October 19, 2020 • 58 mins
Could altering the Earth’s atmosphere to reflect back some of the sun’s rays be a solution to climate change? It would likely decrease global temperatures, but it might lead to climate wars. Humanity might become “addicted” to it for survival. And ultimately, would this technology only distract us from tackling the real problem of carbon emissions?
For links to materials referenced in the episode, suggestions for further learning, and guest bios, visit bravenewplanet.org.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, you're listening to Brave New Planet, a podcast about
amazing new technologies that could dramatically improve our world. Or
if we don't make wise choices, could leave us a
(00:36):
lot worse off. Utopia or dystopia. It's up to us.
In the Zambales Mountains on the island of Luzon in
the Philippines, there lies of volcano named Mount Pinatubo. For
(00:57):
five centuries, it had lain dormant, but on Saturday June fifteenth,
nineteen ninety one, it erupted, causing one of the most
cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. Torrential rain has mixed
with volcanic ash to form a gray mud covering vast
areas of the northern Philippines. The ash falls up to
(01:18):
seven hundred kilometers from Mount Pinatubo. Nearly twenty million tons
of sulfur dioxide were hurled into the stratosphere. The effects
of the eruption were felt around the world. In the
following fifteen months, average global temperature dropped by roughly one
degree fahrenheit. Why because the sulfur dioxide released by the
(01:40):
volcano reflected back a fraction of the Sun's energy, preventing
it from reaching the Earth. The notion that huge volcanos
might affect the weather is actually an old one. Ben
Franklin proposed that the severe winter of seventeen eighty three
to eighty four was triggered by a massive eruption in
Iceland the previous summer. In nineteen sixty five, inspired by
(02:03):
the volcano theory, science advisors to President Lyndon Johnson proposed
develop helping technology to pump sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere
to offset global warming, but the idea didn't go far
because they had no good way to test it. Then,
in nineteen ninety one, Mount Pinatubo ran a test for US.
(02:28):
It seemed to confirm the hypothesis. The proposal started to
gain attention. Point is this, if the problem gets bad
enough to do something about, well, don't you want to
have something to do. The idea of that is to
essentially mimic nature, which is what happens when a volcano blows.
A big volcano blows. That's Stephen Dubner who touted the
idea in his two thousand and eight book Super Freakonomics
(02:51):
as a quick fix for global warming. In politics, the
idea attracted strange bedfellows, including former Republican Speaker of the
House Knut Gingrich, Texas Republican and climate science skeptic Lamar Smith,
and twenty twenty Democratic presidential candidate and Drew Yang. It
even made it into the Netflix comedy show The Fix,
(03:15):
where comedian d l hugely recommended blowing up a volcano
to save the world. So let's find some volcano in
the middle of the ocean, far away from civilization and
blow it the fu the idea, well, not blowing up volcanoes,
but spreading sulfur particles to decreased solar radiation is a
(03:35):
kind of climate intervention that some people call solar geoengineering.
It's gotten enough traction that the US National Research Council
organized a scientific committee to study it, and it's not
just theoretical. Some Harvard scientists are planning to launch an
experimental balloon to start learning how to hack the planet.
(04:02):
Today's big question, with the climate crisis becoming more and
more desperate, should we get ready to alter the atmosphere
of Planet Earth? Solar geoengineering? Can it protect us from
climate change? Do we need it? And what could possibly
go wrong? My name is Eric Lander. I'm a scientist
(04:31):
who works on ways to improve human health. I helped
lead the Human Genome Project, and today I lead the
Road Institute of MIT and Harvard. In the twenty first century,
powerful technologies have been appearing at a breathtaking pace, related
to the Internet, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and more. They
have amazing potential upsides, but we can't ignore the risks
(04:54):
that come with them. The decisions aren't just up to
scientists or politicians, whether we like it or not, we
all of us are the stewards of a brave new planet.
This generation's choices will shape the future never before. Coming
up on this episode of Brave New Planets Blocking the Sun,
(05:19):
we'll talk to one of the leading proponents of the technology,
so solar Gin My sharing ken with total confidence and
this is not an overstatement for store temperatures to pre
industrial We'll hear from two experts who weighed the benefits
and risks for the National Academy of Sciences. I can
imagine this launching climate wars. Some third party might actually
(05:42):
get to the point where the climate in their part
of the world had become intolerable and they would unilaterally
decide to modify the planet's climate without consulting with anyone,
and we'll speak with the executive director of Sunrise, a
movement of young people working to stop climate change, about
(06:06):
whether it's time to consider what to do if else fails.
I understand the desperation. I understand the urgency. I understand
that we need to kick everything into high gear. So
stay with us Chapter one, Climate Crisis. To get up
to speed about the climate crisis. I went down to Washington,
(06:27):
d C. To visit one of the nation's leading scientists,
someone I know well. So my name is Marsha McNutt.
I am a marine geophysicist. As a geophysicist, what's the
coolest thing you've been involved in? There are so many
cool things that geophysicists get to do. I've been down
(06:48):
to the bottom of the ocean to see volcanoes erupting
on the seafloor. I got to stand on the South
Pole on the hundredth anniversary of Amonson's first conquest. I
have been to outer Mongolia with nomadic tribesmen studying the
(07:10):
birth of mountain belts. Chief physicists get to go a
lot of very unusual places and do very wonderful things.
Marsha McNutt has been a professor at MIT, head of
the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, director of the US
Geological Survey, and the editor in chief of Science, the
(07:30):
nation's leading scientific journal. Today, she's president of the US
National Academy of Sciences, an institution created by Abraham Lincoln
in eighteen sixty three to advise the US government. It
prepares major reports on crucial scientific questions facing the country.
I wanted to talk to Marsha McNutt because just before
(07:51):
becoming president of the Academy in twenty and sixteen, she
chaired the Academy's report on Climate intervention, and I also
talked to another of the authors of that report. My
name is Ray Pierre Humbert. I'm the Highey Professor of
Physics at the University of Oxford. I hadn't met Ray before.
He's a dead ringer for Santa Claus. He's also an
(08:13):
expert in planets, not just our own planet, but also
exo planets, the thousands of planets outside our own solar system.
My favorite planet is fifty five kancre E, which is
so hot it has a permanent lava ocean on the dayside.
Where's that located. It's it's around the star fifty five kancres,
(08:33):
which is not quite a visible star, but it is
near the claw one of the clause of the scorpion scorpio.
And that's your favorite planet. Well, let's say it's the
one we're having the most fund with right now. I
see it not the vacation on a It's not one
of the vacation sites, unless you like lava beaches and
so forth. So I talked with Marsha and Ray about
(08:54):
the current state of climate science. Now I shouldn't have
to say this, but just in case you've been living
on an exo planet or in a state of deep denial,
there's no serious question that climate change is real or
that it's largely due to excess carbon dioxide from burning
fossil fuels causing a greenhouse effect. Here's the science in
(09:16):
a nutshell. A greenhouse lets you grow greens and green Bay,
Wisconsin in the middle of the winter because the glass
lets light pass through but holds the heat in. The
thicker the glass, the better the heat retention. CO two
does the same thing for the Earth. It lets sunlight
pass but retains much of the resulting heat. CO two
(09:37):
has been increasing sharply over the past century, two levels
unprecedented in human history, and as a result, the Earth
is getting hotter. The last six years ranks of the
six hottest years in recorded history. There is a lot
more attention to global warming amongst the public and the press,
(10:00):
and amongst politicians, now that we are starting to see
some of the effects. What we've seen with just about
a degree of warming is nothing compared to what you
get with the second degree of warming. Swaths of Puerto
Rico underwater roads turned through raging rivers, millions of people
affected by devastating floods across South Asia, his historic fires
(10:21):
devastating Australia, more than one hundred wildfires burning in the Arctic.
Firefighters in California continuing to battle some dangerous, fast moving wildfires,
five of the six largest infernos in state history, because
of the release of CO two into the atmosphere from
(10:43):
the burning of fossil fuels. Primarily, we are entering basically
an unknown regime of rapidly changing climate. It is very
difficult for anyone looking at the data to say with
any confidence that in this future that we are entering
(11:07):
will continue to be dousive for human habitation. Once you
enter that zone, you basically can't back up. The dye
has already cast, and every projection shows that we have
at most decades to act. What are the sort of
events we expect to happen as we have more and
(11:27):
more SEO two in the atmosphere? What do we see
happening now and what do we imagine happening in the future.
So what we see happening now are things like ice
sheet smelting, sea level rising, more energy in the atmospheric system,
which leads to more storminess, higher amounts of rainfall, stronger hurricanes.
(11:53):
Areas of the country that used to be pleasant to
live in now becoming uninhabitable because of storm surge and
high tides. We're seeing death of coral reefs because the
ocean's too warm for them. Some of the things that
are more complicated but likely to be far more damaging
(12:16):
are the longer droughts, the inner actions between ecosystems, things
like the bloom and plankton coming earlier in the spring
when the animals that need to feed on them haven't
(12:36):
yet returned from their migration, So you basically get animals
dying of starvation. Chapter two the wet bulb temperature. When
scientists describe global warming, they usually talk about average temperature rise.
(12:59):
For example, take the twenty sixteen Paris Climate Agreement. That's
the UN agreements supported by one hundred and ninety four
countries but sadly no longer including the United States. It
aims to keep the average global temperatureize below two degrees celsius.
The problem is that an average temperature rise of two
(13:19):
degrees celsius sounds puny, even if you convert it to
roughly four degrees fahrenheit. After all, temperatures can fluctuate by
twenty degrees fahrenheit over the course of a day. What's
the big deal? I worry that we as scientists have
perhaps done a disservice to climate change by talking about
(13:40):
average changes because the average doesn't sound so bad. But
when you talk about how the extremes are likely to change,
that is when it gets very scary. One of the
aspects of climate change that scares me the most is
(14:02):
if instead you measure climate change by how many days
in a ser location is the temperature likely to exceed
the wet bulb temperature? What's the wet bulb temperature? It's
basically the difference between life and death. Your body is
(14:22):
always generating heat, and to keep your body at a
constant temperature, you need to radiate away the excess heat.
If you can't, you'll die. On a cool day, it's
no problem, your skin can lose heat directly to the air.
But on a hot summer day, you need to sweat
so the evaporation carries away the heat. Now, if the
(14:44):
temperature and the humidity get too high, a person literally
can't sweat enough to cool themselves. What's the limit. Well,
at fifty percent humidity, you can't make it much past
one hundred and twelve degrees in the shade. So unless
that person can get to someplace that's air conditioned, they
(15:06):
will literally overheat and suffer heat stroke. There are many
places on this planet right now in India, Southeast Asia,
Africa where the number of days that are exceeding the
wet bulb temperature are going up dramatically every summer. We're
(15:28):
even seeing life threatening temperatures across temperate zones in Europe,
with record highs recorded in Germany, Netherlands, Britain and France,
with the ladder hitting roughly one hundred and fifteen degrees fahrenheit.
So a better way to think about the effective climate
change might be the number of days that a region
(15:48):
becomes uninhabitable outdoors. If you go from say one degree
of warming to two degrees of warming, a lot of
the damages scale linearly. If you used to have, say
something like thirty days of life threatening heat waves in
some place, we go to something like sixty days when
you go two degrees. What would happen if we blow
(16:11):
past two degrees celsius, it's more like a global rise
of four degrees celsius. If you get to four or
five degrees global mean warming, then you get to the
situation where perhaps half of the earth becomes uninhabitable outdoors
for mammals. Then air conditioning becomes not a matter of
comfort but a matter of life support. It's like living
(16:32):
in a space station and a power failure becomes not
just a matter of inconvenience but megadeath. Of course, most
people on Earth don't have access to homes with air conditioning.
It's these people who will suffer. And then you also
have to think about all the animals that are not
going to be living in air conditioning. What happens to elephants,
what happens to cattle. It's a very different world. Unfortunately,
(16:55):
we're not making much progress on reducing CO two emissions
by almost all scientific accounts. If we don't drastically change
our fossil fuel consumption, we're going to blow past the
target of two degrees in the Paris Agreement. The problem
is it's really hard and really slow to change the
world's energy systems. To move to renewables requires electrifying your
(17:20):
energy system. That's really the only realistic way to do it.
Electrifying the system requires building transmission lines. My homes in California,
it can take three years just to permit a new
transmission line. Replacing power plants takes even longer since they're
designed to last for decades. Power grids generally evolve over
(17:47):
a forty year time scale. So this is why many
scientists and many policymakers are concerned about taking an infrastructure
system that has a forty year renewal rate and trying
to respond to a problem that needs immediate action. Here's
(18:15):
where the volcano strategy comes in. We've already tampered with
our atmosphere and we're starting to feel the consequences. Why
not tamper some more to prevent some of the warming,
saving lives and curbing suffering. That's the idea behind this
type of climate intervention. Is it time to start experimenting
with the technology? Chapter three, Tiny space Mirrors. I arranged
(18:41):
to speak with Professor David Keith. He's one of the
leading proponents of solar geo engineering research and he's aiming
to run a small scale test. David agreed to bicycle
down from Harvard to the other end of Cambridge where
I work at the Broad Institute. So solar geo my
sharing ken with total confidence, and this is not an
overstatement for store temperatures to pre industrial Long before David
(19:05):
started thinking about solar gew engineering, his scientific career had
an unusual start. His first job was as a research
assistance in the Arctic. The year I was there, we
were really working on walruses and we were trying to
learn how to identify them by their calls, and then
we had to brand them with cattle brands that we
(19:26):
bought in Albertic and my job as the young guy,
was to carry the brands. That was the light part
and the propane tank and the kind of flamethory thing
that you needed to heat have the brands. I'd done
way more big outside time than most people, so probably
more than a thousand kilometers of kind of Arctic ski trips, expeditions. Whatever.
(19:47):
Would you call yourself an environmentalist in this topic? This
is such a big fight, you know, I feel like
that's for other people to judge. But I'd say I've
been to Earth First rallies and I've done our actions,
and yeah, I think the short answer it would be yeah.
He began studying global warming when he arrived at M
team the nineteen eighties. I stumbled into this really cool
(20:09):
group of students in between Harvard and MIT grad students
who were working on climate change, both the science and
public policy in an interdictminary way. Today, David focuses on
solar geoengineering. He's mostly focused on stratospheric geoengineering, which is
what we've been talking about, mimicking the behavior of a
(20:29):
volcano by spraying reflective particles into the stratosphere. But there's
actually several different ways of changing the Earth's solar radiation.
There's the idea of brightening a certain kind of marine
boundary there cloud Brighter clouds would reflect more sunlight. There's
the idea of thinning a kind of serious cloud by
(20:49):
adding silver eyedide or something like that. Whispy or clouds
would trap less of the Sun's heat. And then there's
space based technologies idea you could build big orbiting mirrors
or what have you. To make a difference, space mirrors
would need to be huge with a surface area though
about the size of Greenland. It wouldn't be cheap get
them into orbit. I think if you think in the
(21:12):
next decades, I think the idea of space based stuff
is ridiculous. But if you're thinking about this is something
a humans do over a century or century and a half,
I don't think it's crazy to think that we might
do space space things. For now, though, the best approach
would be stratospheric intervention, putting reflective particles into the atmosphere.
You can think of them as tiny space mirrors just
(21:34):
to the lower altitude. Planes would fly around the stratosphere,
springing plumes of sulfur dioxide or similar chemicals. It would
be surprisingly cost effective. The cost to kind of begin
a program that's putting material quantities of staff in the
stratosphere is probably just a few billion dollars the kind
of climate damages we're talking about a global basis or
(21:56):
of order a trillion a year. So the idea that
a few countries spend a few billion a year, that's
a small enough number. They don't think that cost is
going to be the direct driver. A few billion dollars
to clean up a trillion dollar mess sounds like a
pretty good deal, at least on paper. What could possibly
go wrong? Chapter four? What could possibly go wrong? When
(22:23):
the National Research Council scientists set down to write a
report on solar geo engineering, the first thing they realized
was that calling the technology solar geo engineering might be
seriously misleading. I never liked the term geo engineering myself,
because engineering is term we generally apply to precise management
(22:45):
or design to control systems that we actually understand. But
what is generally called geo engineering is something that is
really hard to try out, hard to resolve. The main
questions about this is basically throwing up these particles into
the stratosphere at the whim of the jet stream. They
(23:06):
go where they will. It's not like a house with
thermostats in every room, where you can turn this room
a little cooler and maybe this one not so cool,
and turn this one off because no one really needs
it in this room. So we preferred the term albedo modification,
(23:29):
even though it sounds kind of wonky. Albedo is the
scientific term for the reflectivity of a planet. Unfortunately, albedo
modification wouldn't mean anything to the general public. The other extreme,
some people use the term hacking the planet. There's a
lot of sort of techno optimism involved in the people
(23:50):
that are doing research on this, which is very similar
to the sense of pride, where you're hacking a system
and it is a sort of cool thing to contemplate,
And if we didn't have to live on the planet,
I'd be really interested in it myself. But it is
dealing with the only home that we have and has
potentially really very serious consequences. Ultimately, the scientists settled on
(24:13):
the neutral term climate intervention. I like the climate intervention
because just like with interventions, and say a person who
has a drug problem or whatever, you're not guaranteed to
achieve the outcome that you want. You're having an intervention
because you know something is wrong, but you just can't
be sure that you're not going to actually make the
(24:33):
situation worse, but you may be so desperate that you
really need to do something. As the scientists dug into
the problem, they recognize that the perfect climate intervention would
simply be to dim the sun by one or two percent. Unfortunately, though,
the Sun doesn't have a dimmer switch, and using particles
to block the Sun's rays isn't quite the same thing.
(24:57):
You can control the average global temperature, but the impact
across the globe may be very uneven. If you put
aerosols up in the stratosphere, tiny little particles in the stratosphere,
they don't just sit there where you put them. They
get blown around by the stratospheric winds, They take up water,
and they get bigger. Bigger particles have different reflective properties
(25:19):
than smaller particles. They tend to get bunched up near
the poles eventually and fall out the poles. You don't
necessarily get an equal distribution between the northern hemisphere and
the southern hemisphere. That might have serious consequences for the
Earth's climate. Modeling has shown that if the aerosols were
(25:39):
to preferentially bunch up in one hemisphere, that actually shifts
the tropical rainfall patterns into the opposite hemisphere, so you
would actually create potentially serious droughts. That's one example of
the sort of thing that could go wrong inadvertently. So
to put it in the simplest terms, you're saying, we
(26:00):
could put up aerosols and end up completely surprised by
the winners and losers in the climate effects of that. Right, So,
it's hard to guess in advance how particles will distribute
in the stratosphere. They might cool certain areas of the
globe but leave others vulnerable to droughts and heat waves. Moreover,
(26:22):
it's hard to run a local field test. We can't
just say, okay, we're gonna albedo modify over El Paso, Texas,
and does El Paso get cooler? And what happens till
El Paso's rainfall and are there any negative effects of
sulfur particles falling out of the air or anything. You
(26:45):
can't do that because once I put it up over
El Paso, how long before it distributes around the world.
So most of these injections have to be done near
the equator because that's the best place for distribution, and
they very quickly get into these stratospheric currents that distribute them,
(27:07):
and within two years it's all dissipated, it's all gone,
It all filters out, So you would have to reinject
every year to two years. So one thing you can't
say at least is if you're willing to tolerate a
global experiment, at least it would go away. Let's pull
(27:29):
that thread for a second. Suppose somebody were to do
a global experiment for a couple of years. Now here's
the issue with doing an experiment, a global experiment on
albito modification. We have no idea how to attribute whatever
might happen during those two years to the experiment itself
(27:53):
versus natural variability in storminess, droughts, floods, whatever. And you
can be sure anyone who might have been impacted during
that period by a hurricane, a drought, a flood would say, Bingo,
(28:14):
you did this experiment and I got flooded out of
my house, or I had a hurricane take out my barn,
or I had a drought that wiped out my herd
of cattle. You owe me. There'd be lawsuits all over
the place. There would be lawsuits all over the place,
(28:35):
And who's going to indemnify the person who does the
experiment against the lawsuits. Do you think there's any insurance
company that wants to take on that policy? Chapter five
The Big Balloon. Despite the challenges, David Keith wants to
(28:56):
try an experiment, a very small experiment. He's working with
a team at Harvard on a project called scopex. So
Scopex is about trying to improve our models of the
way stratospheric aerosols and chemistry work in little ways that
are relevant for improving understanding of the risks and efficacy
(29:18):
of solar geno engineering. Keith and his colleagues want to
send the balloon carrying particles high into the atmosphere, puff
them out, and see how they disperse and reflect sunlight.
How big is this balloon? Just give me a picture.
Balloons are like twenty meters diameter, rough sixty foot wide
balloons going up. And what's attached to the balloon we're
(29:38):
building the balloon gondola still what you call it. The
gondola has two little propellers that are more to kind
of move it around slowly, and it has our data system.
It has the batteries to run, It has the thing
that generates the particles it has a particle sensor to
measure the particle size distribution, and the whole thing is
on a winch, so it can winch itself up and
down with alter to the balloon, so the balloon will
(30:00):
spray particles and then right around measuring how they disperse.
The amount of material the team is going to release
is actually tiny, a kilogram or something, which for the
sake of argument, that turns out to be the bound
of sulfur that a commercial aircraft you would normally fly,
and releases it about a minute's flight. While it's physical
cargo is tiny, the balloon also carries with it a
(30:23):
lot of questions about regulations, scientific knowledge, symbolic value, and
possible political misuse. While there's no serious scientific case that
spraying a kilogram of particles can cause any physical harm,
some people still think it's very dangerous. There's a group
of people, and by high quality pulling, we know this
(30:46):
group of people is like a third of Americans who
believe that the government is already spraying toxic chemicals from
airplanes for mass murder or climateguzation or something. And so
those people have conflated that with some of the scientific
work on solar gena sharing, so when they google around
or there's lots of sites that will have me as
(31:08):
a mass murder. I once got a voicemail. My favorite
one that my kids enjoyed a lot, was a voicemail
that said that I was ten million times more evil
than Hitler and Stalin. And then it's not quite clear
if the gentleman is saying that it's combined or separately.
But it's not just conspiracy theorists. Even some of David
Keith's friends, like Ray pr Humbard or opposed to scopex.
(31:33):
It is actually one of the joys of science that,
at least among scientists, you can have very vehement professional
disagreements and still remain on good terms. What's really funny is,
at least from my perspective, I have huge respect for Ray,
both scientifically actually as a human. There's an article, the
most recent article he wrote, which is actually the most
(31:55):
personal and attacking me. It was like attacking the Harvard program.
I forget exactly what it said, but it was like
pretty direct, you know, both smoke and barrels aimed my way.
That was published just a few weeks after I had
a wonderful dinner with him and his wife actually visited
him in Cambridge, Oxford, and we talked about exoplants, and
we talked about American politics, and we mostly actually avoided
(32:16):
talking about this topic. We know we disagree. I don't
imagine that David would pay any attention to what advice
I gave him, but I would advise him to just
drop scopex. Ray has multiple objections. On the one hand,
the experiment is too small. Releasing a few particles won't
teach us anything important about the large scale planetary processes
(32:39):
that would matter most. I still lean towards calling them
stunts and that while they have some scientific payback, they
don't really address the biggest questions we have. You can't
do that with just a puff experiment. If you really
want to resolve some of the questions, that are going
to be a maker break thing for what would happen
(33:00):
if you deployed Albiedo modification. There are a hundred other
things that are more important scientifically. On the other hand,
Ray is concerned that the experiment will open the door
to ever larger solar geo engineering efforts before there are
any rules in place. It's the risk that by doing
a small experiment that crosses a red line. You're opening
(33:23):
the door to escalation. If you can do a small experiment, well,
next year someone's going to do a bigger experiment. It
represents the thin edge of the wedge. What can of
worms are are you opening? But Ray's biggest concern is
more fundamental. Solar geo engineering is wildly, howlingly barking mad,
(33:44):
and no research developments have changed my opinion. One Iota,
Chapter six, The Sword of Damocles. What makes rayper Humbard
call solar geo engineering wildly, howlingly barking mad. It boils
(34:04):
down to two things. First, it doesn't solve the real problem.
As long as we continue to emit CO two, it
continues to accumulate in the atmosphere, much of it remains
for tens of thousands of years, and the greenhouse effect
keeps increasing. Climate intervention just masks the problem by reflecting
(34:26):
away sunlight while we keep pumping vast amounts of CO
two into the air. The second problem is solar geoengineering
could create a sort of time bomb. My biggest worry,
in fact, the worry that underpins all my other worries
about the possibility of deploying albedo modification stems from the
(34:49):
mismatching time scales. The mismatching time scales is this, while
much of the CO two sticks around for tens of
thousands of years, the sulfur particles that would be used
for geoengineering, they disappear very quickly. They need to be
replaced every couple of years. You're committee the entire future
(35:10):
of humanity to doing this essentially forever. When have we
ever saddled the next one hundred thousand years of civilization?
If within obligation to do something without fail each and
every year forever, Essentially, there's no precedent in human history
if you then stop. If you stop because there's a
(35:30):
global war, there's a global depression, or disputes over what
the effect of this is, or you find some horrible
side effect that you just can't bear. If you stop
doing this lbedam modification, then within about ten years you
have nearly the full effect of all the pent up
warming from that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That's what
we call termination shock. Everybody on the planet living under
(35:52):
the sort of damocles, knowing it could fall at any minute,
exactly how much pent up warming what depends on how
much CO two we've allowed to accumulate. A rapid warming
of two degrees celsius would be bad enough. Rise of
four degrees see within a decade, making large swaths of
the planet uninhabitable outdoors most of the year. That would
(36:17):
be catastrophic. I asked Ray if he thought solar geo
engineering would ever make sense. The only scenario is if
you actually had already committed to getting to zero carbon
dioxide emissions in a reasonably short window of time, or
if you had developed technology for removing carbon dioxide from
(36:40):
the atmosphere. In other words, if we had largely solved
the problem and only had to buy a little bit
of time. Unfortunately, we're not on target to get to
zero net emissions, and we're very far from having affordable
technologies for carbon capture from the atmosphere. Chapter seven, Climate Wars.
(37:03):
If the climate crisis continues to deepen, who would decide
whether and when to deploy solar jew engineering? Would United
Nations try to forge a global consensus, or because it's
not so expensive, might some nations just try to do
it on their own. I can imagine some country could
just start deploying Albita modification just because of their own
(37:28):
perceived self interest. Imagine a human nation that is seeing
its elderly people dying from heatstroke. They may think putting
a bunch of particles up in the air as a
pretty simple solution to it. And if that means that
the Canadian wheat harvest fails, well that's their problem. I
(37:49):
can imagine that conflicts that could arise when nations start
tinkering with the composition of the stratosphere. I can also
imagine this launching climate wars because there are quite easy countermeasures.
The kinds of air craft that would be actually spewing
(38:12):
out sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. They're slow moving, they're
easy to target by fairly simple missiles. There are other
kinds of countermeasures you could think of. For instance, if
other countries used geoengineering to slow climate change, but Russia
preferred to let the Earth keep warming because it would
(38:33):
open the Arctic Ocean year round, Russia could interfere. All
they'd have to do would be to increase their coal burning,
increase the CO two to offset the Abito modification. Russia
could actually even do more harmful things, releasing methane into
the atmosphere, they could start manufacturing sulfur hexafluoride, which is
(38:54):
an incredibly potent, long live greenhouse gas. It turns out
that the fear that countries might start acting on their
own was the initial inspiration for the National Research Council report.
The intelligence community was concerned some third party might actually
get to the point where the climate in their part
(39:17):
of the world had become intolerable and they would unilaterally
decide to modify the planet's climate without consulting with anyone.
Some argue that solar geoengineering is basically ungovernable. If one
(39:37):
country wants the world slightly warmer and another needs it cooler,
how could we get a global consensus about who sets
the thermostat right now? There is no treaty, There is
no international agreement. There is no government structure that actually
(39:59):
prevents anyone from intervening in the atmosphere or the stratosphere
to perform some kind of albedo modification. The Academy has
a study underway right now that is focusing on the
(40:20):
governance issue, and hopefully they will come up with some
good ideas of how to take this forward. Chapter eight Sunrise.
Given all the problems with solar geo engineering. Why are
scientists even considering it? The reason is they're beginning to
(40:44):
feel pretty desperate. While the Paris Climate Treaty aims to
keep global warming to two degrees c on, our current
trajectory will blow past that target and may barrel toward
catastrophic increases. Some feel we better be ready with a
break glass in case of emergency solution, but a solving
(41:05):
climate change really hopeless. A lot of young people have
been rising up lately to demand action. They think the
answer will require not just science but political pressure. Seventeen
year old Swedish activists Greta Thunberg recently gained international attention
for her call for a global climate strike and her
(41:27):
demands for policy change at the United Nations. People are suffering,
people are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in
the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can
talk about is the money and fairy tales of eaton
(41:47):
of economic growth. How dare you? In the US, a
youth led environmental movement has been organizing to pressure politicians
through sit ins, songs, and communal action. I decided to
(42:10):
talk to one of the leaders and what's become a
global movement. My name is Marsheni Prakash. I am one
of the co founders of and currently serving as the
executive director for Sunrise Movement, which is organizing tens of
thousands of people, predominantly young people across this nation to
make climate action a priority in our nation for the
(42:31):
first time. So tell me how you got to that point, Like,
what was your path? I am the child of two
South Indian immigrants. India as a place that is being
ravished by the climate crisis, whether it's through drought and
water wars, or farmers committing suicide by the tens of thousands,
(42:51):
or climate fueled floods worsening and impacting people. And I
remember it was like the fall of twenty fifteen when
a series of really horrific floods hit my families from
in southern India. And I remember roads and sidewalks that
(43:11):
I had walked on, that my dad and had grown
up on, just covered in feet of water and seeing
dead bodies and people walking chest deep in water for
miles to sanctuary. And it was this major moment of reckoning,
of realizing that the climate crisis was here there were
people dying as a result of it. It wasn't an
(43:33):
issue thirty forty fifty years in the future, and the
movements that we had in that moment were not growing
or weren't as powerful as we needed them to be.
To address this crisis, Varshini joined a group of young
climate activists who wanted to drive big change. We embarked
on this process for almost a year of strategic planning,
(43:55):
of research, of study, of an assessment of the field,
studying things like the civil rights movement, queer movements, women's suffrage,
Vietnam War era movements, and then contemporary movements as well,
like the movement for Black Lives, Occupy Wall Street, others,
to see how do people make these grand societal transformations
(44:16):
that we need to make to stop climate change, and
how do we emulate that. Out of this work came
Sunrise Movement, which aims to bring together millions of people,
especially young people. As you may have heard, they've proposed
a program called the Green New Deal. One important element
of the program is funding innovation to drive down the
(44:37):
cost of renewables to the point where they're cheaper than
fossil fuels. But the aims of the Green New Deal
are far more ambitious. It can be thought of as
a decade long economic mobilization really to stop climate change
at a scale not seen since World War Two. Everything
from stopping climate change to creating tens of millions of good,
(45:03):
high paying jobs, virtually eliminating poverty in the process. Everything
from addressing agriculture systems to industry, to power generation and
land use, forestry, everything under the sun that we would
need to deploy to address the crisis. It won't be
just one piece of legislation, and it was the same
(45:25):
way with a New Deal. It wasn't There wasn't a
New Deal bill. There were hundreds of bills and projects
that FDR and others implemented. They were really embracing this
ethos of experimentation, of doing whatever it takes to get
Americans out of the Great Depression and put money back
in the pockets of working people. The Green New Deal
(45:47):
resolution is more of a framework than a specific piece
of legislation at this point. Still, the idea has prompted
a range of concerns. Climate change deniers belittle it. They
want to take your pickup truck, they want to rebuild
your home, they want to take away your hamburgers. This
(46:07):
is what Stalin dreamed about but never achieved. Many scientists
and economists view achieving carbon neutrality within ten years as
a pipe dream given the slow rate at which power
plants are replaced. Others think it's trying to do too
much solve climate change, poverty, and racial injustice all at
(46:28):
the same time. But maybe the Sunrisers are onto something
very important in the way they're building a coalition packaging
them as one thing. This sounds sort of counterintuitive to
some people, but it actually makes it more popular. The
parts of the Green New Deal that are the most
popular are the parts around job creation, are the investments
(46:51):
and sustainable agriculture and renewable energy technology for shiny. Contrasted,
the Sunrise movements approach to previous climate change legislation efforts
like the Waxman Marquee Bill in two thousand and nine,
the last forty years of focusing on just like a
singular tax or a singular cap and trade model, or
(47:14):
something that people cannot understand as making basic improvements to
their lives. That's why a lot of the reason why
Waxman Marquis failed in the Senate ten years ago, because
there wasn't the public will and the public support. She
talked to Senator Marky, who sponsored both the two thousand
(47:35):
and nine bill and now the Green New Deal Resolution.
I asked him, what is the major difference that you
are seeing in twenty nineteen versus two thousand and nine,
and he said, the number one difference, and what we
need so badly is that we actually have an army
of people out there pushing for these solutions. I asked
Marsha McNutt what she thought about Sunrise movement. I love it.
(47:59):
I think it's critical. I mean, if it's not going
to be that generation, then who they're the ones that
are going to still be alive in twenty fifty. It's
not going to be me, and it's going to be
their children that are going to be alive in twenty
(48:21):
one hundred that are going to be inheriting this parched earth.
It's incredibly important that they stand up and say no,
this is not their trajectory that I want for the planet.
And when politicians vote with a two year time horizon
(48:43):
in their mind, or if they vote special interest groups
who are looking only at their corporation one year ROI,
that is absolutely criminal. So What would you say to
the people in the Sunrise movement? What encouragement or message
would you say to them? I would say, they are
(49:05):
just like the people who stood up to the Vietnam
War and every other injustice. You know, this is an
injustice to all of humanity. So, after talking with Varsheni
about Sunrise Movement, I asked her whether she and her
fellow activists thought solar geo engineering might be an important
(49:25):
tool in addressing climate change. She was unconvinced, regarding the
technology as a distraction from solving the real problem. If
the issue is decarbonizing and the long term problem is
taking carbon out of the atmosphere, things like geo engineering
don't even do that. But and so, don't get me wrong.
(49:47):
I understand the desperation, I understand the urgency. I understand
that we need to kick everything into high gear. But
I think we are putting carbon into the atmosphere. Perhaps
the easiest fix that we have is to stop putting
carbon into the atmosphere. Chapter nine, The Moral Hazard. I
(50:13):
understand why climate change activists want to stay laser focused
on decarbonizing the world's energy supply, But at the same time,
is there any harm in also having climate intervention as
a backup. Unfortunately, the answer is there might well be.
Some people worry that pursuing solar geo engineering and parallel
(50:34):
might actually make it harder to get the world to
solve climate change. Humans tend to address problems only when
they feel the consequences, such as heat waves, wildfires, floods,
and hurricanes. If blocking the sun decreases natural disasters caused
by global warming, will we become complacent about solving the
(50:55):
real problem. It's like taking a painkiller instead of actually
having the cancer taken out. Eliminating one of the symptoms
of carbon dioxide emission, which is the planet getting warmer,
makes it easier to ignore the root cause of the
problem just continue emitting. This is what economists call the
moral hazard problem, the idea of the people who have
(51:16):
insurance against disasters aren't as careful about avoiding risks. For example,
because the government provides flood insurance for homes on floodplains,
homeowners are more willing to keep rebuilding their flooded homes
on the same sites. But David Keith is worried about
something even more insidious that the mere prospect of solar
(51:39):
jew engineering will be used as a political weapon to
deny the need to act on climate change. At the
beginning of this episode, I noted that some of the
greatest enthusiasm and congress for solar jew engineering has come
from climate change deniers. That's certainly no accident. People are
(51:59):
terrified that if these ideas get out more in the
big world, that they will be seized upon by opponents
of climate action, by oil companies, by people who want
to walk emission scots. Those people will claim falsely that
solo genissioning means we don't need to kind emissions, or
that it may mean we don't have kind emissions, and
they'll use that in the bruising political fight over emission scots.
(52:20):
That is the underlying, I think biggest fear, and sure,
of course it's a complete lygim I fear. I'm terrified
about it. The certainty that they will try and use
it as an argument is there, but that doesn't mean
that necessarily humanity will do less emission scots, and in
the end, those of us who want emission scouts just
have to win on the merits. Although David Keith is
certain his work will be misused by some politicians, he
(52:43):
believes it's essential to do the research. I still think
that that fear is not a reason not to know more.
You may think, or summon your audience to this podcast,
may think the solo Regeniastoni is a terrible idea and
never should be done. Others may think it really could
be part of the way we manage climate change. But
let me let you all out there and podcast land
(53:04):
in on a big secret. We're not deciding now whether
or not this happens. We're decide whether we give the
next generation realistic information. If we keep the taboo going,
then we'll hand them basically no information. So sometime the
next decades, some government, maybe the Chinese government after their
monsoon fails, maybe the US government after a massive Category
(53:26):
five his New York, maybe the Indonesian government after a
big heatwave that kills a quarter million. Some government is
going to seriously consider this. And my view is that
we'd be better to give them lots of knowledge before
they consider it. But Raypierre Humbard doesn't buy it. So
David likes to make the case that if we don't
do these experiments, will just be giving the gift of
(53:47):
ignorance to the future. But sometimes the gift of ignorance
is a precious gift, and so we have to decide
first whether this is a case where the gift of
ignorance is precious or a burden. I think if it
had been possible to actually give the gift of ignorance
about horrible things like nerve gas, if we're dingle to
(54:09):
have the gift of ignorance about building hydrogen bombs, whether
or not that would have been feasible or not, that
would have been a nice kind of ignorance to have.
And again I'm not saying that necessarily albedo modification is
in the same category as these things, but someone has
to make that judgment, and it has to be made
by civil society in some way. So where do you
(54:29):
draw the line. I think that it would be impractical
to have any form of governments that forbid computer experimentation.
But when it comes to stuff kit gear, either a
lab experiment, but especially outdoor experimentation, actually stuffing things into
the atmosphere, even on a small scale, there is a
kind of a clear line there, and so that's where
(54:52):
I think there needs to be some kind of discussion.
Is this a red line worth crossing? Is the scientific
payback enough to actually justify crossing this red line conclusion.
Choose your planet. So there you have it, solar geoengineering.
(55:19):
It could cool the planet at least on average. It
might buy time and mitigate suffering, but its precise impacts
would be uneven and unpredictable, and it's very hard to test.
There could be big winners and losers. It could even
trigger climate wars. If we choose climate intervention, we might
(55:42):
end up addictive for thousands of years, threatened with rapid,
massive temperature increases if we ever stopped. If we don't
consider climate intervention, we might find ourselves without options as
temperatures keep rising in the decades ahead. Should we start
experimenting now so that we'll know enough to be ready
(56:05):
or is it a distraction or even worse, a gift
to climate change deniers who'll use the prospect of solar
geo engineering to keep us from solving the real problem.
So the question is what can you do a lot?
It turns out you don't have to be an expert,
and you don't have to do it alone. If enough
(56:26):
people get engaged together, we will make wise choices. Invite
friends over for dinner and debate about what we should do,
or organize a conversation for a book club or a
faith group, or a campus event online of course for
now in person, when it's safe. And if you hate
having to consider these choices about solar geo engineering, then
(56:49):
join a group to help stop climate change before it's
too late. You can find lots of resources and ideas
at our website Brave New Planet dot org. It's time
to choose our planet. The future is up to us,
and my kids still debate when I'm their dad, is
(57:10):
more evil than Hitler and Stalin or Hitler and Stalin combined.
That's good to know what the family debates. That's fascinating.
Brave New Planet is a co production of the Broad
Institute of MT and Harvard Pushkin Industries in the Boston Globe,
with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Our show
(57:32):
is produced by Rebecca Lee Douglas with Mary Doo theme
song composed by Ned Porter, mastering and sound designed by
James Garver, fact checking by Joseph Fridman, and a Stitt
and Enchant special Thanks to Christine Heenan and Rachel Roberts
at Clarendon Communications. To Lee McGuire, Kristen Zarelli and Justine
(57:53):
Levin Allerhand at the Broad, to mil Lobell and Heather
Faine at Pushkin, and to Eli and Edy Brode who
made the Broad Institute possible. This is brave new planet.
I'm Eric Lander. Two
Pushkin, you're listening to Brave New Planet, a podcast about
amazing new technologies that could dramatically improve our world. Or
if we don't make wise choices, could leave us a
(00:36):
lot worse off. Utopia or dystopia. It's up to us.
In the Zambales Mountains on the island of Luzon in
the Philippines, there lies of volcano named Mount Pinatubo. For
(00:57):
five centuries, it had lain dormant, but on Saturday June fifteenth,
nineteen ninety one, it erupted, causing one of the most
cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. Torrential rain has mixed
with volcanic ash to form a gray mud covering vast
areas of the northern Philippines. The ash falls up to
(01:18):
seven hundred kilometers from Mount Pinatubo. Nearly twenty million tons
of sulfur dioxide were hurled into the stratosphere. The effects
of the eruption were felt around the world. In the
following fifteen months, average global temperature dropped by roughly one
degree fahrenheit. Why because the sulfur dioxide released by the
(01:40):
volcano reflected back a fraction of the Sun's energy, preventing
it from reaching the Earth. The notion that huge volcanos
might affect the weather is actually an old one. Ben
Franklin proposed that the severe winter of seventeen eighty three
to eighty four was triggered by a massive eruption in
Iceland the previous summer. In nineteen sixty five, inspired by
(02:03):
the volcano theory, science advisors to President Lyndon Johnson proposed
develop helping technology to pump sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere
to offset global warming, but the idea didn't go far
because they had no good way to test it. Then,
in nineteen ninety one, Mount Pinatubo ran a test for US.
(02:28):
It seemed to confirm the hypothesis. The proposal started to
gain attention. Point is this, if the problem gets bad
enough to do something about, well, don't you want to
have something to do. The idea of that is to
essentially mimic nature, which is what happens when a volcano blows.
A big volcano blows. That's Stephen Dubner who touted the
idea in his two thousand and eight book Super Freakonomics
(02:51):
as a quick fix for global warming. In politics, the
idea attracted strange bedfellows, including former Republican Speaker of the
House Knut Gingrich, Texas Republican and climate science skeptic Lamar Smith,
and twenty twenty Democratic presidential candidate and Drew Yang. It
even made it into the Netflix comedy show The Fix,
(03:15):
where comedian d l hugely recommended blowing up a volcano
to save the world. So let's find some volcano in
the middle of the ocean, far away from civilization and
blow it the fu the idea, well, not blowing up volcanoes,
but spreading sulfur particles to decreased solar radiation is a
(03:35):
kind of climate intervention that some people call solar geoengineering.
It's gotten enough traction that the US National Research Council
organized a scientific committee to study it, and it's not
just theoretical. Some Harvard scientists are planning to launch an
experimental balloon to start learning how to hack the planet.
(04:02):
Today's big question, with the climate crisis becoming more and
more desperate, should we get ready to alter the atmosphere
of Planet Earth? Solar geoengineering? Can it protect us from
climate change? Do we need it? And what could possibly
go wrong? My name is Eric Lander. I'm a scientist
(04:31):
who works on ways to improve human health. I helped
lead the Human Genome Project, and today I lead the
Road Institute of MIT and Harvard. In the twenty first century,
powerful technologies have been appearing at a breathtaking pace, related
to the Internet, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and more. They
have amazing potential upsides, but we can't ignore the risks
(04:54):
that come with them. The decisions aren't just up to
scientists or politicians, whether we like it or not, we
all of us are the stewards of a brave new planet.
This generation's choices will shape the future never before. Coming
up on this episode of Brave New Planets Blocking the Sun,
(05:19):
we'll talk to one of the leading proponents of the technology,
so solar Gin My sharing ken with total confidence and
this is not an overstatement for store temperatures to pre
industrial We'll hear from two experts who weighed the benefits
and risks for the National Academy of Sciences. I can
imagine this launching climate wars. Some third party might actually
(05:42):
get to the point where the climate in their part
of the world had become intolerable and they would unilaterally
decide to modify the planet's climate without consulting with anyone,
and we'll speak with the executive director of Sunrise, a
movement of young people working to stop climate change, about
(06:06):
whether it's time to consider what to do if else fails.
I understand the desperation. I understand the urgency. I understand
that we need to kick everything into high gear. So
stay with us Chapter one, Climate Crisis. To get up
to speed about the climate crisis. I went down to Washington,
(06:27):
d C. To visit one of the nation's leading scientists,
someone I know well. So my name is Marsha McNutt.
I am a marine geophysicist. As a geophysicist, what's the
coolest thing you've been involved in? There are so many
cool things that geophysicists get to do. I've been down
(06:48):
to the bottom of the ocean to see volcanoes erupting
on the seafloor. I got to stand on the South
Pole on the hundredth anniversary of Amonson's first conquest. I
have been to outer Mongolia with nomadic tribesmen studying the
(07:10):
birth of mountain belts. Chief physicists get to go a
lot of very unusual places and do very wonderful things.
Marsha McNutt has been a professor at MIT, head of
the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, director of the US
Geological Survey, and the editor in chief of Science, the
(07:30):
nation's leading scientific journal. Today, she's president of the US
National Academy of Sciences, an institution created by Abraham Lincoln
in eighteen sixty three to advise the US government. It
prepares major reports on crucial scientific questions facing the country.
I wanted to talk to Marsha McNutt because just before
(07:51):
becoming president of the Academy in twenty and sixteen, she
chaired the Academy's report on Climate intervention, and I also
talked to another of the authors of that report. My
name is Ray Pierre Humbert. I'm the Highey Professor of
Physics at the University of Oxford. I hadn't met Ray before.
He's a dead ringer for Santa Claus. He's also an
(08:13):
expert in planets, not just our own planet, but also
exo planets, the thousands of planets outside our own solar system.
My favorite planet is fifty five kancre E, which is
so hot it has a permanent lava ocean on the dayside.
Where's that located. It's it's around the star fifty five kancres,
(08:33):
which is not quite a visible star, but it is
near the claw one of the clause of the scorpion scorpio.
And that's your favorite planet. Well, let's say it's the
one we're having the most fund with right now. I
see it not the vacation on a It's not one
of the vacation sites, unless you like lava beaches and
so forth. So I talked with Marsha and Ray about
(08:54):
the current state of climate science. Now I shouldn't have
to say this, but just in case you've been living
on an exo planet or in a state of deep denial,
there's no serious question that climate change is real or
that it's largely due to excess carbon dioxide from burning
fossil fuels causing a greenhouse effect. Here's the science in
(09:16):
a nutshell. A greenhouse lets you grow greens and green Bay,
Wisconsin in the middle of the winter because the glass
lets light pass through but holds the heat in. The
thicker the glass, the better the heat retention. CO two
does the same thing for the Earth. It lets sunlight
pass but retains much of the resulting heat. CO two
(09:37):
has been increasing sharply over the past century, two levels
unprecedented in human history, and as a result, the Earth
is getting hotter. The last six years ranks of the
six hottest years in recorded history. There is a lot
more attention to global warming amongst the public and the press,
(10:00):
and amongst politicians, now that we are starting to see
some of the effects. What we've seen with just about
a degree of warming is nothing compared to what you
get with the second degree of warming. Swaths of Puerto
Rico underwater roads turned through raging rivers, millions of people
affected by devastating floods across South Asia, his historic fires
(10:21):
devastating Australia, more than one hundred wildfires burning in the Arctic.
Firefighters in California continuing to battle some dangerous, fast moving wildfires,
five of the six largest infernos in state history, because
of the release of CO two into the atmosphere from
(10:43):
the burning of fossil fuels. Primarily, we are entering basically
an unknown regime of rapidly changing climate. It is very
difficult for anyone looking at the data to say with
any confidence that in this future that we are entering
(11:07):
will continue to be dousive for human habitation. Once you
enter that zone, you basically can't back up. The dye
has already cast, and every projection shows that we have
at most decades to act. What are the sort of
events we expect to happen as we have more and
(11:27):
more SEO two in the atmosphere? What do we see
happening now and what do we imagine happening in the future.
So what we see happening now are things like ice
sheet smelting, sea level rising, more energy in the atmospheric system,
which leads to more storminess, higher amounts of rainfall, stronger hurricanes.
(11:53):
Areas of the country that used to be pleasant to
live in now becoming uninhabitable because of storm surge and
high tides. We're seeing death of coral reefs because the
ocean's too warm for them. Some of the things that
are more complicated but likely to be far more damaging
(12:16):
are the longer droughts, the inner actions between ecosystems, things
like the bloom and plankton coming earlier in the spring
when the animals that need to feed on them haven't
(12:36):
yet returned from their migration, So you basically get animals
dying of starvation. Chapter two the wet bulb temperature. When
scientists describe global warming, they usually talk about average temperature rise.
(12:59):
For example, take the twenty sixteen Paris Climate Agreement. That's
the UN agreements supported by one hundred and ninety four
countries but sadly no longer including the United States. It
aims to keep the average global temperatureize below two degrees celsius.
The problem is that an average temperature rise of two
(13:19):
degrees celsius sounds puny, even if you convert it to
roughly four degrees fahrenheit. After all, temperatures can fluctuate by
twenty degrees fahrenheit over the course of a day. What's
the big deal? I worry that we as scientists have
perhaps done a disservice to climate change by talking about
(13:40):
average changes because the average doesn't sound so bad. But
when you talk about how the extremes are likely to change,
that is when it gets very scary. One of the
aspects of climate change that scares me the most is
(14:02):
if instead you measure climate change by how many days
in a ser location is the temperature likely to exceed
the wet bulb temperature? What's the wet bulb temperature? It's
basically the difference between life and death. Your body is
(14:22):
always generating heat, and to keep your body at a
constant temperature, you need to radiate away the excess heat.
If you can't, you'll die. On a cool day, it's
no problem, your skin can lose heat directly to the air.
But on a hot summer day, you need to sweat
so the evaporation carries away the heat. Now, if the
(14:44):
temperature and the humidity get too high, a person literally
can't sweat enough to cool themselves. What's the limit. Well,
at fifty percent humidity, you can't make it much past
one hundred and twelve degrees in the shade. So unless
that person can get to someplace that's air conditioned, they
(15:06):
will literally overheat and suffer heat stroke. There are many
places on this planet right now in India, Southeast Asia,
Africa where the number of days that are exceeding the
wet bulb temperature are going up dramatically every summer. We're
(15:28):
even seeing life threatening temperatures across temperate zones in Europe,
with record highs recorded in Germany, Netherlands, Britain and France,
with the ladder hitting roughly one hundred and fifteen degrees fahrenheit.
So a better way to think about the effective climate
change might be the number of days that a region
(15:48):
becomes uninhabitable outdoors. If you go from say one degree
of warming to two degrees of warming, a lot of
the damages scale linearly. If you used to have, say
something like thirty days of life threatening heat waves in
some place, we go to something like sixty days when
you go two degrees. What would happen if we blow
(16:11):
past two degrees celsius, it's more like a global rise
of four degrees celsius. If you get to four or
five degrees global mean warming, then you get to the
situation where perhaps half of the earth becomes uninhabitable outdoors
for mammals. Then air conditioning becomes not a matter of
comfort but a matter of life support. It's like living
(16:32):
in a space station and a power failure becomes not
just a matter of inconvenience but megadeath. Of course, most
people on Earth don't have access to homes with air conditioning.
It's these people who will suffer. And then you also
have to think about all the animals that are not
going to be living in air conditioning. What happens to elephants,
what happens to cattle. It's a very different world. Unfortunately,
(16:55):
we're not making much progress on reducing CO two emissions
by almost all scientific accounts. If we don't drastically change
our fossil fuel consumption, we're going to blow past the
target of two degrees in the Paris Agreement. The problem
is it's really hard and really slow to change the
world's energy systems. To move to renewables requires electrifying your
(17:20):
energy system. That's really the only realistic way to do it.
Electrifying the system requires building transmission lines. My homes in California,
it can take three years just to permit a new
transmission line. Replacing power plants takes even longer since they're
designed to last for decades. Power grids generally evolve over
(17:47):
a forty year time scale. So this is why many
scientists and many policymakers are concerned about taking an infrastructure
system that has a forty year renewal rate and trying
to respond to a problem that needs immediate action. Here's
(18:15):
where the volcano strategy comes in. We've already tampered with
our atmosphere and we're starting to feel the consequences. Why
not tamper some more to prevent some of the warming,
saving lives and curbing suffering. That's the idea behind this
type of climate intervention. Is it time to start experimenting
with the technology? Chapter three, Tiny space Mirrors. I arranged
(18:41):
to speak with Professor David Keith. He's one of the
leading proponents of solar geo engineering research and he's aiming
to run a small scale test. David agreed to bicycle
down from Harvard to the other end of Cambridge where
I work at the Broad Institute. So solar geo my
sharing ken with total confidence, and this is not an
overstatement for store temperatures to pre industrial Long before David
(19:05):
started thinking about solar gew engineering, his scientific career had
an unusual start. His first job was as a research
assistance in the Arctic. The year I was there, we
were really working on walruses and we were trying to
learn how to identify them by their calls, and then
we had to brand them with cattle brands that we
(19:26):
bought in Albertic and my job as the young guy,
was to carry the brands. That was the light part
and the propane tank and the kind of flamethory thing
that you needed to heat have the brands. I'd done
way more big outside time than most people, so probably
more than a thousand kilometers of kind of Arctic ski trips, expeditions. Whatever.
(19:47):
Would you call yourself an environmentalist in this topic? This
is such a big fight, you know, I feel like
that's for other people to judge. But I'd say I've
been to Earth First rallies and I've done our actions,
and yeah, I think the short answer it would be yeah.
He began studying global warming when he arrived at M
team the nineteen eighties. I stumbled into this really cool
(20:09):
group of students in between Harvard and MIT grad students
who were working on climate change, both the science and
public policy in an interdictminary way. Today, David focuses on
solar geoengineering. He's mostly focused on stratospheric geoengineering, which is
what we've been talking about, mimicking the behavior of a
(20:29):
volcano by spraying reflective particles into the stratosphere. But there's
actually several different ways of changing the Earth's solar radiation.
There's the idea of brightening a certain kind of marine
boundary there cloud Brighter clouds would reflect more sunlight. There's
the idea of thinning a kind of serious cloud by
(20:49):
adding silver eyedide or something like that. Whispy or clouds
would trap less of the Sun's heat. And then there's
space based technologies idea you could build big orbiting mirrors
or what have you. To make a difference, space mirrors
would need to be huge with a surface area though
about the size of Greenland. It wouldn't be cheap get
them into orbit. I think if you think in the
(21:12):
next decades, I think the idea of space based stuff
is ridiculous. But if you're thinking about this is something
a humans do over a century or century and a half,
I don't think it's crazy to think that we might
do space space things. For now, though, the best approach
would be stratospheric intervention, putting reflective particles into the atmosphere.
You can think of them as tiny space mirrors just
(21:34):
to the lower altitude. Planes would fly around the stratosphere,
springing plumes of sulfur dioxide or similar chemicals. It would
be surprisingly cost effective. The cost to kind of begin
a program that's putting material quantities of staff in the
stratosphere is probably just a few billion dollars the kind
of climate damages we're talking about a global basis or
(21:56):
of order a trillion a year. So the idea that
a few countries spend a few billion a year, that's
a small enough number. They don't think that cost is
going to be the direct driver. A few billion dollars
to clean up a trillion dollar mess sounds like a
pretty good deal, at least on paper. What could possibly
go wrong? Chapter four? What could possibly go wrong? When
(22:23):
the National Research Council scientists set down to write a
report on solar geo engineering, the first thing they realized
was that calling the technology solar geo engineering might be
seriously misleading. I never liked the term geo engineering myself,
because engineering is term we generally apply to precise management
(22:45):
or design to control systems that we actually understand. But
what is generally called geo engineering is something that is
really hard to try out, hard to resolve. The main
questions about this is basically throwing up these particles into
the stratosphere at the whim of the jet stream. They
(23:06):
go where they will. It's not like a house with
thermostats in every room, where you can turn this room
a little cooler and maybe this one not so cool,
and turn this one off because no one really needs
it in this room. So we preferred the term albedo modification,
(23:29):
even though it sounds kind of wonky. Albedo is the
scientific term for the reflectivity of a planet. Unfortunately, albedo
modification wouldn't mean anything to the general public. The other extreme,
some people use the term hacking the planet. There's a
lot of sort of techno optimism involved in the people
(23:50):
that are doing research on this, which is very similar
to the sense of pride, where you're hacking a system
and it is a sort of cool thing to contemplate,
And if we didn't have to live on the planet,
I'd be really interested in it myself. But it is
dealing with the only home that we have and has
potentially really very serious consequences. Ultimately, the scientists settled on
(24:13):
the neutral term climate intervention. I like the climate intervention
because just like with interventions, and say a person who
has a drug problem or whatever, you're not guaranteed to
achieve the outcome that you want. You're having an intervention
because you know something is wrong, but you just can't
be sure that you're not going to actually make the
(24:33):
situation worse, but you may be so desperate that you
really need to do something. As the scientists dug into
the problem, they recognize that the perfect climate intervention would
simply be to dim the sun by one or two percent. Unfortunately, though,
the Sun doesn't have a dimmer switch, and using particles
to block the Sun's rays isn't quite the same thing.
(24:57):
You can control the average global temperature, but the impact
across the globe may be very uneven. If you put
aerosols up in the stratosphere, tiny little particles in the stratosphere,
they don't just sit there where you put them. They
get blown around by the stratospheric winds, They take up water,
and they get bigger. Bigger particles have different reflective properties
(25:19):
than smaller particles. They tend to get bunched up near
the poles eventually and fall out the poles. You don't
necessarily get an equal distribution between the northern hemisphere and
the southern hemisphere. That might have serious consequences for the
Earth's climate. Modeling has shown that if the aerosols were
(25:39):
to preferentially bunch up in one hemisphere, that actually shifts
the tropical rainfall patterns into the opposite hemisphere, so you
would actually create potentially serious droughts. That's one example of
the sort of thing that could go wrong inadvertently. So
to put it in the simplest terms, you're saying, we
(26:00):
could put up aerosols and end up completely surprised by
the winners and losers in the climate effects of that. Right, So,
it's hard to guess in advance how particles will distribute
in the stratosphere. They might cool certain areas of the
globe but leave others vulnerable to droughts and heat waves. Moreover,
(26:22):
it's hard to run a local field test. We can't
just say, okay, we're gonna albedo modify over El Paso, Texas,
and does El Paso get cooler? And what happens till
El Paso's rainfall and are there any negative effects of
sulfur particles falling out of the air or anything. You
(26:45):
can't do that because once I put it up over
El Paso, how long before it distributes around the world.
So most of these injections have to be done near
the equator because that's the best place for distribution, and
they very quickly get into these stratospheric currents that distribute them,
(27:07):
and within two years it's all dissipated, it's all gone,
It all filters out, So you would have to reinject
every year to two years. So one thing you can't
say at least is if you're willing to tolerate a
global experiment, at least it would go away. Let's pull
(27:29):
that thread for a second. Suppose somebody were to do
a global experiment for a couple of years. Now here's
the issue with doing an experiment, a global experiment on
albito modification. We have no idea how to attribute whatever
might happen during those two years to the experiment itself
(27:53):
versus natural variability in storminess, droughts, floods, whatever. And you
can be sure anyone who might have been impacted during
that period by a hurricane, a drought, a flood would say, Bingo,
(28:14):
you did this experiment and I got flooded out of
my house, or I had a hurricane take out my barn,
or I had a drought that wiped out my herd
of cattle. You owe me. There'd be lawsuits all over
the place. There would be lawsuits all over the place,
(28:35):
And who's going to indemnify the person who does the
experiment against the lawsuits. Do you think there's any insurance
company that wants to take on that policy? Chapter five
The Big Balloon. Despite the challenges, David Keith wants to
(28:56):
try an experiment, a very small experiment. He's working with
a team at Harvard on a project called scopex. So
Scopex is about trying to improve our models of the
way stratospheric aerosols and chemistry work in little ways that
are relevant for improving understanding of the risks and efficacy
(29:18):
of solar geno engineering. Keith and his colleagues want to
send the balloon carrying particles high into the atmosphere, puff
them out, and see how they disperse and reflect sunlight.
How big is this balloon? Just give me a picture.
Balloons are like twenty meters diameter, rough sixty foot wide
balloons going up. And what's attached to the balloon we're
(29:38):
building the balloon gondola still what you call it. The
gondola has two little propellers that are more to kind
of move it around slowly, and it has our data system.
It has the batteries to run, It has the thing
that generates the particles it has a particle sensor to
measure the particle size distribution, and the whole thing is
on a winch, so it can winch itself up and
down with alter to the balloon, so the balloon will
(30:00):
spray particles and then right around measuring how they disperse.
The amount of material the team is going to release
is actually tiny, a kilogram or something, which for the
sake of argument, that turns out to be the bound
of sulfur that a commercial aircraft you would normally fly,
and releases it about a minute's flight. While it's physical
cargo is tiny, the balloon also carries with it a
(30:23):
lot of questions about regulations, scientific knowledge, symbolic value, and
possible political misuse. While there's no serious scientific case that
spraying a kilogram of particles can cause any physical harm,
some people still think it's very dangerous. There's a group
of people, and by high quality pulling, we know this
(30:46):
group of people is like a third of Americans who
believe that the government is already spraying toxic chemicals from
airplanes for mass murder or climateguzation or something. And so
those people have conflated that with some of the scientific
work on solar gena sharing, so when they google around
or there's lots of sites that will have me as
(31:08):
a mass murder. I once got a voicemail. My favorite
one that my kids enjoyed a lot, was a voicemail
that said that I was ten million times more evil
than Hitler and Stalin. And then it's not quite clear
if the gentleman is saying that it's combined or separately.
But it's not just conspiracy theorists. Even some of David
Keith's friends, like Ray pr Humbard or opposed to scopex.
(31:33):
It is actually one of the joys of science that,
at least among scientists, you can have very vehement professional
disagreements and still remain on good terms. What's really funny is,
at least from my perspective, I have huge respect for Ray,
both scientifically actually as a human. There's an article, the
most recent article he wrote, which is actually the most
(31:55):
personal and attacking me. It was like attacking the Harvard program.
I forget exactly what it said, but it was like
pretty direct, you know, both smoke and barrels aimed my way.
That was published just a few weeks after I had
a wonderful dinner with him and his wife actually visited
him in Cambridge, Oxford, and we talked about exoplants, and
we talked about American politics, and we mostly actually avoided
(32:16):
talking about this topic. We know we disagree. I don't
imagine that David would pay any attention to what advice
I gave him, but I would advise him to just
drop scopex. Ray has multiple objections. On the one hand,
the experiment is too small. Releasing a few particles won't
teach us anything important about the large scale planetary processes
(32:39):
that would matter most. I still lean towards calling them
stunts and that while they have some scientific payback, they
don't really address the biggest questions we have. You can't
do that with just a puff experiment. If you really
want to resolve some of the questions, that are going
to be a maker break thing for what would happen
(33:00):
if you deployed Albiedo modification. There are a hundred other
things that are more important scientifically. On the other hand,
Ray is concerned that the experiment will open the door
to ever larger solar geo engineering efforts before there are
any rules in place. It's the risk that by doing
a small experiment that crosses a red line. You're opening
(33:23):
the door to escalation. If you can do a small experiment, well,
next year someone's going to do a bigger experiment. It
represents the thin edge of the wedge. What can of
worms are are you opening? But Ray's biggest concern is
more fundamental. Solar geo engineering is wildly, howlingly barking mad,
(33:44):
and no research developments have changed my opinion. One Iota,
Chapter six, The Sword of Damocles. What makes rayper Humbard
call solar geo engineering wildly, howlingly barking mad. It boils
(34:04):
down to two things. First, it doesn't solve the real problem.
As long as we continue to emit CO two, it
continues to accumulate in the atmosphere, much of it remains
for tens of thousands of years, and the greenhouse effect
keeps increasing. Climate intervention just masks the problem by reflecting
(34:26):
away sunlight while we keep pumping vast amounts of CO
two into the air. The second problem is solar geoengineering
could create a sort of time bomb. My biggest worry,
in fact, the worry that underpins all my other worries
about the possibility of deploying albedo modification stems from the
(34:49):
mismatching time scales. The mismatching time scales is this, while
much of the CO two sticks around for tens of
thousands of years, the sulfur particles that would be used
for geoengineering, they disappear very quickly. They need to be
replaced every couple of years. You're committee the entire future
(35:10):
of humanity to doing this essentially forever. When have we
ever saddled the next one hundred thousand years of civilization?
If within obligation to do something without fail each and
every year forever, Essentially, there's no precedent in human history
if you then stop. If you stop because there's a
(35:30):
global war, there's a global depression, or disputes over what
the effect of this is, or you find some horrible
side effect that you just can't bear. If you stop
doing this lbedam modification, then within about ten years you
have nearly the full effect of all the pent up
warming from that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That's what
we call termination shock. Everybody on the planet living under
(35:52):
the sort of damocles, knowing it could fall at any minute,
exactly how much pent up warming what depends on how
much CO two we've allowed to accumulate. A rapid warming
of two degrees celsius would be bad enough. Rise of
four degrees see within a decade, making large swaths of
the planet uninhabitable outdoors most of the year. That would
(36:17):
be catastrophic. I asked Ray if he thought solar geo
engineering would ever make sense. The only scenario is if
you actually had already committed to getting to zero carbon
dioxide emissions in a reasonably short window of time, or
if you had developed technology for removing carbon dioxide from
(36:40):
the atmosphere. In other words, if we had largely solved
the problem and only had to buy a little bit
of time. Unfortunately, we're not on target to get to
zero net emissions, and we're very far from having affordable
technologies for carbon capture from the atmosphere. Chapter seven, Climate Wars.
(37:03):
If the climate crisis continues to deepen, who would decide
whether and when to deploy solar jew engineering? Would United
Nations try to forge a global consensus, or because it's
not so expensive, might some nations just try to do
it on their own. I can imagine some country could
just start deploying Albita modification just because of their own
(37:28):
perceived self interest. Imagine a human nation that is seeing
its elderly people dying from heatstroke. They may think putting
a bunch of particles up in the air as a
pretty simple solution to it. And if that means that
the Canadian wheat harvest fails, well that's their problem. I
(37:49):
can imagine that conflicts that could arise when nations start
tinkering with the composition of the stratosphere. I can also
imagine this launching climate wars because there are quite easy countermeasures.
The kinds of air craft that would be actually spewing
(38:12):
out sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. They're slow moving, they're
easy to target by fairly simple missiles. There are other
kinds of countermeasures you could think of. For instance, if
other countries used geoengineering to slow climate change, but Russia
preferred to let the Earth keep warming because it would
(38:33):
open the Arctic Ocean year round, Russia could interfere. All
they'd have to do would be to increase their coal burning,
increase the CO two to offset the Abito modification. Russia
could actually even do more harmful things, releasing methane into
the atmosphere, they could start manufacturing sulfur hexafluoride, which is
(38:54):
an incredibly potent, long live greenhouse gas. It turns out
that the fear that countries might start acting on their
own was the initial inspiration for the National Research Council report.
The intelligence community was concerned some third party might actually
get to the point where the climate in their part
(39:17):
of the world had become intolerable and they would unilaterally
decide to modify the planet's climate without consulting with anyone.
Some argue that solar geoengineering is basically ungovernable. If one
(39:37):
country wants the world slightly warmer and another needs it cooler,
how could we get a global consensus about who sets
the thermostat right now? There is no treaty, There is
no international agreement. There is no government structure that actually
(39:59):
prevents anyone from intervening in the atmosphere or the stratosphere
to perform some kind of albedo modification. The Academy has
a study underway right now that is focusing on the
(40:20):
governance issue, and hopefully they will come up with some
good ideas of how to take this forward. Chapter eight Sunrise.
Given all the problems with solar geo engineering. Why are
scientists even considering it? The reason is they're beginning to
(40:44):
feel pretty desperate. While the Paris Climate Treaty aims to
keep global warming to two degrees c on, our current
trajectory will blow past that target and may barrel toward
catastrophic increases. Some feel we better be ready with a
break glass in case of emergency solution, but a solving
(41:05):
climate change really hopeless. A lot of young people have
been rising up lately to demand action. They think the
answer will require not just science but political pressure. Seventeen
year old Swedish activists Greta Thunberg recently gained international attention
for her call for a global climate strike and her
(41:27):
demands for policy change at the United Nations. People are suffering,
people are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in
the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can
talk about is the money and fairy tales of eaton
(41:47):
of economic growth. How dare you? In the US, a
youth led environmental movement has been organizing to pressure politicians
through sit ins, songs, and communal action. I decided to
(42:10):
talk to one of the leaders and what's become a
global movement. My name is Marsheni Prakash. I am one
of the co founders of and currently serving as the
executive director for Sunrise Movement, which is organizing tens of
thousands of people, predominantly young people across this nation to
make climate action a priority in our nation for the
(42:31):
first time. So tell me how you got to that point, Like,
what was your path? I am the child of two
South Indian immigrants. India as a place that is being
ravished by the climate crisis, whether it's through drought and
water wars, or farmers committing suicide by the tens of thousands,
(42:51):
or climate fueled floods worsening and impacting people. And I
remember it was like the fall of twenty fifteen when
a series of really horrific floods hit my families from
in southern India. And I remember roads and sidewalks that
(43:11):
I had walked on, that my dad and had grown
up on, just covered in feet of water and seeing
dead bodies and people walking chest deep in water for
miles to sanctuary. And it was this major moment of reckoning,
of realizing that the climate crisis was here there were
people dying as a result of it. It wasn't an
(43:33):
issue thirty forty fifty years in the future, and the
movements that we had in that moment were not growing
or weren't as powerful as we needed them to be.
To address this crisis, Varshini joined a group of young
climate activists who wanted to drive big change. We embarked
on this process for almost a year of strategic planning,
(43:55):
of research, of study, of an assessment of the field,
studying things like the civil rights movement, queer movements, women's suffrage,
Vietnam War era movements, and then contemporary movements as well,
like the movement for Black Lives, Occupy Wall Street, others,
to see how do people make these grand societal transformations
(44:16):
that we need to make to stop climate change, and
how do we emulate that. Out of this work came
Sunrise Movement, which aims to bring together millions of people,
especially young people. As you may have heard, they've proposed
a program called the Green New Deal. One important element
of the program is funding innovation to drive down the
(44:37):
cost of renewables to the point where they're cheaper than
fossil fuels. But the aims of the Green New Deal
are far more ambitious. It can be thought of as
a decade long economic mobilization really to stop climate change
at a scale not seen since World War Two. Everything
from stopping climate change to creating tens of millions of good,
(45:03):
high paying jobs, virtually eliminating poverty in the process. Everything
from addressing agriculture systems to industry, to power generation and
land use, forestry, everything under the sun that we would
need to deploy to address the crisis. It won't be
just one piece of legislation, and it was the same
(45:25):
way with a New Deal. It wasn't There wasn't a
New Deal bill. There were hundreds of bills and projects
that FDR and others implemented. They were really embracing this
ethos of experimentation, of doing whatever it takes to get
Americans out of the Great Depression and put money back
in the pockets of working people. The Green New Deal
(45:47):
resolution is more of a framework than a specific piece
of legislation at this point. Still, the idea has prompted
a range of concerns. Climate change deniers belittle it. They
want to take your pickup truck, they want to rebuild
your home, they want to take away your hamburgers. This
(46:07):
is what Stalin dreamed about but never achieved. Many scientists
and economists view achieving carbon neutrality within ten years as
a pipe dream given the slow rate at which power
plants are replaced. Others think it's trying to do too
much solve climate change, poverty, and racial injustice all at
(46:28):
the same time. But maybe the Sunrisers are onto something
very important in the way they're building a coalition packaging
them as one thing. This sounds sort of counterintuitive to
some people, but it actually makes it more popular. The
parts of the Green New Deal that are the most
popular are the parts around job creation, are the investments
(46:51):
and sustainable agriculture and renewable energy technology for shiny. Contrasted,
the Sunrise movements approach to previous climate change legislation efforts
like the Waxman Marquee Bill in two thousand and nine,
the last forty years of focusing on just like a
singular tax or a singular cap and trade model, or
(47:14):
something that people cannot understand as making basic improvements to
their lives. That's why a lot of the reason why
Waxman Marquis failed in the Senate ten years ago, because
there wasn't the public will and the public support. She
talked to Senator Marky, who sponsored both the two thousand
(47:35):
and nine bill and now the Green New Deal Resolution.
I asked him, what is the major difference that you
are seeing in twenty nineteen versus two thousand and nine,
and he said, the number one difference, and what we
need so badly is that we actually have an army
of people out there pushing for these solutions. I asked
Marsha McNutt what she thought about Sunrise movement. I love it.
(47:59):
I think it's critical. I mean, if it's not going
to be that generation, then who they're the ones that
are going to still be alive in twenty fifty. It's
not going to be me, and it's going to be
their children that are going to be alive in twenty
(48:21):
one hundred that are going to be inheriting this parched earth.
It's incredibly important that they stand up and say no,
this is not their trajectory that I want for the planet.
And when politicians vote with a two year time horizon
(48:43):
in their mind, or if they vote special interest groups
who are looking only at their corporation one year ROI,
that is absolutely criminal. So What would you say to
the people in the Sunrise movement? What encouragement or message
would you say to them? I would say, they are
(49:05):
just like the people who stood up to the Vietnam
War and every other injustice. You know, this is an
injustice to all of humanity. So, after talking with Varsheni
about Sunrise Movement, I asked her whether she and her
fellow activists thought solar geo engineering might be an important
(49:25):
tool in addressing climate change. She was unconvinced, regarding the
technology as a distraction from solving the real problem. If
the issue is decarbonizing and the long term problem is
taking carbon out of the atmosphere, things like geo engineering
don't even do that. But and so, don't get me wrong.
(49:47):
I understand the desperation, I understand the urgency. I understand
that we need to kick everything into high gear. But
I think we are putting carbon into the atmosphere. Perhaps
the easiest fix that we have is to stop putting
carbon into the atmosphere. Chapter nine, The Moral Hazard. I
(50:13):
understand why climate change activists want to stay laser focused
on decarbonizing the world's energy supply, But at the same time,
is there any harm in also having climate intervention as
a backup. Unfortunately, the answer is there might well be.
Some people worry that pursuing solar geo engineering and parallel
(50:34):
might actually make it harder to get the world to
solve climate change. Humans tend to address problems only when
they feel the consequences, such as heat waves, wildfires, floods,
and hurricanes. If blocking the sun decreases natural disasters caused
by global warming, will we become complacent about solving the
(50:55):
real problem. It's like taking a painkiller instead of actually
having the cancer taken out. Eliminating one of the symptoms
of carbon dioxide emission, which is the planet getting warmer,
makes it easier to ignore the root cause of the
problem just continue emitting. This is what economists call the
moral hazard problem, the idea of the people who have
(51:16):
insurance against disasters aren't as careful about avoiding risks. For example,
because the government provides flood insurance for homes on floodplains,
homeowners are more willing to keep rebuilding their flooded homes
on the same sites. But David Keith is worried about
something even more insidious that the mere prospect of solar
(51:39):
jew engineering will be used as a political weapon to
deny the need to act on climate change. At the
beginning of this episode, I noted that some of the
greatest enthusiasm and congress for solar jew engineering has come
from climate change deniers. That's certainly no accident. People are
(51:59):
terrified that if these ideas get out more in the
big world, that they will be seized upon by opponents
of climate action, by oil companies, by people who want
to walk emission scots. Those people will claim falsely that
solo genissioning means we don't need to kind emissions, or
that it may mean we don't have kind emissions, and
they'll use that in the bruising political fight over emission scots.
(52:20):
That is the underlying, I think biggest fear, and sure,
of course it's a complete lygim I fear. I'm terrified
about it. The certainty that they will try and use
it as an argument is there, but that doesn't mean
that necessarily humanity will do less emission scots, and in
the end, those of us who want emission scouts just
have to win on the merits. Although David Keith is
certain his work will be misused by some politicians, he
(52:43):
believes it's essential to do the research. I still think
that that fear is not a reason not to know more.
You may think, or summon your audience to this podcast,
may think the solo Regeniastoni is a terrible idea and
never should be done. Others may think it really could
be part of the way we manage climate change. But
let me let you all out there and podcast land
(53:04):
in on a big secret. We're not deciding now whether
or not this happens. We're decide whether we give the
next generation realistic information. If we keep the taboo going,
then we'll hand them basically no information. So sometime the
next decades, some government, maybe the Chinese government after their
monsoon fails, maybe the US government after a massive Category
(53:26):
five his New York, maybe the Indonesian government after a
big heatwave that kills a quarter million. Some government is
going to seriously consider this. And my view is that
we'd be better to give them lots of knowledge before
they consider it. But Raypierre Humbard doesn't buy it. So
David likes to make the case that if we don't
do these experiments, will just be giving the gift of
(53:47):
ignorance to the future. But sometimes the gift of ignorance
is a precious gift, and so we have to decide
first whether this is a case where the gift of
ignorance is precious or a burden. I think if it
had been possible to actually give the gift of ignorance
about horrible things like nerve gas, if we're dingle to
(54:09):
have the gift of ignorance about building hydrogen bombs, whether
or not that would have been feasible or not, that
would have been a nice kind of ignorance to have.
And again I'm not saying that necessarily albedo modification is
in the same category as these things, but someone has
to make that judgment, and it has to be made
by civil society in some way. So where do you
(54:29):
draw the line. I think that it would be impractical
to have any form of governments that forbid computer experimentation.
But when it comes to stuff kit gear, either a
lab experiment, but especially outdoor experimentation, actually stuffing things into
the atmosphere, even on a small scale, there is a
kind of a clear line there, and so that's where
(54:52):
I think there needs to be some kind of discussion.
Is this a red line worth crossing? Is the scientific
payback enough to actually justify crossing this red line conclusion.
Choose your planet. So there you have it, solar geoengineering.
(55:19):
It could cool the planet at least on average. It
might buy time and mitigate suffering, but its precise impacts
would be uneven and unpredictable, and it's very hard to test.
There could be big winners and losers. It could even
trigger climate wars. If we choose climate intervention, we might
(55:42):
end up addictive for thousands of years, threatened with rapid,
massive temperature increases if we ever stopped. If we don't
consider climate intervention, we might find ourselves without options as
temperatures keep rising in the decades ahead. Should we start
experimenting now so that we'll know enough to be ready
(56:05):
or is it a distraction or even worse, a gift
to climate change deniers who'll use the prospect of solar
geo engineering to keep us from solving the real problem.
So the question is what can you do a lot?
It turns out you don't have to be an expert,
and you don't have to do it alone. If enough
(56:26):
people get engaged together, we will make wise choices. Invite
friends over for dinner and debate about what we should do,
or organize a conversation for a book club or a
faith group, or a campus event online of course for
now in person, when it's safe. And if you hate
having to consider these choices about solar geo engineering, then
(56:49):
join a group to help stop climate change before it's
too late. You can find lots of resources and ideas
at our website Brave New Planet dot org. It's time
to choose our planet. The future is up to us,
and my kids still debate when I'm their dad, is
(57:10):
more evil than Hitler and Stalin or Hitler and Stalin combined.
That's good to know what the family debates. That's fascinating.
Brave New Planet is a co production of the Broad
Institute of MT and Harvard Pushkin Industries in the Boston Globe,
with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Our show
(57:32):
is produced by Rebecca Lee Douglas with Mary Doo theme
song composed by Ned Porter, mastering and sound designed by
James Garver, fact checking by Joseph Fridman, and a Stitt
and Enchant special Thanks to Christine Heenan and Rachel Roberts
at Clarendon Communications. To Lee McGuire, Kristen Zarelli and Justine
(57:53):
Levin Allerhand at the Broad, to mil Lobell and Heather
Faine at Pushkin, and to Eli and Edy Brode who
made the Broad Institute possible. This is brave new planet.
I'm Eric Lander. Two
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.