Still, Burns and others argue that the committee is missing some crucial voices, including critics of geoengineering research and representatives from poorer countries. Among other things, it recommends creating a briefing book to explain the issues and inviting people who live near the balloons’ flight path to “participate in deliberative dialogue about the experiment itself as well as governance of solar geoengineering research.” The committee has already issued a report providing suggestions on how the research team should communicate with the public before any flights that release particles. But the board, she says, forces the researchers to articulate what the work is for and to address public concerns. Long stresses that the experiments, as first proposed, are very small scale and unlikely to present health or environmental dangers. “There is no justification for testing and experimenting with technology that seems to be too dangerous to ever be used.” Solar geoengineering “is a technology with the potential for extreme consequences, and stands out as dangerous, unpredictable, and unmanageable,” reads a letter issued by Greenpeace Sweden, Biofuelwatch, and other groups. They argue not that the research itself presents environmental risks but that it creates a “slippery slope toward normalization and deployment” of a perilous and powerful tool. Some environmental groups and geoengineering critics are calling on government officials in Sweden, where the first SCoPEx flight would launch, and the heads of the Swedish Space Corporation, which would manage them, to oppose the experiments. He adds that we can’t know what it will really do at a planetary scale until it’s fully deployed-and at that point, we’ll be stuck with any droughts or other dangers until the effects subside. And future generations could be forced to manage the effects for hundreds of years. The challenges of governing such a tool are immense-a single country could carry out solar geoengineering on its own, but all countries would be affected. Wil Burns, co-director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy at American University, believes there should be an attempt to reach some kind of global consensus about whether society should ever use such a tool before outdoor experiments go ahead.īut for him, the answer is no: The environmental impacts are unknown. ![]() A commercial airliner pumps out similar amounts of material every minute, Keith notes. The basic idea for their so-called SCoPEx experiments, first proposed back in 2014, is to launch a balloon, equipped with propellers and sensors, that would release up to two kilograms of sub-micrometer-size particles in a roughly kilometer-long plume. ![]() So Keutsch and his colleagues argue that their balloon trials are a critical next step. On the other hand, other papers have concluded that the environmental side effects could be small so long as geoengineering is done in a moderate way.īut all the research done to date, with a few small-scale exceptions, has been conducted in computer models or lab experiments. Some studies have found that solar geoengineering could significantly alter rainfall patterns and cut some crop yields in certain places. ![]() To some critics, doing this deliberately as a measure against climate change is reckless even to ponder, let alone experiment with. ![]() The sulfur dioxide emitted from coal plants and ships produces measurable cooling effects as well. Major volcanic eruptions such as Mount Pinatubo in 1991 have spewed millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the air, depressing global temperatures in the years that followed.
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