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From controlling weather to changing ocean alkalinity to placing mirrors in the sky to manage solar radiation, can — should? — humanity engineer its way out of our climate crisis?
In 1946, with the Second World War barely over, a couple of General Electric scientists were in the company lab in Schenectady, New York, solving a problem. Water droplets in the atmosphere posed a risk to aircraft, freezing when they hit the cold wings and causing buildup. But ice droplets, they knew, would ping off the surface. Irving Langmuir and Vincent Schaefer had discovered that by introducing dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) into an environment with supercooled water (water colder than 32°F but not yet frozen), they could create ice. Another GE scientist, Bernard Vonnegut, compounded the discovery by using silver iodide, which was even more effective at generating ice formations. Though originally intended to keep aircraft safe from ice, the discovery later provided a principle that could be applied to enhance precipitation in times of drought or in arid conditions. The trio had discovered how to control the weather. This principle became the basis for “cloud seeding,” a process in which particles are introduced into clouds. Water droplets adhere to these particles and freeze, forming larger snowflakes or ice pellets that eventually fall as rain or snow.
On October 13, 1947, this “cloud seeding” was tested when the U.S. government flew an Air Force B-17 into a hurricane off the coast of Florida, in an experiment dubbed Project Cirrus. There were three planes in total — one dropping dry ice into the storm at the top cloud level, the second documenting the effect, and the third, carrying Vincent Schaefer, monitoring changes and directing the other two.
The next day, however, when scientists tried to revisit the site of their experiment, they couldn’t locate the storm’s eye. When they finally found it, the hurricane had gained in strength, shifted 135° due west, and was about to make landfall, hitting Georgia and South Carolina. The experiment had increased the hurricane’s intensity and altered its path, and when it hit land, it killed one person, caused $2 million in damage, generated public outrage, and introduced the world to geoengineering.
Geoengineering consists of “deliberate, large-scale attempts to alter the climate system in a way that halts, slows down, or reverses global warming,” according to the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the world’s largest association of Earth and space scientists. These climate intervention technologies include cloud seeding but also carbon dioxide removal, solar radiation modification, ocean alkalinity enhancement, and other emerging technologies such as those aimed at preserving ice sheets and/or restoring sea ice and permafrost. Though the term “geoengineering” was first coined in the 1970s, the concept dates back much further.
“Humans have been interfering with nature in very consequential ways for more than a century,” Professor Salim Ali tells me from the University of Delaware, where he teaches geography and spatial sciences. “We have changed entire ecosystems.”
But recent proposals call for more intentional (and often extreme) interventions, as it becomes clearer that we won’t meet our carbon reduction targets as per the Paris Agreement to keep warming below 1.5°C. Desperate times, the thinking goes, call for desperate measures.
Ali calls cloud seeding “a form of micro-level geoengineering” that, despite the negative consequences of Project Cirrus, remains relatively widespread around the world — including in the United States — as a way to address water shortages. Newer interventions include solar radiation mitigation (various methods that reflect sunlight away from the Earth) and oceanic geoengineering, including proposals to put certain metals in the ocean that would increase algal blooms to sequester more carbon.
These interventions are rarely easy and certainly not without risk. Indeed, there is enough cause for concern that Ali and others signed a letter put forth by the AGU recommending ethical guidelines that should be considered and implemented by anyone planning or undertaking a geoengineering project.
The American Geophysical Union isn’t anti-geoengineering, but it asserts that our first approach to the climate crisis must focus on solutions that are ‘controllable within our terrestrial sphere,' as Professor Saleem Ali put it. In other words, we should be considering strategies such as managed retreat from coastal regions as seas rise, expanding renewable energy infrastructure, and building reservoirs to respond to increased flooding.
The main concern, Ali says, is what’s called the “moral hazard problem,” which posits that people are more likely to take unnecessary risks if the consequences are borne by others. Through a geoengineering lens, this means that we might undertake risky geoengineering solutions (while ignoring or undervaluing the solutions that currently exist) because we either underestimate, can’t reasonably predict, or don’t feel threatened by any undesired consequences — they’ll either impact others in the world or future generations. Professor Ali also speaks to concern that geoengineering could act as a sort of “get out of jail free” card; why clean up emissions, the thinking might go, when geoengineering methods can rescue us? “There [could] be kind of a complacency around just going ahead and emitting because the fossil fuel companies will think, ‘Well, we have a solution, so we will just continue,’” he explains.
Additionally, the funding of geoengineering projects by private investment raises concern that results (and profit) will be prioritized over due diligence. Consequently, the guidelines include a call for transparency and proactive engagement of communities likely to be affected.
The AGU isn’t anti-geoengineering, but it asserts that our first approach to the climate crisis must focus on solutions that are “controllable within our terrestrial sphere,” as Professor Ali put it. In other words, we should be considering strategies such as managed retreat from coastal regions as seas rise, expanding renewable energy infrastructure, and building to mitigate increased flooding.
But that’s not to say we shouldn’t be ready to deploy new kinds of geoengineering projects if necessary.
To wit, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) proposed in 2021 that $200 million be deployed over five years to research three specific approaches to solar engineering to deflect sunlight. But underscoring the AGU’s assertion that existing technologies and methods must be prioritized, “the [NASEM] report makes clear that no research should occur unless a country has already made strong commitments to deep decarbonization,” reads a story in Science magazine. “Reflecting sunlight is at best a bandage and does nothing to curb human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere — or the ocean acidification that comes with it.”
The public remains split on their views around geoengineering, according to a Pew Research study, with about 41% saying they believe solar geoengineering could help mitigate climate change and 53% saying it won’t make a difference. The division seems to depend, at least in part, on how seriously people take the problem of climate change. “With solar radiation management or geoengineering, if you think the risk of climate change [is] very high, then obviously you will see the value of solar geoengineering,” Ali says. However, “If you see the risk of climate change as being less, and it’s manageable, [and] we can adapt to it through other means, then you will not see the value of solar radiation management.”
The public, Ali says, generally doesn’t have a good understanding of risk. “People have to realize we take risks at every point in our lives, and we have constant trade-offs on every decision we make.” It can be hard, however, to assess risk when we don’t trust the information that’s available. “The problem we have … with any kind of large scale human enterprise with technology, is that you’ve got a lot of noise and misinformation that circulates,” Ali says. “And this is true of nuclear energy, deep sea mining, solar geoengineering, the whole gamut. And in an age of social media, it’s very easy to get viral misinformation, and to have reliable science has become an enormous challenge.” Indeed, a key reason for putting forth recommended guidelines was to encourage public trust around geoengineering — to assure people that those engaging in it would incorporate ethical considerations into their planning.
Of course, all climate interventions are not created equal. For instance, some scientists, including Ali, believe that carbon dioxide removal technologies should be prioritized over solar geoengineering that injects aerosols into the atmosphere. In 2021, Ali penned an open letter calling for an international non-use agreement on solar geoengineering, writing that “The risks of solar geoengineering are poorly understood and can never be fully known. Impacts will vary across regions, and there are uncertainties about the effects on weather patterns, agriculture, and the provision of basic needs of food and water.” Nonetheless, he admits, solar radiation management is the method that’s currently gaining the most attention and investment, including from Bill Gates. Which is not to say, Ali points out, that the scientists involved are solely motivated by funding. David Keith, one of the most visible proponents of solar geoengineering, certainly has “good intentions,” Ali says. And Daniele Visioni, who supports the AGU’s framework and is conducting research into solar geoengineering, wants large-scale experiments to be conducted only with proper governance.
Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute are also experimenting with ocean alkalinity enhancement (see sidebar), which involves adding substances to the ocean to promote greater absorption of carbon. It’s a method, however, that’s drawn considerable opposition, Ali says — the ocean has many well-organized defenders — leading to reduced private investment.
The polar regions are drawing attention for various geoengineering experiments, because they are warming more quickly than elsewhere, with consequences projected to be severe and irreversible. But a group of scientists recently considered five of these geoengineering concepts, writing in Frontiers in Science that “According to our expert assessment … we find that the proposed concepts would be environmentally dangerous, … that the assessed approaches are not feasible, and that further research into these techniques would not be an effective use of limited time and resources.” They express concern that these ideas “distract from the priority to reduce greenhouse gas emissions [and] from the critical need to conduct fundamental research in the polar regions.”
The public remains split on their views around geoengineering, according to a Pew Research study, with about 41% saying they believe solar geoengineering could help mitigate climate change and 53% saying it won’t make a difference. The division seems to depend, at least in part, on how seriously people take the problem of climate change.
While GE scientist Bernard Vonnegut spent much of his career learning how to control the weather, his brother, novelist Kurt Vonnegut, spent much of his writing about the dangers of hubristic men, including a character in his novel Cat’s Cradle, who is modelled on the real-life Irving Langmuir. “I was a public relations man for the General Electric Company’s research laboratory,” the novelist Vonnegut told a reporter in 1980. “The job required my visiting the scientists often and talking to them and asking them what they were up to. … I got to know these people, and the older ones began to trouble me a lot; not the younger ones, but the older ones began to believe the truth must be served and that they need not fear whatever they turned up in the course of their research. And a man that my brother worked with there, a Nobel Prize winner named Irving Langmuir … was absolutely indifferent to the uses that might be made of the truths he dug out of the rock and handed out to whomever was around. But any truth he found was beautiful in its own right, and he didn't give a damn who got it next.”
As we grapple not only with the impacts of the carbon party we’ve been throwing since the Industrial Revolution, but also with our resistance to curbing those emissions, the conversation around geoengineering is only going to grow louder and more urgent. Groups, including the AGU, with their call for ethical guidelines, want us to think hard about who benefits or profits from these projects, and who or what might be harmed.
We must, in Vonnegut’s words, give a damn.
(Lucas Thors contributed research to this story.)
The LOC-NESS Project
By Lucas Thors
Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) are taking a measured, thoughtful approach to geoengineering. In response to demand from the world’s leading scientific bodies (like the National Academies of Science and the IPCC), WHOI is pursuing a project that would answer essential questions about marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR). The LOC-NESS Project (short for Locking Ocean Carbon in the Northeast Shelf and Slope; find out more at locness.whoi.edu/) is looking at methods of ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE), a potential type of mCDR that de-acidifies sea water while storing carbon away from the atmosphere. The project was initially situated off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, but when the installation of wind turbines got in the way, it was relocated to the waters off Maine. The Boston Globe describes it as a test to see if “adding an extremely alkaline mixture of sodium hydroxide solution can coax the ocean into swallowing more carbon dioxide than it already does.”
According to Suzanne Pelisson, director of public relations at WHOI, dozens of leading scientists and organizations support the LOC-NESS project. Pelisson emphasized in an email to Bluedot that the project is not a pathway to, or an endorsement for, OAE. Instead, WHOI is interested in a transparent, rigorous scientific evaluation of OAE. “We are not a company and are not participating in the voluntary carbon market. We need real solutions — not fake promises of carbon credits or large corporations charging ahead without evidence,” Pelisson said.
Pelisson said the project goals are as follows:
- Evaluate how regional ocean conditions and human activities would interact with OAE
- Conduct realistic laboratory experiments that assess the biological impacts and the engineered safety of OAE
- Design and conduct a small scale, highly monitored field trial of alkalinity enhancement
- Use an ocean model to expand upon the field trial data
- Engage with communities who care about the impact of OAE on our regional waters
Read WHOI’s full statement on mCDR here.
