Fast, Cheap, Untested - Can Geoengineering Keep the Planet Cool? Ep177

Transcript

Advocates and activists would say that even researching this, or you know, moving forward in dialogue in a serious way, is detrimental to addressing the root cause of climate change. / By tweaking that reflectivity by just 1 or 2%, you could offset the warming from greenhouse gases. / There's not an island or a bunker or a dirigible or a spacecraft that gives you the life you can have on a healthy Earth with strawberries and coffee and medicine and all of the things that you need.

This week we’re looking into the question of what if anything can be done to cool the earth down while we work on transitioning to energy and food systems compatible with a safe climate. This is often referred to as geo-engineering. As we discussed at the end of episode 168 with Anand Gopal, as climate impacts mount, so too will pressure on politicians to do something to alleviate them. And, compared to trying to artificially suck greenhouse gas emissions out of the atmosphere, intervening to cool the earth down could look like an attractive option - since, if it can work, it will likely be faster acting and cheaper to scale. Joining me to explore this important topic is Kelly Wanser, Executive Director of Washington based not-for-profit SilverLining. We most recently met on board the decommissioned aircraft carrier the USS Hornet which is moored in the San Francisco Bay. On the deck of this enormous vessel researchers from Washington University were testing equipment to release and monitor tiny salt water particles into the atmosphere - plumes of which could help to deflect sunlight and thereby cool the ocean. This caught the attention of the New York Times among others, but as we’ll hear, the project ran into some obstacles so I was keen to speak to Kelly about the broader context for the project and to explore some of the challenges her work involves. Please join me in welcoming Kelly Wanser to Cleaning Up. Kelly, it's so good that you could join us on Cleaning Up. I'm really looking forward to this conversation, and I wanted to just start, as we always do, with the question of you introducing yourself and telling us what you do and why.

I'm Kelly Wanser, I'm the executive director of a nonprofit called SilverLining. We're five and a half years old, and our focus is on near term climate risk. So we focus our energy on helping the world better figure out what might happen with climate change over the next 30 or 40 year period, and expanding the options that we have to respond to it, to make sure that the climate system is safe.

And so just unpacking that a little bit, I guess if people come across you, what they might associate you with is human interventions to try and hold back the worst impacts of climate change, right? So, sometimes called geoengineering or remediation or repair. What phrase do you use to describe the sort of interventions you're interested in?

Well, we do use the term intervention, partly because we learn that term from scientists who sort of see this in the complexity of the climate system and the fact that you can, you know, intervene, like you do with medicine, but you can't control, engineer the outcome. There's some uncertainty, so it has a lot of the qualities of medical treatment. So we've gone with that term climate intervention, which came from the National Academy of Sciences report in 2015. And we're interested in that area from a research perspective, because of what I learned when I first started looking into climate change 15 years ago, which is that in all of the scenarios for how we manage climate change, even where we're really, really successful, the climate system continues to warm for a period of several decades. So the origin of SilverLining and our work is really about that problem, which is that the climate system has a lot of latency in it. The greenhouse gas reductions work slowly, you know. So how do we make sure that we're safe in that period of time?

And what was it that got you switched on to climate change initially? Because you have a background in tech, right? Am I right? Did you want to tell us a little bit about your pathway to what got you asking these difficult questions?

Yeah, so my original background was in the IT technology sector, in security and infrastructure. So I was used to looking at complex systems problems. And my original degree was in economics and philosophy. So I was also really interested in risk and so I started to read what were then really infrequent reports of signs of climate change, and thought about the butterfly effect. And I started the very beginning of my career in pharmacoeconomics, in looking at health patterns and things. And so I thought, well I wonder what the risk really is. And because I was in Silicon Valley, I had access to some senior scientists, and like I had done in my tech career, I went to the top people and started asking questions. So it was really out of curiosity. And then as I was asking questions and I was getting to know some of the senior scientists in the field, curiosity became a concern. And it became a concern for this time gap, this few decades, where it seemed like our information level was too low, our risk was too high, and our portfolio was empty. So that seemed like an interesting place to start exploring. And so that's what happened. And it was a gradual process over seven or eight years before I switched my career into climate change.

So I'm really interested in that parallel with health that you just made, that if the planet is showing a fever, like it's showing some symptoms of distress from all the buildup of impact. You're really interested in what we have in our arsenal that could help alleviate those symptoms, like overheating, even as we try to get to the root cause of the problem, and we try to remove the source of the illness. Is that a fair description of what SilverLinings is really honing in on?

That's the right description. So it's both having sufficient diagnostics. So you know, the flip side of the coin of the problem is we're not in a very good position to project how the illness is going to go, and there are aspects of research that apply across both dimensions, which is getting better at understanding these parts of the system and what they're going to do, and then how you might intervene to keep that stable. So I think the analogy of medicine is great on a number of levels. One is that in medicine, you think about a treatment portfolio, not just one thing. And sometimes in the climate space, people are focused on narrowing the array of what we have to do, versus saying, 'well, actually, there's a portfolio of things, and it's likely to change over time.' And I think in medicine too, you have your acute treatment if the patient's crashing or the patient's in the ICU, and the things you do to stabilise the patient. And that's not necessarily the same as treating the underlying disease or bringing the patient back to a more holistic place. And so that analogy is how we think about it, which is if for the purposes of preventing different kinds of feedback and ultra dangerous conditions, we want to keep the temperature stable at a certain place. And that actually helps us do the other things we need to do, right? The medical analogy is really helpful too, because in medicine, you're looking for what is safe and effective, and you're driving hard with research to determine what is safe and effective, and if it's not safe and effective, you're not going to use it. And so the objective of the research is to determine, do you have safe and effective options for improving the temperature profile of the climate system? And really driving research at that without pre-determining, yet, because we don't have a lot of information yet, what the answer to that is.

You say, 'what is safe?' I mean, it has to be seen as relative to the symptoms, right? Because, for example, when you're suffering from cancer, you'll happily put up with radiotherapy or chemotherapy, even though that has some consequences, because it's got a probability that in the long-run, it's going to be net beneficial. Is that the approach we need to take? Rather than a completely do-no harm, there can be no negative impacts approach? Because that would seem very constraining.

Well, that's a really great point Bryony, and it's one of the... You know, I think the thing that has inhibited research on these climate interventions in particular in the early research has been comparing these interventions to pre-industrial climate or current climate, instead of where the climate is going and the relative conditions that you're trying to improve. And so I do think there's been a trend in the past few years of people have started to study these things more seriously, to say that the goal is to compare what is looking like, a really dangerous and dire kind of trajectory for climate change, with the risk profile of these things, and then also trying to do research that helps reduce as much as you can the risk of these things, like you would in medicine.

So Kelly, just to stick with this idea of the medical intervention as a good little parallel, I guess if people were thinking about that, they might say, 'an awful lot of effort goes into trying to make medical trials safe and to run these control experiments and double blinds and placebos, etc., and it's a big endeavour, and I guess you can do it multiple times.' But when it comes to trying to experiment with planetary scale interventions, how can we replicate that? Because if it goes wrong,it could go very wrong, and there's only one planet. So how do we make sure that we address the concern that we just can't afford to get this wrong?

So that's a really great question, and it's one of the very big challenges. It's a significant question also about the experiment we're doing with greenhouse gases, because we're creating this quite anomalous condition that we don't have an ability to understand very well. So the issue is you're exactly right,we don't have a cohort of patients, and we can't necessarily replicate the same type of model quite in medicine, but there are analogies here, where what you're trying to do is generate representation of relevant parts of the system and very localised effects that you could plug into computer models. And the goal is to try to get computer model simulations and other analytical tools as close as possible to being able to represent what would happen. Ultimately, we're going to rely on that. And so we're looking at what in the natural system is like that, that we can observe. You know, what pollution does, what volcanoes do, and then are there ways that we could make these models really much more closely represent what would happen? And what scientists have said, and two US-science agencies published about this, and one of them is likely to publish more about this in coming months, is that part of that is to do very, very small scale studies, like the plume of an aircraft, or the plume of a ship, observe those really closely and try to refine the models of what happens at that scale, and then use those models to inform the bigger models of what happens at larger scales.

So just to clarify that. So at the moment, we're trying to do localised studies that can help us get better at answering that question of whether we should do this? This proposal on the table at the moment is not 'we just need to knock down the regulatory barriers and put in some governance, and then it's all systems go.' We're at a much earlier stage in this, right? We're still just working out, can it be done, and is it net beneficial to do it?

That's right. I mean, there are certainly people that work in our field, who think differently and who draw on the conclusion that we're going to need to use this and maybe even some theories about what will work and what won't work. Most of the scientists we work with — that would include senior scientists at the UK Met Office and NOAA — would say there are indications that these things could be relevant, but we don't have the information that we need to know whether we could safely use them effectively.

But we should at least get to the point where we know how to answer that question?

That's right. And so these small studies that help model these things better, may be a critical path to that. And so that's a factor in how much we can know how quickly.

Bringing it very locally, we both met on a disused aircraft carrier that's parked in the San Francisco Bay, where there was a small-scale experiment being done on the production of salt crystals that will brighten clouds. Can you tell us a bit about what happened to that project? And it was an example of something where certain parts of the problem are being looked at in detail to build up a bigger picture, right?

That's right. And one of the key parts of the problem is can you generate the size distribution and scale of particles? Tools that scientists say would produce the optimum effect with the least waste and the least side effects. And so there's an engineering challenge to say, can you generate this kind of particle stream, and then can you study how that the atmosphere would respond very locally, and then model that out. And so this program, which is a research program at the University of Washington, which is one of the top places for this kind of study, I worked with them before starting SilverLining on an interdisciplinary collaboration to say, could we create the technology to generate this type of particle stream and study this local process on clouds? And in doing that, could we improve the models, not only of brightening clouds on purpose, but could that help us improve the models of what pollution is doing, and therefore the climate projections as a whole? And so a first step in that is, can you create the technology to generate the particle stream and then start to measure what happens to those particles as they hit the atmosphere, and make them a hyper-localised model of that to help people understand it? And so this was what was set up on the USS Hornet, which is a decommissioned aircraft carrier. But it's not disused, it actually operates as a museum. And one of the reasons that the team chose this site was the idea that you could have a facility that other scientists could come to and students and members of the public and learn about this science while it was happening, and the fact that it's a stream of sea salt mist would be a good thing to facilitate that kind of learning and that kind of open exchange of ideas and information. What we've learned is that there's a lot of confusion about these things, and especially because there really haven't been any of these studies that have happened successfully. There was one that was shut down in the UK years ago at Oxford. There was one that was shut down in Sweden. And they get a reaction and an opposition and a response before they're able to generate the science and information that would help people understand what they do. So something similar happened in Alameda, where you get a combination of some people in the local community who get ideas about things being safe or unsafe and what they might do, and organised opposition that comes into wherever these things try to happen, and mobilises and so. I think one of the things we — the people in our community — are grappling with is how we can break the cycle of having these things be something that people are more educated about and aware of and able to process in the right way. And that's still the case in Alameda, and there's still a hope that we could work there or elsewhere in a way that's open, that people can have access to.

What was the main source of the opposition? Was it on moral grounds, or was it on local air quality grounds? Or just lack of public consultation? What was the main cause of concern?

Well, there was a member of the community who raised questions about the safety of the sea salt emission, and it was reviewed by their environmental consultants. And we had, I think you were there, we had some of the regulating agencies there when we were first doing the studies. The issue is that sea salt is not a regulated substance. And in fact, there's not a lot of research on the safety of sea salt because it's ubiquitous, and so when people started raising questions where they wanted a certain standard of evidence, like you might apply to a mercury emission or something, there's actually less information on sea salt than there is on pollutants. And that actually created a problem, and it created a problem that we didn't expect, and it's even a problem now in trying to work with regulating agencies, because it's a non-toxic substance that hasn't had a profile and doesn't have a lot of literature. So there's that aspect, which then can exacerbate misinformation or fear or things like that, where you don't have the science yet to really step through it. And so I think that's a thing where actually having some of these studies happen would be helpful.

Let's talk a little bit about — you've already mentioned a couple of the interventions that are potentially viable — the cloud brightening or the solar radiation management, I know are two that you guys have looked at. But do you want to quickly give us a potted history of geoengineering? Because there's been some wild and wacky ideas, right? And so how do you sift through these ideas?

So as an organisation, we're science led, and we follow the scientific assessments. The first assessment on these topics was actually in the UK, by the Royal Society, and they defined a lot of the terms that we know like geoengineering, solar-radiation modification, marine-cloud brightening, and they did the first-pass walk through of things that people are proposing to try to cool the climate system faster than you can do with emissions reductions, or to bring greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere directly. And so you ended up with these two classes of ideas. One is like,can we actively pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, which is now known as carbon dioxide removal. And different ideas for how to do that mechanically, how to do it with trees, with the ocean, and various things. The other category of thing, which was the answer to the question of could you bring heat energy out of the climate system, and could you do it within a decade or a few years, if you had the capability. And those ideas related to that involve different ways of reflecting sunlight or pushing solar energy away from Earth, instead of coming in and getting trapped there. And so those ideas range from ways of reflecting sunlight out into space, through to ways of reflecting some sunlight out of the atmosphere to things you would do on land and putting big plastic sheets over ice caps or generating bubbles in the ocean to create more white surface or scattering particles on the Arctic to try to prevent melt and increase Arctic reflection and even things like painting roofs white or growing crops that are lighter coloured to reflect more sunlight. And so kind of the three classes were space, atmosphere and land. You know, broadly speaking, where the scientific assessments landed, starting with the UK Royal Society and moving through the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, was that the space-based approaches require a huge amount of scale operating in space, and for the most part, we don't have the technology for that yet. So one idea, for example, is to create a giant filter film at the Lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun. And it might be something like a billion square metres of film that you would need. And the idea that I heard was, you know, if you could create intelligent, self-replicating robots that you would send to an asteroid. They would mine the asteroid, and then they would build this thing. And so that is obviously not a super near-term kind of engineering. So I think when people talk about the space-based approaches, we're used to being able to try to do ambitious things in space, but the scale of this is really quite something. The land-based approaches, or the surface-based approaches have had a lot of appeal to people because it sounds like it'd be great: We could paint roofs white, grow light-coloured crops, and it feels less risky and maybe even more natural to do things on the surface, even if you're scattering silicon beads on the Arctic or putting plastic sheets down. What scientists have said is, the scale required to alter the reflectivity at the surface is large, and the things that you're doing tend to have an impact on the biological and chemical processes that happen between the surface and the atmosphere. So they're actually invasive and so at scale, doing these invasive things has potential impacts that are pretty significant. And at the same time, one of the drawbacks of doing things at the surface is you have clouds in between. So, among other things, the effect is dampened by the fact that you're lower down and underneath the cloud layer. So where scientists landed, and you'll see this in the recent news of publications about these things is that one of the primary ways the Earth system itself, kind of maintains this Goldilocks environment that we're in — that shiny blue dot that you see from space — is the reflection of sunlight from the atmosphere itself. And by tweaking that reflectivity by just 1 or 2%, you could offset the warming from greenhouse gases. And so that's really where they've landed in terms of focus and what you're seeing now in terms of focus for the fast-paced types of things.

And as I understand it, there are two tiers even there, right? There's the upper-atmosphere and then there's the lower-atmosphere interventions. And none of these are permanent, right? So these are activities you'd undertake to temporarily reflect and then they fall back down to earth. I guess is that a rough characterization?

That's a rough characterization. Right now, there are actually three things that we're looking at. So there's the primary fact that I talked about with pollution, which is pollution comes up from the surface and hits the low-cloud layer, and it can stay as haze. If it mixes with clouds, it stays in the atmosphere a bit longer, but it's kind of a few days, maximum of a week. And so it's temporary in that way. The effects when you start cooling a large part of the system, or the whole system, over time, you know, it changes the behaviour of the system. So it's not the case that it's completely transient if you were doing something at scale over time, because you'd have changed the cooling of the ocean and the circulation of things and maybe things that you want to change. But it's not purely transient in quite that way, which I learned from climate scientists. So it's very transient in that, like, if you started doing it and stopped doing it after a week or two, it'd go away. But if you were doing it over the course of years and you've been cooling the planet this way, there would be effects from stopping and you would have created effects that are more sustained. And the main candidate for this, which is based on observation of very large volcanoes that have erupted and pushed particles all the way up to the stratosphere, which is one of the outer layers of the atmosphere. In the stratosphere, you have these very high winds and this very rapid circulation. And so it has two characteristics, one is the particles stay up there a lot longer. So they'll be entrained up there for over a year, and they'll start to fall out gradually. The second thing is they disperse very quickly around the planet, so you got this much more even distribution, dispersed effect from what's happening. The third category of thing is the upper layer of clouds in the atmosphere, the cirrus cloud layer. And those cirrus clouds act more like an insulation than a reflector. And so if you disperse particles in them, you can increase their insulation, or you can thin the clouds and actually make them less insulating. And one of the things that is an active area right now is looking at how current commercial aircraft that are currently flying are having some of these positive and negative effects. Right now, there's the thought that commercial aircraft are adding to that insulation effect, and that by changing aspects of the way that they fly, we could reduce their impact that way.

Yeah because that's one of the puzzles in the various sectors you have to go through to think through how do we eliminate their greenhouse gas contributions? Aviation has always been a really complex one, not only because it's physically difficult to replace a fuel-based system, but also you have all these other effects of emitting particulates and water vapour at a particular part of the atmosphere, and then whether that's... as you say, there's been some controversy about whether it's net cooling or net warming. And it feels like now that we've reached this volume of flights where if you look at a Skyscanner map, you know we really do cover all... there's a huge concentration now of flights per day... It kind of does feel like the net effect of all that, we should try to work it out. That should be something we should be able to solve and not have these error bars, which, as I understand it, are still pretty large, around that question of how damaging it is or how beneficial it could be.

That's a great point Bryony, because the error bars on the effects on clouds, both the cirrus cloud layer and the low-marine cloud layer, the error bars are almost a degree, at least in the low cloud layer, or the cumulative effect. And so the error bars are too big for determining the efficacy of these applications.

We'll be back with more from Kelly Wanser after this short break.

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I want to switch gears slightly and talk about the politics of all of this. And you mentioned that some of these interventions are relatively local and then there's the global ones. But are there particular countries that are more bullish, that are moving ahead? I'm just imagining, if I was the Australian Prime Minister, and I've got a coral reef that's about to pretty much die, but it's a source of huge national pride and tourism? Are there countries that are exploring localised interventions more than others? I'd love to hear your views on who's leading this.

I'll start by saying it's still pretty early and nascent everywhere, and that some of the science challenges that we talked about persist at the global level. In terms of the state of climate models, regional models, and global to regional downscaling and things like that. That said, to your point, Australia has had a group that's been early in looking, you know, trying to look at marine cloud brightening within those limitations of the science and so forth, because of the state of the barrier reef and the limited number of options for addressing it. And so that's been emerging there. And that was part of the very substantially funded program in Australia to look at different ways of mitigating what was happening to the reef. The other place where there's some substantial funding, if not quite yet, a huge amount of output, is Japan. In Japan, they have a moonshot program, and one of the moonshots is to do with controlling weather and typhoons. And one of the big impacts they're facing is they're sort of sitting duck islands in terms of the escalation of the size of these storms. And the storms are associated with increased heat energy at the ocean surface and the low atmosphere. And so one of the ideas is that if you use something like marine cloud brightening to cool the ocean surface and circulation coming into these areas, then you could weaken the force of storms. That has not been studied very much, and it faces a lot of the gap problems of our ability to represent cloud and aerosol processes. But in Japan, this is part of what they want to look at in their moonshot program. The other place that's quite active in this area is the UK and the ARIA program, which is the UK's relatively new Innovation Agency, has launched a program to look at this type of climate intervention, and possibly to do some localised studies of especially the low-cloud aerosol type effects. The UK experienced the unusual Atlantic warming. And the UK is also part of the constituency that has to worry about the AMOC (Atlantic meridional overturning circulation) current, and some of the tipping points.

Expand on the AMOC. This is the marine current, the saline current, right?

That's right. And I should mention, in the context of all of this, because you're from the UK and still active in decision making there. The UK is the father of atmospheric science, and a lot of the earth sciences in general, going back historically. And so as a country, it's one of the leading countries in the type of research that you need, to look at both climate change and especially atmospheric types of responses. The UK is also one of the few places in the world that maintains work on tipping points, which was taboo until relatively recently. So one of the tipping points is the major current system that drives the circulation of the Atlantic ocean and the air currents, called the AMOC current. And that circulation is what maintains the climate conditions in Europe and in the UK, which would otherwise, for the latitude that you're at, look more like Siberia. And so what's been emerging in research reports recently is that observations are indicating some strange behaviour associated with those current systems. It's one of the areas where we have a weakness in our observational coverage. And if you ask scientists that are closer they say it should be a top priority that we have observations of the AMOC current so we can get a sense of whether it is showing indications of a tipping point. And if it changes, you know, if it crosses that threshold of change, then scientists are saying, , 'it's not something that you can reverse.' So one of the drivers of looking at these more rapid interventions, going back to our conversation at the beginning about stabilising the patient, is, are we approaching tipping points? Are we approaching dangerous conditions for different parts of the system, and do we need to arrest the warming and make sure that those kinds of changes don't happen?

So there are countries that are moving pragmatically forward with some studies. But it sounds quite piecemeal, and there's not a huge amount going on. On the other side, are there countries who are very resistant to this, even as a concept? And maybe now is the time to pivot to discussing that question of where the resistance is and we can talk through some of the downsides, right? We've been exploring relatively neutrally or positively, but there are lots of people who have concerns that this is something we shouldn't be doing.

Yes, there are lots of people who have those concerns that this isn't something we should be doing, and also this isn't something we should be researching or necessarily discussing in a serious way. So there's kind of a spectrum of concern, you know, that we would actually do these things, and whether there are negative societal effects from even taking them seriously or researching them in a concerted way. So that has kept them from being researched. And so I would say, up until the past five or seven years, some of our work and the work of other people to try to open up research and try to help people understand that it's related to core climate research on aerosols, that's been helping. But in general, people like Al Gore, like some quite prominent advocates and activists, would say that, and have said that, even researching this or moving forward in dialogue in a serious way, is detrimental to addressing the root cause of climate change. And so I have a lot of sympathy with that, and especially with people who've been in this sphere since the '80s or the '90s, where you would say, 'we should just dial down over the course of the next few decades our use of fossil fuels.And of course, we wouldn't let the climate system get to this very dangerous state. And so studying what happens in that very dangerous state and studying ways to mitigate that very dangerous state doesn't make sense.' So I have sympathy for that. And again, if you use the medical analogy, you have an uncle who's pre-diabetic, and, it's like, 'okay, uncle, here's some medicine to take, go for your walks, dial down the sugar.' And you flash forward, 20 years later, and now more extreme treatment is needed. So we're kind of in that state. But the objections remain, and those communities of opposition are strong, and they're able to activate very specifically on steps forward in research as a nexus point where, if you can stop the research, you know you're not going to get it downstream as an alternative, and you may not even get a serious dialog about it, because there isn't a lot of evidence to inform that discussion.

I know I've had this conversation when I've been in India, and they have got some evidence of the kind of radiation effect that comes from a volcano then having a knock on effect on their monsoon and their crops and their water provision. So it's not just some sort of ideological opposition, it's actually based on some empirical evidence that when these systems get intervened, there are unintended consequences for a country like India, with a billion people all relying on a lot of subsistence farming. That kind of risk, it comes back to our risk profile, right, or is the intervention worse than the cure, or vice versa?

Well, you raise a great point, and it's that point that was one of the motivators for SilverLining, because the very early studies on these kinds of interventions, solar radiation modification, or SRM, were using the tools that they had available. So they started with models that turn on and off the sun, and then they went to models of volcanic eruptions. And then the very first model that our research director supported while he was at the US agency DARPA, was looking at the most extreme case for emissions. And so the most extreme case for putting material into the stratosphere. And so those started to improve the sort of realism of it, but they weren't very realistic, and then they were getting some of these side effect profiles that, in more recent years, as we've been able to support more realistic ways of doing things that would be less bad, then you're not seeing those same findings. And so it's making a strong case for research so that we can generate evidence about what the realities are, versus these initial, quick-pass studies. So now we in SilverLining, one of the first things we did in our research practice was to support more realistic simulation of intervention in the stratosphere, where you would do controlled simulations. One of the very worst ways to do it is to emulate a volcano. Think of medicine, like one big glass of chemo all at once, it's not what you would do. So when they did these studies of these different control models for doing it, of course the side effect profiles came down, including the monsoon. And I think one of the goals of the people in the SRM community and in various groups, again, based in the UK and working with the Global South, is to say can we improve the tools that we have to do high quality simulations that are realistic, and then give people access and tools to be able to look at how this will affect their region? We haven't

We haven't mentioned one major country that is very up to speed on climate science, and that's China. Have you got any sense of whether China is interested in this? Is pursuing it? What do we know about what's going on there?

We've had a few touch points. They actually had a British researcher who ran a program in China, one of the Chinese universities, a modelling of mostly stratospheric interventions and we've had some touch points with senior researchers in China who were looking more on the carbon dioxide removal and marine-carbon dioxide removal side of things, because they have such a big vested interest in the ocean and the health of the ocean in their aquaculture. So they're really interested in that and they have quite sophisticated science capabilities. They built a dedicated climate computer, or sorry, supercomputing system, which we don't have in the United States. We don't have a separate computing system that's dedicated only to climate research. I don't think you have one in the UK either. And so they have that, but they're using the US and other climate models, so they don't have their own native climate model development. So there are aspects of the problem that aren't as native to them, but they are able to spin up things quickly. And they are looking at problems, you know, if you look at their work, and we haven't touched on this, when you asked about localised things: the flip side of the coin, which is cloud seeding and rainfall enhancement, which is going on already.

Which already happens, right for crops and water. And that's not governed by any... Is it governed by an international treaty of any kind?

It's not. There was a treaty that happened after the Vietnam War called the ENMOD Treaty, which was about not trying to weaponize weather, weather engagement. But it doesn't speak to people trying to influence weather on their own behalf. And I think what's happened is that cloud seeding started in a highly localised way. You know, if you think about ski resorts and snow making, right? And then a lot of the cloud seeding... The US is focused on snowpack, and it starts out in this localised way, but as water conditions get more impacted, and people are trying to do more, these things are growing. And two of the biggest places in the world for big-scale efforts are China and the UAE, the Middle East. And as these things grow, then they start to look a bit like what I was talking about, where they're starting to affect kind of weather patterns, and the long distance telekinetic effects on other places, and their weather. And we have a lot of uncertainty in all of that stuff. So the origins of cloud seeding, like a lot of that activity in the United States, for example, or the UK, would be governed by, in the US, by the EPA, and by what gets submitted into the atmosphere and what's safe to breathe and so on. The piece that isn't governed is the local to regional to trans-regional effects on other other places.

This all feels to me like ... So one thing you know I've been musing about is we've had 36 COPs under the UNFCCC and and we have the Paris Agreement, which has largely taken away the need to negotiate anymore because it's mostly now nationally determined contributions. So what is the thing that the UNFCCCis really working on? Like, where are the negotiations going next? And it feels like at some point there needs to be a big workstream kicked off underneath that auspice, which is to sort out all of these questions of observational data, risk assessments, monitoring like regular reporting back, like not waiting for five years for an IPCC summary report. But actually on an annual basis, having a clearinghouse for all this, this whole topic, it feels like it's such a massive topic and we've just touched the sides, and there's so many other things we could talk about. But where is this happening in an organised way? Is there an annual conference everyone goes to in your field, or is it really still not being pulled together?

Well first thing I would say is there's a distinction between weather modification and climate intervention. So right now, those are different communities, and they overlap a bit in the sort of cloud aerosol world, but mostly they're different. And there's a bit more in the system around weather modification, at least in the WMO. However, I think the linkages between weather modification and climate intervention and how these things come together, that's still emerging. Like for the first year at the American Geophysical Union Conference, they're having sessions together and again, because weather modification used to be quite contained, and is now growing to something more impactful. Climate intervention used to be ultra marginalised, and is now growing into something.

It's not an easy problem, Kelly, how do you keep yourself going? Because you've taken on the mother of all problems. Really, there's data gaps, it's very disparate. There's that whole host of complex problems to work through on the research side. There's the political side, there's the public acceptability side. I mean, what gets you out of bed in the morning feeling positive that you can have an impact on all of this.

Well, I think some of it is, the people that we have the good fortune to collaborate and work with, and the fact that we've been able to make progress. And so I'll give you a couple of examples. One is when we started SilverLining. We started with the US Congress, and went on the hill and started the conversation about this problem of pollution aerosols and the near term that we don't know what kind of risk we're facing. We showed them pictures of the tracks of ships from space. And then talked about the fact that people are starting to think about these active interventions that involve dispersing aerosols, and that right now we lack the information base to know how to make a policy response. We literally wouldn't know if somebody starts putting particles in the stratosphere, whether to help them, whether to shoot them down, or what the impacts would be. And that was really compelling to everyone across both sides of the aisle. And so we got some inspiration from the fact that there is a pathway for reasonable thinking and for different kinds of people to work together on something like this. As we talked about: the observational gaps, one of the observational gaps that we have is the stratosphere. And the stratosphere is a place where, if somebody goes to do these kinds of things quickly, that's kind of the target of choice, and we don't have good measurement capabilities for what's in the stratosphere. We have one satellite that's specially configured to look at the stratosphere at a shallow angle like you need, with special instruments like you need. And it's scheduled to go offline early next year, and there is no replacement for it anywhere in the world. And one of the first things we did, supported by Congress, was to help NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) work with NASA to start doing sampling of the stratosphere, to fly aircraft there and take samples, which they hadn't done since the '90s. And there are currently four aircraft in the world that are available for research that can fly in the stratosphere, which has conditions like halfway to space. They're all owned by NASA, and they're all old. And so we got support from Congress to start doing these sampling flights. And now there's enough money to do one every other year so they can go to one spot in the stratosphere every other year. And so that's a start. And when they did that, they actually found that the stratosphere had changed since the '90s, and they found pollution that wasn't there. And there was pollution from wildfires, which are getting to be big enough to kick things up to the stratosphere. But there's pollution from space traffic, and we're seeing pollution from rockets in the stratosphere. And as that traffic grows, we could start to see the same kind of profile that we see in the lower atmosphere, where maybe that's helping a cool planet, but maybe it's hurting the ozone layer and having other side effects. So it's things like that that are quite inspiring and exciting, where you feel like you can help really smart, innovative people move the needle on progress. And then you see policymakers in both the US and the UN who think about these things in really constructive ways.

It does strike me that there needs to be a very clear ask made of all of these bazillionaires who are heading into space with their huge wealth now, that they should be investing in this, almost as a co-investment. .I'm just thinking you couldn't have got the automobile, the car without roads, right? Henry Ford would not have sold his cars without there being road infrastructure, if you're off sending your rockets into Mars or wherever, you should be required to invest in the infrastructure we need to keep our stratosphere or upper atmosphere monitored and safe. And these are the people with the money right. And as you said, philanthropy has stepped into this space to compensate. So maybe there's a big ask here that you need to formulate, of those handful of people who are developing these business models to make sure that we look after our spaceship Earth. This is ground control, and it's got to stay intact and safe, right?

That's a great point, you know. And in the United States, the ground zero for that is NASA. And right now, the circumstances are the opposite. Like the Earth-system budgets at NASA are getting cut, and the space budgets are, 10 times bigger, maybe more. And so we need ... it's helpful. And we've had high net worth individuals from various arenas that have helped fund this catalyst work. But we also need them to help on the governmental side to say, we've got to have this public support for these public goods. We do need Spaceship Earth. It's not going to be good to be trying to go to Mars and not have a great planet to come back to.

I had a friend who had a poster years ago, which was essentially advertising Earth to someone living on Mars, and as soon as you see it from that perspective, you'd be like, 'I want to go there. I don't want to be on this horrible planet. I want to be over there. This looks like paradise.'

Paradise relative to anything else. And I think people are coming to the realisation that there aren't escape hatches for anyone. There's not an island or a bunker or a dirigible or a spacecraft that gives you the life you can have on a healthy Earth with strawberries and coffee and medicine and all of the things that you need.

That's a beautiful point to end on, because I think it leaves us with the mission very clear as to what we need to do. And you've been super helpful, Kelly, in terms of helping us unpack all the complexities. Is there anything you want to leave the audience with that we haven't covered yet? Just leave us with a little parting thought?

I think sometimes people raise the idea with regards to these climate interventions, as you kind of touched on, that there's not a way that the world can make decisions about them, and they're inherently inequitable and that that alone may mean that it's not a good thing to work on. What we've seen is quite the opposite. So we dug in, especially to look at the Montreal Protocol, which has helped protect the ozone layer, and the mechanics of how that works, and how it continues to work every year, even when they expand it to do other things. And so there's a lot of hope in our corner that there are also good ways that the world could work together on this problem and navigate this and based on the evidence that we're seeing, that it's much more the case that we're all in it together. It is much less zero-sum looking than it first appeared, because it really looks like in a warming climate all of us suffer pretty badly, ultimately, even if it's in relative terms. And in a place where we're looking at solutions that help bring down the pressure, it's much more of a shared outcome picture, so that part is hopeful. So I want people to take away that driving science and evidence is what's going to help us work together on these things, make reasonable decisions about them and help people participate in a way that's fair and equitable and just. So supporting that there's a lot of hope that we navigate through this, and ultimately, failure is not an option.

Absolutely agree with that. Well, look, Kelly, it's been a real pleasure. And I know they're going to be feeling, they're going to be moments when we make progress, and there'll be step backs. But I'm just very... Thank you for your time, for spending this time with us. Thank you for doing what you're doing, and thank you for talking us through that in such a thoughtful way. It feels to me the last time I really thought about this seriously was many years ago. And you know, even this conversation, I've seen how things are moving, despite the lack of resources, despite the fact this is often a forgotten and a taboo topic, we are getting more sophisticated in our Andand it's a lot of that, I think, is down to you and your network. So thank you, and I look forward to seeing you in person before too long.

Thank you, Bryony, it was a pleasure talking with you. Appreciate your questions, and I'll look forward to seeing the podcast.

So that was Kelly Wanser, executive director of SilverLining. We'll put links in the show notes to the resources we mentioned during our conversation. And as always, my thanks go to our producer, Oscar Boyd, our researchers, Genie Harrisonn and Alex McInerney, our video editor, Jamie Oliver, and the growing list of people working behind the scenes. Please make sure you join us, same time next week for another episode of Cleaning Up.

Fast, Cheap, Untested - Can Geoengineering Keep the Planet Cool? Ep177 - Kelly Wanser

Bryony Worthington

Kelly Wanser

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