Geoengineering, Climate Engineering, and Climate Intervention

Also referred to as Solar Radiation Modification (SRM)

SRM techniques attempt to reflect sunlight back into space, and include a range of ideas, from orbiting mirrors, tonnes of sulphates sprayed into the stratosphere, and modifying clouds, plants and ice to make them more reflect more sunlight.

Some climate scientists are now proposing geoengineering interventions in the atmosphere to suppress global warming - most prominently Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI): The idea here is to inject inorganic particles – such as sulphur dioxide – into the stratosphere to block incoming sunlight.

In other schemes, plastic beads and other materials are proposed to cover ice surfaces to prevent them from melting. These schemes to manipulate our ecosystems come with great risks and uncertainties, as well as with foreseeable adverse impacts on our natural ecosystems and human communities depending on them.

The video below presents SAI as a method of Solar Radiation Management and focusses on the risks, negative impacts and potential side-effects of this “solution” for tackling climate change. These include severe implications for international peace and security.

ERM proponents suggest that negative effects of climate change can be offset by allowing heat to escape into space – for example, by cirrus cloud thinning (CCT) or cirrus cloud seeding (CCS).

If the time and place of seeding is selected with care, the climate effect of cirrus thinning can be enhanced. For that, only the long-wave warming effect of cirrus clouds should be targeted, and their solar effect should be avoided. This can be achieved if seeding is limited to high-latitude winters or to nighttime seeding.

Lohmann, Ulrike, and Blaž Gasparini. "A cirrus cloud climate dial?." Science 357.6348 (2017): 248-249. DOI: 10.1126/science.aan3325

These proposals posit that it’s possible to suck carbon out of the atmosphere on a massive scale, using a combination of biological and mechanical methods, from seeding the ocean with iron pellets to create plankton blooms to creating forests of mechanical “artificial trees”.

Some climate scientists are now proposing geoengineering interventions on land to halt global warming - most prominently Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), which combines two controversial technologies: bioenergy and CCS. These schemes to manipulate our ecosystems and global natural processes come with great risks and uncertainties, as well as with foreseeable adverse impacts on land ecosystems and human communities depending on them.

The video below presents BECCS as the posterchild of Carbon Dioxide Removal technologies on land. We focus on the risks, negative impacts and potential side-effects of BECCS, and address some of the real solutions the land sector offers for tackling climate change.

“Hands Off Mother Earth” Manifesto: A Permanent Ban on Geoengineering (2018)

110 civil society organizations and popular movements denounce geoengineering and demand an immediate stop to all open-air experiments. If your organization would like to join the fight against geoengineering and endorse the HOME Manifesto, please send an email.

Solar Geoengineering Non-Use Agreement (2022)

On 17 January 2022, more than 60 senior climate scientists and governance scholars from around the world launched a global initiative calling for an International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering. Hundreds of scholars now support the call for a Non-Use Agreement.

Solar geoengineering deployment cannot be fairly governed globally and poses unacceptable risk if implemented as a future climate policy option.

We call on fellow academics, civil society organizations and concerned individuals to sign our open letter to governments, the United Nations and other actors to stop development and potential use of planetary-scale solar geoengineering technologies.

Robock, Alan. "Stratospheric Sulfur Geoengineering - Benefits and Risks." 21st Conference on Planned and Inadvertent Weather Modification, American Meteorological Society 98th Annual Meeting (2018).

Geoengineering, also called climate engineering, has been proposed to address global warming, involving “solar radiation management (SRM)” by injecting particles into the stratosphere, brightening clouds, or blocking sunlight with satellites between the Sun and Earth. (“Geoengineering” also refers to carbon dioxide reduction, a completely different proposed technology, with different costs and governance. It is not addressed here.) While volcanic eruptions have been suggested as innocuous examples of stratospheric aerosols cooling the planet, the volcano analog actually argues against stratospheric geoengineering because of ozone depletion and regional hydrologic responses. No such systems to conduct stratospheric geoengineering now exist, but a comparison of different proposed stratospheric injection schemes, using airplanes, balloons, and artillery, shows that using airplanes to put sulfur gases into the stratosphere would not be expensive. Nevertheless, it would be very difficult to create stratospheric sulfate particles with a desirable size distribution.

Our Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP), conducting climate model experiments with standard stratospheric aerosol injection scenarios, is ongoing. We have found that if we could counteract increasing greenhouse gases with global insolation reduction we could keep the global average temperature constant, but global average precipitation would reduce, particularly in summer monsoon regions around the world. Temperature changes would also not be uniform. The tropics would cool, but high latitudes would warm, with continuing, but reduced sea ice and ice sheet melting. New experiments with time- and space-varying sulfate injections, or that combine stratospheric SRM with surface brightening, show that it may be possible to control to some extent these regional differences. Temperature extremes would still increase, but not as much as without SRM.

If SRM were halted all at once, there would be rapid temperature and precipitation increases at 5-10 times the rates from gradual global warming. Sudden geoengineering termination would more than double temperature velocities for the land and ocean, and would more than triple temperature velocities in multiple global biodiversity hotspots. These geoengineering-associated velocities exceed even the most optimistic dispersal rate estimates for many species, increasing local extinction risks. Rapid geoengineering implementation and termination would significantly increase the threats to global biodiversity and ecosystems from climate change.

SRM combined with CO2 fertilization would have small impacts on rice production in China, but would increase maize production. New experiments with the Community Earth System Model from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which includes comprehensive tropospheric and stratospheric chemistry, show that SRM using stratospheric aerosols would reduce stratospheric ozone and enhance surface UV-B radiation. The enhanced downward diffuse radiation would increase the surface CO2sink. Surface ozone and tropospheric chemistry would likely be affected by SRM, but the overall effect is strongly dependent on the SRM scheme.

If there were a way to continuously inject SO2 into the lower stratosphere, it would produce global cooling, stopping melting of the ice caps, and increasing the uptake of CO2 by plants. But there are at least 27 reasons why stratospheric geoengineering may be a bad idea. These include disruption of the Asian and African summer monsoons, reducing precipitation to the food supply for billions of people; ozone depletion; no more blue skies; reduction of solar power; and rapid global warming if it stops. Furthermore, there are concerns about commercial or military control, and it may seriously degrade terrestrial astronomy and satellite remote sensing. Global efforts to reduce anthropogenic emissions (mitigation) and to adapt to climate change are a much better way to channel our resources to address anthropogenic global warming.

David Keith admits geoengineering SRM will kill many tens of thousands of people

“This is a really important moral point. So if I made a decision, or if there was a collective decision to do a geoengineering program, and you put say, the kind of program I think makes more sense, you put about a million tons of sulfur per year (in the stratosphere), you might end up killing many tens of thousands of people a year as a direct result of that decision.” …

“Now it’s true as part of doing that, you would hope that overall benefits of human mortality would be so that you would save many more people than that. But, the fact that you would save more people than you kill doesn’t mean there’s no moral impact of making a decision that directly kills people and I think that we who talk about this have a duty to be clear-eyed about the direct risks involved in doing it.

SRM geoengineering: how to deal with the losers?

It is likely that any SRM geoengineering intervention will create winners and losers and some nations may always be against any intervention whatsoever.

Gregory Benford raised the issue of reaching agreement on the global scale and how problematic it would be. If for example the arctic council of nations agreed to initiate a decade-long field trial to cool the arctic by 1 C, how could they deal with complaints from nations who felt that this experiment had induced a negative change in their climate?

In any given year there are floods, droughts, heatwaves, etc. but during this field trial a fraction of these events would be attributed (rightly or wrongly, partially or fully) to the intervention. Two questions arise:

Could it be determined if any changes in the climate (outside of the target area) had occurred as a result of the intervention during a 10 year trial?

How would aggrieved nations or peoples seek reparations for perceived negative impacts (scientifically proven or otherwise)?

best regards, Pete Irvine. PhD student, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol

SOURCE: Ken Caldeira's Geoengineering Group

Double catastrophe: Intermittent stratospheric geoengineering induced by societal collapse

Perceived failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has prompted interest in avoiding the harms of climate change via geoengineering, that is, the intentional manipulation of Earth system processes. Perhaps, the most promising geoengineering technique is stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), which reflects incoming solar radiation, thereby lowering surface temperatures. This paper analyzes a scenario in which SAI brings great harm on its own. The scenario is based on the issue of SAI intermittency, in which aerosol injection is halted, sending temperatures rapidly back toward where they would have been without SAI. The rapid temperature increase could be quite damaging, which in turn creates a strong incentive to avoid intermittency. In the scenario, a catastrophic societal collapse eliminates society's ability to continue SAI, despite the incentive. The collapse could be caused by a pandemic, nuclear war, or other global catastrophe. The ensuing intermittency hits a population that is already vulnerable from the initial collapse, making for a double catastrophe. While the outcomes of the double catastrophe are difficult to predict, plausible worst-case scenarios include human extinction. The decision to implement SAI is found to depend on whether global catastrophe is more likely from double catastrophe or from climate change alone. The SAI double catastrophe scenario also strengthens arguments for greenhouse gas emissions reductions and against SAI, as well as for building communities that could be self-sufficient during global catastrophes. Finally, the paper demonstrates the value of integrative, systems-based global catastrophic risk analysis.

SOURCE: Baum, Seth D., Timothy M. Maher Jr, and Jacob Haqq-Misra. "Double catastrophe: Intermittent stratospheric geoengineering induced by societal collapse." Environment Systems & Decisions 33.1 (2013): 168-180.

Policy-makers will rely on computer models of a simulated geoengineered world to determine risks associated with deploying solar radiation management. Many geoengineering models exist and their results are summed up by the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP). Despite the claimed credulity of these predictive computer models, there will never be a model that can predict the outcome of deploying stratospheric aersol injection due to several facts:

1. Computer models cannot accurately predict the weather seven days from now, but are we to trust simulations of an engineered climate?

2. Computer models do not have enough information to accurately predict risks as described by Alan Robock above: Physical and biological climate system, Human Impacts, Esthetics, Unknows, Governance, or ethical negative impacts.

3. It is necessary to point out that many attempts and experiments to modify the atmospheric processes and weather phenomena have been made in the previous century. However, both geoengineering and weather modification are considered outside the scope of control theory. This gives rise to a number of very important problems, which are currently only formulated in general terms, such as problems related to the validation of the input and output variables, determination of the boundaries of both geoengineering activities and weather modification, statement of climate and weather manipulation goals as well as methods of achieving the objectives.

Check out the following Geoengineering and Weather Modification maps to see where the Climate Changers are experimenting with your weather.

The History of Artificial Clouds: How to Geoengineer a Planet with Jet Fuel

Ionospheric Heaters: How HAARP really works

Cloud Ionization, Electric Rainmaking, and Laser-guided Weather Modification

The History of Cloud Seeding: From Pluviculture to Hurricane Hacking

Geoengineering and Weather Modification Patents

The Blue Gold Rush and Water Wars: Using the Rivers of the Troposphere

Weather Modification Corporations, Universities, and Derivative Traders

US military discusses future of Weather Warfare despite ENMOD ban

Hurricane Hacking: The Department of Homeland Security enters the weather modification business

Geoengineering Programs and Weather Modification Experiments