Rob Meyer in The Atlantic is doing some of the best reporting right now on climate change. Here’s one of his latest.
Over the past few years, I’ve heard dozens of scientists talk about solar geo-engineering, the once outlandish idea that humanity should counteract climate change by releasing special gases into the stratosphere to reflect away sunlight and cool the planet.
But I’ve never heard it discussed in quite the terms of Jonathan Proctor, an agricultural economist at UC Berkeley.
“You’re in an arena with a big bear,” he told me. (The bear is climate change.) “And the question is: Should you throw a lion into the arena? You know, maybe they’ll fight and kill each other. Or maybe they’ll just both kill you.”
That lion is looking worse and worse. Recently, a surge of academic research has revealed that solar geo-engineering will be anything but straightforward. Solar geo-engineering is now taken seriously at the highest echelons of science: It commands its own research center at Harvard, a serious book from an Economist editor, and a private triennial global meeting. Even as some of its most devoted researchers doubt it will succeed, they add that climate change’s severe consequences may make it a necessity.
On Wednesday, Proctor and his colleagues added to that growing literature, as they unveiled the first global economic projection of how solar geo-engineering will affect the world’s crops. Its conclusions, which are not positive, should not inspire confidence in our ability to reverse climate change in a simple way.
“You’re in an arena with a big bear,” he told me. (The bear is climate change.) “And the question is: Should you throw a lion into the arena? You know, maybe they’ll fight and kill each other. Or maybe they’ll just both kill you.”
According to the new paper, solar geo-engineering’s consequences will override its benefits. Proctor and his colleagues find that spraying volcanic gas into the air will reduce global temperatures, aiding crops. But those same gases will also scatter sunlight and reduce the amount of radiation that reaches the surface, hampering photosynthesis.
The net effect is roughly nil: Global yields will not emerge from a geo-engineered world any more bountiful than they were before. Solar geo-engineering cannot reverse the worldwide agricultural damage wrought by climate change.
The results were published in this week’s edition of the scientific journal Nature. Proctor compared them to a disappointing clinical trial.
“If you think of solar geo-engineering as an experimental surgery, then the side effects of the treatment—the changes in sunlight—are kind of just as bad as the original disease,” he told me.
But he didn’t want to throw out the idea just yet. “Just because the first test of an experimental surgery had bad side effects for a particular part of the body, it doesn’t mean the procedure should be automatically abandoned,” he said.
Proctor and his colleagues were only able to run the test because something like solar geo-engineering has happened before—in fact, it occurred in living memory.
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