Shake Your Fist at an Empty Sky
Pondering the objections to a precursor of a precursor of solar geoengineering.
Hi there — been a while, no? I guess I grew weary of shouting “science” at a pile of rotting gourds, but it’s a new season, so why not punch it back up? As always, thanks for reading, liking, and sharing far and wide.
This June, some Harvard scientists hope to launch a high-altitude balloon above Kiruna, Sweden, which you could find if you traveled more than 750 miles north of Stockholm, where sits 600 miles farther north than London, which itself is 700 miles farther from the equator than New York. The point is, it’s way up there.
This prospective balloon launch has engendered some hearty opposition. A group of Swedish environmental organizations including the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation and others used the words “dangerous, unpredictable, and unmanageable” in a letter on the issue. Sounds bad!
I am hard-pressed to think of anything similar to this sort of pushback. Why? Because the technology they’re worried about doesn’t exist yet. And not only that, this balloon thing isn’t even an early experiment testing that non-existent technology. It’s in fact an experiment testing the basic logistical feasibility of the baseline concept of a different experiment that might eventually tell us some small thing about how to someday use that technology. I swear that makes sense.
Once again, we are talking about solar geoengineering, the idea of releasing sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to cool down the planet, much like a large volcanic eruption does naturally, while the world goes about the tedious and tendentious business of actually slowing climate change in more reasonable ways. We haven’t done this yet. Most people — well, pretty much everyone — doesn’t want to do this. But some people think climate change is dire enough that we should, at the very least, study the concept, so we could reasonably know what to expect. Many other people disagree. In fact, some voices with a tad more weight these days than Greenpeace Sweden have chimed in:
The group at Harvard, which has been at the forefront of geoengineering research for some time now, wants to head north of New York of London of Stockholm of most reasonable latitudes just to test the delivery system for a future experiment. The balloon, if it flies, won’t actually carry any particles whatsoever up toward the stratosphere; they just want to make sure that it could. This is anticipation of a future potential experiment where the balloon would release a few particles, just so they could then see what happens in the very immediate vicinity. Which is all still a few steps removed from creating airplanes to carry things above 60,000 feet and letting them fly around dumping shit in the sky with the intent of (more or less) blocking out the sun.
What fascinates me about this is the opposition to a non-existent thing. Has anyone ever objected so strongly to a technology that had not yet been developed? To an experiment that isn’t even really the experiment yet?
Viewed from one direction, one could consider this a form of progress. Humans, generally speaking, aren’t great at hitting the brakes on some bit of technological wizardry before it happens; we’re more a shoot-first kind of species.
Or, given the generally late hour when it comes to climate change, are the opponents even to a precursor experiment a species of Luddite, unwilling to even study a technology that may, potentially, provide some sort of way out of a crisis? That is the primary argument of those in favor of studying solar geoengineering — “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” wrote Whole Earth Catalog founder and editor Stewart Brand in the 1960s (and as we titled a book review I wrote of Harvard professor David Keith’s argument in favor of geoengineering research in 2013, giving you an idea of how long this particular argument has been raging).
Of course, it could be considered a bit of misdirection to say we’ve never actually undertaken a global-scale geoengineering experiment before. What, after all, would you call two hundred years of pumping a different kind of particle into the sky, a project whose results we now have oodles of evidence on in the form of, say, this image:
The difference between this and other horribly catastrophic technologies that did not face virulent opposition prior to their invention is that in those cases, it was a bit hard to oppose development of something you couldn’t see coming. Nuclear weapons, for example, didn't exist before they very much did; few knew about Fermi’s reactor under a football field at the University of Chicago, or the tower out in the New Mexico desert that disintegrated into nothingness with the Trinity test. With geoengineering, you can quibble on the the details but at least on some level, we have seen this movie before.
On the other hand (there are many hands in this argument), the CO2 version of geoengineering was unintentional, while this one, were it to move forward, would not be. The argument from the research proponents is that we should try and understand it first — do the research before deployment becomes unavoidably urgent.
Personally, I find the idea of solar geoengineering inherently repulsive, but I also think it’s probably going to happen. And I lean toward the do-the-research side because the argument that experiments may pave the way for deployment seems to elide the possibility that people might just go ahead and do it badly, without having put in the work ahead of time.
And there almost certainly are “bad” versions, where regional variations and potential impacts on monsoon seasons and so on are ignored or miscalculated, while a better researched deployment might avoid some of those problems. Maybe. It’s hard to say! The problem with objecting to tech that doesn’t exist yet is that you’re closing off the possibility of the tech improving to potentially address your objections; the problem with not objecting to it is that all of human history suggests you probably should.
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