we’re talking about scientists. But where is the push for this kind of experiment coming from? Is this an option that governments are seriously thinking about? Is this a UN thing, like, where does the impetus come from?

Bob I think at this point, it’s coming primarily from scientists and researchers in the field. And I don’t think that there’s any government that is officially sanctioning this or saying this is something we should pursue. But your question points to much bigger question. And that is who would be responsible for sort of setting up a regulatory framework and monitoring the results and ensuring that it doesn’t affect a country that doesn’t want to be affected and those kinds of things. So probably at least as big as the technical and scientific questions, and perhaps bigger, are these questions of governance and regulation. And all the scientists who study it theoretically and on an engineering and on a climate level all say at the same time, we need a governance structure. We need for governments to sit down and talk about this. And, yes, the UN would be a likely venue for that.

And there are concerns that some countries may, if things get desperate enough, may strike out on a rogue effort to do something like this without consulting with other countries. So I think anybody who is remotely involved with this says let’s sit down and figure out the governance first before we pursue anything, even small scale experiments.

Jordan In terms of those small scale experiments, you kind of describe one method. But I’m also fascinated just by, like, how could you do a proper experiment for something that would involve changing the global climate? Like even just releasing a balloon with a tiny amount of particles, it seems like it couldn’t properly take into account all the impacts and ramifications of, like, a global scale geoengineering.

Bob Yes. And I don’t think that that particular experiment was aimed at capturing the full effects of a global or regional program. It was more just to see how the material that they want to spread in the atmosphere acts and how long it stays up there. And those sorts of things. To sort of figure out the regional or global effect really requires modelling. So it’s not based on physical observations other than what we know about volcanoes. So it’s really a modelling question. And it’s an open ended question. And many scientists warn of unexpected consequences of trying something like that on any significant scale.

Jordan Oh, for sure. And we’re going to get into that in, like, two minutes. But while we’re on this topic, what do those models say? Like have we seen any of them? What do they predict? What do they show?

Bob Very broadly, I guess we could say that if we were to distribute a certain volume of some type of aerosol or some type of substance in the atmosphere, that you could reflect some of that incoming solar energy back to space and prevent it from heating up the surface farther.

Jordan You just mentioned what could go wrong. And I’m not asking for a doomsday scenario here, but first of all, what could go wrong? And second of all, how much control would we have over this once we release whatever reflective particles they’re out there and whatever’s going to happen is kind of baked in right?

Bob I think the biggest concern that I’ve heard expressed is that once you started, you’d be committed to doing this indefinitely. And the biggest danger would be that let’s say people did this for ten years and then suddenly stopped, that then there would be a huge sudden jump in warming after that, unless something else happened at the same time, like perhaps significant reductions in CO2. The aerosols from volcanoes fall out of the atmosphere eventually, they don’t stay up there indefinitely and keep floating around. They circulate and thin out, and then they start to form nuclei for rain or snowflakes. And eventually they fall back to Earth. And so that dimming effect goes away.

Some of the other unintended consequences that scientists are worried about are, let’s say you spread these over one area, let’s say the Arctic because you’re trying to slow down the melting of the Arctic ice. What does it do to the climate system in the mid-latitudes? will it cause droughts or extreme storms? Those are questions that in my mind have not been answered by the models. The models can say like, okay, theoretically, if you have X amount of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere above the Arctic Circle, you can cut X amount of the Sun’s radiation coming in. But I don’t think they’re very good at showing yet how that might affect other parts of the global climate system.

Jordan I know that our concern right now, rightly, is cutting emissions and moving to sustainable green technology. But obviously we’re in a race against time here. So how will we know if we get to a point where these kind of ideas, as strange as they might sound, are our best or maybe even only option for preserving a livable planet?

Bob That question is probably above my level. I guess my answer would be my biggest concern is that even talking about it takes away somewhat from the focus, the laser focus that we need on reducing emissions as fast as possible. And there are concerns that, for example, fossil fuel companies could be the ones to try and drive solar engineering technology with their very powerful lobbying voices and be able to turn to the public and say, look, if we start doing solar geoengineering, solar radiation management, we can keep on burning fossil fuels. We can sort of manipulate the climate like that. And there is a lot of concern in the science community that the discussion about solar geoengineering is detracting from what we need to do right now.

Jordan Well, I think it’s human nature to hope for the best and hope that there’s going to be some amazing new technology that will save us. It’s certainly easier than trying to change our fundamental behaviour.

Bob True. I think that’s been our pattern in the age of technology, for sure.

Jordan Where’s the line, I guess, is the last thing I want to talk about. Obviously because we may need them in the future, this stuff is probably important to study, but how far down that path can we go before we start to see the allure of using these technologies and risking it instead of focusing on our emissions? And, you know, like you just said, the more this gets out there, we’re going to do this podcast episode. People are going to listen to it. And yeah, it sounds scary. It sounds weird. It sounds like supervillain stuff, but also, it sounds like a way to keep our lives and save the planet without having to give up what we hold dear.

Bob That sort of gets into a social realm that I don’t like to talk about. Global warming policy in the context of giving things up.

Jordan Why not?

Bob Because I don’t believe that that’s absolutely necessary. I think there are other solutions. It’s not just an option between business as usual and geoengineering. There’s a whole range of other actions and alternatives in there. We may have to reduce some meat consumption and change our travel patterns. If it’s presented as either or choice. It makes it really hard for people to see all the things that are out there that can be done step by step to reduce emissions, long before we give up hamburgers or give up traveling, we could reduce the incredible amounts of waste that we produce, and at the same time develop more renewable energy resources and figure out technologies where planes can fly without emissions.

I don’t like to see it presented as an either or choice. Either geoengineering or our whole lifestyle is going to come crashing down. I think that’s a false choice, but it is presented by some people very deliberately, I believe, as part of the continued disinformation campaigns on climate.

Jordan This is my last question. Does it take our eye off the ball? Are we wasting time that could be better spent with some of our brightest minds working on what we can do right now that might not have horrible, unintended consequences?

Bob That’s a good question. And when we discussed the story about geoengineering at Inside Climate News, we actively discussed, like, are we contributing to normalizing this idea just by talking about it? But it doesn’t really help to ignore things and stick your head in the sand. I mean, Geoengineering is out there. There are scientists actively working on it, companies actively looking at different types of options. So no, I think it needs to be talked about. And most of all, it should be a completely transparent process with a good governance framework in place before there’s any talk. I mean, that should be the very first thing. Countries should sit down and figure out some sort of a context for how to even have this discussion. And then we should go from there.

Jordan And the clock is ticking. Thanks, Bob, for sharing this with us and being realistic about it.

Bob Thank you for having me. And thanks for covering the topic, I appreciate it.

Jordan Bob Berwyn writing for Inside Climate News.

That was The Big Story. We’re so glad to be back. We’re glad to have you back as well. Hopefully, you had a safe and happy holidays at least as much as was permitted. Wherever you happen to be. You can find us at thebigstorypodcast.ca, on Twitter @TheBigStoryFPN, and via email at thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!]. You can, of course, find us in every podcast player. We hope you do. And when you’re there, you can rate and you can review, by the way, you can rate podcasts on Spotify now, I’m just saying, if you happened to be listening, we’d love it if you did.

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. Happy New Year. We’ll talk tomorrow.

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