Quico Toro at Persuasion: The climate debate is in a strange place. We’re told we face an epochal, civilization-ending calamity within our lifetimes. But when scientists bring up unconventional new ways of managing that risk, we’re told we mustn’t even talk about them.
Why? Because, alas, some of their most promising ideas got slapped with the label “geoengineering”: a term so scary it seems to shut down people’s prefrontal cortex altogether.
The result is a weirdly misshapen public debate, where a strong taboo weighs over a whole branch of atmospheric science. Our climate debate refuses to acknowledge something top researchers now strongly suspect: that we could reverse global warming quickly and affordably using nothing scarier than sea salt.
The idea is called Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB). It would work by making clouds reflect more of the sun’s energy back out into space. As we speak, researchers are working on the basic science needed to figure out if it can really work at scale.
I’ve been talking to some of them.
They’re not wild-eyed idealists or crazed Bond villains in the making. They’re cautious, evidence-seeking scientists working to push the frontiers of our knowledge in a deeply hostile information environment.
Every one of them sees Marine Cloud Brightening as an “in case of emergency, break glass” option, one that it would be much better never to have to use. Every one of them is keenly aware that the technique may have consequences nobody intended. They always preface their ideas with provisos about the imperative to curb carbon emissions first. They’re allergic to overpromising and terrified of having their work misrepresented by a sensationalist press prone to scaremongering with their research.
And yet they’re passionate. Because in a world awash with charlatans peddling nonsense plans to save the world, they know they’re working on an idea that actually might.
More here.
