Playing the long game

... under an incoming government with the attention span of a goldfish?

All the best for the festive season. On that, I have nothing more to add than what I said last Christmas, except I’m very pleased to note that I’ve successfully made it through one more year (and I can assure you that I don’t look a day older 🤥).

Longer-term subscribers (at least those of you with good memories) may recall an old stack from three years ago where I bemoaned the prospect of a geoengineering option to curb increases in temperature caused by our inability to phase out the use of fossil fuels. That option is by deliberately injecting aerosol particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the incoming sunlight back to space. It goes under the name Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, or SAI, because everything in atmospheric research needs an acronym.

It turns out that my colleagues at Lauder are now involved with a US-led program to check whether this might already be happening. Some countries will fare much worse than others with global warming. For example, the food production of China will be greatly diminished, at a huge social cost. That’s also true for the world as a whole, though for some higher-latitude countries like Russia or Canada there may be short term agricultural benefits. The concern in the US was that some ‘rogue’ countries (read China?) may take the problem into their own hands and unilaterally begin to inject aerosols into the stratosphere to save their bacon.

The new US-led program involves sending balloons up into the stratosphere at regular intervals from several sites distributed around the world. Lauder, New Zealand, is one of those sites. The balloons launched from them carry instruments that can measure the concentrations of aerosols up there and send the data back to the laboratory for analysis.

I heard about the program and Lauder’s involvement in it only after receiving an email from my old colleague, Norm Kjome from the University of Wyoming, who had read an article about it in the New York Times. He’d recognised the photo below from it.

It reminded him of his own balloon launches from Lauder decades ago when he’d visited us with similar instrumentation to investigate effects of aerosols from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the early 1990s. At the time, we were concerned that those aerosols might lead to ozone destruction.

These new deliberately injected aerosols could also lead to future ozone depletion. It’s strange that I heard of this new program only through my personal contact in the USA. It clearly wasn’t widely discussed at Lauder, at least not when I was there (unless I’d nodded off to sleep 😊). And it seems that NIWA management weren’t keen to advertise the work because of possible political ramifications. I think they’re wrong. There’s nothing there that we should be concerned about and I’m glad we’re involved. It was only through this sort of initiative that the illegal emissions of CFCs (from China) were discovered as few years ago. We should be singing about it from the rooftops (and controlling the narrative). In any case, after the NYT article, I think the cat’s definitely out of the bag.

As the article says, the measurements are part of a global US-led measurement system that can detect if another country tries to dim the sun. It quotes NOAA lab-director, David Fahey, as saying they’re playing the ‘long game’. I just hope it can survive the next four years under the incoming US leadership. With Trump at the helm, I’d be more concerned about them being the culprits - and shutting down the NOAA program to hide the truth.

The good news is that, with the now-diminishing levels of chlorine in the atmosphere, any ozone depletion arising from the aerosol injections is expected to be small. In that case, resulting increases in skin-damaging UV will be largely offset by blocking of sunlight from the aerosols themselves. In fact, their blocking of the UV component in incoming sunlight will be even more efficient than for the total.

But, just to be safe - and to preserve our clear blue skies - my long-term hope is that no additional aerosols will be detected because we’ve managed to solve the problem at its source. That would come with the additional bonus that Trump and his friends in the fossil-fuel industry have lost their war with the environment 😊.