Climate change is like the One Ring of environmental issues -- in many ways, it seeks to "rule them all." While this blog will look at everyday ways to go green and stay that way, we are all citizens of Earth -- and will each be affected by climate change more with every passing year. If citizens wish to be heard, it happens for most of us through voting (be it with our feet, our wallets, or our ballots). So I want to help my readers stay informed about how their time and their votes can best help whoop some climate change behind. All that is to say: environmental policy -- as we can relate to it as voters and perhaps volunteers -- will be an important part of this blog too.
There are nearly as many ideas about how to fight climate change as there are people working on the problem. The most proactive of these strategies are often called climate engineering (a subset of the broader term geoengineering). Rather than waiting on humans to stop giving in to their bad habits (like driving gas guzzlers or building coal-fired power plants), geoengineering projects aim to actively correct one or more aspects of the climatic imbalances manifesting themselves these days.
If you've heard of scientists dreaming up giant orbital sun shades, or distributing tiny iron shavings across the oceans' surfaces, then you've heard of a climate engineering project. One of the most plausible and probably economical of such schemes involves a different kind of shade -- one made of tiny, reflective particles. Approaches that are designed to decrease the amount of sunlight (and thus, heat) inbound to Earth's surface are called solar radiation management (SRM) strategies. The giant sun shade is the classic SRM example.
Ginormous flying mirrors aren't exactly plentiful on the clearance rack at Target these days. But the same effect can be achieved in other, cheaper ways. One of them fairly literally fell into humanity's lap -- several times, quite memorably. When large volcanoes erupt, the ash thrown high into the atmosphere has long-recognized, well-known cooling effects the whole planet over. If there's one thing at which humans excel, it's putting crap into our atmosphere, so naturally the idea of doing it in a long-term, systematic way to cool our overheating planet has been tossed around for some time. The technical term for "crap" here is stratospheric sulfate aerosols (SSAs). Extensive computer modeling and data from eruptions like the one from Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 have shown that such a strategy would have concrete benefits for the world's thermometers. What no one has examined until recently is what would happen if our children or grandchildren ever tried to wean the planet off of a successful SSA program.
Climate scientists from the University of Victoria (Victoria, BC, Canada), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA), and the University of Washington (Seattle, WA) recently published a study of the long-term feasibility of SSAs in Environmental Research Letters, and the results are eye-opening. In a paper entitled "Rapid and extensive warming following cessation of solar radiation management," a team led by Kelly McCusker of University of Victoria details the deadly backlash their models predict if a successful SSA program were ever to falter or be halted. Given what a large-scale multinational endeavor such a project would probably be, it is all too likely that at some point beauracracy and budgets would cause hiccups, if not total breakdowns (e.g., Debt Ceiling Foolishness).
This is an excellent study because it reminds us of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Until we are a great deal more knowledgeable about the many linked systems that shape our climate, tinkering like this is almost guaranteed to come back and haunt us. Working to mitigate the cause (excess carbon) should be our focus, not treating the symptoms (like solar heating) separately.
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