Harvard's SCoPEx Experiment: Solar Geoengineering and Global Risks

Bill Gates is among a dozen individual donors and 14 foundations backing the

first stratospheric solar geoengineering experiment out of Harvard.

It's called Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, or SCoPEx.

A high-altitude balloon will lift instruments about 20 kilometers into the

stratosphere, where it will release less than two

kilograms of different

naturally occurring chemicals, like calcium carbonate and sulfates,

and then measure the change in atmospheric chemistry and light scattering.

A study last year found that no existing aircraft can inject the

stratosphere at a

high enough altitude, but developing a new high-altitude tanker

would not be

technologically difficult or prohibitively expensive.

Nozzles still need to be designed that can continuously blast out trillions

of

particles, and scientists still need to decide what

chemicals those particles

should be made of. But unlike cloud brightening, which

is another solar reflection

technique, the tech needed for stratospheric

injections is not far off.

The technology is not the main thing that's holding this back.

The main thing that's holding it back is the uncertainty

about what the exact effects would be and the positives and

negatives of its effects and the,

the governance and decision-making process for implementing it.

Other radical attempts to control climate change have been tested in the past, like

when one California businessman dumped 100 tons of iron dust in the Pacific to

spawn the growth of carbon-absorbing plankton.

But unlike small, sometimes rogue experiments,

planet-wide solar

geoengineering will require buy-in from the international community.

You know, in our simulations, we found China got

warmer and drier relative to the

past when you stabilized global temperature, and India

was now cooler and wetter.

Yeah.

So you can see there how, you know, international

relations around using this technology could become

complicated.

I mean, we can't even decide on what to do about

emissions of greenhouse gases, and

so how are we gonna decide on, on, on setting the planetary

thermostat?

There's this, the real concern that we won't be able to reach agreement,

we

being the entire planet. And so

there's the prospect that countries just go ahead

and do solar geoengineering,

and that causes disagreement, conflict, tension, even

possibly war.