Climate Change Geoengineering: The Threats By Brian Simpson
With climate change alarmist still a dominant ideology of the ruling elites, enter geoengineering: Humanity's "Plan B" to hack the planet. From spraying saltwater off Australia's Great Barrier Reef to dumping alkaline chemicals near Martha's Vineyard, scientists are testing ways to cool Earth artificially, brightening clouds, reflecting sunlight, alkalising oceans. The Associated Press spotlights three U.S.-backed trials, framing them as urgent stopgaps while emissions cuts lag. Proponents say it's not a fix-all, just a bridge to net-zero. But hold up: This isn't tinkering; it's terraforming. Once taboo for fears of Frankenstein fallout, these experiments are now taxpayer-funded realities. Today, let's cut the hype and outline the major threats, environmental, geopolitical, ethical, and beyond. Backed by fresh research, the risks scream caution: We might solve one crisis only to unleash a dozen more.
Geoengineering splits into two camps: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) like ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE), which sucks CO2 into seawater, and Solar Radiation Management (SRM) like marine cloud brightening (MCB) or stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), which bounces sunlight back to space. Sounds clever? Models show SRM could slash warming by 1°C, mimicking volcanic chills like Pinatubo's 1991 cooldown. But as Cornell's Daniele Visioni warns, we're past "yes or no," it's informed vs. blind meddling. The White House's 2023 guidelines nod to ozone holes and crop hits, while UN delegates in Nairobi debate SRM's double-edged sword. Trillions in costs, international treaties needed, yet rogue actors like Mexico's 2023 sulphur balloon ban hint at Wild West vibes. Here's the peril unpacked.
Threat 1: Environmental Wildcards – Unintended Ecological Dominoes
Geoengineering treats Earth like a lab rat, but nature bites back. SRM mimics volcanoes but ignores CO2's acid bath on oceans; stop the spray, and "termination shock" slams temperatures up 1-2°C overnight, worse than gradual warming. CDR sounds safer, but ocean tweaks could poison the blue planet that feeds billions.
SRM's Climate Roulette: SAI (injecting sulphates high up) risks stratospheric ozone depletion, hiking UV radiation and skin cancers. Models predict 5-10% global precipitation drops, turning breadbaskets like the Sahel into dustbowls or flooding Asian monsoons. MCB (salt sprays for whiter clouds) alters storm tracks — a 2024 EGU study warns regional brightening off California's coast could spike European heat by 0.5°C in a 2050 scenario. Cirrus thinning? It might trap more heat ironically.
Marine Mayhem from CDR: OAE (dumping sodium hydroxide) aims to neutralise ocean acid, absorbing 20 tons of CO2 per 6,000-gallon pour. But WHOI's trials gloss over toxicity: Alkaline spikes could kill plankton, crashing food webs and fish stocks. A Carnegie report flags metal oxide build-up harming shellfish and shifting phytoplankton blooms, starving whales. Ocean fertilisation (iron dumps for algae) risks hypoxic "dead zones" and toxic HABs, as seen in failed 2000s trials. Overall, marine geoengineering could cover 10% of oceans in experiments, per CIEL, eroding biodiversity we can't afford to lose.
These aren't hypotheticals, Pinatubo's ash cooled Earth but acid-rained crops. Scale up, and we're gambling with tipping points like Amazon dieback.
Threat 2: Geopolitical Powder Keg – Who Controls the Thermostat?
Who decides when to spray? SRM's "global umbrella" ignores borders: A U.S. test cools Kansas but scorches Kenyan farms. Without treaties, it's unilateral roulette, China or Russia could deploy SAI amid Taiwan tensions, sparking "climate wars." The 2025 UNEA resolution in Nairobi pushes SRM risk assessments, but enforcement? Zilch. Yale's Jessica Seddon calls for "extraordinary bravery" in trials, yet Mexico's geo-ban shows backlash brewing. Developing nations, least culpable for emissions, face veto-less veto power, echoing colonial vibes where Global North "saves" the South at their expense.
Private players amp the chaos: Israel's Stardust (proprietary particles at $15M funding) eyes 60,000-ft releases without full disclosure. Rogue start-ups like Make Sunsets' unauthorized Mexican balloons? A preview of non-state actors hacking the heavens. Carnegie warns of "planetary security" threats: Escalation if one nation's "cooling" another's rains, or arms races in aerosol tech.
Threat 3: Ethical and Moral Minefield – Delaying the Real Fight
"It's an excuse for inaction," thunders Denmark's Dan Jørgensen. Geoengineering distracts from emissions cuts, why curb coal when we can cloud-whiten? A 2021 NAS report urges caution, fearing moral hazard: Politicians tout SRM as a silver bullet, stalling renewables. Ethically, it's hubris: Who consents to chemtrails over indigenous lands? OxJournal highlights equity gaps, poor nations bear risks without benefits, violating "common but differentiated responsibilities" in Paris Accords.
Worse, "lock-in" effects: Trillions invested in spray fleets make reversal politically toxic, even as side effects mount. Visioni at Cornell: Uninformed deployment is reckless. And equity? SRM cools temps but not ocean acidification, corals still bleach.
Threat 4: Technological and Economic Black Swans
Delivery's a beast: SAI needs fleets of high-altitude planes (annual costs: $2-10B), vulnerable to hacks or storms. MCB's salt sprayers? Corrosion nightmares and wind-dependent. OAE mining for alkalines emits more CO2 than it traps, per Friends of the Earth; logistics alone could guzzle 10% of global shipping. Uncertainties abound: 2024 Scripps models show MCB's efficacy drops 30% in warmer futures. And backlash? Protests shut UK's SPICE project in 2012; expect eco-saboteurs targeting barges.
Economically, it's a trillion-dollar gamble with uneven ROI, cooling benefits skewed to polluters, costs dumped on the vulnerable.
Final Verdict: Proceed with Perilous Prudence
Geoengineering's siren song: Australia's Reef trials, Israel's particle puffs, WHOI's ocean Tums: They're probing edges, answering if sprays stick or scatter. But threats loom large: Ecological cascades, geopolitical tinderboxes, ethical evasions, tech flops.
The smart path? Reject climate change alarmism and zero net, before some real environmental damage is done.
Dumping chemicals in the ocean? Spraying saltwater into clouds? Injecting reflective particles into the sky? Scientists are resorting to once unthinkable techniques to cool the planet because global efforts to check greenhouse gas emissions are failing.
These geoengineering approaches were once considered taboo by scientists and regulators who feared that tinkering with the environment could have unintended consequences, but now researchers are receiving taxpayer funds and private investments to get out of the lab and test these methods outdoors.
The shift reflects growing concern that efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions aren't moving fast enough to prevent the destructive effects of heat waves, storms and floods made worse by climate change. Geoengineering isn't a substitute for reducing emissions, according to scientists and business leaders involved in the projects. Rather, it is a way to slow climate warming in the next few years while buying time to switch to a carbon-free economy in the longer term.
Three field experiments are under way in the U.S. and overseas.
This month, researchers aboard a ship off the northeastern coast of Australia near the Whitsunday Islands are spraying a briny mixture through high-pressure nozzles into the air in an attempt to brighten low-altitude clouds that form over the ocean. Scientists hope bigger, brighter clouds will reflect sunlight away from the Earth, shade the ocean surface and cool the waters around the Great Barrier Reef, where warming ocean temperatures have contributed to massive coral die-offs.
The research project, known as marine cloud brightening, is led by Southern Cross University as part of the $64.55 million, or 100 million Australian dollars, Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program. The program is funded by the partnership between the Australian government's Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and includes conservation organizations and several academic institutions.
In Israel, a startup called Stardust Solutions has begun testing a system to disperse a cloud of tiny reflective particles about 60,000 feet in altitude, reflecting sunlight away from Earth to cool the atmosphere in a concept known as solar radiation management, or SRM. Yanai Yedvab, Stardust chief executive and a former deputy chief scientist at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, wouldn't disclose the composition of the proprietary particles.
Yedvab said Stardust has raised $15 million from two investors and has conducted low-level aerial tests using white smoke to simulate the particles' path in the atmosphere. After the company completes indoor safety testing, it intends to conduct a limited outdoor test of the dispersion technology, monitoring devices and particles in the next few months, Yedvab said.
In Massachusetts, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution plan to pour 6,000 gallons of a liquid solution of sodium hydroxide, a component of lye, into the ocean 10 miles south of Martha's Vineyard this summer. They hope the chemical base will act like a big tablet of Tums, lowering the acidity of a patch of surface water and absorbing 20 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, storing it safely in the ocean.
"When you have heartburn, you eat a Tums that dissolves and makes the liquid in your stomach less acidic," said Adam Subhas, an associate scientist at WHOI and the project's principal investigator. "By analogy, we're adding this alkaline material to seawater, and it is letting the ocean take up more CO2 without provoking more ocean acidification. Everything that we're seeing so far is that it is environmentally safe."
The $10 million project, known as ocean alkalinity enhancement, is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, two philanthropies and several private donors, Subhas said. The release of sodium hydroxide, which will require the approval of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is planned for August.
Experiments aimed at cooling the atmosphere by reflecting sunlight away from Earth are an attempt to mimic what happens when a volcano erupts. In 1991, Mount Pinatubo, an active volcano in the Philippines, spewed sulfur and ash into the upper atmosphere, lowering the Earth's temperature by .5 degrees Celsius (. 9 degrees Fahrenheit) for an entire year.
But until a few years ago, many scientists opposed human interventions, fearing a slippery slope that would allow society to avoid making tough decisions about reducing emissions and could ultimately backfire.
"It very easily becomes an excuse for not doing all the things that we already can do and that we know will work," said Dan Jørgensen, Denmark's minister for global climate policy. "When we start interfering with nature, we risk it also having many very negative consequences that we cannot control and that we cannot foresee."
Intervention is needed, Jørgensen said, "but we need to be extremely careful how we do it."
Daniele Visioni, assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University, echoed that sentiment.
"Now we're at the point where the choice isn't between yes or no about doing SRM, but between making an informed decision versus making an uninformed decision," Visioni said
The National Academy of Sciences released a study in 2021 advocating a cautious approach to studying solar geoengineering technologies, and a second report in 2022 reviewed various methods of storing carbon dioxide in the ocean.
In 2023, the White House issued research guidelines for injecting reflective particles into the atmosphere and brightening clouds, concluding that the technologies offer the possibility of cooling the planet but also carry unknown risks, such as depleting the protective ozone layer, harming marine life, damaging crops or altering rainfall patterns.
And this month, in Nairobi, Kenya, delegates to the United Nations Environmental Assembly will debate a resolution to consider the risks and benefits of solar radiation management.
The goal behind this year's field experiments in the U.S., Israel and Australia is to address some of these questions and to get information about whether these projects could lay the foundation for large-scale efforts to cool the planet.
"They are answering really important questions about if we were to spray sea salt into the atmosphere," Michael Diamond, assistant professor of meteorology and environmental science at Florida State University, said about the Australian cloud brightening experiment. "Would that make it to the clouds, would it stay up there? Can you get enough brightening to make a difference?"
For any of these projects to go from field trial to full-scale global deployment, it would require international cooperation and likely cost trillions of dollars. That scenario is years away.
"There's a huge political hesitancy to do outdoor perturbative experiments," said Jessica Seddon, a senior fellow at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. "It's going to take some extraordinary bravery to acknowledge that in certain circumstances those experiments will be needed, have informational value and should be constrained but not banned."
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