Tag Archives: #geoengineering

How to Change the World: a Review of “Under a White Sky”

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Image: Lacey Berg

There are two ways to deal with an environmental issue: do nothing, or do something. 

We’re at a critical moment in deciding the fate of the planet as we know it. Since we joined the planet’s cast of characters, human activity has changed the course of rivers, driven species to extinction, and altered the composition of the atmosphere. Climate scientists have identified a 2 degrees Celsius increase in the planet’s average temperature as a tipping point beyond which climate catastrophe is unavoidable. “Business as usual” is projected to raise average global temperatures by 5 or 6 degrees Celsius. 

But we aren’t totally doomed. In the past year, I’ve witnessed humanity weather a pandemic and widespread political unrest. Through all of the worst parts of it, I learned that like it or not, we’re here to stay on this planet and the least we can do is try to make life better.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, Under a White Sky, examines what happens when someone decides to do something to make life better. You might recognize her dry humor and candid descriptions of frightening climate scenarios from her 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning book The Sixth Extinction. Under a White Sky continues to explore how people have changed the earth.

She argues that human civilization is essentially an experiment in defying nature that has entirely reshaped the world. Since the advent of agriculture, people have been making large-scale changes to their environments in the hopes of improvement. Welcome to the Anthropocene, a proposed geological epoch defined by the impact of human activity. 

Ten thousand years later, Kolbert examines how “people try to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.”

 Kolbert chronicles some truly ingenious human interventions in nature: electrifying the Chicago River to kill invasive carp, building a replica of a unique hot spring in California to save a rare fish, and breeding “super corals” that can withstand marine heat waves, to name just a few. Spoiler alert: none of these ideas went according to plan.

The great limitation to the remarkable cleverness of people is that we can’t predict the future. Imagine explaining the consequences of planting some grains to somebody 10,000 years ago. Now try to imagine what humanity might look like 10,000 years from now. Kolbert proposes enormous philosophical, existential questions, then inserts her voice to remind readers of what it’s really like to live in the world every day. We’re ill-equipped to answer questions of thousand year consequences when thinking about what’s for dinner feels like planning in advance.  

But we can try. And we do try. And we will continue to try.

Under a White Sky ends with a cutting edge idea for saving the planet: solar geoengineering. Solar geoengineering sounds simple enough: block out some sunlight to keep the planet from warming too much. Many people are philosophically opposed to geoengineering because of the dangers of “playing god,” but we already live in a world that’s been fundamentally altered by human presence and activity. 

Instead of asking whether or not we should blast sulfates into the stratosphere, Kolbert wonders what it would be like to live under a white sky, in a world with a little less sun. She calls on history for a little clarity. In 1815, Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia, killing tens of thousands of people and filling the stratosphere with sulfur dioxide, one of the compounds popular among geoengineering researchers. The eruption had cascading effects worldwide. 1816 was known in New England as the “year without a summer.” Crops froze in Massachusetts in August. The gloom inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. There were also brilliant sunsets.

Dan Schrag, a geoengineering researcher at Harvard, tells Kolbert “people have to get their heads away from thinking about whether they like solar geoengineering or not.” In his view, “the highest priority for scientists is to figure out all the different ways this could go wrong.”

And there are so many ways it could go wrong. While scientists make recommendations about geoengineering, ultimately the implementation of any project will be a political decision. How will governments address issues of environmental justice when implementing geoengineering? Who will fly the planes that spray sulfates into the atmosphere? Where will they spray them? When will they stop?

My argument for geoengineering boils down to this: we’re probably screwed anyway, so we might as well try. But I read this book on a series of brilliantly sunny spring afternoons, and I shivered thinking about how awful the weather would have to be to inspire Frankenstein. Even though Kolbert’s frank and funny tone steers the narrative away from nihilism, I’m left wondering if humanity could survive a dark age. 

In the final pages of the book, Kolbert uses ice cores from Greenland to reveal the surprising history of earth’s climate. Air bubbles in the ice cores are time capsules for thousands of years of climate history. The past ten thousand years have been fairly stable, climate-wise, save for the centuries since the Industrial Revolution. But before the last ice age ended, the climate fluctuated wildly; temperatures swung up and down by as much as 8 degrees Celsius at least 25 times in a period of about 3,000 years. 

Human civilization’s short history coincides perfectly with a stable climate, a novelty we’ve mistaken for the norm. Now, we have to figure out how to define our future on an unfamiliar planet.

Kolbert’s conclusion departs from more traditional environmental sentiments about restoring nature. The world is different now than it used to be– we changed it. In the future, the world will be different than it is now. Maybe we’ll embrace geoengineering to help stabilize the climate. For all the things that go wrong, I think we owe it to ourselves to also imagine how things could go right. 

Can we geoengineer hope?

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Image: NASA Earth Observatory

 

I’ll admit it: I’m scared of the future.

By now we’ve all heard frightening speculation about a future of rising carbon emissions and intensifying climate change. I often find myself overwhelmed by the unrelenting reality that humans have thrown the entire planet out of whack and now we’re paying the price. Some days I see human extinction as the only possible outcome. Life in the meantime seems futile.

I’m not alone in my climate despair. Last year, the American Psychiatric Association reported that over two thirds of Americans are anxious about climate change. Young people especially are struggling with imagining a future in a world that seems so unstable. 

Resigning ourselves to climate doom won’t solve climate change. It makes us apathetic and unmotivated to look for innovative solutions or push for emissions reductions. If we want to stave off complete climate catastrophe, we need at least a little bit of hope.

Enter solar geoengineering, the brilliant and controversial idea to release reflective particles into the atmosphere to block out some sunlight and slow down the greenhouse effect. No other proposed climate solution would be anywhere near as fast, effective, or cheap.

A lot of people, including climate scientists and environmentalists, think it’s a terrible idea; it’s slapping on a bandaid while corporations continue to hemorrhage fossil fuel emissions. If geoengineering provides any relief, people might stop feeling the sense of urgency that’s driving other climate action.

There is a lot that could go wrong with trying to engineer the climate. Right now, the research is mostly computer models and speculation. A leading research group at Harvard had planned to conduct some of the first field experiments in Sweden this summer, but they were shot down by Swedish environmental groups and the Saami Indigenous people for failing to consider the interests of local communities.

There’s certainly merit to the criticism. Geoengineering shouldn’t be entered into lightly or without engaging local communities and prioritizing justice and equity. But as I teeter on the edge of a pit of climate doom, the idea that we could buy ourselves more time to get our act together is tantalizing, and I think we should consider it.

Reducing emissions on the scale we need to, in the time we need to do it, seems impossible. Even if the Green New Deal hadn’t crashed and burned two years ago, implementing its massive structural changes to zero-out carbon emissions by 2050 or sooner would be enormously expensive and challenged by conservative politicians at every step of the way. 

Geoengineering could give us a positive action to rally around and make us feel like we’re doing something. Even if it doesn’t work like we expect it to, it could reinvigorate climate action and pull us back from the brink of climate fatalism. 

Maybe we don’t need to geoengineer our way out of a climate catastrophe– just our climate despair.

Nobody can predict what a geoengineered future will look like, but we need to try to imagine it. Last summer, I learned a lot about prison abolition, and something I’ve been carrying with me is the importance of imagination. According to Angela Davis, imagination is one of the most important tools for solving big problems like the prison system. This works for climate change, too: imagine what you want a geoengineered world to look like, then think about what needs to happen to make that a reality.

I’m imagining a world where we’ve embraced geoengineering. It’s a world where fewer people have to move inland to escape rising sea levels, where coral reefs have time to adjust to warmer water, and agricultural belts continue to thrive. It’s also a world where I could hope to see a glacier in real life one day. Sure, it’s just speculation, but I think attitude matters. Geoengineering offers us the opportunity to reframe climate change as an opportunity to build a world we want to live in.

If we really want to stop climate change, we need to stop burning fossil fuels. But a simple answer isn’t always the easy one, and energy transition is going to turn our world upside down. Geoengineering could buy us just enough time to make that  transition thoughtfully, not frantically.

Geoengineering isn’t our only hope– it’s not even a real solution– but it could give us some hope when we desperately need it.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… a baseless conspiracy theory. Here’s what you need to know about the chemtrails conspiracy.

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Photo by Erik van Wees

What are chemtrails? 

First and foremost, chemtrails don’t exist. 

But Suzanne Maher disagrees. Maher is the founder of chemtrails awareness group Bye Bye Blue Sky. According to her website, chemtrails are toxic compounds sprayed into the atmosphere to “direct and control our weather for military purposes and global domination.” 

She sees the evidence in the wisps of white exhaust from planes criss-crossing the blue sky, lingering, and dissipating into a thin cover of clouds. According to chemtrail believers, this exhaust is laden with compounds like aluminum, barium, and strontium that’s intentionally being pumped into the atmosphere.

Maher’s billboard on display in Woodstown, New Jersey. Photo by Sharon LePere.

In reality, the trails left behind airplanes are just condensation, or contrails. When hot, moist engine exhaust hits cold, high-altitude air, condensation forms, the same way you can see your breath in the air on a cold day.

What exactly is the chemtrail conspiracy, and where does it come from?

People are drawn to the chemtrails theory for a variety of reasons. Some think the chemicals are controlling the weather. Others think they’re controlling our minds. Regardless of the specifics, chemtrail believers see a sinister government plot in the clouds.

The most popular and recent version of the theory posits that the chemicals are being sprayed into the atmosphere to block out the sun and slow global warming. This idea might sound familiar if you’ve heard of solar geoengineering. David Keith, a leading geoengineering researcher at Harvard, is investigating the potential of albedo modification; his team proposes that injecting sulfate compounds into the atmosphere to reflect some sunlight back into space, like chemtrails allegedly do, could save us from climate disaster. But their work so far is entirely speculative; there is no active testing or implementation of albedo modification. Keith also reminds chemtrail believers that “the Internet is filled with people who are completely sure about stuff that just isn’t true.” 

Still, a 2016 study in Nature reported that 20-30% of Americans thought the chemtrails theory was “somewhat true.” 

The most compelling conspiracy theories always have a grain of truth. The U.S. started experimenting with cloud seeding in 1946. Cloud seeding introduces compounds to the atmosphere to induce precipitation, but nowhere near the scale that chemtrail believers would have you think. A 1996 paper from the U.S. Air Force speculated about how weather manipulation could be used as a military tactic. Though this work was purely speculative, internet forums of the late 90s became the breeding grounds for accusations that large scale weather control was already underway. 

How did this theory gain traction?

Open platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter make information (and misinformation)  accessible to everyone with an internet connection.

Despite scientists emphatically rejecting the chemtrails theory, the majority of popular YouTube videos about climate modification actually embrace and spread the conspiracy theory. Facebook groups and Twitter help circulate false information about chemtrails. Most people don’t scroll through their feeds with a critical lens. Many take such misinformation at face value.

The Trump era did wonders for fake news and the conspiracy-minded; widespread mistrust of the government and media makes people susceptible to believing in a sinister plot to control the masses. On the left, die-hard environmentalists are quick to believe that the government is destroying the planet. Instead of following predictable party lines, chemtrails unite people from all walks of life.

Even though the evidence against chemtrails is overwhelming, many Americans still believe in them. That has consequences.

What are the dangers of the chemtrails conspiracy?

The most immediate consequence of the chemtrail conspiracy theory affects legitimate geoengineering researchers. Chemtrail theorists have hijacked the terminology of geoengineering research because of the similarities in proposed albedo modification projects and the alleged implementation of chemtrails. 

Geoengineering is already controversial. The effects of albedo modification are under researched, and a lot of people, including climate scientists, worry about interfering with environmental processes. The chemtrails theory asserts that large-scale geoengineering projects are already underway, recklessly endangering our health and our planet. This misguided belief has contributed to anti-geoengineering sentiment and researchers like Keith are stuck cleaning up the mess.

The chemtrails conspiracy theory is also a gateway to general mistrust and paranoia. If the government and scientists are conspiring to secretly control the global climate, what else could they be hiding? 

Perhaps the most dangerous part of the theory is how it mirrors the fundamental truth of climate change in a terrifying fun house sort of way. By continuing our reliance on fossil fuels, the government and corporations really are pumping toxic compounds into the atmosphere that are harming our planet and our health. By focusing their energy on the fake plot, conspiracists misdirect action away from the real problem.

How can conspiracy theories be countered?

Swaying hardcore chemtrail believers is hard– maybe even impossible. Mainstream reporting on the science that disproves the chemtrails conspiracy takes an overwhelmingly condescending tone, which only strengthens the conviction of conspiracy believers. Dedicated believers like Maher only seem to double down when faced with criticism. 

Still, the chemtrails theory might have had its day in the sun. Google searches for chemtrails peaked during the 2016 election cycle, and the uptick this year is mostly attributed to Lana Del Rey’s new album, Chemtrails Over The Country Club. 

Like many of us, geoengineering researchers hope that we can restore our trust in science. Staving off climate disaster requires innovative solutions and early geoengineering studies show a lot of promise. It might not even work, but I prefer an optimistic future to a false reality.

Geoengineering could save the Arctic, study finds

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Image: NASA

The Arctic is our planet’s refrigerator. It’s also warming six times faster than the global average.

The Arctic’s snow and ice reflect much of the light that reaches it, helping to keep the planet cool. As the planet warms, ice melts and the Arctic reflects less light. Warmer temperatures also mean that permafrost, or soil that is frozen year-round, begins to thaw out. When it does, frozen organic matter begins to decay, releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, which intensifies the greenhouse effect, leading to more warming, which leads to more permafrost thawing and… you get the point. 

This cycle, called permafrost climate feedback, drives the higher rates of warming at the poles. Arctic permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere. A melted Arctic would release this carbon into the atmosphere, leading to catastrophic effects for the entire planet. 

So, we need to keep the Arctic frozen. But how?

A study in Nature  by Yating Chen and her colleagues at Beijing Normal University examines a radical solution: increase albedo in the Arctic to prevent warming and permafrost thawing by preventing sunlight from entering the atmosphere. 

Known as solar geoengineering, this strategy aims to mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption by injecting sulfur compounds into the atmosphere. These compounds reflect some sunlight back into space before it has the chance to enter the atmosphere.  

Solar geoengineering is controversial partly because the effects of sulfate injection are under researched. But don’t worry; Chen’s study is just a simulation. By using what we know about environmental processes, Chen and colleagues  built an earth system model that mimics the conditions of life on earth, then manipulate the conditions to predict the future. This study uses a geoengineering model that’s popular because it models a sudden injection of sulfates into the atmosphere. If we embrace geoengineering only as an emergency solution to climate change, sulfate injection will probably happen quickly as a last-ditch attempt to save the world, so this model is realistic.

In addition to modeling sulfate injection, this study incorporates a moderate emissions reduction framework that projects the climate stabilizing at a global average of 1.8 degrees Celsius warmer. This keeps our climate just under the 2 degrees C of warming that has come to represent a point of no return for the global climate. If the climate stabilizes at 2 degrees C, the models predict that 40% of Arctic permafrost will melt. Under moderate emissions reductions, 35% would melt. With the sulfate injections, this figure plummets to just 15%.

Putting a price tag on the Arctic is tricky, but the permafrost climate feedback could result in  $13.8 trillion (trillion, with a tr) in economic losses, even under the reduced-emissions scenario. Sulfate injection would help save about $8.4 trillion. 

There’s still a lot we don’t know about sulfate injection. What are the ecological impacts of more atmospheric sulfur? How would people living in the Arctic, especially Indigenous communities, be affected? What does maintenance look like? What would happen if a solar geoengineering project was suddenly interrupted? 

Critics raise these questions to discredit geoengineering, but the immensely promising results of this study should spark interest in more research using models to explore the effects of sulfate injection. Nobody can predict the future with certainty, but models can give us a pretty good guess. 

There is no silver bullet to stop climate change, but this study shows that the combination of reduced emissions and sulfate injection are key in preventing permafrost thawing. Stabilizing the climate is a daunting task, but the Arctic is a good place to start.

Can we engineer our way out of a climate disaster?

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Image: NASA

The deadline is clear: we must cut our carbon emissions in half by 2030 in order to avoid catastrophic and irreversible effects of climate change. 

After a brief COVID-19-induced dip, carbon emissions are shooting upwards again with no sign of slowing down. Transitioning away from fossil fuel use is a monumental undertaking that will require enormous societal and economic restructuring. As the climate clock ticks, nations stumble through climate decision making, and achieving the necessary reductions in time seems impossible. 

But what if we could buy ourselves more time? 

Cutting carbon emissions is essential to curbing the effects of climate change, but it is not our only hope. Advocates for geoengineering argue that manipulating the environmental processes that underlie global warming is critical to stabilize the climate. 

The two main schools of geoengineering thought are simple: remove existing carbon from the atmosphere or solar geoengineering to prevent more sun from getting in. 

The “negative emissions” approach of sucking carbon from the atmosphere would help to de-insulate the planet, allowing more low-energy heat to travel through the atmosphere and back out to space. A firm called Carbon Engineering has already designed a machine that uses a series of simple chemical reactions to isolate and capture pure carbon dioxide gas from the atmosphere before burying it underground.

Solar geoengineering projects propose spraying a fine mist, either of seawater or sulfate aerosols, into the atmosphere to reflect some sunlight back into space. Usually, high-energy sunlight enters the atmosphere and is absorbed into the planet, then re-emitted from the earth as lower-energy heat, which gets trapped in our increasingly greenhouse gas-rich atmosphere. Solar geoengineering would deflect some high-energy sunlight, never giving it a chance to be trapped as heat.

These types of projects could slow warming and extend the deadline set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), giving us time to make the necessary changes to prevent complete climate disaster.

Despite its promise, geoengineering strategies  attract sharp criticism for interfering with natural processes or attempting to “play god.” Some critics point to the lack of research on the potential detrimental effects of geoengineering projects, like pollution from introduced aerosols or crop failure from a dimmed sun. Others worry that providing alternatives to cutting carbon emissions will decrease the sense of urgency that has driven decades of climate activism and policy advancements. 

I hope to examine all sides of the controversy and explore the potential of geoengineering as a tool in the fight against climate change. What are the risks and rewards of geoengineering projects? Who stands to benefit the most from geoengineering, and who will bear the costs? How are we, as humans, responsible for the planet we call home? Can we save it?