In Silicon Valley, a Rogue Plan to Alter the Climate | Some restless entrepreneurs are releasing pollutants in the sky to try to cool the planet.
In Silicon Valley, a Rogue Plan to Alter the Climate | Some restless entrepreneurs are releasing pollutants in the sky to try to cool the planet.
Animated by the “move fast and break things” credo that permeates Silicon Valley, the founders of Make Sunsets have no such concerns. They are selling “cooling credits” to customers who want to offset their personal carbon emissions. And a few times each month, after selling enough credits, they head for the hills and release balloons full of sulfur dioxide into the California sky.
“This is the one tool realistically that can cool Earth in our lifetime,” said Mr. Iseman. “Every day we’re not doing this leads to needless harm.”
Sikina Jinnah, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California Santa Cruz who has studied geoengineering, is also concerned about harm. “They are a couple of tech bros who have no expertise in doing what they’re claiming to do,” she said. “They’re not scientists and they’re making claims about cooling credits that nobody has validated.”
Yeah....Gotta admit I didn't have a lot of confidence in the idea when I first started reading the article. Then I read this part and my confidence went from low to zero.
Silicon Valley, where scams go to get funded.
Yeah, this is a giant scam. The whole "we're stealth" and "we look just like a regular RV" are key giveaways. If what they were doing was 100% legal and above board, they wouldn't be doing it this way.
One problem I have with this idea is that the cooling profile from releasing sulphates into the atmosphere looks very different from the greenhouse gas warming profile. For example, the latter has a more pronounced effect at higher latitudes, since GHG are insulators. The arctic is getting hit harder than the tropics. The former, I would expect, would affect the places in the world that get the most sun, since it is effectively a solar filter. So, the lower latitudes, in other words.
If we have a baseline scenario A of what would have happened without the GHGs and B with what is currently happening, this would make for a scenario C that is neither of the others. I would submit that C would likely be as far from A as B is. Yes, you might get global warming under control in an accountant-looking-at-only-the-bottom-line sort of way, but this would still represent a massive climate change into uncharted territory. Would scenario C still be preferable to B is the question I guess?
The part where he asks 'what am I missing here?' falls on silent ears...
Sulfur dioxide added to the atmosphere through human action does contribute to reducing global temperatures. There's a Nature article about it. From their abstract:
In 2020, fuel regulations abruptly reduced the emission of sulfur dioxide from international shipping by about 80% and created an inadvertent geoengineering termination shock with global impact.
Ships had been emitting a lot of SO2 and the effect of abruptly stopping that is apparently quite large:
a doubling (or more) of the warming rate in the 2020 s compared with the rate since 1980
In other words, the laws against SO2 emission by ships are making global warming twice as bad. It's ironic that environmentalists are contributing as much to global warming as everyone else put together.
The guys running this company sound like loose cannons, but it may take a loose cannon to overcome the bias that institutions have towards doing nothing rather than taking an action that involves risks. It's true that adding SO2 to the atmosphere may have serious unintended consequences, although the huge amount that ships had been adding until recently wasn't catastrophic. However, doing nothing as the planet keeps warming will definitely have serious unintended consequences! It's the trolley problem: these guys are pulling the lever and their critics are saying "They're going to kill one person!" but if the critics had their way, five people would die.
Sulfur dioxide added to the stratosphere might cool the world for a few years. They're selling offsets though, so they give people permission to add CO₂ which causes the world to warm for hundreds of thousands of years
There's a real problem with that.
I agree that the offsets have exactly the problem that you point out. I think the value (moral value, not financial value) that this company has is that it is setting a precedent for the deliberate release of SO2 as a form of climate engineering. Going from "responsible experts oppose using SO2 but weirdos are talking about it" to "responsible experts oppose using SO2 but weirdos are doing it" takes us one step closer to "responsible experts are seriously working towards using SO2 (or finding that it really is counterproductive as opposed to simply saying that there isn't enough evidence)".
This couple of guys with their balloons got a critical article in the NYT about using SO2, but it's still an article in the NYT about using SO2.
Tropospheric so2 is a problem for reasons beyond warming.
Stratospheric so2 might not be a problem, but geoengineering is always risky.
Plus, since so2 is significantly more reactive than co2, it will be removed from the atmosphere more quickly, meaning that it can only act as a temporary mask without constant maintenance. All-in-all, it’s probably best to see how much damage we are doing early on before we find ourselves in the so2 equivalent of credit card debt and slowly poisoning ourselves to death trying to stay cool.
I haven't finished it yet, but Neal Stephenson's newest book Termination Shock deals with this exact concept, from what i can tell.
It does, but importantly, it's fiction. So it raises some (but not all ) of the relevant issues, but doesn't necessarily present a realistic view of how things will play out.
More would involve some serious spoilers.
Also Snowpiercer.