Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Both Sunlight Reflection and Carbon Reduction -- the only way to head off catastrophic climate risks



by Ira Straus

 

 

Only one thing can plausibly head off the growing dangers from global warming in the near-medium term. It is not carbon reductions, but sunlight reflection, or what is technically called "Solar Radiation Modification" (SRM).

Carbon and emissions reductions are often described as the only answer. The proposals for them often are quite extreme. Yet at the same time they are all inadequate for dealing with the dangers of warning.

SRM is a less extreme solution. And it has a good chance of actually working to get the problem under control.

To be sure, carbon reductions are needed as well as SRM for an enduring solution. But they can help significantly only in the longer term; the warming would continue to worsen for decades, even if we could somehow reduce emissions to zero. SRM is essential for the short-medium term: it alone could reduce the global temperature in real time.

 

Warming is perpetuated by policy planning obstruction

At the same time, there has been a dangerous obstruction on the policy discussion and planning level. SRM has not been sufficiently researched to know how to do it well and safely -- or even to be entirely sure it can be done well and safely.

The necessary research has been long delayed, sometimes actively suppressed, by those who dislike it, or fear it as a competition to their own preferred program. It is a bitter situation: entrenched interests have often preferred to add to the damages to the world from warming than to solve the problem, if solving it would mean amending their belief systems and programs, and – what is sometimes even more resented – potentially reducing the costs spent on those programs.

More and better research and development on SRM is something that has come to be urgently needed. It is, in fact, the only thing that could turn the program of carbon reductions into a relevant and realistic solution for global warming, by supplementing its long-term usefulness with means also for managing the near-medium term risks.

 

Can we break out of the vicious circle in the warming debate?

Too much of our discussion refuses to face this reality. It ends up in a deadly cycle of symbiotic denials – and an escalating cycle of unrealism:

 

1. First, a “believers” side shows, mostly accurately, a catastrophic climate danger.

2. It demands increasingly costly measures against the danger, yet inherently insufficient ones.

3. It avoids adding, and usually avoids even mentioning, the only measures -- basically SRM -- that could potentially enable us to prevent the catastrophe.

4. Instead it calls for ratcheting up the old, inherently insufficient measures still higher; still without getting even close to adequacy for managing the problem.

5. Others – the “skeptics” -- reject this believers’ program as both extreme and irrelevant; and often deny the danger itself. They often win politically, in face of the costs and seeming inefficacy of the believers’ program.

6. The believers call the skeptics “deniers” and blame them for the problem, without facing their own, symbiotic denial of what is needed for policy realism and even for basic adequacy for tackling the problem.

7. Reason is squeezed out by the symbiotic blindnesses on both sides.

8. The feeling of helplessness grows. Given the constriction of the debate to a framework that rules out any solution, it makes sense to be left feeling helpless. It is the only logical point in this cycle.

9. The cycle repeats itself, but at a ratcheted-up level: in worsened conditions, with heightened dangers, nearer dangers, more damages already endured, greater irrationalities on both sides -- and the discussion focused on costlier yet still inherently inadequate policies.

 

It is truly a vicious circle. It ensures that the dangers from the warming will continue worsening. We need to break out of it.

To get out of the cycle of helplessness, we must enlarge the discussion and start talking about real solutions, beginning with SRM.

Fortunately there are new sprouts shooting up for this larger discussion. A few of them are more significantly placed in the public square than in the past. I link one here, to which my own feeble efforts contributed. It shows that, no matter what the seeming odds, the effort is worth making.

The bulk of the discussion is still, to be sure, trapped in the vicious circle. But a growing part is not.

This is a reason for hope. And a reason for proceeding with greater confidence in moving the larger discussion forward.


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