How to think about solar radiation management

Even if greenhouse gas emissions halted entirely right now, we
would continue to feel climate change effects for decades due to
existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and warming could
accelerate, as we reduce the aerosol pollution that happens to be
acting as a partial shield. In this episode, Kelly Wanser of
nonprofit SilverLining makes the pitch for solar radiation
management, the practice of adding our own shielding particles to
the atmosphere to buy us some time while we step up our
greenhouse gas reductions.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


One of the more uncomfortable truths about climate change is that
temperatures are going to rise for the next 30 to 40 years no
matter what we do, just based on carbon dioxide already in the
atmosphere and the reduction of aerosol pollutants that are now
shielding us from some of the worst of it. That's going to bring
about potentially devastating changes that we do not yet well
understand and are not prepared for.


How can that short-term risk be mitigated? One proposal is to add
particles to the atmosphere that would do on purpose what our
aerosol pollution has been doing by accident: shield us from some
of the rising heat. No one credible who advocates for solar
radiation management (SRM) believes that it is a substitute for
reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, it would be a way to
buy a little more time to reach zero carbon.


My guest today, Kelly Wanser, is the head of a non-profit
organization called SilverLining that advocates for research and
policy around near-term climate risks and direct climate
interventions like SRM that can address them.


I've long been curious about — and wary of — solar radiation
management, so I was eager to talk to Wanser about the case for
SRM, what we know and don't know about it, and what we need to
research.


Okay then. Kelly Wanser of SilverLining, welcome to Volts. Thank
you so much for coming.


Kelly Wanser


Thank you very much, David. I am a fan and it's a pleasure to be
here.


David Roberts


Awesome. Well, I have wanted to do a pod on this subject forever.
I'm going to try to be focused, but I sort of have questions that
are all over the place, so let's just jump right in. The way I'm
approaching this is, I think, to average people off the street,
and maybe I even include myself in this. The idea of reaching up
into the atmosphere and fiddling with it directly, thinking that
we can dial in the temperature we want, strikes me as crazy. And
I think that's probably a lot of people's intuitive response.
Obviously, you have thought your way past that, going so far as
to found an organization designed to advocate for this stuff.


So maybe just tell us a little, to begin with, your personal
background and how you came to advocacy for geoengineering, which
is not a super crowded field.


Kelly Wanser


I'll say first that you're actually not in the business of
advocacy for geoengineering and it will give you some context for
how I came to be doing what I do.


David Roberts


Sure.


Kelly Wanser


Really it was about — I was working in the technology sector in
an area called IT infrastructure, and that's the sort of plumbing
of data in the Internet and was looking at problems like how you
keep networks operating. And I started to read about climate
change, and I was very curious about the symptoms that we were
starting to see in the climate system and where the risk really
was. And I started to get to know various senior climate
scientists in the Bay Area and other places, and I asked them the
question like you might ask, how would you characterize the risk
of runaway climate change in our lifetime? And this is maybe
twelve years ago.


And they said, "Well, it's in the single digits, but not the low
single digits."


David Roberts


Not super comforting.


Kelly Wanser


Yeah, I mean, my original degree was economics, so I thought,
well, if you had those odds of winning the lottery, you'd be out
buying tickets. If you had those odds of cancer, you'd be getting
treatment. So that seemed like a really high risk to be exposed
to. And then they told me about another feature of what was
happening in that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a
long time, keeping things warm. Comes out very slowly. So even if
you stop emissions completely and there are other dynamics going
on, the system will continue to warm for a while.


And so you've got another few decades of warming. So wherever you
are and whatever you see, you've got some additional warming
that's going to happen, which means that whatever risk point
you're at, you reach a higher risk point over that period of
time. And so I became very interested in that problem, because
there's a mismatch between the increased risk profile of really
serious and catastrophic climate events and impacts and the kinds
of responses that we had to reduce the risk. So really my
organization is focused on what we call "near-term climate risk,"
which is the 30 to 40 year time horizon where the things we need
to do to ultimately fix the problem, all the ways we reduce
greenhouse gases in the system, they don't work in that time
horizon to meaningfully reduce the risk.


And so that's how we find ourselves here. Because getting back to
your original comment, in the absence of the kind of risk
situation that we're in, these ideas would be really extreme and
you wouldn't consider them. So we like to use the sort of
metaphor of medicine because it has many similarities to medical
treatments. And medical treatments require a lot of research and
they're as useful as the context of where your condition is.


David Roberts


Right. So maybe the way to phrase this is you looked around, you
saw climate change, you saw that our ways of mitigating climate
change are sort of slow, if you will, slow acting and long term,
which leaves this short-term risk gap.


Kelly Wanser


Right.


David Roberts


So there's going to be warming over the next 30 to 40 years,
regardless almost of what we do. And you're focused on how to
mitigate those risks.


Kelly Wanser


Yeah. So related to that, and again, you can go to the United
Nations Climate Reports, and you can see what they think is
happening and going to happen they have these charts that show
these curves. And the curves go up all the pathways, all the
different scenarios for climate change going up through 2050,
some of them bend back down because we've done a good job. But in
their reports where they describe that they're projecting what's
happening to people and different parts of the world over those
30 years. And right now they've come out and said, well, under
their projections, as many as 1 billion people get displaced.


And you can go to websites that have simulations of what's going
on and you can see places that get overwhelmed by water, that get
overwhelmed by heat. And so you've got a lot of suffering, a lot
of dramatic impact that's baked in. And so what we are saying is
we need to do really rapid research to find out if we can do
better than that. Because in the current projections, it's bad
for everyone and it's terrible for quite a few people.


David Roberts


Yes, two things spring to mind confronted with that situation.
One is a lot of people looking at that would say, "Well, we need
to go gangbusters on adaptation." Let's figure out how to make
that suffering less by adapting to some of it. And the other
thing that jumps to mind is methane, which, as Volts listeners
know, is a greenhouse gas, but acts on a much shorter time
horizon than CO2. And so I think that the thought in some
quarters is if you could rapidly reduce methane, you could have a
much more rapid effect on the climate than in reducing CO2.


Why not either of those two routes?


Kelly Wanser


So, also those two routes. I think one of the things that struck
me about coming into the climate space was it wasn't very
well-equipped to think in terms of portfolios. So if you look at
the risk profile, it's sort of like we're having these debates
about should it be wind and solar, or nuclear? Should it be
emissions reductions or these things? But if you look at the risk
and uncertainty involved, there's a lot of uncertainty involved
in all the different ways of responding to climate change. And
there's a huge amount of risk, potentially existential risk.


And so from a portfolio perspective, methane reduction is one of
my absolute favorites. And there are some great things happening
in that field. Adaptation is a harder problem, and it was made
harder because people didn't want it in the portfolio 20 years
ago. And they didn't want people to think it was adoptable. So
they didn't want people looking at it. Well, it turns out when
you look at it, you find out it's not easily adoptable, really.
You can see, like, look at Pakistan. These big extreme events
happen. They're pretty overwhelming. And even in the US, we're
arguably one of the best equipped places in the world to manage
these things, and Austin, Texas, had a third of the city with no
power.


David Roberts


Yeah, we managed to bungle it regularly, even with all our money.


Kelly Wanser


But really what it was about is saying, okay, we should have a
rich portfolio here. If you thought of this as like, shares, or
you thought of this as insurance policies, we'd have a portfolio
of things so that when you brought that portfolio together and
those things that are different profiles and there are different
levels of uncertainty, we have a lot of coverage.


David Roberts


Right?


Kelly Wanser


And the problem is that this part of the portfolio, if you needed
to arrest climate change quickly, if you really needed to get in
there and say, oh, the ice sheet is about to go. The wet bulb
effects in India are happening and we can't take it. And you
needed something that operated in a sub-decade time horizon, then
that's the key part of the portfolio that's empty. And we don't
want to do those things. But from a risk management point of
view, in terms of what's at stake, even evaluating whether we
have them, that's something on deck that we really should be
doing.


David Roberts


And one more thing about the risk question, the short-term risk
question, and I feel like maybe more climate types have grown
cognizant of this recently, but it's really an under-discussed
aspect of all this, is the aerosol effect. So maybe just tell us
what it is and why that adds to these worries about short-term
risk.


Kelly Wanser


That is a great question, because as I was digging into this and
finding out the things I'm telling you, this came up effectively.
There are forces in the atmosphere that trap heat and help keep
us in this sort of temperate zone that we're in. And there are
forces in the atmosphere that reflect energy away. And so the
particles and clouds in the atmosphere, they're reflecting
sunlight away from Earth, which is part of what keeps us in this
Goldilocks zone. When you look at the Earth from space and you
see that shiny blue dot, that's what that is.


And these particles that come into the atmosphere, they create
clouds, they live in the atmosphere. They're part of that whole
system, and they come from nature, but they also live in
pollution. And the particulates in pollution that come from coal
plants, that come from ships over the ocean, they are mixing with
clouds that are living in the atmosphere in ways that make the
atmosphere slightly brighter. And it's this effect that
scientists have reported is cooling the planet currently by
reflecting sunlight back to space. And they don't know exactly by
how much, but they think it's between a half a degree Celsius and
1.1 degrees Celsius.


David Roberts


That's not small.


Kelly Wanser


No, it's not small. It could be offsetting half the warming that
the gasses would otherwise be making.


David Roberts


Yeah. Just to sum that up. So our particulate pollution to date
has had the sort of perverse effect of reflecting away a bunch of
solar radiation with the consequent problem that insofar as we
clean up our pollution, which we are striving to do, we are going
to lose that cooling effect and maybe get another one whole
degree of warming which would double...


Kelly Wanser


That's right.


David Roberts


...our warming since preindustrial times. So that's a little
wild.


Kelly Wanser


I was just going to say it's right there in the climate reports.
And it's been there consistently, but not prominently noted, not
highlighted in the sort of climate discussion. And so it's
surfacing more now recently, that this was there. And we're
getting very good at cleaning up pollution. One of the features
of this problem is that in climate reports, when they show these
effects, they'll have bar charts that show the different effects
on the climate system. And they have these lines that show how
much uncertainty there is. This is the most uncertain thing about
the climate system.


And that uncertainty has been unchanged for 20 years. We have not
been able to improve our understanding of that. And so when we in
SilverLining are talking about our advocacy, we're saying we need
to improve our information base, we need to quickly improve our
ability to do that problem. That problem happens to be the same
or very similar to the problem of what if I want to achieve this
effect actively. So we think it's kind of a no brainer for
society to say we need to go after that problem really hard, like
the human genome, and understand what's going to happen when we
take the pollution away.


And is there a cleaner, more controlled version of this that
might help?


David Roberts


Right, yeah, I'm going to get some of those questions in a
minute. So the aerosol effect is you have these particles up
there now which talk about geoengineering. We've been
geoengineering the climate ever since industrialization by
throwing all these particles up, which are shielding us. So, in
effect, as we clean up our particulate pollution, we are pushing
the target for climate change farther and farther away. In other
words, we're making a longer and longer runway for ourselves. So
in addition to advocating for research, which we'll get to in a
minute, it looks like your organization has because the term
geoengineering, I think, as people think of it now, brings to
mind all sorts of various and sundry schemes in the ocean and
crumbling rocks and there's all these different notions.


But it seems like you all have settled more or less. Your main
focus is on solar radiation management, SRM, which is just
replacing the particles that we're taking out of the atmosphere
with new particles to continue enjoying that cooling effect. Why
focus in on that one rather than the others? Is there a reason to
think it is the most out of all the geoengineering schemes? Why
focus on this one?


Kelly Wanser


Well, we, we don't use the term "geoengineering." We don't use
the term "scheme." But I will answer your question.


David Roberts


I know, I noticed that you carefully say "climate interventions"
rather than "geoengineering."


Kelly Wanser


Yeah, "climate intervention" was a term the National Academy of
Sciences coined in their 2015 report. And it's useful because,
like you said, "geoengineering" kind of evokes the most
engineering-oriented stuff, engineers in space, and there's
really not a lot of engineering involved. There's a lot of
science involved, and it's directed at climate. And intervention
is a really good term because it's so similar characteristics to
a medical type intervention. Engineering has a lot of certainty.
Like, if I can do the math, I can engineer a bridge. An
intervention has a lot of uncertainty and a lot of trade-offs,
depending on where the patient is.


So this looks a little more like that. But to your question, we
are a science-based, science-driven organization, so we follow
what the scientists recommend. And so we didn't arrive at this
conclusion ourselves. We took what the National Academy of
Sciences and the Royal Society in the United Kingdom said. They'd
done a couple of assessments where they gathered scientific
experts together and asked the same question and if you wanted to
reduce warming in the climate system quickly, what are the best
candidates for research? And so they landed on this because
there's a lot of precedent for this effect in the atmosphere.


So in addition to what pollution is causing, they've seen this
effect when large volcanoes go off and release material into the
outer layer of the atmosphere, the stratosphere. And they've seen
that cool the climate system globally. So when Mount Pinatubo
erupted in 1991, they observed about a half a degree Celsius of
cooling for about a year and a half. So when people talk about
all these things are terrible. Well, most of us who are 25 or
older experienced this already when Mount Pinatubo went off and
we didn't notice the sky was different. So we've actually lived
it a little bit already.


David Roberts


In a sense, we know it works, or at least we know the physical
effect is somewhat predictable.


Kelly Wanser


Again, I'm going to go back to the medical analogy because it's
so similar. There are differences in efficacy and side effect
profiles based on what we know today. And the reason we want to
do research is to understand the efficacy and side effects
better.


David Roberts


Right.


Kelly Wanser


And so in the outer layer of the atmosphere, they feel like they
know a lot more about the efficacy because the stratosphere is
very uniform. They've seen it with volcanoes. And so you can get
a pretty good grasp, although they're finding just as early
research is going on, there are pretty big differences, maybe in
how you do it as to what happens. And you certainly don't want to
do it like volcanoes do.


David Roberts


Why not, just out of curiosity?


Kelly Wanser


Like all at once big bursts. So it turns out that doing it from —
most volcanoes are around the equatorial regions, which for some
of what they're finding is like the worst place to do it and that
you wouldn't do it like in one giant burst all at once. And of
course, volcanoes include a lot of stuff that you wouldn't put in
there that is...


David Roberts


Right.


Kelly Wanser


So what we know, or have some handle on, is that in that kind of
a burst where there's material in the stratosphere for a year or
two and it gradually falls out. We kind of know a bit about what
the side effect profile is of that a bit. And I should say we
don't know that much about the chemistry effects and the ozone
layer and things like that because our measurements aren't very
good. But the thing we really need to think about is, okay, if
you needed to do this for a couple of decades of 20, 30, 40
years, and it's got a side effect profile in different parts of
the system, maybe it's heating up the stratosphere a little bit.


And that gets to a point where you have big changes in
circulation or other things. That's what they don't know.


David Roberts


It occurs to me that we've gotten this far in without ever
actually really saying what we're talking about. So just for
listeners who might be confused, the idea here is to deliberately
inject a bunch of these particles, sulfur particles, into the
atmosphere to basically do on purpose what our pollution is doing
by accident reflect light away. And there are a couple of
different versions of this, even if you just focus in on this is
called solar radiation management. I don't know if that's the
term you all use.


Kelly Wanser


Yup.


David Roberts


There's a couple of different versions even of that. So maybe
just discuss like what are we concretely talking about doing?
There's different layers of the atmosphere, there's different
methods of throwing things up, maybe give us a sense of what it
looks like in practice.


Kelly Wanser


So there's the idea that would sort of be lifting off from what
they've seen with volcanoes, which is dispersing particles into
the upper atmosphere, this stratosphere probably via aircraft and
possibly with selected places that they're releasing the material
based on what they're learning and models about what produces the
best efficacy with the least side effects. And that this would
probably happen in a continuous way with planes flying
continuously, releasing stuff. And the net effect that they're
trying to produce is about a 1% increase in the amount of
sunlight the stratosphere reflects. So it's not something that
you see from the ground.


It's not something that would be noticeable except for maybe
certain changes in light to certain types of plants, things like
that. And that would be the idea.


David Roberts


One question about that, the stratosphere you said is pretty
uniform. Would interventions on that level have a uniform effect
around the world or would they be localized?


Kelly Wanser


It's far more uniform. The particles get entrained in really high
winds up there and disperse globally. And so you get a global
effect. You might have some differentiation in how that plays out
down below in weather patterns and things. And that's what people
want to study. And because it's not simple, it's a really
complicated system. And one of the concerns scientists have is
that like reflecting sunlight up there, you're slightly heating
the stratosphere and that can affect its interactions with the
atmosphere below it. It can affect the way chemicals play out in
the stratosphere in a way that affects the ozone layer.


And so all of those things, again, if you're really good to think
about medicine, it's like oh, how does it interact with that part
of the body? There are medications. So there it's really about
trying to project forward, trying to figure out what is the
optimized way to do this, where you get the highest efficacy and
the best safety.


David Roberts


And isn't there also a whole other genre of this that has to do
with clouds putting the particles in lower clouds?


Kelly Wanser


Great question. Yes, there is. And the particles that they're
talking about putting in the clouds are different, too.


David Roberts


Different than the stratospheric particles.


Kelly Wanser


That's right. So in the stratosphere, their starting point is
sulfur dioxide, which is like worse than pollution. And they know
the most about that because it's what volcanoes put up there.
Aircraft pollution is starting to waft up there too. But they're
also looking at other things in the stratosphere, like calcium
carbonate, which is chalk, like chalk dust.


David Roberts


Interesting.


Kelly Wanser


And even diamond dust. So those are the kind of the two other
methods.


David Roberts


And the idea here is trying to maximize reflectivity while
minimizing, presumably other...


Kelly Wanser


That's right.


David Roberts


Everything else.


Kelly Wanser


And in this case, especially thinking about the ozone layer. And
that's important, obviously. And in fact, in the international
arena, in the UN, where they've done probably the most scientific
evaluation of these things to date is in the part of the UN that
looks after the ozone layer, the Montreal Protocol. So they're
thinking forward about that. And that's the issues in the upper
atmosphere, in the low cloud layer. So we have lots of particles
going up into clouds all the time, especially over land. The less
polluted clouds are over the ocean, although you can see and if
anyone listening to the podcast, if you Google Ship track it'll
pull up pictures of cloud decks over the ocean and you can see
these streaks and the clouds that are made by the emissions of
ships.


And so that's like the ship particulates from the ship pollution
brightening the clouds and you can see it visibly where it's
really concentrated, but it's also spreading in ways that you
don't see visually. So the idea here is, well, could we use a
cleaner material and really optimize the effect? And it turns out
one of the very best materials for doing this with is one of the
materials that's part of making clouds over the ocean, which is
sea salt. Sea salt spray from ocean water. And so what scientists
proposed two British scientists back in the 90s was, well, maybe
you could make a really optimized mist from sea spray spray it
from ships in a continuous way and brighten the kinds of clouds
that are really susceptible to this, and do it in more localized
areas where you get a big bang for the buck.


And so you still offset a couple of degrees of warming, but
you're only dispersing over like something equivalent to three to
4% of the ocean surface.


David Roberts


Interesting. And this would also have a uniform global effect
because it seems much tighter area, lower clouds. It just seems
intuitively, like that ought to be more of a local effect. Does
that also end up spreading?


Kelly Wanser


Your intuition is correct. It is localized. And the side effects
that you're most interested in is what does that do? Because you
are creating concentrated areas of cooling in the system and
these are all the mechanisms by which weather and atmosphere move
around. So it's almost certainly likely to affect weather flows
and patterns. And the thing you would be trying to learn then is
are there ways for that to work in your favor and are there ways
for that to be really bad? And so I'll give you two examples. And
one of the reasons we're such strong advocates for research is
because these kinds of questions really shine a light on where
our climate models and our climate observations are weak.


So to answer these questions, you've got to really improve doing
that uncertainty problem and also getting better at weather
circulation. But in the very early models which we helped fund to
try to represent these things, one of the possibilities that
arose is that when they simulate brightening clouds over the
Southern Ocean, which is one of the places that you might do it.
You get these cooling currents because it cools the water below
in the air in the low layer that flow onto Antarctica. And so you
got this improvement in kind of an outsized cooling of
Antarctica, which is a useful thing potentially.


But on the reverse side, in another targeted area of clouds, when
they cooled that region, they affected weather patterns such that
you got dryness in the Amazon forest region, which is a very bad
thing to have.


David Roberts


Yeah.


Kelly Wanser


So in the moral to this story is that these are just very early
bottle based simulations that tell you you have these kinds of
questions and that it's probably given the state of the risk that
we have, and given that it's one of the top two candidates, and
given that studying it will help us understand what the pollution
problem is going to do. Really important to study, but really
hard to say for sure whether or how you should use it.


David Roberts


So these two versions of SRM, solar radiation management, the
injecting particles in the stratosphere and then the cloud
brightening, are those the sort of two main, most viable sort of
targets for research. Like when people think about SRM, are those
the kind of the two things that should come to mind?


Kelly Wanser


They are from scientific assessments and from senior scientists.
There's a third one that's sort of like a tier below because it's
even more uncertain than the low cloud brightening, but it is
something that is already occurring. And this is in the high
cloud layer. So between the stratosphere and the lower
atmosphere. So the upper troposphere where you get to when you're
cruising altitude on a long flight, 30,000 feet, depending on the
circumstances, when you put pollution particles or similar into
these high clouds, you can have the effect of either thickening
them or thinning them, depending on the conditions.


And those clouds are insulating clouds, so they keep heat trapped
in. Infrared radiation trapped in. So if you put particles in
them in the right circumstances, you could thin them.


David Roberts


Let more heat out.


Kelly Wanser


Let more heat out. And this phenomenon is happening from air
traffic, from airplanes, and we don't know enough about it.


David Roberts


Well, I have a bunch of questions about governance and moral
hazard and all this, but first let's just briefly touch on the
main subject of your latest report, which is just research,
advocating for research. I come into this sort of like leery
about doing things like this that we know so little about. But
when I got into sort of reading about the kind of research we
need, what's sort of remarkable is probably like two thirds of
the research you're advocating is not even directly on doing
these things. It's just understanding what's in the atmosphere
right now, like what are the risks of short term rapid changes
now?


Just very basic climate science stuff that you would think we
would already be researching. I think even sort of the most
committed opponent of these schemes would agree that it's crazy
how little we know about this whole area of study. So maybe just
like talk about what when you advocate for research, just talk
about sort of the basics of what you're advocating for here. I
mean, I think people will be a little bit shocked that some of
this stuff doesn't already exist.


Kelly Wanser


Well, thank you for that. You're exactly right because I think we
were shocked not coming from this field and just kind of looking
at it as an information problem. And the problem you want to do
is you want to be able to project and evaluate the risk of what
the climate system is going to do. So I'd really like to know, be
able to project with some confidence how the Earth system is
going to respond to this warming over the next 30 years and then
what it would look like if you change the things that are
influencing it, either in the warming direction, the greenhouse
gases, or in the cooling direction, what scientists call
aerosols.


These particles. So we're coming at it saying, "Okay, we just
want to help set us up to do that problem and evaluate what it
looks like if you are introducing aerosols in different ways and
how does that improve or not, like the risk profile of what's
happening." And so then we bump into these gaps and what the
problems that we can't do in the models and a lot of them center
right in the atmosphere, that the models don't represent all the
phenomenon that are happening in the atmosphere very well and
that we don't have the observations that we need to improve them.


David Roberts


It's like insane. It's like five, six decades now. Of talk about
climate change and talk about all this, but we still on some very
basic levels are just not watching what's happening in the
atmosphere.


Kelly Wanser


I think people assume that it's like, hey, we've got this, right?
And you hear there are these satellites and you hear the
scientific studies coming out that are projecting what climate is
going to do. We have satellites looking at everything. And then
you sort of dig under the hood and that's where solar radiation
management just has an analysis problem. Because what some of the
scientists in our circles have said is people want a higher
standard of evidence for this. So they're saying, well, you need
to be able to tell us what will happen and what the impacts will
be.


And we shouldn't be having that standard of evidence for what
greenhouse gas is doing and what these other aerosols are doing,
but we haven't. And so we get in there and say, okay, if you
really want to do this problem, here's what you need. So to give
you example for the very top candidate for this is putting
particles in the stratosphere. And so if you want to project what
will happen, you first need a baseline of what's in the
stratosphere. And it turns out we don't have that. We can't
characterize what's in the stratosphere currently. So then it's
very hard to do that problem.


And so the first thing that we did when we started talking to
members of congress and working with NOAA is just to say we have
this problem of having a baseline of what's there, which is a
really important problem to solve. If you want to know if
somebody else is adding material to the stratosphere, if you want
to know what it will do, and so that was our starting point. And
it's similar kinds of things now, where even in the low cogler,
we're working on a program to put instruments on ships like the
current ships that travel, that would just be taking atmospheric
readings of that low atmosphere so that you would have a baseline
and you'd be able to help the models and even the satellites
interpret what's going on.


David Roberts


Right. So just gathering more data about what's actually in the
atmosphere. So we have a baseline, because one thing the report
emphasizes over and over again is that it doesn't really make
sense to talk about the risk of doing these things in isolation.
It's always, what is the risk of this intervention versus the
risk of not doing this intervention? What are the risks we're
facing as a baseline against which we are measuring the risks of
this intervention? And we just don't know. That's what's wild to
me. We just don't know what the current risks are. So there's no
way to make an informed risk judgment because you don't know the
differential.


Kelly Wanser


That's right. And we haven't really invested in it, which is
another quite eye-popping reality.


David Roberts


It's wild.


Kelly Wanser


Like, globally and in the United States, climate research
investments have been relatively flat for decades.


David Roberts


That is wild to me. I know. Every time I read that, I read that
statistic periodically, and every time I run across it, I'm
shocked all over again. Like, all this talk, all this
international action, all this agita and angst, and we're not
spending any more on climate research than we were two decades
ago.


Kelly Wanser


This really baffled me. Coming into this, I didn't understand it,
and I sort of learned there was quite a long period of time where
there was an orientation that I'm kind of sympathetic to, which
was, we know what we need to know. We need to reduce emissions.
And so if you think about it as like two sides of an equation,
and you look at the reduced emissions side of that equation, and
you just focus everything on that, and you say, don't spend your
energy on figuring out what's going to happen if it gets warmer,
because we're not going to let it get warmer.


And really, that combined with a lot of other pressures on
climate science, climate science has been in lockdown mode. I can
still remember, like ten or twelve years ago. It's brutal.


David Roberts


Under siege, yes.


Kelly Wanser


Terrifying. But now we're seeing these extremes, and we've had a
flat level of investment. And inside that flat level of
investment in climate research, in the part that looks directly
at the atmospheric observation of atmospheric basic science has
actually declined in real terms.


David Roberts


Oh, my God, that is mind-boggling.


Kelly Wanser


It's heartbreaking. And that's the fulcrum for everything we need
to know about what's happening and how we evaluate what we're
going to do. So the good thing is it represents an opportunity if
we can improve it. And I'll just finish by saying climate
research investments in the United States are about three and a
half billion a year, and that's everything on that side of the
equation. And if you compare that to the 55 billion we spent on
the three most recent storms.


David Roberts


Yes.


Kelly Wanser


And even the big money that's gone into these other programs,
what we're saying is, hey, to invest an additional 60 or 70% in
that bring it up to 5 and a half, 6 billion a year, that seems
reasonable.


David Roberts


I really encourage listeners to go look at the report because the
details of what kinds of research are needed are, like, I keep
saying, sort of eye-popping because over and over again you're
going to read something and be like, wait, we're not doing that
already. We're not looking at that already. We're not measuring
that already. That's not included in the models already. A lot of
the research recommendations are just like stuff we should
obviously be doing. Regardless of what you think about these
direct interventions, only when we have a better understanding of
these short-term climate effects can we even coherently compare
what would happen if we did these interventions right.


We have a baseline against which to compare, and the details of
some of that research are really interesting. But just sort of to
wrap up the research part, let's just talk about that price tag
so we can get a sense of the of the scale. You want to double
from 3.3 billion to 6.3 or something like that, but just, you
know, like I hate to be a cliche, but like, compare this to how
much we spend on defense research or like pharmaceutical research
or like dog food research. It's it's, you know, concretely, what
price tag are you asking for?


And sort of like, where basically would that money go?


Kelly Wanser


Well, so concretely, we're asking for an additional 2.6 billion a
year on top of approximately 3.5 billion. So it's less than
double. And it spread across kind of the modeling and analysis of
scientific workforce side of it, across observational platforms,
which are the most expensive piece. So you need the airplanes
that fly through the atmosphere to take readings. You need stuff
on the ocean at the surface. And shockingly, the satellites that
actually can look at aerosol particles in the atmosphere. They're
aging out and there are no plans to replace them. Yeah.


David Roberts


So we're going to know less about aerosols.


Kelly Wanser


We're going to know less soon.


David Roberts


That seems like the wrong direction,


Kelly Wanser


So the investment in those platforms. And here's the other hold
your gut thing. The US supplies most of the world's data. So if
we don't do it in the US, we can't count on it coming in. There
are some European programs, but the US is the biggest provider of
this information.


David Roberts


Yikes. It just seems like how is it in the UN, all this sort of
like, poorer and more vulnerable countries organize and they want
money in the Green Fund and all this. How is it like they are the
ones who are most directly at risk in this 30 to 40 year time
horizon in some very direct and scary ways. Why aren't they
advocating for research? Like, what's going on?


Kelly Wanser


Well, they have a lot of fish to fry, huge amount of sympathy
because they're getting pummeled by the impacts and they're not
getting the money they were promised to deal with the impacts or
the transition. And what's striking is many of them are still
ahead of the developed countries in transitioning away from
fossil fuels. You take a country like Honduras, they're over
accomplishing against their commitment and they're like the
second or third most impacted country by climate change. Like
half the country is going to disappear in the period I'm talking
about. And so a lot of these countries are really impressive in
how they're trying to deal with this, but they don't have good
visibility of these research problems because they don't have the
assets to do this problem at all.


David Roberts


Right,


Kelly Wanser


And so that gets into where you talk about the climate system is
so big and so complicated that you need very high tech resources
like massive supercomputers satellites, stratospheric capable
aircraft that only a handful of countries actually have.


David Roberts


Yeah, I guess one additional note about the research to emphasize
is just and you have a whole piece about this in the report. It's
just the people from these vulnerable countries who are now more
or less locked out of this research by the high sort of capital
costs of it need to be brought in, right. This cannot be another
sort of white dudes around a conference table undertaking. Their
interests are most directly involved and they need to be involved
in the research. That's just to put a pin in that.


Kelly Wanser


I'll say one more thing, and I'll give a plug to our partner at
Amazon, because we care about that problem a lot and there are
ways that technology can help. And so with regard to giving
access quickly, getting the climate models and data sets onto the
cloud, out of these big supercomputing, one off facilities and
onto the cloud where people in different parts of the world can
access them, has a huge potential to benefit. Takes a bit of
technical work, it takes some money. But then they have
supercomputing too. They have climate models, they have the data
sets too.


And so we're working on this very actively right now. It's like
Netflix. It's like how do we bring it to the world? And if you
want those people to be able to do these problems of what is
climate change going to do in my part of the world? And then what
would these interventions do? You need things like that and you
need them pretty fast.


David Roberts


Right. Most research, yeah, you notice of the little there has
been, has been focused mostly on developed countries because
that's just where the researchers tend to be.


Kelly Wanser


That's right.


David Roberts


There are huge justice implications to both these interventions.
And just to emphasize again, to not doing these interventions, to
not doing anything, both those have enormous justice implications
which need to be centered. So yeah, if I could just sort of
summarize the research bit. The part that struck me is just how
much of this research seems like it ought to be happening anyway.
It is uncontroversial. It's crazy that we're not doing it
regardless of whether we decide or want to intervene directly or
not. Understanding the short-term dynamics of the climate and the
risk of tipping points and the dynamics of aerosols and all these
things, we're just woefully underfunded and need more funding.
That seems uncontroversial.


So I want to get to the problems that everybody when I ask about
this online, everybody sort of comes up with the same question,
which is just this sort of nest of moral hazard problems. And so
just for listeners who aren't familiar with the term, the idea of
moral hazard is the worry here. One of the worries here is if
this becomes a real possibility, it will serve as an excuse to do
less mitigation basically to reduce emissions less. The idea is
here we have an escape hatch. Like, I had a guest on talking
about modeling a few weeks ago and she was sort of talking about
how in climate models we just have CCS plugged in as kind of a
carbon capture and Sequestration plugged in as kind of a gap
filler because we don't know what else to fill that gap with.


But it gives us sort of this false sense of security. Like, oh,
we can get to the targets. Even though if you look at the models
like, oh, here's a kajillion tons of a technology that does not
really exist yet on any commercial scale. So it's giving us a
false sense of security. And her worry is that solar radiation
management is going to serve a similar role. ie. Kind of an
escape hatch that you can just plug into models when you want to
get the right output. That's one of the remoral hazard arguments
is it'll lull us into a false sense of security and will reduce
the urgency of mitigation.


I'm sure you've discussed that issue a kajillion times. What's
your kind of take on it?


Kelly Wanser


Yeah, we might need a whole 'nother podcast, but...


David Roberts


I know I wish we had more time for this.


Kelly Wanser


I share the worry that it gets plugged in in a similar kind of
way. I might differ in what I think that means about research
because I've had this moral hazard issue come into our world in
saying it's a reason not to do research, because the research
itself creates this impression that you're going down this path
and it opens up this option and digging into this coming from
outside and looking starting to learn from people the history.
Because these same arguments were made about adaptation research,
and they were made about carbon dioxide removal research, and
they were even made about research into reducing methane that it
would distract from looking at CO2. And what kind of happens is
they say, well, the research creates a moral hazard, so they sort
of suppresses research.


Adaptation research is a really good example because then you
didn't have it. Well, the research might have given you a lot of
really interesting information that compelled thinking about
emissions reduction because of the kind of adaptation s**t show
that...


David Roberts


I know, the more you know about adaptation, the more — it's not
like you're going to be like, "Oh that's easy, that's easy."


Kelly Wanser


Let's just do that on planet Earth would have been to have just
tons of adaptation research. That really blew my mind, actually.
And so when I think, I guess, or our premise is that information
actually helps. And when you dig into these climate
interventions, they're not magic. And I sat with conservatives
and Republicans in Congress and said to them, look, what the
science tells you is the least amount of additional things you
put in the atmosphere, the safer it is.


David Roberts


Yeah, which is just completely ...


Kelly Wanser


It's showing you where the thresholds are, and I can have that
conversation. And so we say there's at least we need to look at
the evidence that when we start to dig into this, there's also
evidence could be highly motivating of pushing on emissions
reductions and pushing on the things we can do, that's in
addition to all ... the fact that we want to fill gaps and
information that will help all these other parts of the climate
problem, we're saying that we think society actually with more
information, can do a better job and that information itself
isn't bad.


David Roberts


Well, most people would agree with that up to a certain extent, I
think, but then gathering information is one thing, but how do
you at a certain point when you're talking about doing these
things it's so complex, there's no way to predict or model
completely in advance what's going to happen. So ultimately you
have to do some of this stuff to find out what's going to happen.
And I guess a lot of people just wonder sort of like how do you
half do this? What does an experiment along these lines even look
like? And ultimately, like how much can you learn without doing
it on a big broad scale?


And then once you've done it on a big broad scale it's sort of
like the Pandora's box is open. It's one thing to understand the
climate better, but how do you understand doing these things
without doing them?


Kelly Wanser


I think if you think about the steps of what you can learn, in
what ways. So the thing that scientists are proposing doing are
releases of plumes, like small batches of plumes, like the
equivalent of what comes out of the smoke stack of a ship or of
an aircraft. And that gives you a lot more information than you
have now about how the particles behave when they hit the
atmosphere and how they disperse. And that is information that
right now, if you want to model this stuff, you're just taking a
wild flaming guess, and then everything downstream of that is
based on your wild flaming guess.


And so if I want to know like what are the exactly right size of
particles and those really teeny in earth terms experiments give
you that first order information that you can plug into models
and then your models of what happens at a bigger scale are a lot
smarter. And so that level, like I think scientists have said
they've recommended it already in scientific assessments, but
people are confused because it's sort of conflated with, "Oh,
previous folks in the space have said this is cheap and easy to
do and we got a guy out there saying you can throw up balloons."
It's like I've dug a tiny hole, but I'm building a skyscraper.
What you would need to engineer the climate system is tens of
billions of dollars of investment in something that would be able
to influence the planet at a really big scale.


And so you have this inflection point where there's a bunch of
science you need to do to even advise countries or the world as
to what would make sense as far as regards investment like that,
if anything. So no one is going to be off doing this at the kind
of scale that would really have a major impact without a really
big investment.


David Roberts


Well, let's talk about this then, because it is sort of...


Kelly Wanser


I let myself in for that one, didn't I?


David Roberts


This kind of conventional wisdom, or at least often repeated in
this space, that sulfur particles and squirting them up into the
atmosphere is relatively cheap compared to other things such that
like a single interested country or even a single interested
billionaire could do a big chunk of it themselves. So before we
discuss the kind of security and governance implications of that,
just is that true?


Kelly Wanser


Well, I think what's happened, as some research has started to
happen there's the things that sort of physicists and modelers do
with the information that they have and the numbers that they
have and aren't taking into account a lot of the complexity, a
lot of the uncertainty, or even a lot of the way the world really
works. And so then you dig in and you say, oh, no, what it looks
like is you need platforms capable of reaching the stratosphere
if you're going to work up there. There's only a handful of
countries that have that one species programs, and you would need
to scale up very substantially, like any sort of capacity for
that, which is not within the means of more than a handful of
countries and really not in the means of any individual
billionaire either. And also, by the way, none of them are
stepping in to spend their whole net worth this way either.


So I think that was kind of when you do it in the back of the
envelope and you know very little, you can sort of be optimistic
about that. But when you dig in, the reality is it's probably a
subset of the world's developed countries or countries with a lot
of assets who would be players in that. Now, in the low cloud
layer, it's a little bit different because you've got these cloud
seeding efforts that are coming up and springing up to try to
address local impacts and there are ways that cloud brightening
could be used that people are starting to look at. And so you
could get regional things that could affect other people and
things like that that are more widely available or potentially
used.


So these are questions that need to be thought about. And again,
science and observation really helps you and it's not a good
space to be flying blind in.


David Roberts


Right.


Well, the broader question of governance, I guess, is one thing
that really just vexes people about. This vexes me about it, too,
which is just like whenever I read or listen to someone like you
talk about it, I'm like just like cool heads.


Reasonable people taking all the right precautions, building
institutional capacity such that scientists are in the driver's
seat of this thing and policymakers only doing what scientists
sort of advise them. And there's international cooperation and
there's knowledge sharing, et cetera, et cetera. It sounds
delightful when sensible people discuss it as though sensible
people will be in charge of it. But of course, a glance at recent
world history reveals that quite frequently sensible people are
not in charge. You said that the bar for getting seriously
involved in this is higher than maybe people think. But it
certainly seems like this is something that people could be doing
sort of half ass experiments with in various ways.


How do you I guess just what's your confidence that a sensible
international knowledge transparent knowledge sharing system is
going to be in place to manage doing this research and taking
these experiments and trying this versus scientists losing
control over it and insane capitalists or rogue nations or
whatever taking it and running with it? Is there an answer to
that question like what's the best we can do to try to keep this
under the control of sensible people?


Kelly Wanser


Well, that's a good question. And I think one of the reasons that
SilverLining exists is really that question, which is if you
think about the climate conditions getting potentially worse and
worse and people being more inclined to take kind of radical
actions how do you put yourself in a position to be smart, to be
equitable, and to be as safe as you can in that context? So it
definitely appears that when you have a sharing of information
and you have cooperation around science and information, it calms
everybody down. And there's a lot of when we have conversations
with policymakers, whether it's in Congress or the UN.


And we say, yeah, you know, we're here to talk about science anyd
how we step forward on scientific work and cooperation and feel
like, great, because we can do that as as policymakers and we can
work across the aisle. We can work with people we don't agree
with on other things. If we're in the science lane and that's
been true in our experience in the US where we've worked across
the aisle in Congress and we've gotten Republicans to increase
basic climate, basic science budgets in a Republican Congress.


David Roberts


Well, that's something.


Kelly Wanser


Yeah. And so when you're talking about science and you're talking
about ways of the technology can improve science and sharing
information, same at the UN level. And then as we started to dig
into how do different things work in the UN and where do they
work well and where don't they work well and why? And we worked
with a couple of experts, Dan Bodanski, who wrote the book on
international climate law, and Sue Biniaz, who is the current
Deputy Climate Advisor for the US to look at that question in the
context of this subject and what emerged is like what we are
interested in, SilverLining is what is most effective in terms of
outcomes?


What produces the best outcome in the environment, what produces
the best outcome in safety for people? And the absolute best case
of that is the Montreal Protocol for the Protection of the Ozone
layer. And so we really have gone up close and personal to figure
out why does that work? And yeah, people say, "Well, it's a
narrow problem, but actually it's quite similar to this one.
You've got a smaller number of actors, you've got a sort of focus
thing they're emitting. You've got all the countries of the world
not only agreeing to that, but they've agreed that changes in it,
expansions of it, everybody makes their commitments."


It's really interesting. And they have this feature that's
different from the other UN fora the scientific and technical
assessment panels that make the evaluation of what's going on and
what needs to be done are fully independent of the nation states.
Their reports are written completely independently. And if you
look at the IPCC, where the UN does their climate work, they
negotiate kind of the top line summary of what those reports
say...


David Roberts


Yeah.


Kelly Wanser


...with the countries. And so, again, we could do a whole podcast
on this. But I would say that really looking at the Montreal
Protocol, a. because it does apply to this particular thing as it
would operate the stratosphere and b. because understanding how
that works is really important because all the countries of the
world are continuously meeting every year and we went to their
meeting.


It's calm, people are calm. It's incredible. So figuring that out
and how we can translate that onto other things, I think it's a
really good idea.


David Roberts


Yeah. If only all international cooperation and agreements could
be as calm and sensible as Montreal.


Kelly Wanser


Right.


David Roberts


This does seem like an area where really going overboard to keep
the science independent seems super important because this is
just this whole thicket of issues here is going to implicate
countries in a lot of like sort of our interests versus global
interests. There's going to be a lot of ulterior motives, I think
involved. Everybody's going to be sort of thinking, on the one
hand, how can we improve the world and the state of science? On
the other hand is like, how can we make out best in a world where
people are messing with solar radiation?


So it does seem like independent science is more important even
than normal.


Kelly Wanser


And it's really important to your point from before, that other
countries, especially the most impacted to developing countries,
have the same level of access to information and can evaluate it
for themselves.


David Roberts


Is there kind of a short-term goal of yours? Like, is there a
particular development or institution you'd like to see funded or
just like a first step, is there something kind of tangible
people can look forward to and advocate for if they want to see
more progress on this?


Kelly Wanser


Well, certainly they can support SilverLining. We're like a
medical foundation, so we fund research directly so that we can
help advance some of the initial critical research, like getting
the climate model supporting some of these problems, some of the
lab work and things like that. And that feeds into our broader
advocacy, which is trying to get the US government to invest in
research aggressively. And like you said, some of these assets
that we need to understand the atmosphere and climate system for
people who are in a position to help influence attention on the
fact that we have gaps in our understanding of what influences on
the atmosphere due to the climate.


And that's not acceptable. And we need to improve on that really
fast.


David Roberts


Right. It's a little wild that we just spent we just passed a
bill spending hundreds of billions of dollars on manufacturing
and stuff, and literally like a rounding error on any of those
sums would have been enough to double our research budget. It's a
little wild.


Kelly Wanser


Yeah. So anything people can do to kind of be in there for the
atmosphere. We're alone on the Hill right now lobbying for
increases in budgets for atmospheric observations and research.


David Roberts


I guess I don't understand. Why are scientists themselves not
more self interestedly, advocating for this? Like, why don't you
have allies?


Kelly Wanser


Very interesting. I talked to them about because, like, the
astrophysics community, the telescope people, man, they get those
big telescopes. They're really good at it. But part of it is that
climate research is classified and has emerged as a basic
science. It's very academic, and it hasn't involved big applied
efforts. And technologies have come in relatively recently, so
they've been pretty good at getting, like, super computing
attached to national labs. But in general, it's very academic.
There's been a lot of downward pressure on climate scientists in
terms of sticking their necks up. And so it just hasn't had those
same drivers, and it doesn't have a commercial community like
bioscience or space.


There's no money in it for anybody.


David Roberts


You got to wonder once we understand these things a lot better
and get a lot better at it if there might emerge commercial
applications. Can you imagine that?


Kelly Wanser


It's changing quickly because there are obviously economic
interest in being able to make better predictions. And as the
climate system gets more volatile and there are more risks, that
information becomes more valuable. So the landscape is changing,
but that upstream part, which is, do we know what's specifically
in the atmosphere? And can we model that from its tiny components
down to what it's doing to the climate system? That piece is so
basic and so general to everyone that nobody's there.


David Roberts


Interesting. Well, thank you for coming on and clarifying this. I
feel like this is a subject where there's just lots of weird
mythologies and hang ups and access to grind floating around and
not a lot of sort of basic knowledge of what's actually happening
and what needs to happen, so I appreciate your work on this. And
thanks for coming on and sharing with us.


Kelly Wanser


Well, I really appreciate your questions and the opportunity to
talk about it. Love your show. Thanks for having me.


David Roberts


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