Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

If the SAILs flew for a few decades and then, for whatever reason—a war, a pandemic, unhappiness with the results—they stopped, the effect would be like opening a globe-sized oven door. All the warming that had been masked would suddenly manifest itself in a rapid and dramatic temperature run-up, a phenomenon that’s become known as “termination shock.”

Alan Robock

http://people.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock/

Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project, or GeoMIP.

https://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/GeoMIP/publications.html

Robock maintains a list of concerns about geoengineering; the latest version has more than two dozen entries. Number 1 is the possibility that it could disrupt rainfall patterns, causing “drought in Africa and Asia.” Number 9 is “less solar electricity generation,” and number 17 is “whiter skies.” Number 24 is “conflicts between countries.” Number 28 is “do humans have the right to do this?”

So far, Harvard’s geoengineering research program is the world’s best-financed, with funding of almost $20 million.

Dan Schrag is the director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment and a MacArthur “genius” grant winner. He helped set up Harvard’s geoengineering program and sits on its advisory board. “Some have expressed consternation at the prospect of engineering the climate for the entire planet,” he has written. “Ironically, such engineering efforts may be the best chance for survival for most of the earth’s natural ecosystems—although perhaps they should no longer be called natural if such engineering systems are ever deployed.”

“But I see a lot of pressure from my colleagues to have a happy ending. People want hope. And I’m like, ‘You know what? I’m a scientist. My job is not to tell people the good news. My job is to describe the world as accurately as possible.’

If we stop CO2 emissions tomorrow, which, of course, is impossible, it’s still going to warm at least for centuries, because the ocean hasn’t equilibrated.

it could easily be another seventy percent beyond what we’ve experienced. So in that sense, we’re already at 2°C. We’re going to be lucky to stop at 4°C. That’s not optimistic or pessimistic. I think that’s objective reality.”

7.2° F—is not just well beyond the official threshold of disaster, it’s heading into territory that’s probably...

“People have to get their heads away from thinking about whether they like solar geoengineering or not,

we don’t get to decide. The United States doesn’t get to decide. You’re a world leader and there’s a technology that could take the pain and suffering away, or take some of it away. You’ve got to be really tempted. I’m not saying they’ll do it tomorrow. I feel like we might have thirty years. The highest priority for scientists is to figure out all the different ways this could go wrong.”

The reason we’re thinking about it is because the real world has dealt us a shitty hand.”

During that time, there wasn’t much for the pair to do except watch their computers, which sat on little heating pads, and listen to ABBA. “The word ‘stuck’ is not in our vocabulary,” the Icelander told me, with a nervous laugh.

struck, I don't get it.

Dansgaard’s analysis of the core suggested that in the midst of the last ice age, the climate of Greenland was so variable it could hardly be called a climate. Average temperatures on the ice sheet had, it appeared, shot up by as much as 8°C—more than 14°F—in fifty years. Then they had dropped again, almost as abruptly. This had happened not just once but many times.

Dansgaard–Oeschger events. There are twenty-five such D–O events recorded in the Greenland ice.

Over the last hundred and ten thousand years, the only period as stable as our own is our own.

“The current Arctic is experiencing rates of warming comparable to abrupt changes, or D–O events, recorded in Greenland ice cores,” a team of Danish and Norwegian scientists recently reported.

To combat rising sea levels and the more deadly storm surges that they bring, the Army Corps of Engineers has proposed building a series of artificial islands in New York Harbor. These would be connected by six miles of huge retractable gates. An early cost estimate for the project ran to more than $100 billion.

This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.

they were enthusiastic about their work. But, as a rule, this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt.

No one in his right mind would undergo chemotherapy were better options available. “We live in a world,” he has said, “where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.”

you have to imagine not only that the technology will work according to plan but also that it will be deployed according to plan. And that’s a lot of imagining. As Keutsch, Keith, and Schrag all pointed out to me, scientists can only make recommendations; implementation is a political decision.