Exposing the Bad Arguments Against Geo-Solar Engineering

Saving the Climate is too Important to Play Games with Fallacies and Rhetoric

The threat of climate change cannot be overstated. Increases in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation are already wreaking havoc on the environment, and the effects are only going to get worse in the next decade. Drought, sea level rise, increasingly intense storms, flooding, and deadly heat waves are just a small sampling of the impending global climate disaster. In spite of this, we as a species are doing diddly squat about fixing the problem that we created.

These are certainly desperate times, and so naturally some are calling for desperate measures. And one of the more intriguing of these desperate measures is solar radiation management (or SRM). SRM is a subcategory of Geo-solar engineering, which refers to any large scale technological manipulation of the processes that control climate with the aim of reducing the effects of global warming.

SRM specifically involves technologies aimed to reduce the amount of light energy from the sun that gets converted into heat. This includes comparatively low-tech ideas such as painting roofs white to reflect more light back out into space. But low-tech SRM is unlikely to make much of a difference. On the other extreme are high tech proposals such as placing giant mirrors in orbit, which are too farfetched to be implemented, or ever tested, any time soon.

There is, however, one form of SRM that is feasible. We could spray a fine mist of sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere to block a portion of light from the sun. The technology is not particularly sophisticated; and we know how to make it work thanks to data gathered from the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, which put 20 million tons of sulfates into the stratosphere causing global average temperatures to drop 0.6° C for more than a year.

This approach to fighting climate change, not surprisingly, faces serious opposition among a certain faction of the environmentalism movement. Some of the objections to SRM are well founded. It might harm plants by reducing the amount of sunlight available for photosynthesis. It could change precipitation patterns, causing desertification in some areas and flooding in others. Most importantly, it is a possible moral hazard. Keeping global temperatures in check might weaken our motivations for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That would be bad because high CO2 levels do more than just warm the planet; they also contribute to ocean acidification and other problems.

Unfortunately, there are also some very bad arguments against SRM that have gained traction, muddying the debate. In an attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff, let us analyze some of the more fallacious objections.

The worst argument, if you can even call it an argument, is the tired old “playing God” rhetoric. (Op-ed piece “Geoengineering and the Folly of Playing God with the Planet,” by Wash Po meteorologist, Jason Samenow, is just one of many examples.) When critics denounce SRM as playing God, they are simply appealing to irrational superstition and taboo rather than providing any rational justification against employing this tool in the effort to save the planet. What this objection leaves out is any explanation of what exactly it means to play God and why it is wrong to do so. However you define it — interfering with natural processes, creating new species, deciding who lives or dies — if playing God is wrong, then so is invitro fertilization, chemotherapy, selective breeding of animals, or any non-random system of distributing vital organs for transplantation.

I suspect that the notion of “playing God” is not the bogeyman that it used to be, partly because of declining religiosity in the western world, and partly because it has been evoked too often in opposition to unobjectionable practices.

But there are plenty of other equally spurious arguments against SRM. A recent article by Douglas Fischer, executive director of Environmental Health News, is prime collection of fallacious objections to Geo-solar engineering.

First, he quotes Oxford physics prof Raymond Pierrehumbert, who says “We know from medicine that if you ignore the root cause and treat the symptom, the consequences are often fatal.” All I can say is that I am glad Mr. Pierrehumbert is not a doctor. Obviously, we should treat both the symptoms and the root cause, when possible. Imagine that your doctor informs your that there is nothing he can do to treat your cancer, and when you ask for analgesics for the agonizing pain, he says “No. That would be merely treating the symptoms.”

As pointed out by a better article in the same publication, reducing greenhouse gas emissions might not be enough to combat the effects of climate change. Even if were to reach net zero emissions tomorrow, there will still be excessive greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere that will continue to warm the planet beyond the +1.5° C we are already approaching. And even if temps stayed at or below the +1.5° C mark, we will still face melting glaciers and polar ice caps, droughts, and destruction of coral reefs well into the next century.

A closely related and equally bad argument cited in the article comes from Northeastern University sustainability scientist, Jennie Stephens, who claims that SRM “takes solutions off the table.” This is what philosophers refer to as the fallacy of false dichotomy. There is nothing about implementing SRM that precludes us from also pursuing other solutions as well. It is one thing to argue that SRM might represent a moral hazard. That is when undue protection from risk leads to irresponsible behavior. That is certainly something we would need to worry about if we were to go down the Geo-solar engineering path. But those alternative solutions would not become unavailable.

False dichotomy is not the only easily identified fallacy among the SRM objections. Pierrehumbert presents this caricature of the pro-SRM position.

It’s an outrageous commitment to lay at the feet of future generations: To say we are going to continue to burn fossil fuels so we can get richer, and we’ll do that at the cost of forcing the next thousand generations of humanity to continue this without fail.

This is a paradigmatic case of strawman fallacy. That is when you distort the opposing argument, presenting an easily refuted parody of it, and then pretend to have refuted the actual argument. There are many reasonable people who support SRM. And they do so because they think we need to employ any and all solutions to save the planet. They do not favor SRM because they want to continue to pump the atmosphere full or CO2 so that wealthy billionaires can continue to reap short term profits at the expense of future generations.

Climate change is a serious matter. If we do not make the right decisions, it could be the end of human civilization. What we need is clear thinking and careful deliberation, not fallacies and rhetoric. There are good reasons to consider SRM as well as some good reasons against it. We need to deliberate carefully about those reasons and not get distracted by sloppy thinking a half-baked pseudo-arguments.