by Ira Straus
Increased outward reflection of sunlight, or what is called "Solar Radiation Modification" (SRM) and “Solar Geoengineering”, is essential for stopping global warming in the near-to-medium term and heading off the growing damages from it. SRM would in fact give carbon reductions time to
proceed finally on a workable schedule.Carbon
emissions reductions are often misleadingly described in as the only thing that
can be done about the problem. This leads the proposals for reductions to grow often
quite extreme, yet, even then, they remain inherently inadequate as the sole
response to the dangers of warning.
Solar
geoengineering, unlike carbon reductions alone, has a good chance of working to
stop the warming in a short enough span of time. This makes it the precondition
for success with carbon reductions. It would meanwhile reduce the collateral damage
to the economy and society from anti-warming policy.
Carbon
emissions reductions will continue to be needed, alongside SRM, for an enduring
solution. But reductions can help significantly only in a longer term. This is
the case even when they are supplemented by a still longer-term method – carbon
geoengineering, or sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it
underground (CCS) – and studies
indicate inherent limits to CCS. By itself, furthermore, carbon management could
not stop the warming from continuing to worsen for decades – the
sum of the time lapses it will require to get through a series of intervening steps
needed for stopping the warming itself not just the increases in
atmospheric carbon – even if it were able to stop it after that.
This makes SRM
essential for the short-medium term, when it alone could dial back the global thermostat
in real time; and probably for the long term as well.
Warming has
been perpetuated by obstruction of Solar Radiation Management
Dangerously,
there has been obstruction of research, discussion, and planning on SRM. It has
not been sufficiently researched to know how optimally to do it, nor even to be
sure it can be done well and safely.
Research has
been long delayed out of unawareness, and too often actively suppressed out of
ideology. This has led to a bitter cycle of policy failures, one that has:
A.
Added
to the damages to the world from warming.
B.
Added
to the hasty expenses being demanded for an emissions-reductions-only approach.
C.
Led
to increased reactions against what is being done against emissions, instead of
leading to solutions supplementary to that.
We should
not put the matter too finely. On one side, some people believe their society should
pay very heavy costs for overcoming global warming, almost as a form of penance
for the sins of society; they have emphasized both extreme projections and
extremely costly policy responses. On the other side, some people, suspicious
of the first group as sensationalist and not entirely well-intentioned toward their
society, turn to denial of the problem of global warming.
These two extremes
are the voices most often heard. They get trapped in their mutual polemics, at
the expense of considering what is needed.
Can we
break out of the vicious circle in the warming debate?
More and
better research and development on sunlight reflection – SRM – is something
that has come to be urgently needed. It is, in fact, the only thing that could
turn the present global program of carbon reductions into a realistic solution
for global warming. It would do so by supplementing its long-term usefulness
with means also for managing the near-medium term risks.
By failing to
face this reality, Western discussion has landed in a deadly cycle of denials and
unrealisms:
1.
First
move: A “believers” side shows, mostly accurately, a catastrophic climate
danger. It demands increasingly costly measures against the danger, yet
inherently insufficient ones. It refuses on ideological grounds to allow urgent
research on the only measure – SRM – that could potentially render its
preferred anti-carbon method work. Instead it just calls for ratcheting up that
method still higher.
A “skeptics” side rejects this believers’ program as both
extreme and irrelevant, and often denies the danger itself. It often wins
politically, in face of the costs of the believers’ program and its seemingly insuperable
inadequacy.
2.
Second
move: The believers call the skeptics “deniers” and blame them for the problem.
By insisting simply on their policy as what “has to be done”, they blind
themselves to their own denial of what is needed for a realistic and adequate policy.
The skeptics call the believers sensationalists and their
projections a “hoax”. They blind themselves to the basic truth of those
projections, and to the likelihood that the reality is still worse than what
can be projected.
Reason is squeezed out by the symbiotic blind spots on both
sides. A feeling of helplessness grows – justifiably so, given the constriction
of discussion.
3., 4., 5. … Subsequent moves: The
cycle repeats itself, at a ratcheted-up level each time: in worsened
conditions, after sustaining greater damages, with heightened dangers, and with
greater irrationalities on both sides.
We have been
going around this circle for more than half a century. It is a truly vicious
circle. It ensures that the dangers from the warming will continue worsening,
and that the damages will keep rising to ever more catastrophic levels. We need
to break out of it.
The Way
Out
To get out
of the cycle of helplessness, we must enlarge the discussion and start talking
about real solutions, beginning with SRM. Carbon reduction would continue
alongside this. Its continuation would be on a more sustainable schedule, and
with fewer of the oscillations between extreme demands for it and extreme
denials and cancellations of efforts on it.
There have
been sprouts
shooting up of this larger discussion. They give reason for moving the
discussion forward with renewed confidence today.
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