Outlandish Theories for Reversing Climate Change
In a time when science fiction and reality are blending like your morning green juice, is the possibility of reversing climate change that hard to believe?
Leonardo di Caprio spent the last three years in collaboration with National Geographic to produce his latest film Before the Flood (stream it free until November 7th). In the process, he came to a stark conclusion that our current commitments to combatting climate change aren’t nearly enough.
Leo had the opportunity to speak to President Obama about the COP21 agreement made in Paris, on which he remarked, “I was happy that we put the architecture in place. But the targets that have been set in Paris are nowhere near enough for what the scientists tell us we have to do eventually to solve this problem.”
Some very smart people have pointed out that we can’t just slow down climate change. We need technology to actually reverse it. Let’s begin with why.
CO2 Loves to Linger
The thing that’s easy to overlook in the race towards renewable energy is that once CO2 is released, our atmosphere accommodates it for a century or more. Like millennials that still live at home with their parents, it won’t be paying rent or going anywhere soon.
Unlike millennials, the lingering CO2 that’s already in our atmosphere, not including the CO2 we pump out today, tomorrow, or the next day, poses a threat to the livability of our environment in the not-that-distant future.
The John Wayne of climate scientists, James Hansen, pointed out in his 2008 paper that if CO2 levels in the atmosphere exceed 350 ppm it will lead to warming that we can’t stop (read: without technology). Its presence in our atmosphere alone will have a detrimental snowball effect.
And what did we do? We blew right by it
The solution then is not just renewables. We need to be aiming higher as Google engineers Ross Koningstein and David Fork present in their article What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change.
They suggest we’ll need more than just a jab. Think of it as a one-two punch with competitively priced carbon-free energy and efficient ways to remove carbon that’s already been released.
We’ve talked about capturing and storing carbon. The technology for that is here, but it’s in its early days, and there is much room for improvement.
The bottom line, according to our Googlites, is that both governments and private companies should allocate significantly more R&D resources to new and disruptive technologies. Think 10% instead of 0.1%.
Onto the Outlandish
In addition to capturing carbon, there is another strategy to aid the cooling process. It’s called solar radiation management (SRM). The idea is to limit the amount of energy we absorb from the sun.
Here are the 3 main methods:
1. Marine Cloud Brightening: Clouds provide us with natural reflection and cooling. A fleet of autonomous ships could be built to spray seawater upwards in places where marine clouds commonly form.
2. Stratospheric Sulfate Aerosols: During volcanic eruptions, sulfuric aerosols are released into the atmosphere and result in a cooling effect. Scientists have proposed replicating this natural phenomenon could be a viable way for us to limit sun energy hitting Earth’s surface. Options for delivering sulfuric aerosols into our atmosphere include planes, modified artillery, or specially made hot air balloons, as mocked up in this graphic by Hugh Hunt.
3. Space Sunshade or Lens: Sending a parasol satellite into orbit that could run on the energy of the sun while blocking some of the sun’s energy from hitting Earth.
Back to Now
The future of Earth’s habitability falls on us. The above methods for engineering our climate are not without major risks, and in no way should they ever be mistaken as an alternative for transitioning to renewables and away from fossil fuels.
But the reality is we’re in an extreme situation, and extreme measures are going to be necessary.
If the little piece of glass in your pocket, that’s a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful than the room-sized supercomputers of 50 years ago, is any indication, we’ve got all the reason in the world to be positive and optimistic about what’s possible.
Our job as a community is to encourage and empower scientists, engineers, governments and the private sector to spend more of their resources, especially in R&D, on moonshots.
How do we do that?
We begin by knowing this truth and spreading the good word. Seeing as how broad awareness is going to be key, sharing this post would be a start.
