This lab is planning to test the world’s first solar geoengineering experiment in the field. Here’s why that’s so controversial.
Solar geoengineering, an idea that picked up steam over a decade ago when a Nobel Prize winning scientist called for more research on this climate engineering intervention, is back in the news. The idea made it into the 2019 UN Environment Assembly agenda and was used to kickstart a global conversation surrounding the contentious response to the climate crisis.
With growing urgency and scientific interest, a team at Harvard University took up the charge to investigate solar geoengineering in a fully fledged research program.
Solar geoengineering involves a plan that would disperse particles into the stratosphere and could ultimately reduce global temperatures by bouncing the Sun’s rays back into space.
However, this type of geoengineering intervention would not fix the root cause, which is the rising funnel of greenhouse gas emissions that are getting trapped in our atmosphere.
The video is about the Finnafjord in the northeast of Iceland because it represents a broader global challenge. While Iceland as a whole is experiencing the negative effects of climate change stronger than many other nations, this specific region actually aims to profit from the changing climate. From 2021 onwards, the construction of a large container port will begin, which is supposed to turn Iceland into a new hub for international merchant shipping.
This is what the world will be like if we do not act on climate change.
The best-case scenario of climate change is that world gets just 2°C hotter, which scientists call the “threshold of catastrophe”.
Why is that the good news? Because if humans don’t change course now, the planet is on a trajectory to reach 4°C at the end of this century, which would bring $600 trillion in global climate damages, double the warfare, and a refugee crisis 100x worse than the Syrian exodus.
David Wallace-Wells explains what would happen at an 8°C and even 13°C increase. These predictions are horrifying, but should not scare us into complacency. “It should make us focus on them more intently,” he says.
David Wallace-Wells is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City. His latest book is The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.
