The Mystery Deterrent
Solar geoengineering doesn't exist. Can it make or break the world anyway?
Likely last one of these until after New Year’s. Thanks a ton for reading—share this far and wide, sign up if you haven’t yet, and let’s do it again next year.
At one point in “Dr. Strangelove,” the titular character explains the Doomsday Machine at the center of the movie’s plot, and eventually arrives at the main reason for its failure: no one knew about it.
The whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost… if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world!
That, of course, is the key to anything considered a “deterrent”—people have to be scared enough of the threat in order to do anything to try and avoid it. With nuclear weapons, this is simple enough: any nuclear attack is terrifying and horrible, and clearly maintaining the current state of no-nuclear-holocaust is preferable. The status quo, such as it is, is better than the action in question.
But what happens when the status quo kind of sucks for a whole lot of people?
With climate change, the base scenario—continuing as we were, equivalent to not dropping nuclear bombs on anybody—is very bad already, will get progressively worse, and shows no signs of improving meaningfully over reasonable time scales. The “deterrent,” in this scenario, has to scare people into doing something, rather than not doing something.
Our version of the Doomsday Machine here is geoengineering—the use of various techno-fixes for the climate that might, in their ideal forms, slow the warming of the planet while we set about trying to stop burning any more fossil fuels. The most commonly discussed is known as solar radiation management, or SRM, where we dump a bunch of sulfate aerosols—tiny particles like those spewed from volcanic eruptions—into the stratosphere, where they hang out for a bit and reflect sunlight away from the ground.
SRM remains hugely controversial, but also continues to gain ground in both scientific and policy circles as the world generally continues to do fuck-all about climate change. It has a host of potential problems—regional variation in temperature change, lack of effect on ocean acidification, potential changes to crucial monsoon seasons, among others—but on a very basic level it would probably work: the world would cool down somewhat if we did it. But it is those potential problems that make it a deterrent.
In a new paper from researchers at NYU (Gernot Wagner) and the Paris School of Economics (Adrien Fabre), its potential as a deterrent is laid out. They use a simple game theory model to show that, basically, the very presence of geoengineering as an option might, given a certain set of circumstances, convince the world to actually cut back on carbon emissions in a meaningful way. Maybe.
Here’s how it works. Imagine there are two climate change mitigation strategies, a low mitigation strategy where we take our time and don’t undertake the radical transformation of energy and transportation and agriculture that is obviously necessary, and a high mitigation strategy where we, uh, do all that. Some countries, like, say, Kiribati, or Bangladesh, probably prefer the high mitigation strategy. We’ll call them the Good Countries. Others, where climate damages aren’t projected to be quite as bad, might prefer the low end, which could involve less of an economic disruption. We’ll refer to them as Jackasses.
The Good Countries prefer the high mitigation scenario, and thus might also prefer geoengineering to the low mitigation scenario, because low mitigation means bad things happen and geoengineering, while risky, might fix things at least temporarily. The Jackasses, meanwhile, prefer low mitigation to high mitigation, but also might prefer high mitigation to geoengineering, because geoengineering is very risky and fraught with unknowns.
This means that both the Good Countries and the Jackasses prefer high mitigation to geoengineering. Thus, the very possibility that geoengineering might happen could be impetus enough to push both sets of countries toward high mitigation.
Tell people about the Doomsday Machine, and they won’t launch the nukes. The nukes in this case, again, are not doing anything.
Now, this does require a very particular set of circumstances to be true, which the authors acknowledge. Here’s a table of the outcomes one could expect given countries’ preferences for high or low mitigation, or geoengineering:
That bolded H is the only scenario where the world actually does the good thing (well, yes, if all countries preferred high mitigation that would work too, but, well, [gestures around]). And you’ll notice, I’m sure, how many G’s there are in that table. There are a whole bunch of scenarios in this model where the presence of geoengineering as an option leads to deployment of geoengineering.
So, let’s say it’s a bit of a fraught situation. The saving grace, at least at the moment, is that geoengineering—solar radiation management, specifically—is not present as an option. (As far as we know. I am not a conspiracy theorist by nature but the idea that China is at least farther along a pathway toward SRM than we are aware is… not unconvincing to me.) We do not yet have the technology available to carry a bunch of sulfur particles up to around sixty or seventy thousand feet and dump them out, endlessly, over thousands and thousands of flights, every year, for the foreseeable future. That tech boundary, though, doesn’t feel much like a deal-breaker to me.
Many people have been saying for a while now that we should at the very least put in the research to SRM, and some other geoengineering schemes, just in case the world fails to take the obviously better mitigation actions and we really do need to offer a planetary ice bath for a few years while we get our shit together. Books have been written on this idea.
But a strange side effect of the new game theory paper is that it calls the research-as-bulwark-against-disaster idea into question. “For G[eoengineering] to induce H[igh mitigation], the threat of deploying G must be credible. And it must indeed be a threat— something opting for H can avoid. All that relies on G being risky and shrouded in uncertainty,” the authors write. “The more research discovers about G, decreasing its potential risks and uncertainties, the less it might be able to induce H.”
The less scary it seems, the less likely it is to convince us to do something different. If the Soviets’ Doomsday Machine just launched a few fireworks into the sky instead of unleashing thousands of nukes, I’m not sure it could have the same (theoretical—I mean, we know what happens at the end of the movie) deterrence ability. And then of course, plenty of people have argued that geoengineering actually would have the opposite effect: a technological fix for warming would actually offer those who want to keep emitting carbon—fossil fuel companies, Republicans, and so on—an excuse to do so. We can cool the planet anyway, why stop the party?
So. So this thing, this relatively simple trick of physics that does not, as yet, exist, serves as a cudgel in almost any direction you see fit to wield it. It could spur action; it could spur inaction. It could destroy the world; it could save the world. I’m not sure there has ever been a non-existent technology so capable of occupying a void. How many other such technologies engender entire fields of study about what they might mean, or lead to, before they even take realistic form?
I have argued before that we are going to keep bickering about geoengineering until someone out there (China, or maybe Elon Musk) simply does it, possibly without permission or discussion, once they decide the alternative is too ugly. As with many aspects to climate change, these aren’t really controllable experiments; we’re going to do X until Y happens, and that’s pretty much the only time we get to run the simulation.
I do find the new paper convincing, in the sense that it does follow that the presence of the Doomsday Machine could prevent nuclear catastrophe if it were unveiled properly. We don’t get as good a movie that way, of course, and in our actual, real-world simulation the “Doomsday Machine” of thousands of ICBMs on constant alert for six or seven decades has, anthropic principle-wise, led to no such catastrophe. I’m not entirely sure, though, that sitting on that particular razor’s edge would be all that comfortable.
random bits
I cannot recommend this Vox feature on a few “supertrees” enough. They went to the Amazon, Indonesia, and the Congo Basin to learn more about how three species of tree are holding back climate change, keeping the rain flowing in the rainforest, and protecting all the other stuff that grows near them. It’s visually stunning, and interesting too.
Hey, the latest UN climate summit largely failed. Who could’ve guessed it.
2I/Borisov, the second interstellar comet ever observed in our solar system, is on its way through at the moment. It’s moving at 20 miles per second. Which seems fast.
Happy holidays everyone. Let’s do 2020 a bit better.
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