Claim: Unilateral Geoengineering Attempts Could Lead to Conflict

Essay by Eric Worrall

“… Once climate engineering is deployed, countries may be more likely to blame climate engineering for extreme events such as hurricanes, floods and droughts, regardless of the evidence. …”

Desperate Nations May Unilaterally Begin Hacking The Global Climate

ENVIRONMENT07 April 2024
By BEN KRAVITZ AND TYLER FELGENHAUER, THE CONVERSATION

…

The world is already facing natural disasters of epic proportions as temperatures rise. Heat records are routinely broken. Wildfire seasons are more extreme. Hurricane strength is increasing. Sea level rise is slowly submerging small island nations and coastal areas.

The only known method able to quickly arrest this temperature rise is climate engineering. (It’s sometimes called geoengineering, sunlight reduction methods or solar climate intervention.) This is a set of proposed actions to deliberately alter the climate.

These actions include mimicking the cooling effects of large volcanic eruptionsby putting large amounts of reflective particles in the atmosphere, or making low clouds over the ocean brighter. Both strategies would reflect a small amount of sunlight back to space to cool the planet.

…

Creating risks for neighbors raises conflict alarm

The climate doesn’t respect national borders. So, a climate engineering project in one country is likely to affect temperature and rainfall in neighboring countries. That could be good or bad for crops, water supplies and flood risk. It could also have widespread unintended consequences.

Some studies show that a moderate amount of climate engineering would likely have widespread benefits compared with climate change. But not every country would be affected in the same way.

Once climate engineering is deployed, countries may be more likely to blame climate engineering for extreme events such as hurricanes, floods and droughts, regardless of the evidence.

…

Read more: https://www.sciencealert.com/desperate-nations-may-unilaterally-begin-hacking-the-global-climate

Advocates of volcanic eruption / sulphate aerosol geohacking ignore that most likely outcome of a serious sulphate geohacking attempt would be a global famine.

Estimating global agricultural effects of geoengineering using volcanic eruptions

Published: 08 August 2018

Jonathan Proctor, Solomon Hsiang, Jennifer Burney, Marshall Burke & Wolfram Schlenker

Nature (2018)

Solar radiation management is increasingly considered to be an option for managing global temperatures, yet the economic effects of ameliorating climatic changes by scattering sunlight back to space remain largely unknown. Although solar radiation management may increase crop yields by reducing heat stress, the effects of concomitant changes in available sunlight have never been empirically estimated. Here we use the volcanic eruptions that inspired modern solar radiation management proposals as natural experiments to provide the first estimates, to our knowledge, of how the stratospheric sulfate aerosols created by the eruptions of El Chichón and Mount Pinatubo altered the quantity and quality of global sunlight, and how these changes in sunlight affected global crop yields. We find that the sunlight-mediated effect of stratospheric sulfate aerosols on yields is negative for both C4 (maize) and C3 (soy, rice and wheat) crops. Applying our yield model to a solar radiation management scenario based on stratospheric sulfate aerosols, we find that projected mid-twenty-first century damages due to scattering sunlight caused by solar radiation management are roughly equal in magnitude to benefits from cooling. This suggests that solar radiation management—if deployed using stratospheric sulfate aerosols similar to those emitted by the volcanic eruptions it seeks to mimic—would, on net, attenuate little of the global agricultural damage from climate change. Our approach could be extended to study the effects of solar radiation management on other global systems, such as human health or ecosystem function.

Read more (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0417-3

We also have real world historical evidence to back the concerns expressed in the study above. A natural volcano eruption which may have produced 2.7C of cooling, a similar magnitude to the kind of change advocates want to attempt, brought about the rapid decline and collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

…

Summer temperatures in 536 fell by as much as 2.5 °C (4.5 °F) below normal in Europe. The lingering impact of the volcanic winter of 536 was augmented in 539–540, when another volcanic eruption caused summer temperatures to decline as much as 2.7 °C (4.9 °F) below normal in Europe.^[2] There is evidence of still another volcanic eruption in 547 which would have extended the cool period. The volcanic eruptions caused crop failures, and were accompanied by the Plague of Justinian, famine, and millions of deaths and initiated the Late Antique Little Ice Age, which lasted from 536 to 560.^[3]

…

In 538, the Roman statesman Cassiodorus described the following to one of his subordinates in letter 25:^[7]

• The sun’s rays were weak, and they appeared a “bluish” colour.
• At noon, no shadows from people were visible on the ground.
• The heat from the sun was feeble.
• The moon, even when full, was “empty of splendour”
• “A winter without storms, a spring without mildness, and a summer without heat”
• Prolonged frost and unseasonable drought
• The seasons “seem to be all jumbled up together”
• The sky is described as “blended with alien elements” just like cloudy weather, except prolonged. It was “stretched like a hide across the sky” and prevented the “true colours” of the sun and moon from being seen, along with the sun’s warmth.
• Frosts during harvest, which made apples harden and grapes sour.
• The need to use stored food to last through the situation.
• Subsequent letters (no. 26 and 27) discuss plans to relieve a widespread famine.

…

Tree ring analysis by the dendrochronologist Mike Baillie, of the Queen’s University of Belfast, shows abnormally little growth in Irish oak in 536 and another sharp drop in 542, after a partial recovery.^[20] Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica show evidence of substantial sulfate deposits in around 534 ± 2, which is evidence of an extensive acidic dust veil.^[21]

…

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536

The Year Without a Summer of 1816, the last great Western famine, also provides evidence that volcanic eruptions can disrupt seasons.

… The year 1816 AD is known as the Year Without a Summer because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1 °F).^[1] Summer temperatures in Europe were the coldest of any on record between 1766 and 2000,^[2] resulting in crop failures and major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.^[3]

Evidence suggests that the anomaly was predominantly a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in April in the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia). This eruption was the largest in at least 1,300 years (after the hypothesized eruption causing the volcanic winter of 536); its effect on the climate may have been exacerbated by the 1814 eruption of Mayon in the Philippines. …

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

The impact on temperature of the 1816 event was just 0.4-0.7C cooling, well within the range of temperature changes advocates of geoengineering (geohacking?) would want to achieve, yet it was enough to disrupt weather patterns for an entire year, and cause food shortages in parts of the USA and Europe.

Even worse, imagine if a natural volcano erupted just as the geoengineering attempt was being performed. Most of these noteworthy famine events were the result of multiple volcanic eruptions over a short period of time. There are plenty of large volcanoes which could erupt anytime, and contribute their load to the artificial sulphate injection – The Campi Flegrei super volcano in Italy, Mount Merapi in Indonesia, The Taupo supervolcano complex in New Zealand, which is well overdue for a big eruption, large and very active volcanoes in Siberia, and of course Yellowstone and the Hawaiian volcanoes, and probably a heap more I haven’t included.

It wouldn’t even have to be a fully fledged supervolcano eruption, the eruptions which triggered the Year Without a Summer and the Roman Dark Ages were big, but well short of what Earth can deliver on a bad day. If a large volcano erupted during the middle of a geoengineering global cooling experiment, the result could be an ice age.

Geoengineering is bad for plants – it blocks sunlight plants needs to thrive. Geoengineering has demonstrable potential to massively disrupt seasons and cause weather instability. And Geoengineering would expose us to a vastly increased risk that a natural volcanic eruption during the middle of the Geoengineering experiment could trip us into a new ice age.

Please lets retire the idea of geoengineering, once and for all. We have enough problems with the risk of natural volcanic eruptions disrupting global food production, without adding to the burden of risk by deliberately pumping sulphates into the atmosphere. There is no evidence any global warming we could experience in the foreseeable future is worth the risk of geoengineering.

And of course there is the very real risk geoengineering could trigger a major conflict, despite attempts by advocates to downplay this risk.

Imagine if a major unilateral US geoengineering effort accidentally coincided with a major volcanic eruption, which together triggered a medieval Dark Ages scale volcanic winter, with widespread prolonged crop failure, and national instability, mass starvation and millions of deaths in Russia, Canada, China and Northern Europe, along with lesser food shortages in the USA. I doubt many national leaders would be open to the argument that the US contribution to this hypothetical disaster was unintentional. You don’t need to be Einstein to figure out what could happen next.

There are excellent WUWT articles on the Year Without a Summer, such as Missing the Missing Summer, President Jefferson Meets Mount Tambora, Summer of 1816 in New Hampshire: A Tale of Two Freezes.