StarTalk Radio - Changing the World (Literally)

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

Could we create an atmospheric sun shield to halt the effects of global warming? Should we? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly are joined by climate scientist Daniele Visioni and sociologist Holly Jean Buck to explore the science and ethics of deliberately altering Earth’s climate.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/changing-the-world-literally/Thanks to our Patrons S Harder, Evalange, Pat Z., Victoria Hamlin, Jacob Silverman, Lucia Leber, The Fabulous Mr Fox, Meghan Lynch, Gligom, Joe Ingracia, Physche, Jeremy Astin, ThizzRyuko, KK, Justin Costa, Little Blue Heron, Andrew Sparks, Patrick, Austin Becker, Daniel Tedman, Enrique Vega, Arrun Gibson, GSC, Jim Minthorne, Hayden Upton, Bob Loesch, J Mike, TreesSway, Mitchell Joseph, Griffin Stolp, Eric Sundberg, Jeff Bombard, Serenella Argueta, Jack Hatfield, lindsey, Cake Bytes, SuperVedos, C.Spinos, Audrey Anane, Jim B, Frederic R. Merchant, C., Curry Bäckström, Rory Cardin, nathan morrow, Harinath Reddy K, Joel Campbell, tia tia, Tyler Hanes, Joan Lozier, MythFinder, Big_Gorem_Hero, Kirk Zeigler, and Daysha Denight for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.

All this talk of geoengineering sounds like the plot of a movie soon to be written. Yeah, a Bond movie. A Bond movie. Yes. And a Bond movie always comes with a Bond villain. That's what I'm talking about. So the Bond villain is controlling the geoengineering.

All right, coming up, we're gonna find out is it Bond villain or is it science on Star Talk. Welcome to Star Talk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. Star Talk begins right now. This is Star Talk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, and this is Special Edition,

and we're gonna be talking about geoengineering. Gary, you cooked this up. Yes. My cohost, Gary here, how you doing, man? I'm good. All right, you're looking in good shape. Breathing in, as we've discussed. Breathing in.

It's the breathing out I'm not doing. That's all right. Yes and no. Welcome back as my cohost. Always a pleasure. All right, so Gary, what did you set up today? All right, so the annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate takes place here in the Hayden Planetarium,

and this year, in 2025, it is geoengineering, the pros and the cons. Seen by many as controversial, it's an approach to solving global warming, but there are others see its potential as very, very effective. There are a number of different options up for consideration, but with them come not

just scientific issues, but ethical considerations as well. So pre-debate, we kidnapped two of the panelists, sorry, and we've dragged them, locked them in the office, and we're going to have our own debate because we couldn't wait until this evening. Did they come willingly? Help. He's still in a box. Who do we have here?

Daniele Vigione. Daniele, welcome to Star Talk. Thank you, Neil. Thank you for having me. and I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking.

I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking.

I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking.

I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. I'm gonna go ahead and start talking. It is, yes, it does. Yes. It is and it does, yeah, we get it. You're a climate scientist specializing in this cottage industry of people who care about stratospheric aerosols and their behavior. Ooh. Whether they misbehave or behave as you intend. That's your whole. Let's find out.

That's, ha ha ha. And you also are a specialist in what they're calling climate intervention methods and what its impact would be on the climate, on ecosystems, and even on culture, society. So, I mean, what a, damn, that's a very high responsibility. Yeah, it is. In other words, don't mess up.

Yeah. If I'm over that, I grab your lapel and say, don't mess up. If I were over that, I'd grab your lapel and say don't mess this up. So who had the idea that this is a thing that would work? People have been discussing it for decades. I would say some people point to Edward Teller actually being the first one discussing. Teller of the H-bomb fame or infamy.

Right, people had discussion about could we fundamentally deliberately alter climate one discussing. Teller of the H-bomb fame. Yes, indeed. Or infamy. Right. People had discussion about could we fundamentally, deliberately alter climate for a long time, right? For as long as we understood what climate was. With my weather machine, I will one day rule the world. Yeah, no, indeed. So it is in a way, one could say nothing new, except then as the problem of global warming,

of climate change became more and more prominent, more and more scientists started thinking about this maybe a bit more deeply. So it wasn't just a fringe idea? It was a fringe idea in the sense that a lot of people. No, initially, but now. Right. No longer fringe.

Many would still consider it fringe, or at least would like not to talk about it too much. Oh, that's different, okay, okay. Right, fringe in that sense. I would say that the scientific basis is as well established as for most of climate science, but most of the issues being in sort of the ethical, societal dimension bring this topic into a different light.

So as I understood from my bit of reading here, you had some prior awareness and understanding of this problem or the solution with volcanoes. Because they pump all manner of. Nastiness. Yeah. Nastiness into the atmosphere. Nasty.

Nasty. Into the atmosphere and you get to study that, that's nature doing it. And so what have you found from the history of volcanoes? Yeah, so the interesting thing is that it was Benjamin Franklin, one of the first. Everybody loves Ben. And he was a great scientist too.

He was the first person to point out that potentially the weirdness in climate that people had seen in the early 19th century were due to the Tambora eruption, a volcano in Indonesia exploding in 1815. Okay, so he's around, of course, at that time. Just remind me, I think Indonesia also has Krakatoa. I mean, there's no shortage of volcanic.

There's plenty of volcanoes in the tropical band, yes. Yes, yes, yes. Close to the equator. And sometimes they just go off and they explode. Yes. And you get to see which way the ejecta goes. Like it goes west to east, right, following prevailing air currents.

So people get to study this. And he was clever enough to connect the dots between odd weather and an odd atmospheric phenomenon of volcano. Okay, so this is some of your foundational background for how you go forward from that? Yes, in the 20th century then there were at least three different volcanic eruptions,

not as big as Tambora, but still big enough, the last one being Pinatubo in 1991. And after- You know, I was observing at a telescope, and when Pinatubo went off, it changed the optical properties of the atmosphere. We had to redo all of our data. Pissed me off.

It's not all about you. Not your favorite volcano, I assume. Because I was at the telescope when this stuff came by. Not when it went off, but it took a while. Once again, scientists taking their cue from Mother Nature. I don't mean that sarcastic lens effect. No, it's great, yes. So, with putting, it's sulfate aerosols. What aerosol, tell me what is an aerosol?

Okay, so by aerosol, us climate scientists define just every kind of solid or liquid particle suspended in air. But very tiny. So it's a suspended part that makes it an aerosol. Yes, the suspended part, yes. Yes, okay. The. So it's a suspended part that makes it an aerosol? Yes, the suspended part, yes. Yes, okay. The fact that it can be suspended at all

makes it an aerosol no matter what it is. Like SARS-CoV-2? You see, that's a very interesting thing. There were a lot of discussion about what constituted an aerosol when it came to the discussion around COVID, because there were different definitions between what climate scientists consider an aerosol, these very tiny particles, sub-micron scale,

they float around for a long while. And the droplets. Is a millionth of a meter, so very small. Very small, so gravity doesn't really do much, turbulence actually keeps them afloat, and the very large droplets like spit that medical practitioners consider aerosols. So there was, this was a lot of the confusion at the beginning around airborne.

Two slightly different usages of the term. Same term. Same term. To get to reducing mean temperatures here on Earth, what science do those aerosols have to perform? By mean temperatures, you mean average? Mean. These are the temperatures that make fun of the lower temperatures. Mean temperatures. The mean average? Mean. It's not nasty. These are the temperatures that make fun

of the lower temperatures. Mean temperatures. They're pissed off temperatures. There she goes. Okay, yeah. So the aerosols we think about, again, sub-micron scale, that ends up being the same size of the wavelength of most of the visible light that we get.

Oh. So they are at the specific size where they really interact a lot with incoming sunlight. That's wild. So it's photochemical. It's actual, more like, well, it's physical. It's a physical block. There's also some chemistry, but mainly all of the aerosols

that are around that size will reflect, will interact with solar radiation through Mie scattering, through various scattering processes. Remind me, Mie scattering, through various scattering processes. And it reflects. It might be Mie scattering, and it's M-I-E scattering. So that's a simple scattering where the wavelength of the light matches the particle,

and then it redirects it. Bounces off. Because it goes off. But we have, like Rayleigh scattering is a different kind of scattering that gives us the blue sky. The blue sky, that's for much smaller. And we did a whole episode on that.

That's for light, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was great. By the way, that makes so much sense because you're talking about the radiation that's coming in and greenhouse gases, primarily carbon, is trapped, carbon dioxide, sorry, is trapped because when the ground radiates heat, it's the atmosphere

that's trapping a different wavelength. Right, completely different. Right, right. And infrared specifically. Infrareds, right. So that's so wild. It literally becomes kind of a bounce board. It's called science.

It's so cool, isn't it? It's pretty cool. How about that? I'm just saying. Oh my God! You could still call it wild, but at the end of the day, it's science. I'm Nicholas Costella, and I'm a proud supporter

of Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. So for this process to be successful to the level that we would all want it to be successful, how much aerosols do you have to put into the stratosphere? How long is it there? I mean, who gets to argue over where you put them? Does it matter then on seasonality?

And what have we learned from volcanoes about where it goes? And if I remember correctly, I think it was the late 80s where there was talk of nuclear winter, where a total nuclear exchange would burn forest, put, I guess, aerosols in the atmosphere, blocking sunlight, plunging all the Earth into- Darkness and cold.

Into cold. So that would be a bad effect of it, but now you're trying to make it a good effect. So let me, all great questions, but they can all, and it can also all be connected, right? So aerosols, we already have aerosols all around us, right? Most of the pollution, the haze that you see in New York City, that's pollution.

Those are aerosols, right? But it makes for, the haze that you see in New York City, that's pollution, those are aerosols, right? But it makes for a lovely sunset, let's be real. Makes a lovely sunset, it's super bad for your health. When you burn fossil fuels, you burn coal, you produce these aerosols that are super bad for your health. And once they rain down- My infancy has never been worse.

But it's a beautiful sunset. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I want to hear this. I need to. I'm just trying to think. So they come down, and they come down mostly, we burn them very close to where we live. They stay in the air, but they are below the clouds. So whenever then there's rain, they just get washed out. So actually currently, we... Just to be clear, a raindrop forms on these particles. It absorbs the... not as much for sulfate.

Sulfate is actually not as good as cloud nuclei as other kind of particles. Not all aerosol particles make good cloud nuclei. But when they say something, things rain out, they typically mean that the droplet formed on these particles? No, it can also mean that the droplet, while falling, absorbs these tinier particles.

That's called wet deposition or washout of aerosol. And what's the real term? Wet deposition or washout. I love that. What's the real term? Wet deposition or wash out. I love that. So normally we emit as humans, just as pollution, over 100 million tons of sulfur dioxide, which is the precursor of all sulfate aerosols per year. 100 million tons.

It's a lot. And most of that falls down close to where we live, right? Acid rain, people who are alive in the 80s, not me, but people who are alive in the 80s will remember acid rain. They were, because before. Wait, just so I get my chemistry, remember my chemistry. Sulfur dioxide is not itself acid,

but if you combine with a hydrogen, you get H2SO4, which is itself sulfuric acid. And that would be the acid rain. SO2 gets oxidized by OH, the radical OH, which is present everywhere in the atmosphere. And these then eventually results in other three reactions and results SO3 and then H2SO4. And then this H2SO4, it's in vapor form, sulfuric acid,

and then tends to nucleate into sulfuric acid particles, liquid aerosol droplets. Hence acid rain. Yep, hence acid rain. So back in the 80s, the US was emitting way more sulfur than it is now, and so the global emissions were 160 million, 150 million tons.

Now we're getting, the US has been going down for a while, Europe as well, China and India have been going up, but in general, we're still around 100 million tons. These aerosol particles do have a cooling effect. We know this, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change has known this for a while. They do cover up a small fraction of the warming produced by the greenhouse gases.

What you're saying is, our effort to clean up the air has taken these particles out and thereby increased the effects of global warming. Unmasked. It has unmasked. Unmasked, very good. That's the word that normally it's used. It has unmasked part of the global warming

that before was sort of hidden. So, and this is the other part of the observation, right? You need, but to do this masking close to the surface, you need hundreds of millions of tons, because these aerosols stay just a couple of days. So the idea behind something like stratospheric aerosol injection is what if you could put a tiny fraction of these aerosols that would stay though

for a hundred times longer than they do at the surface before falling down. Months, up to a year. Essentially you would get more bangs for your buck. With just a smaller fraction, you would get the same amount of cooling, but far away from where people leave and breathe, and you could get the same effect while not pushing.

So what makes the stratosphere special for how long something would last there? Is it because we're not making clouds there? Right, so there's no clouds, there's no water vapor, the stratosphere is very dry, so there's no rain out. But also, the troposphere, it's called troposphere because it's turbulent, right? Because there are turbulence connected.

Troposphere is the lowest level, the lowest level. Where we live, where airplanes are. Above the troposphere, there's a stratosphere that is called like that because it's very stratified. Things, there's no turbulence, things move very slowly. I never thought about that. Because if you have turbulence, it's turbulence up and down. And if you're up and down turbulence, it's not stratified.

So that's why you call it stratosphere. Very good. Thank you. And in Italian, what is it? Stratosfera? I knew it would be a cool word. Stratosfera. Well, that's where it comes from, right? Yes, yes. It's the original Latin root.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The original Latin root. So yeah, once you put something, especially in the tropical stratosphere, that's where there is the large-scale, what we call the Brewer-Dobbson circulation. It's essentially this large-scale stratospheric circulation that pushes things up close to the tropics and then pushes them poleward. So eventually, the air that is in the stratosphere goes back down, but close to the pole,

and it takes a year, a year and a half before a parcel of air that originates or of any material that is in the stratosphere goes all the way, gets removed from the stratosphere. Got it, and you get a good spreading of the effect. Yeah, that too. By latitude. Right, because the other thing is that,

both on a latitude, but even more importantly, on a longitudinal way, as in once, if you put, and this is another one thing that makes stratospheric aerosol injection complex from a political point of view, is that you can't put these aerosols on top of the US and they're not going to stay there. They're going to spread throughout definitely

the whole latitudinal band. So China, which is in the same latitude as the US or Europe, these aerosols are going to in a week. So longitudinally, the winds are very fast. And so in a week or two, there's a complete spread. And we see that with volcanoes all the time. Small volcanic plumes spread in a couple of weeks throughout the whole tunnel.

That's how I know, because I was in the Chilean Andes and the Pinatubo, east of us, that just came due west. Just all to mess you up. Messed me up. So when we had that explosion in Iceland, it brought civil aviation to the ground. Let's see if he can pronounce the name of that volcano. What was the name of that volcano in Iceland?

Everybody calls it a... I have a lot of volcanologists. You got the answer you deserve. That's the answer I deserve. That stopped air traffic in and out of Heathrow. Everywhere. Everywhere in Europe, yeah. But that was not the sulfate.

Okay, so do we have a potential issue, because you say it's going to sit above this area of commercial air flight, will it not descend? So two things, volcanoes explode all the time, and when they explode, the main thing they do, the short-term larger effect, is the ash. Right. Right?

So that's the thing that is very dangerous for aviation, because when ash interacts with the aircraft, it can- Gumps up everything. Right, it can glassify and so it can be a real danger. Some volcanoes- Did you say glassify? I think so and I'm not sure

whether that's an actual scientific term but let's pretend it is. Wow, I love that. So this is the ash getting heated in the engine. Right. Turning into- Glass. Glass.

Something like glass. But wasn't it already heated in the volcano? Right, but then it cools down pretty quickly, and so the ash actually forms that way, and then it can sort of undergo. So the ash is pretty, okay, so when people get buried in ash like they did in. Pompeii. No, no, Pompeii was not ash.

El Galano was ash. Pompeii was a. Well, just a magma. Yeah, the lava. That was a magma flow? It was actually a mud flow, really. Oh Galano was ash. Pompeii was a... Just a magma. It was a magma flow? It was actually a mud flow really. Oh that's right. That's why everything was preserved. Preserved.

That's right. It was a mud flow. So I hadn't fully appreciated what the ash was and what it can be at its worst. Yeah, so this ash is the first thing you actually see. You don't really see the sulfate, right? But it's a thing that is dangerous over a one, two days time scale a week, right? Also because this ash is also very tiny and so you can breathe in, it's very dangerous and so on. And it's dangerous for aviation. Some volcanic eruptions also have,

what for climate scientists is a lot of sulfate. Not all volcanic eruptions also launch sulfate in the atmosphere. For instance, Hungatonga that happened in 2022, the huge volcanic eruption, there was also launch sulfate in the atmosphere. For instance, Hungatonga, that happened in 2022, the huge volcanic eruption, there was almost no sulfate. It was just water vapor pushed up from the ocean. But there was almost no sulfate. Hungatonga had something like 300,000 tons of sulfate.

Pinatubo had 17 million tons of sulfate in a couple of hours. And how much sulfate does does Akuna Matata have? I will have to go back and check my number. I don't know. Good question. So we're putting aerosols into the stratosphere and we've got the natural cycle of the wind systems.

How do you discuss this with sovereign nations? And they say, well, I don't want that flying over my territory. Who then owns the territory above a particular country? Do you have to find your counterpart in every country so that they can speak to their governments to come to an agreement on this? That's definitely what we do as scientists. Yes. I constantly talk and work with climate scientists from all over the world, for sure. For your question though, I would say nobody knows who the stratosphere belongs to. The stratosphere of all places is actually one of the least regulated.

We know airspace is in the troposphere, and so we know who is liable for things that happen in the troposphere, and then there's space and some other treaties regulating that. But nobody really had to regulate the stratosphere for a long time. The only treaty that exists is the Montreal Protocol for substances that affect stratospheric ozone, which protects us from damaging ultraviolet light. But that whole protocol was just for the ozone.

He was just for the ozone, and a couple of years ago, there was an increase in one of these ozone depleting substances that was not predicted, was not expected, and it took countries a year to figure out from which country this depleting substance, this increasing depleting substance was coming from, but even then, the Montreal Protocols. Don't leave us hanging, which country was it?

Well, it was a country in Asia. Okay. Okay. Even, you see, interesting thing was that the agency, the US scientific agency that found out about where this product was coming from, couldn't just point the finger and say, this is coming from you, right? They could say, we think that this increase

is coming from this region of the world. But there was no, there is no enforcement mechanism, even in the Montreux Protocol, that could say, oh, you have to stop. I mean, the country voluntarily agreed to stop, right? So a lot of these international treaties don't really have enforcement mechanisms. For the Montreal Protocol, it's all a matter of all countries agreeing that Odeson is important

and it should be protected. I think more countries signed that than any other treaty ever. It is the most successful climate and Environmental protection treaty in the world. Yeah, every country signed it because every country realized how important it was to have an ozone layer Yeah, so Chuck you missed it. Yeah, okay. It was a cosmic phenomenon that affect mostly white people and so they acted That is surprisingly correct They acted that crazy. Yeah. That is surprisingly correct.

What does it take to motivate the powerful countries of the world? Yeah. Just say... Not get their tan. If the tan is at risk. You're going to lose the beaches. Yeah. So, what could the Stratocera aerosols achieve in terms of temperature?

So, first of all, very clear, these aerosols cannot solve climate change. Climate change is a whole other problem. It comes from the greenhouse gases that we have in the atmosphere. So it's a band-aid, as we would say. It's a band-aid. It's a stopgap. You can call it everywhere. It's something, you know, some people dismissively say, well, it's like taking an aspirin if you have cancer. It's not treating the underlying causes,

but even if you have cancer, you have the right to a dignified life and not to suffer from other pains, right? And so in a way, it's a bandaid in the sense that, yes, it could help temperature from going up, right? It could prevent further warming, and this way could reduce some of the risks that come from this warming that we know are going to come from this warming and that we're already observing are coming. It could prevent further warming, and this way it could reduce some of the risks

that come from this warming, that we know are gonna come from this warming, and that we're already observing are coming with the warming that we see now. So a couple questions, fast ones. Climate seems to me, even as an astrophysicist, to be an immensely complex problem to solve, given all the variables,

given the turbulence in an atmosphere, gas and different gas species, and the interaction of the atmosphere with the ocean and the land, all of this. So is AI helping you in any of this? We're definitely exploring a lot of ways in which AI could help reading the huge amount of data that we already have. For instance, from satellite observation of things like plumes coming out of volcanoes.

Nobody could look at all of them, right? That's what AI is very good at. Pattern recognition, finding stuff that humans would have a hard time with. So this is really an emerging field, but there's a lot of interesting things that we are starting to do with AI as well. Okay, so then here's a risk that I learned about, and I just want to know, is it authentic, and is it the worst thing to worry about? If the temperature starts rising,

and you say, we need more aerosols, and so you got these two competing forces, you get to tamp it down, then there's a terrorist attack on the people putting up the aerosols. Then the aerosol falls out, and now you have a catastrophic shock to the system because the greenhouse gases have been going up. What you were masking for so long just becomes.

You were masking for so long, then it's instantly, you have a catastrophic exposure to greenhouse warming. How much do you think about contingencies here? you have a catastrophic exposure to greenhouse warming. How much do you think about contingencies here? That's a great question. I would say it is something to worry about, except I would say it would not be instantaneous. If you stopped putting, since these aerosols stay for so long,

if you stop putting them for a day, a week, a month, nothing really changes, because the aerosols stay on for a long time. Now, if you stop for a year or two years, that's where you unmask all the warming. So this is your... So that gives you some time. You have a cushion to find the terrorists.

You have a cushion to find the terrorists and kick their ass. Right. And rebuild or whatever. But of course you would have, I think this is a very valid concern when it comes to stratospheric aerosol, but it's also one that points out to the fact that essentially you would have... I think this is a very valid concern when it comes to stratospheric carousel, but it also points out to the fact that essentially you would need to plan carefully, have contingency

plans, and you could not rely on just one actor doing this, right? Because this is a worldwide thing. Could someone go up and put something? Sure, maybe they could before they were stopped, but that's not how you would achieve anything. To achieve anything, you would need a carefully planned thing with contingency plans for what happens if we need to stop. For instance, I've done research on what would happen if a volcanic eruption happened while you're doing this.

What would you do? And well, it turns out that then you would ramp down or maybe shift where you're putting the aerosols to try to manage it. This is true geoengineering. You understand your planet. You interact in a way to your benefit. The key difference is really in the word deliberate.

When we say what does geoengineering mean? And a lot of people ask me, well, haven't we been geoengineering the planet already with all the greenhouse gases? Maybe in a way, but the point of geoengineering, we say deliberate, because this would be the first time we consciously decide to globally affect climate to our benefit.

Or to somebody's. Engineering on purpose. Yeah. Yeah. Now what about unintended consequences, because you do something here, something else has to happen over there. So what do you anticipate, or what have you seen?

That's way too polite. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How can this go horribly wrong? There you go. That is a perfectly fair question. Because there's things you look, that you know could go wrong,

and then there's the things you don't know could go wrong. Right. And for something as catastrophic as Earth's atmosphere, where does your confidence come from? Our confidence comes from a lot of different observations. The main one being we do have an upper bound for how wrong things can go. And that's again, Pinatubo.

If a volcano can dump 17 or 20 million tons of sulfate all at once. Into the stratosphere. Into the stratosphere. And things happened after that, right? Temperatures cooled, there were changes in atmospheric chemistry and so on. But fundamentally that's really as catastrophic

as it can get. And we've been able to understand what happened there, right? On top of all of that, all of the sulfate came down, yes, but there's so much more. When we talk about sulfate, the reason we do that is because we understand the environmental impacts. They're not good for sure, but we understand them. When we talk about sulfate, the reason we do that is because we understand the environmental impacts. Now, you could be thinking of what if we try to engineer

a perfect compound to put in the stratosphere instead of sulfate? Something that works better, that's legit, but in that case, that's not something that we understand how it interacts with the environment long term, well, sulfate is something we understand very well. So I would say that's a- It's the devil you know, right? It's the devil we know, we understand the upper bound of how wrong things can be.

You have experience with it, you've seen it happen before. And just to be clear, when the rain comes out, you can acidify regions that could be harmful to wildlife or plant life. So again, as opposed to when we do it through pollution, these aerosols would mix very well. And most of the aerosols then would fall over the oceans, where really, sulfur is not something that affects

ocean acidification that much, because that's mostly carbon driven. Again, that's a clear trade off. You would increase pollution by a little bit, right? 10% more than now in many locations, you would spread it evenly, but it would still come down. And does that affect? Yes, that's one of the, again,

that's one of the things we definitely are looking into and should be looking into more, actually quantifying and understanding these trade-offs, all the things that could go wrong. And it could very well be that there are other things that could go wrong that we don't know yet, or maybe we haven't thought about, which is why I always welcome other climate scientists

starting to look into this field, because if suddenly we found a roadblock, something we hadn't thought about, nobody had thought about in the last 30 years that would make these, no, look, we really can't do this, it's too dangerous for this reason. Okay, at least we know, right?

The point of doing research is that then, at least, we can say, nope, we've thought about this, here's the reason why we can't do that. So I have an analogy from physics where in the Large Hadron Collider, where they're creating energies, where there was some risk that you might create a black hole. A small risk.

But you know. It's just a small black hole. That would then consume the Earth as it moved through. And so why do you proceed, even if that's such a small risk because that's a small risk but it's catastrophic to the planet and it turns out nature gave us examples. There are cosmic rays that come from deep space

like the center of the galaxy at extremely high energy, higher energy than anything we're making inside the accelerator, and they collide with molecules in our atmosphere, and it's not really making black holes, and we've been here for five billion years. So that's the cosmic peanutiboo, or peanutuba. Pune-tuba.

That's the cosmic peanut butter. We have nature to calibrate our expectations. Where are we with the simulations and therefore then testing? Because we can sit here and have a talking shop for decades, it sounds like we have, because I'm part of the team now, obviously. But surely this testing goes on, but there must be something pushing back for this not to be the case, because this sounds too good to be true to... Even if it's a band-aid, I think we'll take the band aid right now.

Yeah, I think that's part of the issue, right? And I would say I work a lot with social scientists as well, and when it comes to this topic. And one time I was talking to one of my colleagues, and he really asked me the same question. I was like, well, then this sounds good. Why aren't we doing it? And we kind of set out to think about these from a societal perspective, right?

As any good scientist should do. You want to look at all angles, even angles opposite which were you trying to go with it. Yeah, and it is clear that there are a lot of worries, right? When you talk to people about it, they're like, wow, this sounds crazy, and that's a perfectly good reaction. Now the question is, when do people stop having

that reaction, will it ever happen, and what is it going to take? Some people suggest that once people are going to experience more and more the effects of climate change, that's going to change their mind. But you know. I do not think we should make plans out of desperation. On the other hand, people are saying, well will there be a point in which we are secure enough

into our assessments that this will convince most people? Right? I think that's kind of the angle that I try to work with, as in I think that the main ways in which we're going to have meaningful discussions about this and move forward and maybe start even outdoor testing is once we've put the whole scientific community in a way behind assessing robustly, what do we know and understand

about something like Stratosphere Carousel Injection. So at this point, there's just, yeah, honestly, a handful of scientists compared to the whole climate science endeavor. But the amount of people that are looking into this is getting bigger and bigger. And so I think we're pretty close to having broader international assessments around the topic, which means that, because eventually,

when I maybe talk to policymakers or to people in other country, they don't want to know the results of my study or of my climate model, they want to know what's the agreement, right? So that's kind of why it's so important to talk about this from an international perspective. The results of any one plan.

You need a geopolitical scientific consensus. Imagine if they had thought about that with something like the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Politics. Indeed, yeah. And once you have that, you might be in a better position to move. But then when you get 10 people in a discussion,

you end up with 12 opinions. Of course. Always the case. But trying to get nations to sit around a table and, well, it's not bothering me or you're not putting that over my sky. Oh yeah, they're not in my backyard. So how far are we from making something like this implemented? I would have absolutely no way to predict that, I would say, to be honest.

But I think we can, for instance, look at climate change, right? And say, honestly, the first assessment report from the IPCC was in 1994, or was in the early 90s. And we've advanced greatly, but fundamentally conclusions haven't really changed from 1994, which is we add greenhouse gases, that's bad, that increases warming, and that's going to make things worse. And there have been, I want to take in this case the optimistic view of saying, you know,

there have been many advances when it comes to climate change mitigation and policy. Have there been enough? Definitely not, but there have been, right? There have been the Paris Agreement. Now, is the United States of America out of the Paris Agreement? Yes, it is.

Will they stay for long? I don't know, but you know, solar and wind are kind of unstoppable. There's a lot of Europe. At the rate they're going now. Yeah. Europe is very much into renewable. China is even more than Europe and the United States.

In spite of their carbon footprint growing in some sectors, they're still making great advances. Yes they are, because they understand. They see it as an economic issue, they don't even care right now, they look at it as this is a necessity for our economy, unlike unfortunately the supposed greatest economy in the world.

So in this sense, I guess as a scientist, I'm not gonna be the one making the decision about whether to do this or not, I shouldn't be, it should be no scientist, you know me and Sir Neil as well, we've met enough scientists, we shouldn to be the one making the decision about whether to do this or not. I shouldn't be. It should be no science. You know, me and Sir Neil as well, we've met enough scientists. We shouldn't be the one making this kind of decisions. Come on. Well, you should if you can laugh maniacally while you're doing it. Oh, yeah. That's how it gets done.

Yeah, that's what you're doing. But we can provide... I still think that the overall, the strongest merit of science is providing the information that can let people make the good decisions. Will they make good decisions all the time? No, because we're humans and we don't. But that's not a good reason why not to provide the information that could allow people

to make these decisions. So let me land this plane by saying every. The stratospheric plane? Hey. I'm saying every disaster movie begins with people in charge ignoring the advice of scientists. Just saying. I hear you.

Yeah, that's it. Daniele, missione. Good night. I love how you said that. Oh, I love thinking about how to say it. Thanks for joining us here. Thank you. Oh my gosh, we loved your expertise

and you put it in the mix and stir it up and see what comes out the other side. As these years progress, we don't know where the valuation will land. Oh, we know. No, stop. Come on, guys. It's America 2025.

We murky. We murky right now. Murk. So again, thank you for joining us. Thank you. So next up, we're gonna get the point of view from a sociologist who thinks about the impact of all these measures on the human condition,

not only domestically, but around the world. Coming right up. So our next guest is Holly June Buck, associate professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Buffalo. That's SUNY. SUNY Buffalo. Yeah. So, ain't that something, when I was growing up, no one would imagine a department with this title, environment and sustainability.

And that's why we're in this mess that we are in right now. Because nobody envisioned needing this. Needing this. Also, Haverdown's Radcliffe Salata Climate Justice Fellow at Harvard. That sounds like a superhero. That sounds badass. It really does, yes.

Cape and everything. And interdisciplinary environmental social scientist. And with special attention to how people engage with emergent climate control technologies. That's a thing. That's like a whole sociological thing. It has to be. It's gotta be, why not?

And my favorite title of them all, author of a book from 2019, After Geoengineering, climate tragedy, repair and restoration. Wow. Sounds very much like the movie The Day After. Yeah. Or what's that other movie, Snowpiercer. Snowpiercer.

That was after, that's where climate people messed up. Yeah, exactly. Welcome to Star Talk, Holly. Thanks so much, it's great to be here. Do we call you Holly Jean or just Holly? Either one's great. Either one's great, Holly Jean's kinda, yeah, Holly. Thanks so much, it's great to be here. Do we call you Holly Jean or just Holly? Either one's great. Either one's great, Holly Jean's kinda, yeah. Cool.

Holly Jean. Holly Jean sounds like a country western star. You know? Holly Jean. Holly Jean. So, we've just come off of a conversation looking at the pros and cons of aerosol injections into the atmosphere.

Could you just give us some options on how to achieve the same effect that are banding it about today? The same effect as solar geoengineering? Yeah, I mean, it's got a noble goal to sort of protect Earth from our own misdeeds regarding climate. And so if we don't do that, what are you going to offer us?

Did I direct that question to you? Oh, I'm sorry. Because I had an answer. Yeah. Well, there's plan A. Shall we go over plan A? Well, go. Yes.

So a whole bunch of countries, including the US up until a minute ago, but states as well, New York state have signed onto these net zero targets. So ideas that. It's net zero carbon dioxide. Or greenhouse gas. In general. Yeah, I mean they're a little bit different targets,

but yeah, the main idea is you don't put out more than you can remove. And that needs to happen by mid-century, which is actually really soon. Yeah. It could have happened yesterday, and it needs to happen yesterday. Yeah, and we still got some issues

if it would have happened yesterday, but go ahead. So basically remaking our whole energy system, our built environment, it's a big transformation. That's why people are talking about engineering. All right, so I get that. And this aerosol in the atmosphere solution sounds so Bond villain. It does sound sexy, doesn't it?

It sounds like this should be in a movie, but why not just take the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? And they don't have to worry about any of this. Well, you sound like my mother. You know what you need? You need a sitcom. Why don't you have a sitcom?

In other words, yeah, that's good. We do need to do some of that, but there's a limit at how much we can do. I mean, think about all the effort it took to take it out of the ground, right? All the pipes, all the refining, all the distribution, all of that infrastructure. We're talking about building that basically all over again

to put it back underground. And there are limited places where you can actually store CO2. Exactly. Interesting sort of macro way to see that. That is, yeah. That's a really interesting way to look at it because you never really consider how much infrastructure is involved

in just oil extraction and then refinery. Just that. Let alone everything else involved to get it to you where everything that we see. I don't have to bury it, do I? For example, the White Cliffs of Dover, that's limestone cliffs, and that's a repository of carbon from our environment.

And they're not buried, but not that we're making that, but I'm just saying that didn't involve a pipe to put it back into the ground. Yeah, so people talk about closed system and open system carbon removal. So in a closed system, you would have an injection well, you'd be injecting that into rock formations deep underground.

You more or less know where it is, but what you're just talking about is more of an open system approach, putting it into the ocean, putting it into fields where you can make rocks weather faster. That's a bit trickier because it's harder to measure what's going on. How are we transporting this? Because you've got certain industries that produce an awful lot of CO2 and then they don't have somewhere right on their doorstep to squirrel this away, I'll call it that. So how are we, I mean pipes are one, are we transporting it in any other way?

Barges, rail, trucks, ships. The same as oil. The same as oil. It's exactly the same. Put two trucks in opposite's exactly the same. The two trucks go opposite directions on the highway. Exactly, they tip each other at two. What?

That was my soft point. That's funny. So we're spending how many billions on carbon catcher plants, right? And I just say to myself, just... Are we actually, is that a real thing? We spent a few billions trying to start them. We'll see if they get finished.

It's still a nascent industry. Yeah, very much nascent. Are they better than trees capturing sea food? That's a very good question, actually. I love that. I mean, trees are great for a whole bunch of reasons. The thing with these land-based approaches, we need more of them for providing habitat

for a million reasons, but we can't expect nature to do all the work here of what we took out of the ground. Yes, right. We have limited land for trees, unfortunately, because we want that land for growing food. So basically, we should stop eating. That's really the answer here.

Eating and heating ourselves. Stop eating and heating. Eating and heating, let it go. So I get many of the land solutions to this, but how about ocean solutions? Other than CO2 just getting absorbed into the water, surely there are creatures out there that would value some uptake in CO2.

If you're talking about the whale concept, that one might not scale to the levels we need it to, but if you're talking about plankton, on the other hand, that seems more promising. These are really early stages of research, though. But the theory seems really positive. How does it work? What's the procedure?

Basically, the concept of ocean iron fertilization would be to add nutrients to the ocean to create a big plankton bloom. The plankton falls down to the bottom of the ocean. What do plankton blooms have anything to do with CO2? Or are these the photosynthetic plankton? Yeah. Oh, like a tree.

Yeah. Like a plant. They do what a plant would do. Yeah, exactly. Oh, okay. The light bulb went on. Yeah, thank you, thank you. So it's an LED light bulb.

I would expect nothing else. So you're growing plankton in the presence of the CO2, no differently how you would grow trees in the presence of CO2, except oceans are huge. So what happens when the plankton die and then they fall to the bottom, then what? I mean, ideally that CO2 would stay at the bottom, but this is the issue with this category of approaches

is that the science is really early and the science is expensive, right? Because you need ocean chartered vehicles going out, they're doing experiments, and we just haven't really begun that process. It's not a laboratory experiment. But the potential for this sink and die of the phytoplankton is capturing massive amounts of CO2, but surely that has some toxicity in the ecosystem.

What does it do with oxygen? There's little creatures down there that they do matter. I care about them. What was the little microscopic creature that was here that put all the oxygen in the air? Oh, yeah, cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria, right? Yeah, early.

Yeah, so there are consequences that happen when you do this kind of stuff. Yeah, but they would absorb CO2 and release oxygen. So what's so bad about that? I mean, for ocean life? What do you have against oxygen? What kind of a person are you? No way.

Remember I'm a sociologist. Okay, no, we get it. No, it's this lack of joined up thinking that's got us in this situation in the first place. So surely we've got to look at the effect of every living thing in any environment we go into. But the problem is we need to explore, we need to research further,

and it doesn't look as if there's a desire or possibly the finances to do it, or am I wrong? It's just short of what's needed to really get into some of these questions. All right, so if you're not a sociologist of plankton, you'd be a sociologist of people. So how do the effects of all these efforts land differently around the world, either economically or geographically?

Well, the rest of the world is ripping us off. That's the first thing. And it's time for us to make sure that we have dominance. The kind of dominance that comes from drill, baby drill. Thank you, Chuck. Yeah. Chew on the nose. No, I mean, there's a couple of issues here.

One is that unless people grasp the climate change, the energy transition, the situation we're in, talking to them about these ideas is probably not going to land very well because if you don't know why we would try it in the first place, right? But there are countries who have nowhere near the resources to participate in this,

so they would be passive observers, possibly even victims of our efforts or our folly. And oddly enough, those countries are far more amenable to the solutions that we need to enact in order to solve this problem. You would think that from what you said that they would be the ones who would be most skeptical. They're not, we're the frickin' problem.

Was that right? Yeah. We actually do have some research that colleagues of mine have done in several different countries trying to learn about people's perceptions. And they did find more support for countries in the global south, countries that are facing a lot of climate impacts right now. But I would caution that with most people haven't heard anything about any of these

approaches. So what somebody hears in a survey or initially is going to be shaped by what people Say about it other messengers their friends and family once they start to discuss it with other people Which is I think was this year's Yale report that still it's somewhere around upwards 53 percent of people say they rarely or never talk about climate change with friends or family That's this year's report. So we're just not even discussing it at all. We're la la la.

Right now this little group here are outliers. Yes! So how do we then think about the social consequences or ethical issues of this down the line? How do you handle that? I mean, I think the first step is just to involve more people in the conversation. Okay.

And that can be done a lot of ways. Which hardly ever happens. Yeah. You need agencies or organizations that'll do that. Yeah, you need actually dedicated staff to work on it. That's a big challenge. So who's the most important voices that need to be heard in regards of this?

Her voice. No, my voice. Lean into the microphone. My voice. Go. But do it ASMR. It's my voice, yes. Holly Jean is speaking. Is it the powerful rich western nations or is it the global south? Is it African nations? Is there a demographic or group? I feel everybody has a stake

and everybody needs to do something with climate and energy, right? Nobody can sit by. Yeah, nobody's getting out of this one. No, that's. So what, of all the options that you've seen, what horse would you bet on as the most effective but also most humane, if I may.

I think we need to triple nuclear capacity. We have a goal about that, or we did. I hope we keep doing that. We need abundant clean energy for people because a lot of people don't have access to energy. So this might turn the tables on the anti-nuke movement that had been so strong over the decades. I hope so. We've seen public sentiment on that shift

pretty quickly, actually. So that's the show we had with Catherine Hough on the small modular reactors. Right, because the nuclear reactors can be scaled and they can be built anywhere you need them, right? I don't think they're at the point where they can commercially put them in, although we've had nuclear reactors in submarines.

Oh yeah. For some time, so there must be some way to scale it and make it practical. Oh yeah, completely, completely. Plus, there's not as much spoken of how dependent France has been on nuclear power for decades, and it's not even a thing. Right, they'll protest anything at any time of day.

Except smoking. I'll give you a true example about France's nuclear program. I'll have to say nuclear. Would you stop giving France cancer? Every time you're imitating a French person. They put a nuclear power plant on the northwest coast of France

closer to London than it was to Paris. That's how much the French love the books. So is there going to be a mistake that we make in our attempts to do the right thing? What are we most likely going to get wrong? I mean you can see a lot of problems considering that we're dismantling our capacity to even monitor what's going on in terms of, you know, attacks on science and government. So yeah, there's tons of risks. All the people who are concerned, I share their concern.

Okay, give us something positive here, please. Tell us, what are you hopeful for? Well, I think that public thinking about this can and will shift. The question is one of timing. That's why we're talking about geoengineering. Yeah, but you would know better than others what would help make that shift. What kind of forces need to be in play

to change an attitude or a perspective. Has there been something in history that you're familiar with where a public sea change of opinion has happened for the better. Because that's kind of the shift that we need to have for this, at least here in America. Some of the examples people point to are the civil rights movement, gay marriage, these social things.

I think it's a little bit trickier when you're talking about reconfiguring the built environment. But the mindset has to happen first. How about we get ahead of the story? There seems to be a fair bit of misinformation regarding climate, global warming. Or disinformation. That's exactly it. So there's this disinformation.

How about we get ahead of that narrative and start to put out real solid strong and take that 53% and make it much, much bigger? I mean, you asked me about technologies and I said nuclear, but we have to also shift the framing into investing in social infrastructure, investing in people. And I think that because we have an administration that's backing away from that,

that's crushing our social infrastructure, people are going to recognize the value in the relationships, the agencies, functioning government, and we'll build that capacity to, when we do have the political will, to build these new technologies. We'll have the social will that matches it. Not to put words in your mouth, but are you saying that the dismantling of these social structures, these social institutions may awaken people to their need in ways that they had previously taken for granted? Yeah, we had a problem even before Trump where we passed all this money in the US for climate

and energy projects and we couldn't get it spent fast enough because we didn't have enough people in the agencies to spend it, to review it, to even hear about the grants. People on the ground didn't know. And now people are realizing you need people to do this. It's not just about investing in tech. So what I was gonna say is it takes money. It actually takes money to spend money. It takes money to educate people.

And how do you combat the other side, which is disinformation. Fossil fuel companies through their so-called outlets and foundations, right? They spent $900 million that was tracked last year. $900 million on disinformation. So we gotta come up against that. That's a serious thing.

And we gotta land this plane real quick. But presumably, if you ask them, they wouldn't say it was disinformation. They would just say it's information. So what you really have to do is empower the listener to know the difference. From a sociological perspective, how do you do that? Yeah, you don't go to people and say you're misinformed.

Because then it's like you're saying, well you're dumb, you didn't know the right information. So that's my problem, I'm an idiot, Jesus! No, you give them information that's my problem. I'm an idiot. Jesus. No. Right. You give them information that's grounded in science, and you say they're really hard trade-offs, but you have choices. It's important that you don't make people feel like all of this stuff is going to take

away their freedom. That's what they're worried about. I'm saying- We do such a good job. We need to start calling electricity liberty juice. Liberty juice. Liberty juice. We need a focus group.

We want to save America, what you gotta do is get a card that runs on liberty juice. All right, this thought experiment. That's a pretty good joke. I think that's a good one. The answers are out there, bro. Yeah, yeah. Say we fall on a technology that is practical, cost-effective, give or take, and we do get

ourselves to these pre-industrial zero levels, will we not think, well, it doesn't matter, we can burn all the fossil fuels we want because we can control it now? You okay with that? That's a big argument, yeah, man. Is that likely to happen for us? Because we've driven ourselves at speed here. If we become good at it, then drill baby drill, who cares? I just think burning rocks is kind of archaic.

I just think we can do better. I mean, whatever, I think we can come out with something that outcompetes that. And also, fossil. You wait economically then, and then the economics drives it. But do we not, as a species, do that thing anyway, where we tie our own shoelaces together

or find a way to shoot ourself in the foot? Speak for yourself, dude. I was. I was. That was good. Well, I think the danger that many people see is that once you have anything that's viable on a geoengineering scale,

which we're nowhere near by the way, but once you do that fossil fuel companies will then use that as a cudgel to say, we can keep burning fuel. So a lot of people are like- And that's my concern. Yeah, a lot of people are like- You foresee that presumably. Yeah, I read of people are like. You foresee that, presumably.

Yeah, I wrote a book called Ending Fossil Fuels that was about the challenge of how you end fossil fuels and the geopolitics of it are really tough because some countries really depend on this for their revenue and their legitimacy and I could see them saying, well, let's keep on going. So countries like Venezuela or Qatar or... Russia.

Yeah. Yeah, these are all the countries. Yeah, so it's a whole other thing. Here we're saying, stop burning fossil fuel, and you'll bankrupt the country. Yeah. They built their whole economy on it. Unless we're willing to make massive transfers of finance,

which we apparently aren't. Yeah. Well, then that becomes your problem as a sociologist. I'll take all the problems. You fix it. A lot of work. Well, Professor Buck, thank you for being on Star Talk. Delighted to have you on the Asimov panel

and that you guys kidnapped her for Star Talk. Very good job here. Thank you. Thanks so much. And just so you know how deeply I respect your profession, my father's a sociologist, and I actually received a sociology award from Congress. Just I think they appreciated how much I always tried

to think about the impact of science on people, and I was very moved by that. And so I wish you well. Thank you. And maybe some luck. You might need some of that too. Based on how stuff goes down with the human interaction function that's out there. Yeah, we're screwed.

Thank you, Chuck, for that. Including that. So Holly, Chuck, Gary. Always good. Always a pleasure. This has been another edition of Star Talk Special Edition. Geoengineering, the good, the bad, the ugly. Until next time, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Keep looking up.