The right media sphere is lighting up with a wave of doom-porn stories about a touted British test of ‘solar geoengineering’ as a possible means of lowering global temperatures. Well, if nothing else, the right are at last joining hands with the left on climate doomsaying. I guess what unites them – technofear! – is stronger than what divides them.
It looks like the enviro-looney left who tried to stop the Cassini launch on the grounds that it risked poisoning all life on Earth are finding common cause with the looney right who cower in fear every time they see a contrail. I’m sure it’s all Bill Gates’s fault, or something.
So, just what is Britain wanting to do?
The experiments will include solar geoengineering, where particles are injected into the air to deflect some of the sun’s radiation back into space with the goal of reducing Earth’s surface temperature.
Professor Mark Symes, the program director for [the Advanced Research and Invention Agency], said the looming threat of climate change was a strong reason to research the controversial solar geoengineering.
“One of the missing pieces in this debate was physical data from the real world,” Symes told the Telegraph. “Models can only tell us so much.”
Well, OK, I can see how ‘injecting particles into the air’ can sound scary to some. The only thing is, we’ve been doing exactly that for the last 250 years and more. Burning coal releases vast quantities particles into the air, including aerosols like sulphur dioxide – which, as it happens, is the one of the very aerosols the experiment is likely to use.
But the reason sulphur dioxide is a likely candidate for the experiment is that its time in the atmosphere is very short-lived. Typically days. When, for instance, large-scale blackouts, such as the 2003 Northeast blackout in the US, atmospheric sulphur dioxide levels immediately plummet. In 2003, SO2 levels dropped 90 per cent, while ozone concentrations halved.
So whatever ill-effects might result from the experiments would disappear within days.
Symes guaranteed, “Everything we do is going to be safe by design.”
“We have strong requirements around the length of time experiments can run for and their reversibility, and we won’t be funding the release of any toxic substances to the environment,” Symes stressed […]
Dr Sebastian Eastham, a senior lecturer in sustainable aviation at Imperial College London, told the Telegraph, “Every time you fly, sulphur, which is naturally present in jet fuel, is emitted into the lowermost stratosphere, causing a small cooling effect.”
“Similarly, aircraft contrails cause accidental cirrus cloud modification, but in this case accidentally causing, rather than preventing or thinning, cirrus clouds,” Eastham explained. “This points to the fact that it’s theoretically possible [to cool the planet] with current-day technology, but there are many practical questions that would need to be answered before they could be done at scale.”
That isn’t stopping the fearmongering, though.
A study released in December 2024 found that solar geoengineering experiments could cause more pollution and damage the ozone layer, which would cause an increase in mortality from skin cancers.
As I always advise, when the media tell you that a ‘study says…’, you should always run down the study and check for yourself. In this case, big surprise, the media are only telling you a fraction of the story.
In fact, the study in question looked at both the risks and the benefits of such an experiment – and concluded that the risks were a fraction of the potential benefits.
It finds the benefits – in the form of reduced heat-induced mortality – from using solar geoengineering are about 10 times larger than the mortality costs that could come from the additional air pollution and ozone loss potentially caused by solar geoengineering.
“Benefit-cost analyses should not – and ours does not – mechanically determine policy outcomes but should be a crucial input to policy analysis and debate,” says study co-author David Keith, the director of the Climate Systems Engineering initiative at the University of Chicago. “This perspective is particularly relevant to solar geoengineering given its uncertainties, risks, and distributional effects.”
Now, before you start going all Guardian-reader on me and gibber on about the so-called ‘Precautionary Principle’, it’s worth considering that you take risks all the time. A simple drive to the shops entails a significant risk, as traffic injuries and deaths per-kilometre travelled statistics show.
And Cassini, in case you haven’t notice, didn’t turn the Earth into a lifeless rock, nor was it ever going to.
