Washington Post Editorial comment

[Jessica Gurevitch]

There was an editorial in today’s Washington Post saying we might want to consider SRM. Comments were all the usual knee jerk reactions (what about microplastics and population growth?! And other irrelevant stuff, and lots of the usual unintended consequences, governance, acid rain and whatnot). I thought some of you might want to read my comment. Here it is. 

I have been an environmentalist and sometimes activist for 50 years. I am a PhD ecologist. I have come after years of studying this to start to consider that we may need to include climate intervention in our toolbox to save Earth and its people and ecosystems and biodiversity. MAYBE. We need to learn a lot more about climate intervention, particularly the potential effects on humans and ecosystems. Knee jerk reactions against considering reflecting a small amount of sunlight to cool Earth while continuing to eliminate emissions is short sighted. Yes, there are risks and unintended consequences of intentional climate intervention, certainly. Governance is extremely challenging. Inequality is an issue. But there are enormous risks and unintended consequences from the unintentional climate intervention we have been carrying out for 200 years and continue to do. If reflecting some sunlight from the stratosphere would save hundreds of millions of human and animal lives, would that be worth learning more about? Is that one potential outcome? Maybe.  Yes, we’ve messed up big time with cane toads and all the rest, but we’ve also had some successes. Electricity? Penicillin? Do these have downsides? Sure. But don’t dismiss climate intervention out of hand. And it is certainly not turning down a thermostat—it is a deliberate reduction of sunlight energy to cool earth’s surface, which involves a complex intervention in a very complex atmospheric system which we know a lot about—but far from everything. 

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