What is behind the idea of spraying tons of sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere?
The prestigious Time magazine headlined an article: ‘Why Billionaires are Obsessed With Blocking Out the Sun’. Yeah, why?
While some scientists speculate theoretically about counteracting global warming by blocking out the sunlight radiating on the planet, there is already a start-up company – Solar Geo-engineering Make Sunsets – that is carrying out risky experiments to artificially alter the climate.
These attempts to tamper with the atmosphere, referred to as solar geo-engineering, have raised a lot of controversy in the world of climate science due to the potential side effects on the global climate, feasibility issues and the risks of so-called ‘moral hazard’, in essence the concern that the search for a quick fix may distract political will from addressing the underlying problem of emissions.
The scientific rationale behind climate manipulation
A group of 60 scientists wrote an open letter containing catastrophic predictions and suggestions for ‘creative’ solutions.
“Although reducing emissions is critical, no amount of reduction undertaken now can reverse the warming effect of past and present greenhouse gas emissions,” wrote the group, led by Sarah Doherty, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington.
To solve this seemingly unsolvable problem, the group of scientists proposes to block some of the sun’s rays from hitting the Earth. To be precise, these scientists say the proposal should be subjected to ‘rigorous and rapid scientific evaluation’.
The climate balloon start-up
The solar geo-engineering company Make Sunsets, however, has gone ahead and is experimenting with introducing a few grams of sulphur dioxide (SO2) into its helium weather balloons. The sulphur dioxide, once it reaches the upper atmosphere, would be dispersed to create a kind of mirror that bounces solar radiation back into space.
The idea of spraying chemicals into the atmosphere, known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), is an old and controversial idea in climate science. For decades, the consensus was that the idea was not worth serious consideration because the potential side effects – acid rain, damage to the ozone layer, changes in weather patterns with damage to agriculture – could be as bad as the problem it was intended to solve.
A quick solution that does not force changes in lifestyles
At the Munich Security Conference in mid-February, it was not only Ukraine and the war with Russia that were discussed. In fact, financier George Soros took the stage to talk about the risks of climate change and the solution to deal with it: manipulating the clouds over the Arctic to reflect the sun’s energy away from the melting ice caps.
Soros is not the only billionaire advocate of geo-engineering. Bill Gates, for example, sponsored research by Harvard University scientists in 2021 to test the idea of spraying calcium carbonate into the atmosphere in the skies over northern Scandinavia, a project that was later abandoned due to protests from environmentalists.
Jeff Bezos put Amazon’s supercomputers to work to calculate the effects of releasing huge amounts of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere.
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has allocated $900,000 to fund scientists in Mali, Brazil, Thailand and other countries to study the potential effects of solar geo-engineering.
According to Time, some of the billionaires interested in solar geo-engineering are probably looking for a quick fix, one that does not involve fundamental changes in what and how we consume, one that does not stop the extraction of ever-increasing amounts of resources, and one that does not cause slowdowns in the economy that has seen them accumulate wealth in excess of the budgets of many nation states.
Spraying a couple of million tonnes of SO2 into the stratosphere is imagined as a quick fix against climate change, and then continuing to do things basically the same way we have been doing them.
