Will Geoengineering With Solar Radiation Management Ever Be Used?

ALAN ROBOCK
Department of Environmental Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA

“In addition to the above issues, there are more that would affect the implementation of planetary geoengineering. The principle of informed consent governs medical interventions. How could we get the informed consent of the entire planet? What if a big multinational corporation was in charge? Would you trust the fate of the planet to the BP Geoengineering Corporation? The US military is the best at flying material up into the atmosphere. Would the rest of the world trust them, or any military, to have their best interests at heart? Certainly the developed world is most capable of doing any geoengineering implementation. The history of colonialism will make the rest of the world wary of climate manipulations that are presumably for their benefit.

Global agreement is not necessary for regional or global-scale geoengineering to be implemented. What if one country determined that intervention would benefit them, say by relieving drought caused by global warming, and their research showed that the negative aspects elsewhere would be minimal? In this rather unlikely event, and if the research proved correct, there may be no retribution. Yet the creation of a stratospheric cloud in one location will allow the cloud to spread globally if in the Tropics and covering half a hemisphere in high latitudes, so it is bound to have large-scale effects. Similarly, cloud brightening on a scale large enough to change regional climate will also have effects in other nations. And it is highly unlikely that the effects outside the target area will be only positive, or that it will be possible to determine them amidst the weather noise.’  p204

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