U.S. geoengineering research gets a lift with $4 million from Congress

January 23, 2020 |By John Fialka, E&E News | AAAS Science |

NASA/ISS CREW/JOHNSON SPACE CENTER

"BOULDER, COLORADO—The top climate change scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said he has received $4 million from Congress and permission from his agency to study two emergency—and controversial—methods to cool the Earth if the U.S. and other nations fail to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

David Fahey, director of the Chemical Sciences Division of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory, told his staff yesterday that the federal government is ready to examine the science behind "geoengineering"—or what he dubbed a "Plan B" for climate change.

Fahey said he has received backing to explore two approaches.

One is to inject sulfur dioxide or a similar aerosol into the stratosphere to help shade the Earth from more intense sunlight. It is patterned after a natural solution: volcanic eruptions, which have been found to cool the Earth by emitting huge clouds of sulfur dioxide.

The second approach would use an aerosol of sea salt particles to improve the ability of low-lying clouds over the ocean to act as shade.

This technique is borrowed from "ship tracks"—or long clouds left by the passage of ocean freighters that are seen by satellites as reflective pathways. They could be widened by injections of vapor from seawater by specialized ships to create shading effects.

Research in both techniques, Fahey emphasized, are recommended in a forthcoming study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine titled "Climate Intervention Strategies that Reflect Sunlight to Cool Earth."

But in a sign of how controversial the topic is, Fahey recommended changing the nomenclature from geoengineering to "climate intervention," which he described as a "more neutral word."

Fahey also emphasized this is not an approval to move forward with geoengineering. Rather, it's to prepare the U.S. government for a political decision if the world fails to adequately limit the rise of global warming.

"Geoengineering is this tangled ball of issues and science is only one of them," he said.

"One of the things I'm interested in doing is let's separate the science out," he added. The idea is to give policymakers a clear view of how a hurry-up bid to save the planet would work.

Even then, the results likely wouldn't be immediate. Fahey showed slides and graphics that noted that a Plan B might take until the next century to complete the cooling.

Still, better science might "buy time" to improve the efforts, he said."