Is anyone deliberately tampering with our atmosphere? If so, this crew is watching
If someone were trying to deliberately tamper with the earth's atmosphere, would we even know it?
We will if the scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have anything to do with it.
Using weather balloons for detailed checks and satellites for a more global and continuous picture, scientists at NOAA’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, are part of a broad NOAA effort to build an early-warning system in case anyone's trying some do-it-yourself geoengineering.
Their goal is twofold: Get a baseline measurement of what the earth’s stratosphere looks like, and see how natural events such as volcanic eruptions and wildfires can change it. With that data, they can look for anomalies that shouldn’t be there.
"The more we know about what the natural variability is, the more we're able to say, ‘That’s not natural’ or ‘That looks really strange,’” said Troy Thornberry, the scientist in charge of the program.
Something “really strange” could indicate that someone somewhere on earth is attempting solar geoengineering: injecting gases or tiny particles into the upper part of the atmosphere to reflect back some of the sun’s heat.
This could theoretically cool the earth and has been suggested as a temporary solution to climate change until humanity stops burning the fossil fuels that pump greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere – something it's having a hard time doing.
Researchers and scientists have been studying the stratosphere since the late 1950s, but this specific NOAA effort began in 2020.
“There's never been the resources or capability to have globally distributed, systematic measurements. That is what we're trying to go accomplish,” said Alexandre Baron, a specialist in atmospheric composition and chemical processes at the University of Colorado's Cooperative Institute for Research In Environmental Sciences, who works with the NOAA group.
How would solar geoengineering work?
The earth’s atmosphere has several layers, what NASA calls “a multi-layered cake.”
We live in the troposphere, which in the U.S. extends about 6 miles above the earth’s surface. It’s where there’s air and where weather happens.
Above that is the stratosphere, which starts between 7 and 10 miles above the earth’s surface. If tiny particles get into the stratosphere they can hang there for months and even years, reflecting back tiny bits of sunlight like millions of tiny mirrors, and very slightly cooling the earth.
We know this because every once in a while it happens naturally. When Indonesia’s Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, it ejected so much dust and sulfur dioxide so high it reached the stratosphere, cooling global temperatures that year by as much as 2 degrees, according to scientists.
For the first time, this NOAA project is giving humans an almost real-time look into what’s happening broadly in the stratosphere.
"It's like a film of particles that is dimming the sunlight. The satellites can see how thick this film is and how much dimming it does," said Baron.
So far, there’s no evidence anyone is doing solar geoengineering “on a measurable scale,” said Elizabeth Asher, a scientist with NOAA's Ozone and Water Vapor research program in its Global Monitoring Lab, she works on stratospheric aerosol testing and modeling.
A tiny startup in California called Make Sunsets is launching a few pounds of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere every week or so to see what happens, but it's not enough to register in NOAA's testing.
Is solar geoengineering a good idea?
The thinking is that solar geoengineering could buy humanity time as emissions are lowered, which is why the idea is increasingly discussed.
“Given the situation we are in, the world is increasingly considering an intervention approach called geoengineering, either to provide respite or to lessen the potential full of effects of climate change,” said Lisa Graumlich, president of the American Geophysical Union.
But there are multiple potential questions about solar geoengineering that haven’t been answered:
- No one knows if it would work
- No one knows if it’s something humans can accomplish
- No one knows if it would affect different parts of the planet differently
- No one knows what unknown side-effects it might cause.
Given all those concerns, scientists are extremely cautious about the very idea of attempting something that could have such potentially disastrous, large-scale, long-term and unknown consequences.
In October, the American Geophysical Union released a set of ethical guidelines aimed at countering some of those risks. The guidelines called for more research, transparency about the potential risks and rewards, including communities that could be affected in the decision-making process, oversight and clarity on who’s funding such efforts.
One thing scientists, conservationists and researchers are clear on is that solar geoengineering is not a get-out-of-jail card for lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
“First and foremost, aggressive actions must remain the primary strategy for reversing and addressing climate change,” Graumlich said at the scientific group’s annual conference in Washington D.C. last month.
Whether geoengineering will ever happen isn’t known, but thus far, other efforts to keep temperatures from rising too far above pre-industrial levels haven’t gone well.
Experts on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and at institutions around the world have long warned the long-term global average temperature increase should be kept below 1.5 - 2.0 degrees Celsius to avoid catastrophic consequences. That’s a rise of between 2.7 and 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
Humanity may already have blown past the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold. It’s expected that 2024 was the hottest year on modern record.
There was a time when talk of solar geoengineering was relegated to the fringes of online conspiracy theorists and science fiction. But as other efforts have failed, the once dystopian idea is increasingly being discussed by mainstream scientists, even by environmental groups that once shunned it.
Could these measurements make geoengineering possible?
Perhaps even greater than the question of whether solar geoengineering should be done is whether it can be done. While such tweaks to the earth’s stratosphere might make theoretical sense, so do many things that end up not working in the real world.
The data being gathered by NOAA and others will also help scientists know whether it’s even an option.
“Detecting somebody trying to intentionally do something was sort of always in the background,” said Thornberry. “One of the bigger services we can provide is improving how well we can model stratospheric aerosols.”
With solid data, scientists can better understand the extremely complex systems involved. That way, if someone says: ‘We can geoengineer our way out of this,’ scientists will be able to ask, ‘Does your model really get the right answer?’ he said.
Baron and many others believe more data will at least give humanity information about whether solar geoengineering is even a possibility.
While he doesn’t advocate for geoengineering, “staying blind” isn’t useful either, he said. “You don't want to be facing a wall in a couple of decades when somebody asks if we could or could not do it and have no answers.”