Speaker 1: Pushkin, you're listening to Brave New Planet, a podcast about
Speaker 1: amazing new technologies that could dramatically improve our world. Or
Speaker 1: if we don't make wise choices, could leave us a
Speaker 1: lot worse off. Utopia or dystopia. It's up to us.
Speaker 1: In the Zambales Mountains on the island of Luzon in
Speaker 1: the Philippines, there lies of volcano named Mount Pinatubo. For
Speaker 1: five centuries, it had lain dormant, but on Saturday June fifteenth,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one, it erupted, causing one of the most
Speaker 1: cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. Torrential rain has mixed
Speaker 1: with volcanic ash to form a gray mud covering vast
Speaker 1: areas of the northern Philippines. The ash falls up to
Speaker 1: seven hundred kilometers from Mount Pinatubo. Nearly twenty million tons
Speaker 1: of sulfur dioxide were hurled into the stratosphere. The effects
Speaker 1: of the eruption were felt around the world. In the
Speaker 1: following fifteen months, average global temperature dropped by roughly one
Speaker 1: degree fahrenheit. Why because the sulfur dioxide released by the
Speaker 1: volcano reflected back a fraction of the Sun's energy, preventing
Speaker 1: it from reaching the Earth. The notion that huge volcanos
Speaker 1: might affect the weather is actually an old one. Ben
Speaker 1: Franklin proposed that the severe winter of seventeen eighty three
Speaker 1: to eighty four was triggered by a massive eruption in
Speaker 1: Iceland the previous summer. In nineteen sixty five, inspired by
Speaker 1: the volcano theory, science advisors to President Lyndon Johnson proposed
Speaker 1: develop helping technology to pump sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere
Speaker 1: to offset global warming, but the idea didn't go far
Speaker 1: because they had no good way to test it. Then,
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety one, Mount Pinatubo ran a test for US.
Speaker 1: It seemed to confirm the hypothesis. The proposal started to
Speaker 1: gain attention. Point is this, if the problem gets bad
Speaker 1: enough to do something about, well, don't you want to
Speaker 1: have something to do. The idea of that is to
Speaker 1: essentially mimic nature, which is what happens when a volcano blows.
Speaker 1: A big volcano blows. That's Stephen Dubner who touted the
Speaker 1: idea in his two thousand and eight book Super Freakonomics
Speaker 1: as a quick fix for global warming. In politics, the
Speaker 1: idea attracted strange bedfellows, including former Republican Speaker of the
Speaker 1: House Knut Gingrich, Texas Republican and climate science skeptic Lamar Smith,
Speaker 1: and twenty twenty Democratic presidential candidate and Drew Yang. It
Speaker 1: even made it into the Netflix comedy show The Fix,
Speaker 1: where comedian d l hugely recommended blowing up a volcano
Speaker 1: to save the world. So let's find some volcano in
Speaker 1: the middle of the ocean, far away from civilization and
Speaker 1: blow it the fu the idea, well, not blowing up volcanoes,
Speaker 1: but spreading sulfur particles to decreased solar radiation is a
Speaker 1: kind of climate intervention that some people call solar geoengineering.
Speaker 1: It's gotten enough traction that the US National Research Council
Speaker 1: organized a scientific committee to study it, and it's not
Speaker 1: just theoretical. Some Harvard scientists are planning to launch an
Speaker 1: experimental balloon to start learning how to hack the planet.
Speaker 1: Today's big question, with the climate crisis becoming more and
Speaker 1: more desperate, should we get ready to alter the atmosphere
Speaker 1: of Planet Earth? Solar geoengineering? Can it protect us from
Speaker 1: climate change? Do we need it? And what could possibly
Speaker 1: go wrong? My name is Eric Lander. I'm a scientist
Speaker 1: who works on ways to improve human health. I helped
Speaker 1: lead the Human Genome Project, and today I lead the
Speaker 1: Road Institute of MIT and Harvard. In the twenty first century,
Speaker 1: powerful technologies have been appearing at a breathtaking pace, related
Speaker 1: to the Internet, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and more. They
Speaker 1: have amazing potential upsides, but we can't ignore the risks
Speaker 1: that come with them. The decisions aren't just up to
Speaker 1: scientists or politicians, whether we like it or not, we
Speaker 1: all of us are the stewards of a brave new planet.
Speaker 1: This generation's choices will shape the future never before. Coming
Speaker 1: up on this episode of Brave New Planets Blocking the Sun,
Speaker 1: we'll talk to one of the leading proponents of the technology,
Speaker 1: so solar Gin My sharing ken with total confidence and
Speaker 1: this is not an overstatement for store temperatures to pre
Speaker 1: industrial We'll hear from two experts who weighed the benefits
Speaker 1: and risks for the National Academy of Sciences. I can
Speaker 1: imagine this launching climate wars. Some third party might actually
Speaker 1: get to the point where the climate in their part
Speaker 1: of the world had become intolerable and they would unilaterally
Speaker 1: decide to modify the planet's climate without consulting with anyone,
Speaker 1: and we'll speak with the executive director of Sunrise, a
Speaker 1: movement of young people working to stop climate change, about
Speaker 1: whether it's time to consider what to do if else fails.
Speaker 1: I understand the desperation. I understand the urgency. I understand
Speaker 1: that we need to kick everything into high gear. So
Speaker 1: stay with us Chapter one, Climate Crisis. To get up
Speaker 1: to speed about the climate crisis. I went down to Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. To visit one of the nation's leading scientists,
Speaker 1: someone I know well. So my name is Marsha McNutt.
Speaker 1: I am a marine geophysicist. As a geophysicist, what's the
Speaker 1: coolest thing you've been involved in? There are so many
Speaker 1: cool things that geophysicists get to do. I've been down
Speaker 1: to the bottom of the ocean to see volcanoes erupting
Speaker 1: on the seafloor. I got to stand on the South
Speaker 1: Pole on the hundredth anniversary of Amonson's first conquest. I
Speaker 1: have been to outer Mongolia with nomadic tribesmen studying the
Speaker 1: birth of mountain belts. Chief physicists get to go a
Speaker 1: lot of very unusual places and do very wonderful things.
Speaker 1: Marsha McNutt has been a professor at MIT, head of
Speaker 1: the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, director of the US
Speaker 1: Geological Survey, and the editor in chief of Science, the
Speaker 1: nation's leading scientific journal. Today, she's president of the US
Speaker 1: National Academy of Sciences, an institution created by Abraham Lincoln
Speaker 1: in eighteen sixty three to advise the US government. It
Speaker 1: prepares major reports on crucial scientific questions facing the country.
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk to Marsha McNutt because just before
Speaker 1: becoming president of the Academy in twenty and sixteen, she
Speaker 1: chaired the Academy's report on Climate intervention, and I also
Speaker 1: talked to another of the authors of that report. My
Speaker 1: name is Ray Pierre Humbert. I'm the Highey Professor of
Speaker 1: Physics at the University of Oxford. I hadn't met Ray before.
Speaker 1: He's a dead ringer for Santa Claus. He's also an
Speaker 1: expert in planets, not just our own planet, but also
Speaker 1: exo planets, the thousands of planets outside our own solar system.
Speaker 1: My favorite planet is fifty five kancre E, which is
Speaker 1: so hot it has a permanent lava ocean on the dayside.
Speaker 1: Where's that located. It's it's around the star fifty five kancres,
Speaker 1: which is not quite a visible star, but it is
Speaker 1: near the claw one of the clause of the scorpion scorpio.
Speaker 1: And that's your favorite planet. Well, let's say it's the
Speaker 1: one we're having the most fund with right now. I
Speaker 1: see it not the vacation on a It's not one
Speaker 1: of the vacation sites, unless you like lava beaches and
Speaker 1: so forth. So I talked with Marsha and Ray about
Speaker 1: the current state of climate science. Now I shouldn't have
Speaker 1: to say this, but just in case you've been living
Speaker 1: on an exo planet or in a state of deep denial,
Speaker 1: there's no serious question that climate change is real or
Speaker 1: that it's largely due to excess carbon dioxide from burning
Speaker 1: fossil fuels causing a greenhouse effect. Here's the science in
Speaker 1: a nutshell. A greenhouse lets you grow greens and green Bay,
Speaker 1: Wisconsin in the middle of the winter because the glass
Speaker 1: lets light pass through but holds the heat in. The
Speaker 1: thicker the glass, the better the heat retention. CO two
Speaker 1: does the same thing for the Earth. It lets sunlight
Speaker 1: pass but retains much of the resulting heat. CO two
Speaker 1: has been increasing sharply over the past century, two levels
Speaker 1: unprecedented in human history, and as a result, the Earth
Speaker 1: is getting hotter. The last six years ranks of the
Speaker 1: six hottest years in recorded history. There is a lot
Speaker 1: more attention to global warming amongst the public and the press,
Speaker 1: and amongst politicians, now that we are starting to see
Speaker 1: some of the effects. What we've seen with just about
Speaker 1: a degree of warming is nothing compared to what you
Speaker 1: get with the second degree of warming. Swaths of Puerto
Speaker 1: Rico underwater roads turned through raging rivers, millions of people
Speaker 1: affected by devastating floods across South Asia, his historic fires
Speaker 1: devastating Australia, more than one hundred wildfires burning in the Arctic.
Speaker 1: Firefighters in California continuing to battle some dangerous, fast moving wildfires,
Speaker 1: five of the six largest infernos in state history, because
Speaker 1: of the release of CO two into the atmosphere from
Speaker 1: the burning of fossil fuels. Primarily, we are entering basically
Speaker 1: an unknown regime of rapidly changing climate. It is very
Speaker 1: difficult for anyone looking at the data to say with
Speaker 1: any confidence that in this future that we are entering
Speaker 1: will continue to be dousive for human habitation. Once you
Speaker 1: enter that zone, you basically can't back up. The dye
Speaker 1: has already cast, and every projection shows that we have
Speaker 1: at most decades to act. What are the sort of
Speaker 1: events we expect to happen as we have more and
Speaker 1: more SEO two in the atmosphere? What do we see
Speaker 1: happening now and what do we imagine happening in the future.
Speaker 1: So what we see happening now are things like ice
Speaker 1: sheet smelting, sea level rising, more energy in the atmospheric system,
Speaker 1: which leads to more storminess, higher amounts of rainfall, stronger hurricanes.
Speaker 1: Areas of the country that used to be pleasant to
Speaker 1: live in now becoming uninhabitable because of storm surge and
Speaker 1: high tides. We're seeing death of coral reefs because the
Speaker 1: ocean's too warm for them. Some of the things that
Speaker 1: are more complicated but likely to be far more damaging
Speaker 1: are the longer droughts, the inner actions between ecosystems, things
Speaker 1: like the bloom and plankton coming earlier in the spring
Speaker 1: when the animals that need to feed on them haven't
Speaker 1: yet returned from their migration, So you basically get animals
Speaker 1: dying of starvation. Chapter two the wet bulb temperature. When
Speaker 1: scientists describe global warming, they usually talk about average temperature rise.
Speaker 1: For example, take the twenty sixteen Paris Climate Agreement. That's
Speaker 1: the UN agreements supported by one hundred and ninety four
Speaker 1: countries but sadly no longer including the United States. It
Speaker 1: aims to keep the average global temperatureize below two degrees celsius.
Speaker 1: The problem is that an average temperature rise of two
Speaker 1: degrees celsius sounds puny, even if you convert it to
Speaker 1: roughly four degrees fahrenheit. After all, temperatures can fluctuate by
Speaker 1: twenty degrees fahrenheit over the course of a day. What's
Speaker 1: the big deal? I worry that we as scientists have
Speaker 1: perhaps done a disservice to climate change by talking about
Speaker 1: average changes because the average doesn't sound so bad. But
Speaker 1: when you talk about how the extremes are likely to change,
Speaker 1: that is when it gets very scary. One of the
Speaker 1: aspects of climate change that scares me the most is
Speaker 1: if instead you measure climate change by how many days
Speaker 1: in a ser location is the temperature likely to exceed
Speaker 1: the wet bulb temperature? What's the wet bulb temperature? It's
Speaker 1: basically the difference between life and death. Your body is
Speaker 1: always generating heat, and to keep your body at a
Speaker 1: constant temperature, you need to radiate away the excess heat.
Speaker 1: If you can't, you'll die. On a cool day, it's
Speaker 1: no problem, your skin can lose heat directly to the air.
Speaker 1: But on a hot summer day, you need to sweat
Speaker 1: so the evaporation carries away the heat. Now, if the
Speaker 1: temperature and the humidity get too high, a person literally
Speaker 1: can't sweat enough to cool themselves. What's the limit. Well,
Speaker 1: at fifty percent humidity, you can't make it much past
Speaker 1: one hundred and twelve degrees in the shade. So unless
Speaker 1: that person can get to someplace that's air conditioned, they
Speaker 1: will literally overheat and suffer heat stroke. There are many
Speaker 1: places on this planet right now in India, Southeast Asia,
Speaker 1: Africa where the number of days that are exceeding the
Speaker 1: wet bulb temperature are going up dramatically every summer. We're
Speaker 1: even seeing life threatening temperatures across temperate zones in Europe,
Speaker 1: with record highs recorded in Germany, Netherlands, Britain and France,
Speaker 1: with the ladder hitting roughly one hundred and fifteen degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: So a better way to think about the effective climate
Speaker 1: change might be the number of days that a region
Speaker 1: becomes uninhabitable outdoors. If you go from say one degree
Speaker 1: of warming to two degrees of warming, a lot of
Speaker 1: the damages scale linearly. If you used to have, say
Speaker 1: something like thirty days of life threatening heat waves in
Speaker 1: some place, we go to something like sixty days when
Speaker 1: you go two degrees. What would happen if we blow
Speaker 1: past two degrees celsius, it's more like a global rise
Speaker 1: of four degrees celsius. If you get to four or
Speaker 1: five degrees global mean warming, then you get to the
Speaker 1: situation where perhaps half of the earth becomes uninhabitable outdoors
Speaker 1: for mammals. Then air conditioning becomes not a matter of
Speaker 1: comfort but a matter of life support. It's like living
Speaker 1: in a space station and a power failure becomes not
Speaker 1: just a matter of inconvenience but megadeath. Of course, most
Speaker 1: people on Earth don't have access to homes with air conditioning.
Speaker 1: It's these people who will suffer. And then you also
Speaker 1: have to think about all the animals that are not
Speaker 1: going to be living in air conditioning. What happens to elephants,
Speaker 1: what happens to cattle. It's a very different world. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: we're not making much progress on reducing CO two emissions
Speaker 1: by almost all scientific accounts. If we don't drastically change
Speaker 1: our fossil fuel consumption, we're going to blow past the
Speaker 1: target of two degrees in the Paris Agreement. The problem
Speaker 1: is it's really hard and really slow to change the
Speaker 1: world's energy systems. To move to renewables requires electrifying your
Speaker 1: energy system. That's really the only realistic way to do it.
Speaker 1: Electrifying the system requires building transmission lines. My homes in California,
Speaker 1: it can take three years just to permit a new
Speaker 1: transmission line. Replacing power plants takes even longer since they're
Speaker 1: designed to last for decades. Power grids generally evolve over
Speaker 1: a forty year time scale. So this is why many
Speaker 1: scientists and many policymakers are concerned about taking an infrastructure
Speaker 1: system that has a forty year renewal rate and trying
Speaker 1: to respond to a problem that needs immediate action. Here's
Speaker 1: where the volcano strategy comes in. We've already tampered with
Speaker 1: our atmosphere and we're starting to feel the consequences. Why
Speaker 1: not tamper some more to prevent some of the warming,
Speaker 1: saving lives and curbing suffering. That's the idea behind this
Speaker 1: type of climate intervention. Is it time to start experimenting
Speaker 1: with the technology? Chapter three, Tiny space Mirrors. I arranged
Speaker 1: to speak with Professor David Keith. He's one of the
Speaker 1: leading proponents of solar geo engineering research and he's aiming
Speaker 1: to run a small scale test. David agreed to bicycle
Speaker 1: down from Harvard to the other end of Cambridge where
Speaker 1: I work at the Broad Institute. So solar geo my
Speaker 1: sharing ken with total confidence, and this is not an
Speaker 1: overstatement for store temperatures to pre industrial Long before David
Speaker 1: started thinking about solar gew engineering, his scientific career had
Speaker 1: an unusual start. His first job was as a research
Speaker 1: assistance in the Arctic. The year I was there, we
Speaker 1: were really working on walruses and we were trying to
Speaker 1: learn how to identify them by their calls, and then
Speaker 1: we had to brand them with cattle brands that we
Speaker 1: bought in Albertic and my job as the young guy,
Speaker 1: was to carry the brands. That was the light part
Speaker 1: and the propane tank and the kind of flamethory thing
Speaker 1: that you needed to heat have the brands. I'd done
Speaker 1: way more big outside time than most people, so probably
Speaker 1: more than a thousand kilometers of kind of Arctic ski trips, expeditions. Whatever.
Speaker 1: Would you call yourself an environmentalist in this topic? This
Speaker 1: is such a big fight, you know, I feel like
Speaker 1: that's for other people to judge. But I'd say I've
Speaker 1: been to Earth First rallies and I've done our actions,
Speaker 1: and yeah, I think the short answer it would be yeah.
Speaker 1: He began studying global warming when he arrived at M
Speaker 1: team the nineteen eighties. I stumbled into this really cool
Speaker 1: group of students in between Harvard and MIT grad students
Speaker 1: who were working on climate change, both the science and
Speaker 1: public policy in an interdictminary way. Today, David focuses on
Speaker 1: solar geoengineering. He's mostly focused on stratospheric geoengineering, which is
Speaker 1: what we've been talking about, mimicking the behavior of a
Speaker 1: volcano by spraying reflective particles into the stratosphere. But there's
Speaker 1: actually several different ways of changing the Earth's solar radiation.
Speaker 1: There's the idea of brightening a certain kind of marine
Speaker 1: boundary there cloud Brighter clouds would reflect more sunlight. There's
Speaker 1: the idea of thinning a kind of serious cloud by
Speaker 1: adding silver eyedide or something like that. Whispy or clouds
Speaker 1: would trap less of the Sun's heat. And then there's
Speaker 1: space based technologies idea you could build big orbiting mirrors
Speaker 1: or what have you. To make a difference, space mirrors
Speaker 1: would need to be huge with a surface area though
Speaker 1: about the size of Greenland. It wouldn't be cheap get
Speaker 1: them into orbit. I think if you think in the
Speaker 1: next decades, I think the idea of space based stuff
Speaker 1: is ridiculous. But if you're thinking about this is something
Speaker 1: a humans do over a century or century and a half,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's crazy to think that we might
Speaker 1: do space space things. For now, though, the best approach
Speaker 1: would be stratospheric intervention, putting reflective particles into the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: You can think of them as tiny space mirrors just
Speaker 1: to the lower altitude. Planes would fly around the stratosphere,
Speaker 1: springing plumes of sulfur dioxide or similar chemicals. It would
Speaker 1: be surprisingly cost effective. The cost to kind of begin
Speaker 1: a program that's putting material quantities of staff in the
Speaker 1: stratosphere is probably just a few billion dollars the kind
Speaker 1: of climate damages we're talking about a global basis or
Speaker 1: of order a trillion a year. So the idea that
Speaker 1: a few countries spend a few billion a year, that's
Speaker 1: a small enough number. They don't think that cost is
Speaker 1: going to be the direct driver. A few billion dollars
Speaker 1: to clean up a trillion dollar mess sounds like a
Speaker 1: pretty good deal, at least on paper. What could possibly
Speaker 1: go wrong? Chapter four? What could possibly go wrong? When
Speaker 1: the National Research Council scientists set down to write a
Speaker 1: report on solar geo engineering, the first thing they realized
Speaker 1: was that calling the technology solar geo engineering might be
Speaker 1: seriously misleading. I never liked the term geo engineering myself,
Speaker 1: because engineering is term we generally apply to precise management
Speaker 1: or design to control systems that we actually understand. But
Speaker 1: what is generally called geo engineering is something that is
Speaker 1: really hard to try out, hard to resolve. The main
Speaker 1: questions about this is basically throwing up these particles into
Speaker 1: the stratosphere at the whim of the jet stream. They
Speaker 1: go where they will. It's not like a house with
Speaker 1: thermostats in every room, where you can turn this room
Speaker 1: a little cooler and maybe this one not so cool,
Speaker 1: and turn this one off because no one really needs
Speaker 1: it in this room. So we preferred the term albedo modification,
Speaker 1: even though it sounds kind of wonky. Albedo is the
Speaker 1: scientific term for the reflectivity of a planet. Unfortunately, albedo
Speaker 1: modification wouldn't mean anything to the general public. The other extreme,
Speaker 1: some people use the term hacking the planet. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of sort of techno optimism involved in the people
Speaker 1: that are doing research on this, which is very similar
Speaker 1: to the sense of pride, where you're hacking a system
Speaker 1: and it is a sort of cool thing to contemplate,
Speaker 1: And if we didn't have to live on the planet,
Speaker 1: I'd be really interested in it myself. But it is
Speaker 1: dealing with the only home that we have and has
Speaker 1: potentially really very serious consequences. Ultimately, the scientists settled on
Speaker 1: the neutral term climate intervention. I like the climate intervention
Speaker 1: because just like with interventions, and say a person who
Speaker 1: has a drug problem or whatever, you're not guaranteed to
Speaker 1: achieve the outcome that you want. You're having an intervention
Speaker 1: because you know something is wrong, but you just can't
Speaker 1: be sure that you're not going to actually make the
Speaker 1: situation worse, but you may be so desperate that you
Speaker 1: really need to do something. As the scientists dug into
Speaker 1: the problem, they recognize that the perfect climate intervention would
Speaker 1: simply be to dim the sun by one or two percent. Unfortunately, though,
Speaker 1: the Sun doesn't have a dimmer switch, and using particles
Speaker 1: to block the Sun's rays isn't quite the same thing.
Speaker 1: You can control the average global temperature, but the impact
Speaker 1: across the globe may be very uneven. If you put
Speaker 1: aerosols up in the stratosphere, tiny little particles in the stratosphere,
Speaker 1: they don't just sit there where you put them. They
Speaker 1: get blown around by the stratospheric winds, They take up water,
Speaker 1: and they get bigger. Bigger particles have different reflective properties
Speaker 1: than smaller particles. They tend to get bunched up near
Speaker 1: the poles eventually and fall out the poles. You don't
Speaker 1: necessarily get an equal distribution between the northern hemisphere and
Speaker 1: the southern hemisphere. That might have serious consequences for the
Speaker 1: Earth's climate. Modeling has shown that if the aerosols were
Speaker 1: to preferentially bunch up in one hemisphere, that actually shifts
Speaker 1: the tropical rainfall patterns into the opposite hemisphere, so you
Speaker 1: would actually create potentially serious droughts. That's one example of
Speaker 1: the sort of thing that could go wrong inadvertently. So
Speaker 1: to put it in the simplest terms, you're saying, we
Speaker 1: could put up aerosols and end up completely surprised by
Speaker 1: the winners and losers in the climate effects of that. Right, So,
Speaker 1: it's hard to guess in advance how particles will distribute
Speaker 1: in the stratosphere. They might cool certain areas of the
Speaker 1: globe but leave others vulnerable to droughts and heat waves. Moreover,
Speaker 1: it's hard to run a local field test. We can't
Speaker 1: just say, okay, we're gonna albedo modify over El Paso, Texas,
Speaker 1: and does El Paso get cooler? And what happens till
Speaker 1: El Paso's rainfall and are there any negative effects of
Speaker 1: sulfur particles falling out of the air or anything. You
Speaker 1: can't do that because once I put it up over
Speaker 1: El Paso, how long before it distributes around the world.
Speaker 1: So most of these injections have to be done near
Speaker 1: the equator because that's the best place for distribution, and
Speaker 1: they very quickly get into these stratospheric currents that distribute them,
Speaker 1: and within two years it's all dissipated, it's all gone,
Speaker 1: It all filters out, So you would have to reinject
Speaker 1: every year to two years. So one thing you can't
Speaker 1: say at least is if you're willing to tolerate a
Speaker 1: global experiment, at least it would go away. Let's pull
Speaker 1: that thread for a second. Suppose somebody were to do
Speaker 1: a global experiment for a couple of years. Now here's
Speaker 1: the issue with doing an experiment, a global experiment on
Speaker 1: albito modification. We have no idea how to attribute whatever
Speaker 1: might happen during those two years to the experiment itself
Speaker 1: versus natural variability in storminess, droughts, floods, whatever. And you
Speaker 1: can be sure anyone who might have been impacted during
Speaker 1: that period by a hurricane, a drought, a flood would say, Bingo,
Speaker 1: you did this experiment and I got flooded out of
Speaker 1: my house, or I had a hurricane take out my barn,
Speaker 1: or I had a drought that wiped out my herd
Speaker 1: of cattle. You owe me. There'd be lawsuits all over
Speaker 1: the place. There would be lawsuits all over the place,
Speaker 1: And who's going to indemnify the person who does the
Speaker 1: experiment against the lawsuits. Do you think there's any insurance
Speaker 1: company that wants to take on that policy? Chapter five
Speaker 1: The Big Balloon. Despite the challenges, David Keith wants to
Speaker 1: try an experiment, a very small experiment. He's working with
Speaker 1: a team at Harvard on a project called scopex. So
Speaker 1: Scopex is about trying to improve our models of the
Speaker 1: way stratospheric aerosols and chemistry work in little ways that
Speaker 1: are relevant for improving understanding of the risks and efficacy
Speaker 1: of solar geno engineering. Keith and his colleagues want to
Speaker 1: send the balloon carrying particles high into the atmosphere, puff
Speaker 1: them out, and see how they disperse and reflect sunlight.
Speaker 1: How big is this balloon? Just give me a picture.
Speaker 1: Balloons are like twenty meters diameter, rough sixty foot wide
Speaker 1: balloons going up. And what's attached to the balloon we're
Speaker 1: building the balloon gondola still what you call it. The
Speaker 1: gondola has two little propellers that are more to kind
Speaker 1: of move it around slowly, and it has our data system.
Speaker 1: It has the batteries to run, It has the thing
Speaker 1: that generates the particles it has a particle sensor to
Speaker 1: measure the particle size distribution, and the whole thing is
Speaker 1: on a winch, so it can winch itself up and
Speaker 1: down with alter to the balloon, so the balloon will
Speaker 1: spray particles and then right around measuring how they disperse.
Speaker 1: The amount of material the team is going to release
Speaker 1: is actually tiny, a kilogram or something, which for the
Speaker 1: sake of argument, that turns out to be the bound
Speaker 1: of sulfur that a commercial aircraft you would normally fly,
Speaker 1: and releases it about a minute's flight. While it's physical
Speaker 1: cargo is tiny, the balloon also carries with it a
Speaker 1: lot of questions about regulations, scientific knowledge, symbolic value, and
Speaker 1: possible political misuse. While there's no serious scientific case that
Speaker 1: spraying a kilogram of particles can cause any physical harm,
Speaker 1: some people still think it's very dangerous. There's a group
Speaker 1: of people, and by high quality pulling, we know this
Speaker 1: group of people is like a third of Americans who
Speaker 1: believe that the government is already spraying toxic chemicals from
Speaker 1: airplanes for mass murder or climateguzation or something. And so
Speaker 1: those people have conflated that with some of the scientific
Speaker 1: work on solar gena sharing, so when they google around
Speaker 1: or there's lots of sites that will have me as
Speaker 1: a mass murder. I once got a voicemail. My favorite
Speaker 1: one that my kids enjoyed a lot, was a voicemail
Speaker 1: that said that I was ten million times more evil
Speaker 1: than Hitler and Stalin. And then it's not quite clear
Speaker 1: if the gentleman is saying that it's combined or separately.
Speaker 1: But it's not just conspiracy theorists. Even some of David
Speaker 1: Keith's friends, like Ray pr Humbard or opposed to scopex.
Speaker 1: It is actually one of the joys of science that,
Speaker 1: at least among scientists, you can have very vehement professional
Speaker 1: disagreements and still remain on good terms. What's really funny is,
Speaker 1: at least from my perspective, I have huge respect for Ray,
Speaker 1: both scientifically actually as a human. There's an article, the
Speaker 1: most recent article he wrote, which is actually the most
Speaker 1: personal and attacking me. It was like attacking the Harvard program.
Speaker 1: I forget exactly what it said, but it was like
Speaker 1: pretty direct, you know, both smoke and barrels aimed my way.
Speaker 1: That was published just a few weeks after I had
Speaker 1: a wonderful dinner with him and his wife actually visited
Speaker 1: him in Cambridge, Oxford, and we talked about exoplants, and
Speaker 1: we talked about American politics, and we mostly actually avoided
Speaker 1: talking about this topic. We know we disagree. I don't
Speaker 1: imagine that David would pay any attention to what advice
Speaker 1: I gave him, but I would advise him to just
Speaker 1: drop scopex. Ray has multiple objections. On the one hand,
Speaker 1: the experiment is too small. Releasing a few particles won't
Speaker 1: teach us anything important about the large scale planetary processes
Speaker 1: that would matter most. I still lean towards calling them
Speaker 1: stunts and that while they have some scientific payback, they
Speaker 1: don't really address the biggest questions we have. You can't
Speaker 1: do that with just a puff experiment. If you really
Speaker 1: want to resolve some of the questions, that are going
Speaker 1: to be a maker break thing for what would happen
Speaker 1: if you deployed Albiedo modification. There are a hundred other
Speaker 1: things that are more important scientifically. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: Ray is concerned that the experiment will open the door
Speaker 1: to ever larger solar geo engineering efforts before there are
Speaker 1: any rules in place. It's the risk that by doing
Speaker 1: a small experiment that crosses a red line. You're opening
Speaker 1: the door to escalation. If you can do a small experiment, well,
Speaker 1: next year someone's going to do a bigger experiment. It
Speaker 1: represents the thin edge of the wedge. What can of
Speaker 1: worms are are you opening? But Ray's biggest concern is
Speaker 1: more fundamental. Solar geo engineering is wildly, howlingly barking mad,
Speaker 1: and no research developments have changed my opinion. One Iota,
Speaker 1: Chapter six, The Sword of Damocles. What makes rayper Humbard
Speaker 1: call solar geo engineering wildly, howlingly barking mad. It boils
Speaker 1: down to two things. First, it doesn't solve the real problem.
Speaker 1: As long as we continue to emit CO two, it
Speaker 1: continues to accumulate in the atmosphere, much of it remains
Speaker 1: for tens of thousands of years, and the greenhouse effect
Speaker 1: keeps increasing. Climate intervention just masks the problem by reflecting
Speaker 1: away sunlight while we keep pumping vast amounts of CO
Speaker 1: two into the air. The second problem is solar geoengineering
Speaker 1: could create a sort of time bomb. My biggest worry,
Speaker 1: in fact, the worry that underpins all my other worries
Speaker 1: about the possibility of deploying albedo modification stems from the
Speaker 1: mismatching time scales. The mismatching time scales is this, while
Speaker 1: much of the CO two sticks around for tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of years, the sulfur particles that would be used
Speaker 1: for geoengineering, they disappear very quickly. They need to be
Speaker 1: replaced every couple of years. You're committee the entire future
Speaker 1: of humanity to doing this essentially forever. When have we
Speaker 1: ever saddled the next one hundred thousand years of civilization?
Speaker 1: If within obligation to do something without fail each and
Speaker 1: every year forever, Essentially, there's no precedent in human history
Speaker 1: if you then stop. If you stop because there's a
Speaker 1: global war, there's a global depression, or disputes over what
Speaker 1: the effect of this is, or you find some horrible
Speaker 1: side effect that you just can't bear. If you stop
Speaker 1: doing this lbedam modification, then within about ten years you
Speaker 1: have nearly the full effect of all the pent up
Speaker 1: warming from that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That's what
Speaker 1: we call termination shock. Everybody on the planet living under
Speaker 1: the sort of damocles, knowing it could fall at any minute,
Speaker 1: exactly how much pent up warming what depends on how
Speaker 1: much CO two we've allowed to accumulate. A rapid warming
Speaker 1: of two degrees celsius would be bad enough. Rise of
Speaker 1: four degrees see within a decade, making large swaths of
Speaker 1: the planet uninhabitable outdoors most of the year. That would
Speaker 1: be catastrophic. I asked Ray if he thought solar geo
Speaker 1: engineering would ever make sense. The only scenario is if
Speaker 1: you actually had already committed to getting to zero carbon
Speaker 1: dioxide emissions in a reasonably short window of time, or
Speaker 1: if you had developed technology for removing carbon dioxide from
Speaker 1: the atmosphere. In other words, if we had largely solved
Speaker 1: the problem and only had to buy a little bit
Speaker 1: of time. Unfortunately, we're not on target to get to
Speaker 1: zero net emissions, and we're very far from having affordable
Speaker 1: technologies for carbon capture from the atmosphere. Chapter seven, Climate Wars.
Speaker 1: If the climate crisis continues to deepen, who would decide
Speaker 1: whether and when to deploy solar jew engineering? Would United
Speaker 1: Nations try to forge a global consensus, or because it's
Speaker 1: not so expensive, might some nations just try to do
Speaker 1: it on their own. I can imagine some country could
Speaker 1: just start deploying Albita modification just because of their own
Speaker 1: perceived self interest. Imagine a human nation that is seeing
Speaker 1: its elderly people dying from heatstroke. They may think putting
Speaker 1: a bunch of particles up in the air as a
Speaker 1: pretty simple solution to it. And if that means that
Speaker 1: the Canadian wheat harvest fails, well that's their problem. I
Speaker 1: can imagine that conflicts that could arise when nations start
Speaker 1: tinkering with the composition of the stratosphere. I can also
Speaker 1: imagine this launching climate wars because there are quite easy countermeasures.
Speaker 1: The kinds of air craft that would be actually spewing
Speaker 1: out sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. They're slow moving, they're
Speaker 1: easy to target by fairly simple missiles. There are other
Speaker 1: kinds of countermeasures you could think of. For instance, if
Speaker 1: other countries used geoengineering to slow climate change, but Russia
Speaker 1: preferred to let the Earth keep warming because it would
Speaker 1: open the Arctic Ocean year round, Russia could interfere. All
Speaker 1: they'd have to do would be to increase their coal burning,
Speaker 1: increase the CO two to offset the Abito modification. Russia
Speaker 1: could actually even do more harmful things, releasing methane into
Speaker 1: the atmosphere, they could start manufacturing sulfur hexafluoride, which is
Speaker 1: an incredibly potent, long live greenhouse gas. It turns out
Speaker 1: that the fear that countries might start acting on their
Speaker 1: own was the initial inspiration for the National Research Council report.
Speaker 1: The intelligence community was concerned some third party might actually
Speaker 1: get to the point where the climate in their part
Speaker 1: of the world had become intolerable and they would unilaterally
Speaker 1: decide to modify the planet's climate without consulting with anyone.
Speaker 1: Some argue that solar geoengineering is basically ungovernable. If one
Speaker 1: country wants the world slightly warmer and another needs it cooler,
Speaker 1: how could we get a global consensus about who sets
Speaker 1: the thermostat right now? There is no treaty, There is
Speaker 1: no international agreement. There is no government structure that actually
Speaker 1: prevents anyone from intervening in the atmosphere or the stratosphere
Speaker 1: to perform some kind of albedo modification. The Academy has
Speaker 1: a study underway right now that is focusing on the
Speaker 1: governance issue, and hopefully they will come up with some
Speaker 1: good ideas of how to take this forward. Chapter eight Sunrise.
Speaker 1: Given all the problems with solar geo engineering. Why are
Speaker 1: scientists even considering it? The reason is they're beginning to
Speaker 1: feel pretty desperate. While the Paris Climate Treaty aims to
Speaker 1: keep global warming to two degrees c on, our current
Speaker 1: trajectory will blow past that target and may barrel toward
Speaker 1: catastrophic increases. Some feel we better be ready with a
Speaker 1: break glass in case of emergency solution, but a solving
Speaker 1: climate change really hopeless. A lot of young people have
Speaker 1: been rising up lately to demand action. They think the
Speaker 1: answer will require not just science but political pressure. Seventeen
Speaker 1: year old Swedish activists Greta Thunberg recently gained international attention
Speaker 1: for her call for a global climate strike and her
Speaker 1: demands for policy change at the United Nations. People are suffering,
Speaker 1: people are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in
Speaker 1: the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can
Speaker 1: talk about is the money and fairy tales of eaton
Speaker 1: of economic growth. How dare you? In the US, a
Speaker 1: youth led environmental movement has been organizing to pressure politicians
Speaker 1: through sit ins, songs, and communal action. I decided to
Speaker 1: talk to one of the leaders and what's become a
Speaker 1: global movement. My name is Marsheni Prakash. I am one
Speaker 1: of the co founders of and currently serving as the
Speaker 1: executive director for Sunrise Movement, which is organizing tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of people, predominantly young people across this nation to
Speaker 1: make climate action a priority in our nation for the
Speaker 1: first time. So tell me how you got to that point, Like,
Speaker 1: what was your path? I am the child of two
Speaker 1: South Indian immigrants. India as a place that is being
Speaker 1: ravished by the climate crisis, whether it's through drought and
Speaker 1: water wars, or farmers committing suicide by the tens of thousands,
Speaker 1: or climate fueled floods worsening and impacting people. And I
Speaker 1: remember it was like the fall of twenty fifteen when
Speaker 1: a series of really horrific floods hit my families from
Speaker 1: in southern India. And I remember roads and sidewalks that
Speaker 1: I had walked on, that my dad and had grown
Speaker 1: up on, just covered in feet of water and seeing
Speaker 1: dead bodies and people walking chest deep in water for
Speaker 1: miles to sanctuary. And it was this major moment of reckoning,
Speaker 1: of realizing that the climate crisis was here there were
Speaker 1: people dying as a result of it. It wasn't an
Speaker 1: issue thirty forty fifty years in the future, and the
Speaker 1: movements that we had in that moment were not growing
Speaker 1: or weren't as powerful as we needed them to be.
Speaker 1: To address this crisis, Varshini joined a group of young
Speaker 1: climate activists who wanted to drive big change. We embarked
Speaker 1: on this process for almost a year of strategic planning,
Speaker 1: of research, of study, of an assessment of the field,
Speaker 1: studying things like the civil rights movement, queer movements, women's suffrage,
Speaker 1: Vietnam War era movements, and then contemporary movements as well,
Speaker 1: like the movement for Black Lives, Occupy Wall Street, others,
Speaker 1: to see how do people make these grand societal transformations
Speaker 1: that we need to make to stop climate change, and
Speaker 1: how do we emulate that. Out of this work came
Speaker 1: Sunrise Movement, which aims to bring together millions of people,
Speaker 1: especially young people. As you may have heard, they've proposed
Speaker 1: a program called the Green New Deal. One important element
Speaker 1: of the program is funding innovation to drive down the
Speaker 1: cost of renewables to the point where they're cheaper than
Speaker 1: fossil fuels. But the aims of the Green New Deal
Speaker 1: are far more ambitious. It can be thought of as
Speaker 1: a decade long economic mobilization really to stop climate change
Speaker 1: at a scale not seen since World War Two. Everything
Speaker 1: from stopping climate change to creating tens of millions of good,
Speaker 1: high paying jobs, virtually eliminating poverty in the process. Everything
Speaker 1: from addressing agriculture systems to industry, to power generation and
Speaker 1: land use, forestry, everything under the sun that we would
Speaker 1: need to deploy to address the crisis. It won't be
Speaker 1: just one piece of legislation, and it was the same
Speaker 1: way with a New Deal. It wasn't There wasn't a
Speaker 1: New Deal bill. There were hundreds of bills and projects
Speaker 1: that FDR and others implemented. They were really embracing this
Speaker 1: ethos of experimentation, of doing whatever it takes to get
Speaker 1: Americans out of the Great Depression and put money back
Speaker 1: in the pockets of working people. The Green New Deal
Speaker 1: resolution is more of a framework than a specific piece
Speaker 1: of legislation at this point. Still, the idea has prompted
Speaker 1: a range of concerns. Climate change deniers belittle it. They
Speaker 1: want to take your pickup truck, they want to rebuild
Speaker 1: your home, they want to take away your hamburgers. This
Speaker 1: is what Stalin dreamed about but never achieved. Many scientists
Speaker 1: and economists view achieving carbon neutrality within ten years as
Speaker 1: a pipe dream given the slow rate at which power
Speaker 1: plants are replaced. Others think it's trying to do too
Speaker 1: much solve climate change, poverty, and racial injustice all at
Speaker 1: the same time. But maybe the Sunrisers are onto something
Speaker 1: very important in the way they're building a coalition packaging
Speaker 1: them as one thing. This sounds sort of counterintuitive to
Speaker 1: some people, but it actually makes it more popular. The
Speaker 1: parts of the Green New Deal that are the most
Speaker 1: popular are the parts around job creation, are the investments
Speaker 1: and sustainable agriculture and renewable energy technology for shiny. Contrasted,
Speaker 1: the Sunrise movements approach to previous climate change legislation efforts
Speaker 1: like the Waxman Marquee Bill in two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: the last forty years of focusing on just like a
Speaker 1: singular tax or a singular cap and trade model, or
Speaker 1: something that people cannot understand as making basic improvements to
Speaker 1: their lives. That's why a lot of the reason why
Speaker 1: Waxman Marquis failed in the Senate ten years ago, because
Speaker 1: there wasn't the public will and the public support. She
Speaker 1: talked to Senator Marky, who sponsored both the two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine bill and now the Green New Deal Resolution.
Speaker 1: I asked him, what is the major difference that you
Speaker 1: are seeing in twenty nineteen versus two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: and he said, the number one difference, and what we
Speaker 1: need so badly is that we actually have an army
Speaker 1: of people out there pushing for these solutions. I asked
Speaker 1: Marsha McNutt what she thought about Sunrise movement. I love it.
Speaker 1: I think it's critical. I mean, if it's not going
Speaker 1: to be that generation, then who they're the ones that
Speaker 1: are going to still be alive in twenty fifty. It's
Speaker 1: not going to be me, and it's going to be
Speaker 1: their children that are going to be alive in twenty
Speaker 1: one hundred that are going to be inheriting this parched earth.
Speaker 1: It's incredibly important that they stand up and say no,
Speaker 1: this is not their trajectory that I want for the planet.
Speaker 1: And when politicians vote with a two year time horizon
Speaker 1: in their mind, or if they vote special interest groups
Speaker 1: who are looking only at their corporation one year ROI,
Speaker 1: that is absolutely criminal. So What would you say to
Speaker 1: the people in the Sunrise movement? What encouragement or message
Speaker 1: would you say to them? I would say, they are
Speaker 1: just like the people who stood up to the Vietnam
Speaker 1: War and every other injustice. You know, this is an
Speaker 1: injustice to all of humanity. So, after talking with Varsheni
Speaker 1: about Sunrise Movement, I asked her whether she and her
Speaker 1: fellow activists thought solar geo engineering might be an important
Speaker 1: tool in addressing climate change. She was unconvinced, regarding the
Speaker 1: technology as a distraction from solving the real problem. If
Speaker 1: the issue is decarbonizing and the long term problem is
Speaker 1: taking carbon out of the atmosphere, things like geo engineering
Speaker 1: don't even do that. But and so, don't get me wrong.
Speaker 1: I understand the desperation, I understand the urgency. I understand
Speaker 1: that we need to kick everything into high gear. But
Speaker 1: I think we are putting carbon into the atmosphere. Perhaps
Speaker 1: the easiest fix that we have is to stop putting
Speaker 1: carbon into the atmosphere. Chapter nine, The Moral Hazard. I
Speaker 1: understand why climate change activists want to stay laser focused
Speaker 1: on decarbonizing the world's energy supply, But at the same time,
Speaker 1: is there any harm in also having climate intervention as
Speaker 1: a backup. Unfortunately, the answer is there might well be.
Speaker 1: Some people worry that pursuing solar geo engineering and parallel
Speaker 1: might actually make it harder to get the world to
Speaker 1: solve climate change. Humans tend to address problems only when
Speaker 1: they feel the consequences, such as heat waves, wildfires, floods,
Speaker 1: and hurricanes. If blocking the sun decreases natural disasters caused
Speaker 1: by global warming, will we become complacent about solving the
Speaker 1: real problem. It's like taking a painkiller instead of actually
Speaker 1: having the cancer taken out. Eliminating one of the symptoms
Speaker 1: of carbon dioxide emission, which is the planet getting warmer,
Speaker 1: makes it easier to ignore the root cause of the
Speaker 1: problem just continue emitting. This is what economists call the
Speaker 1: moral hazard problem, the idea of the people who have
Speaker 1: insurance against disasters aren't as careful about avoiding risks. For example,
Speaker 1: because the government provides flood insurance for homes on floodplains,
Speaker 1: homeowners are more willing to keep rebuilding their flooded homes
Speaker 1: on the same sites. But David Keith is worried about
Speaker 1: something even more insidious that the mere prospect of solar
Speaker 1: jew engineering will be used as a political weapon to
Speaker 1: deny the need to act on climate change. At the
Speaker 1: beginning of this episode, I noted that some of the
Speaker 1: greatest enthusiasm and congress for solar jew engineering has come
Speaker 1: from climate change deniers. That's certainly no accident. People are
Speaker 1: terrified that if these ideas get out more in the
Speaker 1: big world, that they will be seized upon by opponents
Speaker 1: of climate action, by oil companies, by people who want
Speaker 1: to walk emission scots. Those people will claim falsely that
Speaker 1: solo genissioning means we don't need to kind emissions, or
Speaker 1: that it may mean we don't have kind emissions, and
Speaker 1: they'll use that in the bruising political fight over emission scots.
Speaker 1: That is the underlying, I think biggest fear, and sure,
Speaker 1: of course it's a complete lygim I fear. I'm terrified
Speaker 1: about it. The certainty that they will try and use
Speaker 1: it as an argument is there, but that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that necessarily humanity will do less emission scots, and in
Speaker 1: the end, those of us who want emission scouts just
Speaker 1: have to win on the merits. Although David Keith is
Speaker 1: certain his work will be misused by some politicians, he
Speaker 1: believes it's essential to do the research. I still think
Speaker 1: that that fear is not a reason not to know more.
Speaker 1: You may think, or summon your audience to this podcast,
Speaker 1: may think the solo Regeniastoni is a terrible idea and
Speaker 1: never should be done. Others may think it really could
Speaker 1: be part of the way we manage climate change. But
Speaker 1: let me let you all out there and podcast land
Speaker 1: in on a big secret. We're not deciding now whether
Speaker 1: or not this happens. We're decide whether we give the
Speaker 1: next generation realistic information. If we keep the taboo going,
Speaker 1: then we'll hand them basically no information. So sometime the
Speaker 1: next decades, some government, maybe the Chinese government after their
Speaker 1: monsoon fails, maybe the US government after a massive Category
Speaker 1: five his New York, maybe the Indonesian government after a
Speaker 1: big heatwave that kills a quarter million. Some government is
Speaker 1: going to seriously consider this. And my view is that
Speaker 1: we'd be better to give them lots of knowledge before
Speaker 1: they consider it. But Raypierre Humbard doesn't buy it. So
Speaker 1: David likes to make the case that if we don't
Speaker 1: do these experiments, will just be giving the gift of
Speaker 1: ignorance to the future. But sometimes the gift of ignorance
Speaker 1: is a precious gift, and so we have to decide
Speaker 1: first whether this is a case where the gift of
Speaker 1: ignorance is precious or a burden. I think if it
Speaker 1: had been possible to actually give the gift of ignorance
Speaker 1: about horrible things like nerve gas, if we're dingle to
Speaker 1: have the gift of ignorance about building hydrogen bombs, whether
Speaker 1: or not that would have been feasible or not, that
Speaker 1: would have been a nice kind of ignorance to have.
Speaker 1: And again I'm not saying that necessarily albedo modification is
Speaker 1: in the same category as these things, but someone has
Speaker 1: to make that judgment, and it has to be made
Speaker 1: by civil society in some way. So where do you
Speaker 1: draw the line. I think that it would be impractical
Speaker 1: to have any form of governments that forbid computer experimentation.
Speaker 1: But when it comes to stuff kit gear, either a
Speaker 1: lab experiment, but especially outdoor experimentation, actually stuffing things into
Speaker 1: the atmosphere, even on a small scale, there is a
Speaker 1: kind of a clear line there, and so that's where
Speaker 1: I think there needs to be some kind of discussion.
Speaker 1: Is this a red line worth crossing? Is the scientific
Speaker 1: payback enough to actually justify crossing this red line conclusion.
Speaker 1: Choose your planet. So there you have it, solar geoengineering.
Speaker 1: It could cool the planet at least on average. It
Speaker 1: might buy time and mitigate suffering, but its precise impacts
Speaker 1: would be uneven and unpredictable, and it's very hard to test.
Speaker 1: There could be big winners and losers. It could even
Speaker 1: trigger climate wars. If we choose climate intervention, we might
Speaker 1: end up addictive for thousands of years, threatened with rapid,
Speaker 1: massive temperature increases if we ever stopped. If we don't
Speaker 1: consider climate intervention, we might find ourselves without options as
Speaker 1: temperatures keep rising in the decades ahead. Should we start
Speaker 1: experimenting now so that we'll know enough to be ready
Speaker 1: or is it a distraction or even worse, a gift
Speaker 1: to climate change deniers who'll use the prospect of solar
Speaker 1: geo engineering to keep us from solving the real problem.
Speaker 1: So the question is what can you do a lot?
Speaker 1: It turns out you don't have to be an expert,
Speaker 1: and you don't have to do it alone. If enough
Speaker 1: people get engaged together, we will make wise choices. Invite
Speaker 1: friends over for dinner and debate about what we should do,
Speaker 1: or organize a conversation for a book club or a
Speaker 1: faith group, or a campus event online of course for
Speaker 1: now in person, when it's safe. And if you hate
Speaker 1: having to consider these choices about solar geo engineering, then
Speaker 1: join a group to help stop climate change before it's
Speaker 1: too late. You can find lots of resources and ideas
Speaker 1: at our website Brave New Planet dot org. It's time
Speaker 1: to choose our planet. The future is up to us,
Speaker 1: and my kids still debate when I'm their dad, is
Speaker 1: more evil than Hitler and Stalin or Hitler and Stalin combined.
Speaker 1: That's good to know what the family debates. That's fascinating.
Speaker 1: Brave New Planet is a co production of the Broad
Speaker 1: Institute of MT and Harvard Pushkin Industries in the Boston Globe,
Speaker 1: with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Our show
Speaker 1: is produced by Rebecca Lee Douglas with Mary Doo theme
Speaker 1: song composed by Ned Porter, mastering and sound designed by
Speaker 1: James Garver, fact checking by Joseph Fridman, and a Stitt
Speaker 1: and Enchant special Thanks to Christine Heenan and Rachel Roberts
Speaker 1: at Clarendon Communications. To Lee McGuire, Kristen Zarelli and Justine
Speaker 1: Levin Allerhand at the Broad, to mil Lobell and Heather
Speaker 1: Faine at Pushkin, and to Eli and Edy Brode who
Speaker 1: made the Broad Institute possible. This is brave new planet.
Speaker 1: I'm Eric Lander. Two