Geoengineering (Wrong 2)

A case study in fallibilism

Because of my book Termination Shock I am occasionally contacted by journalists writing stories about the idea of geoengineering—specifically Solar Radiation Management (SRM), a proposed way of temporarily cooling down the earth by putting aerosols into the stratosphere. These will reflect a small fraction of the sun’s light back into space before it can warm things up down here.

In general I have been declining such opportunities because I feel that I said as much as I have to say on the topic in the novel, which gave me enough breathing room to discuss SRM’s pros and cons, its risks and uncertainties, and the way that people would likely respond to it politically.

This recent article on the subject came out in the New York Times not long after I’d published a piece about fallibilism here on this Substack. Consequently I read it in a fallibilist frame of mind. The article itself, the mindset of the scientists featured in it, and most of the reader notes all make for a case study that I thought might be interesting to people who read my above-linked fallibilism piece.

Context

Charles Sanders Peirce advocated the Method of Scientific Investigation as the best way of fixing belief.

In many realms of politics and society, scientific investigation frankly isn’t that useful. In this case, however, we have a lot of hard data to work with. Atmospheric CO2 levels over time are plotted on this page. I’ll screenshot the plot here in case the link goes bad:

Right now the level is higher than it has been in a million years and still climbing fast. The last time it was this high the earth had a completely different (much hotter) climate. But it got to that level gradually, so that plants and animals had a long time to adapt to the warming of their environment.

The above plot compresses the Industrial Revolution into a vertical spike. This is effective for showing the suddenness of the change, but it hides the details.

Another plot on the same site zooms in on the last couple of hundred years, spreading the spike out into a more legible plot. The blue line is the actual CO2 level in PPM and the gray line is how much CO2 was emitted by humans:

So regardless of what other opinions you might have about climate change, geoengineering and so on, I don’t think there’s any denying that CO2 levels have suddenly become extremely high by the standards of the last million years and that this is the result of human activity. 275 ppm seems to have been a normal pre-Industrial Revolution value. At the time I was born, the number was something like 320, an increase of 45 ppm since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and today it’s about 424, a further increase of 104 ppm just during the time I’ve been alive.

To repeat: from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution until I was born, the increase was 45 ppm. During my lifetime, the increase has been 104 ppm.

It’s going up by about 3 ppm per year, and the rate at which it’s going up is increasing rather than decreasing, in spite of various efforts supposedly being made to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. Not only is the CO2 level continuing to increase year to year, but the rate at which it increases is also increasing.

Natural processes remove CO2 from the air very slowly and so it will take hundreds of thousands of years for the number to drop back to pre-Industrial Revolution levels unless we take direct action to capture the gas back from the atmosphere.

This is bad for all kinds of reasons, but by far the most dangerous is the possibility of future “wet bulb events” in which the combined heat and humidity rise to a level that will automatically kill humans who are not in air conditioned spaces.

In such an event, it doesn’t matter if you’re young and healthy. It doesn’t matter if you are using every possible “beat the heat” strategy such as lying down in the shade with fans blowing on you while drinking plenty of water. You will die of heatstroke anyway because physics dictates that the same thermodynamic processes that keep you alive will poach your brain.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future opens with a very well researched and written fictional account of such an event taking place in the near future. If you lose your AC under such conditions you will die. If it happens in places with stable power grids and ubiquitous air conditioning the death toll will be limited, but once the power goes out it becomes a mass fatality event on the level of the bubonic plague, in the sense that, in the affected area, the majority of all humans (and many animals) will die¹. If this happens in a heavily populated area the death toll could reach into the millions.

I was in Seattle during the unprecedented summer 2021 heat dome, which out of nowhere spiked temperatures as high as 108 F (42 C) and killed 1400 people in the US and Canada. Here’s a day-by-day account of how it played out in Seattle. My place didn’t have central AC at the time and so I ended up camping out for three days in a bedroom with a window air conditioning unit. If we had lost power, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything except lie down, drink water, and wait for it to be over. Others who weren’t so lucky were found dead in their homes later. So what I’m about to write here should be understood in the light of the fact that I think we’ll begin seeing mass fatality wet bulb events within a decade. Of course, as a fallibilist, I’m mindful that I might be wrong about this. I’d certainly like to be wrong.

History has taught us that when sulfur dioxide (SO2) is injected into the stratosphere by major volcanic eruptions, global temperatures go down for a couple of years until the SO2 naturally falls out of the atmosphere and things return to normal. This is a natural scientific experiment that has been repeated many times throughout recorded history, but only since the Pinatubo eruption in 1991 have we been in a position to capture data and make sense of it.

This has given rise to the obvious thought that by duplicating artificially what volcanoes do naturally, we could cool the earth down. Hence SRM, which has come in for a certain amount of discussion but very little actual implementation. The only entity I’m aware of that’s doing anything at all is Making Sunsets. So far their activities are on a very small scale. Efforts to conduct even the most preliminary research studies on this topic have tended to get shut down by people who are good at using the levers of politics and social media to stop people from doing things. A case in point is the work of David Keith, which was covered in an earlier New York Times article.

Parenthetically, but important to my theme here, I’ll mention that this is the first thing you’ll see if you click on that David Keith article:

So, “spray a pollutant”…

“Pollutant” is technically correct. Anything that humans put into the air, water, or soil could be so classified. The pollutant in this case is sulfur dioxide. Volcanoes naturally release 63,000 tons of it into the atmosphere every day, or 23 million tons per year. Humans put an additional 70 million tons into the atmosphere every year by burning fossil fuels. Wildfires are another significant source of naturally occurring SO2 emissions.

For purposes of solar radiation management, the only difference is that the SO2 would be injected at higher altitudes. From there it would gradually make its way down into the lower amosphere unless it were being continually replenished. Pinatubo released about 17 million tons into the stratosphere over a short period of time, and had a marked effect on global climate. Any SRM program that purported to be serious about mitigating global warming would have to operate at a level of a few million tons of SO2 per year, or a few percent of what is already coming from volcanoes, fossil fuels, and wildfires.

“Spray” is another technically correct term that is nonetheless obviously pejorative. “Spray a pollutant into the sky” could be replaced with “inject precisely controlled quantities of a ubiquitous natural substance into the stratosphere” with no loss of accuracy.

But I would argue that any mention of this that doesn’t compare it with the incredible spike in CO2 levels is burying the lede. So my preferred formulation would be “CO2 levels are higher than they’ve been in a million years and still climbing fast. As a result millions of people, mostly poor people in the Global South, are going to die. David Keith wants to study the idea of injecting precisely controlled quantities of a ubiquitous natural substance into the stratosphere in the hopes that it might save lives.”

Just to lay my cards on the table, I think that SRM should be investigated and possibly even implemented. But I don’t think it is likely to be, because people on the right and left both hate it. People on the right lump it in with chemtrails, and hate it for the same reasons (if that is the correct word) they now have now decided that the polio vaccine is bad. People on the left hate it because…well, I’ll get to that in a second. So I don’t think it will happen unless a Trumpian figure comes out in favor of it and pitches it to the populist base in a style that will make those people think it’s awesome.

In other words, I think that this is largely an abstract debate that is more interesting as a case study in fallibilism than it is on its own merits.

The NYT Article

The article describes how some exceptionally smart and technically capable people are using their ingenuity and energy (and presumably taxpayer money) to set up a detection system that will enable them to blow the whistle on anyone who actually tries to implement SRM. This is because “[SRM] could also unleash untold dangers. Many worry that solar geoengineering could have unintended consequences.”

I’m not going to pore over the article in detail because I try to keep these Substack entries reasonably short. But if we take it at face value, it seems that everyone mentioned in this story, as well as the journalist writing it, simply accepts the premise that even the smallest and most preliminary efforts that might be made towards studying SRM are so unthinkably reckless that the most important thing that they can possibly be devoting their careers to is creating sophisticated systems “to measure aerosol concentration and raise a red flag at any anomalies.”

For context, it’s worth mentioning that very few engineering projects could be more blatantly obvious, more easily detected from a distance—even with the naked eye—than SRM at scale. The most common proposed method would involve the use of a whole fleet of special airplanes. But as the article itself states, “There are only a handful of aircraft that can reach the stratosphere. One model is the WB-57, three of which are housed at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.”

In order to put enough SO2 into the stratosphere to make any difference to the climate, it would be necessary to create a huge fleet of such aircraft. The scenario is well described in Chapter 1 of Oliver Morton’s The Planet Remade. They’d have to be specially designed, since these things aren’t exactly rolling off of production lines at the moment, and the ones that do exist aren’t configured as tankers (the WB-57 carries 4 tons of payload, so in order to carry a million tons of SO2 to the stratosphere over the course of one year—only one seventeenth of a Pinatubo—250,000 flights would be necessary, or about 700 flights per day; these planes would have to take off every 30 seconds around the clock).

Entire new manufacturing facilities would have to be established in order to build that fleet. Thousands of people would work in them. Once built, the planes would be in continuous operation, taking off laden with SO2, flying around in the stratosphere in a manner that couldn’t be more obvious, and that would be easily detected by radar, satellites, and people standing in the flight path simply looking up. Takeoff and landing would occur at airfields that would have to be equipped with facilities for loading them with sulfur dioxide.

Other methods to implement SRM have been proposed, such as using huge systems of balloons or firing enormous guns into the air. The only thing they have in common is that they are almost comically enormous. They have to be, since what they are trying to do is to replicated in a controlled manner some of the largest volcanic explosions in history.

What then is the purpose of putting all of this ingenuity to work building these exquisitely sophisticated systems for detecting faint traces of aerosols in the stratosphere? The only explanation that makes any sense is that the goal is to sense even the tiniest and most preliminary exploratory efforts in the field of SRM. Experiments, basically. Programs that are, by definition, too small to actually change the climate. If someone were changing the climate, we’d know about it. We wouldn’t need high altitude balloons or WB-57s. We could just aim a webcam at the special airport where hundreds of weird planes were taking off every day.

And it’s worth reiterating—because the level of anxiety about SRM is so high—that the purpose of those weird planes would not be to drop bombs, spray nerve gas, or strafe peasants, but to ameliorate, temporarily and reversibly, the effects of a completely uncontrolled and incredibly reckless geoengineering experiment that the human race has been engaging in for 200 years, and will continue to engage in for at least another 50 years, by dumping vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere and the oceans.

A charge often levelled against environmentalists by the right is that tree-huggers are in some sense anti-technological and by extension anti-human. That they are in love with the idea of an unspoiled natural order and that anything humans do to change it is automatically bad.

But that doesn’t explain this curiously asymmetrical reaction to, on the one hand, the very idea that some people might engage in preliminary studies of techniques intended to save humanity from the consequences of too much anthropogenic CO2 in the air, vs., on the other hand, the ongoing reality of what we are actually doing when we burn fossil fuels. I don’t understand how people who think this way are going to explain such positions when a million people are lying dead of heatstroke somewhere. The only way I can process it is to construe it as a kind of religious belief—an article of faith.

The fallibilist take

Peirce has an explanation. Obviously, writing as he did in the 1870s, he didn’t have terminology like “social media bubble,” but TL;DR that’s where this is going to end up.

A fallibilist asks “what if I’m wrong?”

The hard scientific data are as clear as they can be: crazy amounts of CO2 in the air, rising temperatures, and the simple fact that people die when it’s too hot. These facts are unlikely to be wrong.

Beyond that, however, we get into just the kinds of topics that Peirce describes as belonging to the “a priori method,” in which people engage in what they suppose is reasoned debate and try to arrive at sensible conclusions. Which is a pretty exact description of a lot of the discourse that happens on social media, and in academic and institutional settings, among generally well-informed, sincere people.

As Peirce states, “This method is far more intellectual and respectable from the point of view of reason…. But its failure has been the most manifest…the very essence of [the A Priori Method] is to think as one is inclined to think.”

In other words, as soon as you move beyond hard data and facts that can be rigorously verified, you are entering into a realm where you, and like-minded people around you, can talk yourselves into believing almost anything you like to believe. And precisely because you’ve arrived at those conclusions by spelling out what seems like a rational argument, and because you’re surrounded by trustworthy-seeming people nodding their heads and signalling agreement, you feel confident that you’ve fixed beliefs solid enough to act on. It’s a human failing that Peirce identified as long ago as the 1870s, but I think that social media amplifies it.

People mentioned in this article, as well as (I suspect) the journalist who wrote it, many people who work at the New York Times, and almost everyone who chimed in on the comment thread, all seem absolutely certain that even doing research on SRM is literally unthinkable—not in the sense that one can’t think about it but in the sense that one should never think about it.

As I already mentioned, that’s a position that makes no sense to me at all. But I don’t have to understand it. I just have to note that it exists. My next question would be, what if this position is wrong?

In that case, we’ve unilaterally disarmed ourselves in the face of a threat that could end up being more dangerous than any military invasion.

If I’m wrong, then, somewhere along the line, I think we’ll say “oh, SRM isn’t a good way to do this, so let’s not design, build, and fly that huge fleet of special airplanes.” In other words, I am, to some degree, trusting our civilization not to just do incredibly stupid shit.

Some might see that as naive. But implementing SRM is about the most technocratic, engineering-heavy project you can possibly imagine, and I actually do have some confidence in the ability and willingness of engineers to proceed adaptively and carry out such a program in a way that addresses many of the objections and fears of its detractors.

1. The bubonic plague analogy might even understate the severity of such an event, in that we have medicines that can defeat the plague bacterium. In a plague outbreak it would be possible to send medical teams, rendered safe from infection by antibiotics and protective gear, into an affected area to administer lifesaving care. However, in a wet bulb event, there is no medical treatment that can save afflicted persons short of dunking them in cold water, and the medical teams would be just as vulnerable to the effects of the heat as anyone else.