Accidental Geoengineering

Geoengineering is this fairly controversial idea that you could intentionally change the climate of the planet. Now, that is different from when you accidentally change the climate of the planet, which is the last hundred years.

We do a lot of accidental geoengineering. Like releasing tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and thus decreasing the amount of heat that can radiate back out into space, trapping extra heat in the system.

Or, burning dirty fuels like coal and fuel oil, which releases sulfur dioxide, which temporarily decreases the temperature of the area, because it’s good at seeding clouds. It does that by combining with atmospheric moisture to form droplets of sulfuric acid. Which isn’t perfect, but it’s ok. This also happens when volcanos erupt.

One of the biggest emitters of sulfur dioxide is container ships, which burn the cheapest, dirtiest oil around. They do this so much that you can see these lines of sulfur dioxide clouds from space, they’re called ship tracks.

The UN’s International Maritime Organization passed a rule in 2020 that said these ships need to burn low-sulfur fuels, and over the last few years there have been way fewer ship tracks.

Scientists have found that most the new warming of the North Atlantic’s sea surface since 2020 can be attributed to the missing ship tracks.

So in one way, this is very bad news. Like, it turns out global warming is worse than we thought it was. We were just being shielded from some of its effects by other pollution that we were throwing up into the atmosphere.

But in another way, and I think a bigger way, in the long term, this is good news. Because the experiment we just ran here is priceless.

To have run this experiment intentionally would have been logistically and politically impossible.

Instead we got a perfect experiment showing us the effects of local geoengineering on this area. And the thing is, you don’t have to use sulfur dioxide to seed clouds.

One of the ways is to just shoot sea water up into the air with misters. Most of it will evaporate, and the salt crystals will seed clouds, and eventually fall back down to the ocean where they came from.

Some people say that we can’t seriously consider geoengineering, but in 10-20 years' time we won’t have the choice to ignore it. We simultaneously need to do 3 things:

• Stop pumping new CO2 into the atmosphere
• Extract old CO2 out of the atmosphere
• Deal with the effects of warming that is by now already unavoidable

We are entering into the overlap period. The period during which the problem is big enough that we can’t ignore it anymore, and when we can still do things to solve it.

So a decades-long experiment that proves we’re already doing it, and gives us a promising direction to investigate, is priceless.

Instead of saying, should humanity take this giant step forward and begin geoengineering the planet. What we’re saying is, should we take a giant step forward and do it–instead of accidentally and haphazardly and the most reckless manner possible–do it intentionally and carefully?