Air Condition the Planet — Juan Enriquez 2/4

Juan Enriquez says we may have to air condition the planet by a degree or two while net zero catches up. Neither of us likes geoengineering. We like extinction even less.

We get into runaway methane, the climate history buried in Greenland ice cores, volcanic shade, Stephen Salter’s cloud ships, reflective drones, and the political problem behind any planetary intervention. The science needs to exist before catastrophe turns a bad idea into the only idea left.

Transcript

Juan: The problem with that was we've heated the water in the ocean so much. These oceans are now giving off the heat instead of absorbing it. We're seeing that with massive storms, with hurricanes, with flash floods. That is really scary. I think what we're going to have to do is air condition the planet by one or two degrees centigrade for a decade or two while this net zero kicks in, because I don't think we have the political willingness to do what we have to do.

Pablos: We worked on some geoengineering projects in my lab almost 20 years ago, trying to find cheap ways of putting sunglasses on the earth or something. When we started, it was extremely fringe. Now people acknowledge that it might be possible, but they really don't want to do it. They all think it's a terrible idea for one reason or another.

I've never seen any idea of how you would handle the geopolitical decision-making process to do it, because you're talking about affecting the climate all over the planet. Even if you could get it free so you didn't have a financing problem, I don't know how you get these things done. It does seem unlikely that until there's extreme catastrophes, we're not gonna do anything.

Juan: There's that wonderful Kim Stanley Robinson book, Ministry for the Future. It starts out with the difference between a sauna and a steam bath: the steam bath temperature is much lower. In the sauna, when you pour the water on the stones, it feels horrendously hot. If a sauna had the humidity of a steam bath, you'd be dead quickly. And so what you get is this temperature gradient where you can have a very high temperature and low humidity.

When you get high temperature and high humidity, you kill a lot of people, like sous vide in your kitchen: you cook people. In Robinson's book, when the air conditioning and electricity fail in hot places, a lot of people start to die. I don't think we're that far away from that in Europe, in the Middle East, in parts of Africa. When that happens, I think stuff like what you worked on is going to be desperately sought.

I think we've got to do that and put it in place so that the science is done, so we don't do something totally stupid; we only do something partially stupid. We're gonna get it wrong. I hate the idea of geoengineering. I hate the idea of extinction even more.

The stuff we're playing with right now: each molecule of methane is 20 to 80 times the impact of a CO2 molecule. The peat, which is miles thick, in Siberia and Canada, is now on fire. That can release more CO2 than we've ever released through everything. That's where you get these cycles on Earth. Once that starts, it gets really ugly, really fast.

Pablos: It's real hard to undo.

Juan: We went and dug some ice cores. Then you take an airplane, fly a couple of hours, land on two-miles-thick ice in the middle of Greenland. Then you dig down through history. Ice cores have these rings on them. You can measure—look, here's a volcano. Here's the beginning of the Iron Age. Here's the beginning of the Nuclear Age. Here's the beginning of the industrial age. That's the very top of the ice cores. Then you go down and get prehistoric very quickly.

Here's why these ice cores are interesting: they're history books. What they're telling you is that across different periods of time, you have these cycles. These cycles will take the temperature of Greenland and transform Atlanta into Minneapolis in about five years. You can have changes that are five to ten degrees centigrade on average. You can get that in a period of years, and then it can happen across all of Greenland in less than 30 years. That's what people can observe in the ice cores.

The reason why the research you were doing is so important is because you can get these runaway cycles. I think they can be caused by meteorite impacts, by volcanoes. They can be caused by CO2 in the atmosphere drying out the permafrost to the point where it starts burning, or heating it to the point where it starts burning.

And then you get methane releases. You're seeing it in Canada right now. If you look at a map of Canada CO2 absorption, Canada is so large and has so many trees that, for most of its history, those trees were growing and absorbing CO2. Canadian wildfires have now gotten to the stage where Canada has become a net CO2 emitter, and it's growing and growing.

Once the permafrost starts to go, methane is just such powerful greenhouse stuff. I think one of the things venture has to do, and basic science has to do, is start measuring what we can put into the stratosphere that will create some shade for the planet. It ain't going to be free, but the alternative is becoming so nasty so quickly that big chunks of the world will become unlivable if we don't do that.

If the permafrost starts to go, then it's all gone. We just go into another reset for the world. You've had periodic extinction events where 70, 80, 90% of life forms go extinct. We're gonna be one of them if this happens. It would be good to have the science. Hopefully I'm wrong. Hopefully we never use it. The scale of what you have to do isn't that big, right? It's the equivalent of one volcanic eruption per year. We're not talking about blanketing the entire world. We're talking about a volcanic plume, such as occurred with Krakatoa.

Pablos: Our project was trying to replicate Pinatubo by finding cheap ways of putting sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere. We'll keep working on that.

Juan: But don't use sulfur dioxide.

Pablos: I like your idea of finding other materials. Sulfur dioxide is abundant and cheap, and it's what the volcanoes use. I figured it would be less controversial, but that didn't seem to help much. You think there's something better? We just haven't figured it out yet.

Juan: I think we have to use weather balloons. We have to test about 50 different chemicals. What you're looking for: this reflects a lot of sunlight, stays up there for a while, doesn't chemically do something nasty to the stratosphere, drops to earth and it doesn't hurt stuff. We should be testing those chemicals right now.

Pablos: The truth is, all we want is reflectivity. At this point, we can mass-manufacture reflective Mylar. It might not be hard. It wouldn't even have to be stratospheric. You could do maybe stratospheric drones that just fly for a year and reflect a square meter each—a million of those. They fly up there. They're so far away and so small. They'd reflect one or two percent of sunlight. You could probably do it with structures instead of chemicals. Chemicals are basically tiny, like a tiny drone.

Juan: These autonomous ships navigate around and test stuff. They could do it. The question was: could you use some of the Rocket Boys stuff and deploy these Icarus things?

Pablos: I think Stephen Salter had this idea, which was to make seafaring vessels: autonomous ships in the ocean that would aerosolize seawater to create albedo over the ocean, to make reflective low-hanging clouds. You could throw these things out in the ocean. They could drive in circles. They would create cloud cover over the ocean to reflect sunlight, to keep the ocean from heating up.

I sort of dismissed it because it seemed more expensive than the plan we had to put sulfur dioxide up. But if it's sort of less controversial, more gentle in the sense that people are used to having ships—they're not used to volcanoes or synthetic volcanoes—maybe it's easier.

Juan: I think an interesting question is: what else could these things do? Could they substitute for some of these low-Earth-orbit satellites in terms of communication? Could they help beam down the energy from reflectors that are further out? If you could dual-purpose or triple-purpose—if you had cheap, reflective flying birds—what could you do with them?

Pablos: There's an idea that somebody pitched me on. I don't think this is top secret. They were building essentially a solar-powered drone. Think of it as a helicopter with no body. It's just a giant helicopter blade. The blade is covered in solar panels. The blades have steel cables to the center, and they spread out. He wanted to make it at least hundreds of meters in diameter.

But this thing can fly itself perpetually. It's on sun power. There's a little bit of battery to get through the night. He wanted to do it as cell towers, or at least emergency cell towers. The thing could fly—I don't know—60,000 feet. Probably could get up that high; there's enough atmosphere. He could run this thing, and it could have hundreds of square meters of reflector on it. There might be possibilities like that, and they're not expensive to build.

Juan: What would be very cool is to build almost like those planes that have those banners across beaches on weekends—very long kite-like tails that were ultra-reflective. A physicist is probably gonna shoot us down in 10 seconds. At least we have to get some of the smartest people in the world thinking: Do we want volcanoes? Do we want reflectors? Do we want cooling layers?

Pablos: I think the dual-use idea is probably the one thing that matters here, because if you could figure out a commercial case for building whatever you're building, maybe there's a chance of getting this done, whereas without it, I don't know. Even with it, I think probably most of the objection at this point isn't economic. It's just people's squeamish reaction to the idea that we're fucking with the weather.

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