Moral hazard or not, I now feel the climate situation is bad enough that we should begin scalability work for stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) immediately.
This is not the same conclusion I would have had even two years ago, but the increase in ocean temperature and extreme climate events indicates a trend that will rapidly get worse unless we are able to take global-scale action within the next 1-5 years, and SAI is the only feasible one.
For those whose initial reaction is opposed, there are a few key things you should be aware of:
- One common fear is that this will be bad for crop yields. I thought this too, but the existing data from volcanic eruptions (which have similar effect) indicated a neutral to positive (!) productivity effect on crops.
- This is not "polluting the air with sulphur." The amount of SO2 needed to significantly induce cooling is on the order of 1% of the SO2 pollution we currently emit, and we would be injecting it into the upper atmosphere. Existing SO2 pollution occurs much lower down, so moving it much higher would likely be better, in terms of health/pollution effects.
- The cessation of sulphur emissions from ships since the 2020 ban on those fuels has given us strong evidence that the prior SO2 emitted by those ships had an (unintended) anti-warming effect on the Atlantic shipping lanes, which is now warming rapidly. While it was also unhealthy pollution, it gives us strong real-world data that this would work at large scale, and we can do it without the harmful pollution side effects by injecting it in the higher atmosphere.
At this point I believe the facts now this conclusion should be relatively uncontroversial if one is practical about looking for solutions.
I am the "tree guy" and in 2020 I would not have supported this, as I felt the world could move quickly to a large-scale reforestation and land restoration effort to make significant progress by 2030. But pandemic, wars, and recession have prevented this (along with good ol' inertia), and warming has accelerated.
Would successful implementation of SAI reduce incentive to move away from fossil fuels? It is a very real risk, yes. In fact, I personally think it is likely.
But the hard brutal reality is that the heating trends right now are very dire, and immediate action to reduce the heating are necessary.
We must begin scaling SAI immediately precisely so that things like reforestation and other carbon capture solutions have time for implementation, which in turn buys time for decarbonization of our economies.
If you want to support this, @MakeSunsets seems to have highest ROI and most scalable method of doing this. You can donate to them or utilize their DIY guide, as SAI can be done in a decentralized way.
Most of the copy on their website talks about it as “cooling power equivalent to trees” which is really scientifically awful if you are STEM-literate, but I talked to them and they do it because (as measured in donation effectiveness), it drives the most action.
They have done the science properly under the hood, so it is just part of the unfortunate reality of climate where you need to speak differently to audiences with different levels of sophistication. One of the things I like about them is that they have very good telemetry and measurement so they can report accurately on what they’re doing.
The advantage of using high-altitude balloons is that they are cheap and scalable to produce, rather than needing to design-build expensive new aircraft to deploy it, which was how SAI was originally conceived.
If you just want to support tree-planting (forest restoration), you can still send money to
terraformation.org. We will direct it to maximally catalytic tree-planting (native biodiverse forest restoration) efforts.
If you wish to invest larger amounts, you can contact us and we can arrange for you to fund any number of projects that we have coming through our forest creation accelerator.
