Solving the Climate Trilemma — What Most People Don’t Know About Climate Science

Current policies only address part of the problem

Tom Hafer

It’s going to get hotter for the rest of your life. This will happen regardless of how many windmills or electric vehicles we buy. Why is this? Weren’t we told that ending fossil fuel use would take care of the problem? This is widely misunderstood. To see why, we will use an analogy.

Imagine that you are in a locked room with very high walls. In these walls there are a number of pipe outlets that are dripping out water. There is a small drain in the floor, so initially no water accumulates, as shown in figure 1.

Then the flow of water from some of the pipes begins to increase and water starts to accumulate in the room. The flow keeps increasing and the water rises. You panic and try to stop up the pipes but even as you reduce the flow from one, others pour out more, as shown in figure 2.

Soon the water is far over your head and you have to swim, as shown in figure 3. You can do this for a while but eventually you will become fatigued and will drown. What must you do?

There are three things you must do. You must reduce the flow from all the pipes. You must increase the size of the drain such that more water goes out than comes in. And perhaps most important, you need something to float on while the water recedes. This is the trilemma that must be addressed.

In this analogy, the water flowing from the pipes is like the greenhouse gasses, principally carbon dioxide (CO2), that are being emitted in ever-greater quantities. Each pipe is the output from a nation. Initially there was a natural balance: the CO2 produced from forest fires and respiration was balanced out by absorption by plants and trees. But as industrialization began, mankind started burning fossil fuels and more CO2 (water in the analogy) was produced. Soon this began to overwhelm the ability of plants and trees to process it. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere is like adding blankets to a bed; until you stop adding blankets it will continue to get hotter.

CO2 is now being emitted in huge volumes — roughly 36 billion tons every year, and rising. The US is no longer the biggest emitter, having been far surpassed by China. Other large contributors are the EU, India, and Russia. The US and EU are slowly bringing their emissions down. But China, Russia, India, and the rest of the world are vastly overwhelming our emission reductions. To effect a long-term solution, all these emissions must be greatly reduced. In our analogy, this is like stopping up all the pipes. But most nations are still increasing their emissions. Unfortunately this will continue for decades regardless of how many “green” initiatives we undertake in the US.

The “drain” is CO2 removal from the atmosphere. This can take various forms including reforestation and other biological approaches, but these are extremely slow (centuries) and prone to mishaps such as forest fires. A faster approach is Direct Air Capture, in which air is ingested into large structures that use a chemical process to remove the CO2, which is then stored underground or used in a product such as concrete. This is being attempted at various facilities now, but the scale is nowhere near what is needed and the expense is high. As of 2022, roughly 8,000 tons of CO2 were removed at various facilities. A one million ton plant is supposed to begin operating in the American Southwest in 2024. But it would take nearly 40,000 of these plants to simply balance out the CO2 emissions expected each year, much less reduce the overall amount. So CO2 levels will climb for decades and temperatures will rise along with that. Nevertheless we must initiate a process for doing this or the CO2 levels will never go down.

In the meantime we need a means of “staying afloat”, i.e. temporarily reducing temperature, for several decades if we are to avoid the ever-greater impacts of global warming. How do we do this? There is one known approach: global shading. This can take various forms and derives from the well-known effects of major volcanic eruptions. These can throw ash and sulfur dioxide particles into the stratosphere and result in a small reduction in the amount of sunlight reaching the earth. But the earth is very sensitive to small changes in sunlight. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 resulted in global temperature reductions of about half a degree for the next year or two. And the much larger 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora resulted in “the year without a summer”, including snow in Virginia on the 4th of July 1816.

Scientists have looked at simulating volcanic effects by injecting massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. But this has serious environmental effects and is likely a non-starter. There is also an experiment currently on-going to spray massive amounts of seawater into the clouds in an attempt to whiten them and cause higher reflectance of sunlight back into space. But this raises the likelihood of salty rain, which would be disastrous to agriculture. So this is probably a non-starter also.

The New York Times recently published an article on a NASA concept to build a giant solar shield. The shield would be located nearly a million miles in space and would be massive: roughly the size of Argentina. It would block enough sunlight to reverse the current level of global warming. But it would be extremely expensive and since future global warming is unknown, it is difficult to determine exactly how large it should be and whether it would need to grow to account for future warming.

However, there is a more down-to-earth way of accomplishing the same thing in a more flexible manner. Using a large array of large balloons in the stratosphere to provide shade could have the same effect. These could be deployed in a belt near the equator to accomplish much the same effect as the solar shield but with much quicker deployment and probably at far lower expense.

Unfortunately, all these approaches have one irredeemable flaw: they would require virtually unanimous consent of all the nations on earth. Given the current international political environment this seems unlikely. Is the situation hopeless?

Not necessarily. A Google X effort called Project Loon demonstrated the ability to navigate and hover high-altitude balloons over a spot on the earth. So an array of balloons could be hovered over the US Southwest that would reduce temperature within parts of the US and would require no international agreements. An array of about 3–4 balloons per square mile, each about 100 meters in diameter would reduce temperatures in the Southwest by 1–2 degrees and, as the cooler air travelled eastward, would provide some benefit to the rest of the nation.

These balloons would be so high that you would barely notice them, and they would be well above aviation altitudes. They would act like a thermostat: if you want it cooler, add more balloons. They would be recoverable and environmentally benign. And if they were successful in the US, other nations might follow suit; until eventually an international agreement could result.

Currently the world is investing trillions of dollars on efforts to reduce CO2 output. This is akin to stopping up the pipes in our analogy. This is good, but it will help your grandchildren, not you. We cannot stop them up fast enough to prevent the water from getting way over our heads. This means that temperature will continue to go up, and the effects coming from that such as floods, droughts, and hurricanes will increase. Emission reductions alone, i.e. buying windmills and electric vehicles, cannot reduce global warming no matter how many we buy because they do not reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

We are investing almost nothing in the other two thirds of the solution. We need to increase the size of the drain through Direct Air Capture such that the “water level” i.e. the total CO2, will eventually go down. But this will take decades at best. In the meantime we need a “life raft”, i.e. a way of cooling off in the near term if we are to avoid the adverse consequences of global warming during the next several decades. Balloon arrays may seem unorthodox but at least they are environmentally and politically realistic, and the physics is sound. What other choice do we have? We should do the research and development to determine their cost and effectiveness so that we can deploy them rapidly if needed. This would provide immediate relief for American taxpayers and help sustain the momentum toward reducing global warming.