Just to lay my cards on the table, I think that SRM [Solar Radiation Modification] should be investigated and possibly even implemented. But I don’t think it is likely to be, because people on the right and left both hate it. People on the right lump it in with chemtrails, and hate it for the same reasons (if that is the correct word) they now have now decided that the polio vaccine is bad. People on the left hate it because…well, I’ll get to that in a second. So I don’t think it will happen unless a Trumpian figure comes out in favor of it and pitches it to the populist base in a style that will make those people think it’s awesome.
In other words, I think that this is largely an abstract debate that is more interesting as a case study in fallibilism than it is on its own merits.
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In order to put enough SO2 into the stratosphere to make any difference to the climate, it would be necessary to create a huge fleet of such aircraft. The scenario is well described in Chapter 1 of Oliver Morton’s The Planet Remade. They’d have to be specially designed, since these things aren’t exactly rolling off of production lines at the moment, and the ones that do exist aren’t configured as tankers (the WB-57 carries 4 tons of payload, so in order to carry a million tons of SO2 to the stratosphere over the course of one year—only one seventeenth of a Pinatubo—250,000 flights would be necessary, or about 700 flights per day; these planes would have to take off every 30 seconds around the clock).
Entire new manufacturing facilities would have to be established in order to build that fleet. Thousands of people would work in them. Once built, the planes would be in continuous operation, taking off laden with SO2, flying around in the stratosphere in a manner that couldn’t be more obvious, and that would be easily detected by radar, satellites, and people standing in the flight path simply looking up. Takeoff and landing would occur at airfields that would have to be equipped with facilities for loading them with sulfur dioxide.
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What then is the purpose of putting all of this ingenuity to work building these exquisitely sophisticated systems for detecting faint traces of aerosols in the stratosphere? The only explanation that makes any sense is that the goal is to sense even the tiniest and most preliminary exploratory efforts in the field of SRM. Experiments, basically. Programs that are, by definition, too small to actually change the climate. If someone were changing the climate, we’d know about it. We wouldn’t need high altitude balloons or WB-57s. We could just aim a webcam at the special airport where hundreds of weird planes were taking off every day.
And it’s worth reiterating—because the level of anxiety about SRM is so high—that the purpose of those weird planes would not be to drop bombs, spray nerve gas, or strafe peasants, but to ameliorate, temporarily and reversibly, the effects of a completely uncontrolled and incredibly reckless geoengineering experiment that the human race has been engaging in for 200 years, and will continue to engage in for at least another 50 years, by dumping vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere and the oceans.
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People mentioned in this article, as well as (I suspect) the journalist who wrote it, many people who work at the New York Times, and almost everyone who chimed in on the comment thread, all seem absolutely certain that even doing research on SRM is literally unthinkable—not in the sense that one can’t think about it but in the sense that one should never think about it.
As I already mentioned, that’s a position that makes no sense to me at all. But I don’t have to understand it. I just have to note that it exists. My next question would be, what if this position is wrong?
In that case, we’ve unilaterally disarmed ourselves in the face of a threat that could end up being more dangerous than any military invasion.
If I’m wrong, then, somewhere along the line, I think we’ll say “oh, SRM isn’t a good way to do this, so let’s not design, build, and fly that huge fleet of special airplanes.” In other words, I am, to some degree, trusting our civilization not to just do incredibly stupid shit.
From Neal Stephenson's essay:
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