Geoengineering May Be the Answer to Climate Change

man is actually causing the average temperature to rise two degrees per century I am today committing the United States of America to develop an effective and science-based response to the issue of global warming we've known about climate change for over 50 years our response to the dire warnings has ranged from too little too late to outright denial as a result current atmospheric carbon dioxide now exceeds levels that haven't been seen in three million years long before humans even existed vice has addressed this important issue in all six of our sins however what we have seen

is that instead of comprehensively addressing this crisis Humanity is going backwards the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate Accord many scientists believe that we have gone past the point of no return and as such need to focus on much more radical ideas so in this episode we are gonna look at potential solutions that could possibly steer us back from the brink [Music] [Music] [Music] so we're here in southern Greenland that we used to be called Eagle glacier so-called because it looked like an eagle with two wings and a neck and a head the

neck and the head were here melted that whole wing is melted since we've last came here this part of southern Greenland is losing ice faster than anywhere else in Greenland in fact as fast as anywhere on earth it's losing ice so fast that it's about three trillion tons in a decade the coastal environment you know it's already just beginning to be a problem sandy was a good example of high tide plus storm surge plus sea level rise then flooding in New York subway costing sixty billion dollars like that so we'll see more of those type

of extreme events more yeah yeah so even halting emissions now we still have this problem of 50% too much co2 in the atmosphere plan a which was conservation has largely failed so Plan B geoengineering needs to be plan a it seems we have to try everything at this stage because we're in such deep can we dial the thermostat yeah can we technologically grab hold of this car that's spinning out of control and and start driving in the right direction to find out what's being done to actually fix the planet we spoke to David Keith the

Harvard scientist who's leading global research efforts in geoengineering or the use of technology to rein in the planet's rising temperatures the world is facing a huge crisis in climate change global warming sea level rise what is the fastest these solutions could be implemented so one of the things that's scary about solar geo is ITER's it could be done in dumb ways now right so the basic idea isn't new at all the very first report that went to sort of the most powerful decision-maker in the world on climate change what President Johnson in 1965 when I

was 2 years old well so that was the first really good climate report and that report included as one of the few things that was suggested to deal with the problem what we would now call solar to engineering a varying temperature so these ideas aren't new at all and the basic ability has been around for a long time so it typically means two really different things and actually don't have much to do with each other so one of them is the idea that we might take co2 out of the atmosphere or otherwise kind of accelerate

natural sinks for co2 so taking carbon out of the atmosphere the second part is solar geoengineering which is the idea that humanity might deliberately make the earth a little more reflective to reduce some of the risks of the accumulated carbon dioxide to battle these rising carbon dioxide levels groundbreaking technologies are being developed to cool down the earth and slow sea-level rise by removing carbon from the atmosphere brightening clouds and even replicating volcanic eruptions to reflect sunlight away from the planet and in one experimental sight in the Arctic a scientific team is focusing their work on

the ice itself so we sent Ben Anderson to Alaska's northernmost town [Music] this is hollow glass microspheres you can think of it as a form of floating sand it's reflective it's bright it's basically a thin silica shell around a gas core I mean a lot of these things seem to be about damage limitation but this is actually about boosting yeah we're the ability they're working on Arctic restoration people are attributing a quarter to a half of global temperature rise every year right now is coming from the loss of that reflective heat shield in the Arctic

we want to build that back to be the Earth's heat shield the Earth's refrigerator the idea is surprisingly simple cover the ice with reflective sand to reduce the amount of sunlight absorbed the team is testing the concept on a small scale on a nearby frozen lake first of all you've done so far this area will be covered with your reflective sand roughly how much longer will the ice last the prediction is days and and that matters on this scale the long-term goal is to scale up the process and pinpoint the areas in the Arctic where

it will have the greatest effect we're looking at areas on the order of a half a percent of the Arctic by building that back you stop this inevitable eating feedback loop of getting things hotter and hotter sea levels rising and destabilizing the jet stream and having more severe storms in century rebuilding ice would be easier on the wildlife would be easier on the planet is this is one of the safest things we can think of to be able to turn back to where we weren't the idea is to try to rebuild a natural system with

the least possible intervention you can possibly make we really have to preserve the Arctic there's no option there and we have to proceed with all due speed on all these other mitigation techniques that people are using I mean this is just it's key it's it's absolutely essential we have to work together one of the mitigation techniques that dr. field mansions is currently being researched in Silicon Valley by a team of retired engineers and entrepreneurs their goal is to develop a technology that can be quickly applied to kick sunlight away from the earth and thereby cool

the planet these are all my partners in crime so to speak Eddie this is the dream team here this is the dream team has sort of a geriatric team we've been doing this for almost 10 years and the pay is really good zero almost like something out of a Hollywood film our mod Newcomen's and his unconventional team of engineers and entrepreneurs resemble the cast of a real-life space cowboys and have actually banded together using the seed money from Bill Gates and their own personal savings to study and develop a technology that could actually brighten clouds

so why if you guys are all successful X inventors and entrepreneurs why work for free on this we're trying to get an insurance policy right so if things get really bad we're gonna need to have go twos and this is maybe potentially one of the go-to that's right if we have to do it it means we've got is that so far that we're gonna try anything it's a Geo engineering technology called marine cloud brightening a process that uses salt water spray to whiten clouds why are we trying to brighten them in the first place this

is how clouds form what we're doing is in trying to enhance that process but what part of the ocean has clocks on it take about 30 or 40 percent of that and you get that 5% enhanced you will reflect enough sunlight to almost compensate for doubling of CFE the key to their technology is the spray for the effect to work optimally they need to spray trillions of microscopic salt particles every second [Music] there we go right so this is typical operations this is three thousand billions particles coming out of this novel for second [Music] I

hope that's not any weird chemical because I just put it in my mouth rage you're great sodium chloride hey now what's ingenious about this plant is that these salts prayers can be deployed on cargo ships already crossing our oceans so why do you believe that this technology is gonna work so there's good evidence that it might work from ship Thanks so ships make a track like a cloud so long the wind field Rosalyn goes in a certain direction and those are they hydroscopic particles and they make clouds just like these other ones do if the

conditions are right you look carefully even where there already clouds they're actually whiter again because of the ship track going underneath them like over here over here so it's the same as when you see a line from a plane there's a line from the each ship that's wild I didn't know that so you guys say let's replace the bad with the good and brighten them up it will just take sea water spray sea water essentially ships would be outfitted with a specially designed nozzle that can spray highly condensed ocean saltwater to brighten the clouds and

better reflect solar radiation away from the earth I'm doing it because I really can't think of anything better I could be spending my time on I have a kid in a private college you know because I want to ensure the best possible future for it right but if we're you know gonna warm up this planet he has virtually no future good answer now Marine cloud brightening is a very promising technology but it may not be enough on its own simultaneously another team is studying volcanoes and their abilities to actually darken our skies and thereby cool

the planet one of the most active volcanoes on earth Guatemala's volcan de fuego scientists are studying how ash cloud particles can affect global temperatures so we visited with volcanologist matt watson during the months before its devastating eruption this summer which killed more than 160 people in 1991 mountain Pinatubo erupted it was the largest eruption of the 20th century and they had a profound impact on climate we saw a drop in temperature around about half a degree we see a drop in global temperature after large eruptions and that that's because the sulfur dioxide is ejected by

volcanoes into the atmosphere that converts into sulfate aerosol which act as tiny little mirrors and scatter incoming solar radiation back out into space that has the effect of cooling the planet I'm really interested in volcanoes as analogs for deliberate intervention into the climate system its climate control right it's changing the way the global climate system works to try and reduce the worst impacts of climate change scientists are now studying how the deliberate introduction of sulfur into the atmosphere would mimic the cooling effect of volcanic ash okay so stop our on the tracking antenna we're about

to fly a drone into an ash cloud and the reason we want to do that is because we want to collect particles the segue into climate engineering particularly so that you engineering is twofold firstly we need to know and understand and control the size very well if the particles get too large we might actually induce the opposite effect in that Worman and secondly I'm pretty confident to say that if we were ever to do this for real we need to monitor it very very carefully the clearance is one kilometer above reggae we're going up to

the height of Friday [Music] particles collected by the drone will be studied to better understand volcanic aerosols and how to replicate their cooling effect the journeys about video 8 about the same elevation as the top yeah that's what we're heading for yes it's coming around okay we're coming to us atop the clouds now over you got your food master should be almost community at this point over geoengineering using volcanic like particles could successfully lower the planet's temperatures but it also carries the serious potential for harming crop production across the world this stuff is so terrifying

such a big scary idea we have to be really honest about the pros and cons of this stuff because there are nine billion lives at stake when in order to get a better idea of the potentially dangerous side effects of mimicking volcanoes scientists are now finalizing plans to spray sulfur particles from a high-altitude balloon what do you think that the public's reaction because I just before you're even doing this there's conspiracy theories about chemtrails and all of these things we've examined all the Twitter tweet tweets ever there's a way to do that most of the

tweets that have anything to do with geo cheering or about chemtrails Wow yes and he's a scientist I don't know what reactor its knots but it's a citizen I worry about our ability to make any sensible decisions if a significant fraction people believe stuff which are just kind of obviously false to go back to the realm of the sane we've talked about the solar reflection bring us there like there's so much carbon in the atmosphere how do we even make a dent how do we scale that up how do we how do we take enough

out to make it to make it count removing all the carbon from the atmosphere is inherently hard because you actually have to deal with all that material I helped to form a start-up that has an industrial technology for removing co2 from the air and we have fought like crazy to find industrially scalable ways that are cheap to do that our market is capturing co2 to combine it with hydrogen that comes from cheap solar power to make transportation fuels say to energize aircraft in a carbon neutral way now in a case of tragic timing just as

we arrived to go see this prototype plant for carbon recapture a state of emergency had been declared in British Columbia with nearly 600 forest fires raging out of control thereby releasing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere so this is our plant great to have you here this land where we're at here in Squamish it's a great example of climate change at work this is a development site we're building lots of houses here and Industry but they're having to raise the land by about two meters because of the concern about rising sea levels right meanwhile

we look around and we got 600 forest fires in BC right now so we can't see the mountains because of the smoke so all of this is smoke from forest fires yeah 600 NB C everything here is a working model full process working think of it as like a big cooling tower large fan the fan draws the co2 in chemical reaction and we capture the co2 wouldn't there be more carbon to capture by dirty naughty factories now it's uniformly distributed so we could yeah we could put one of these plants in the middle of Beijing

or we could put it in the middle of the Sahara Desert you would capture the same amount of atmospheric co2 so we as a species have put it in so we as a species should be taking it out well that's not choice but I think we have to all find somewhere else to live right and so it's basically we recycle plastic we recycle paper we recycle wood why don't we recycle energy you're hitting the nail on the head we would like people to be reciting that fuel in the same way as they recycle other things

your technology is we're gonna refine that energy that carbon out of the atmosphere combine it with hydrogen and water and then that's the same as gas or jet fuel yep yeah it's chemically the same no pollutants so for example our diesel burns completely clean none of that black smoke you see from trucks when they go else completely but yeah it's chemically identical got a sample here this is the world's first recyclable fuel here's the interesting thing a carbon neutral fuel that's compatible with any vehicle in the world today right so that car you just drove

up in we can make that carbon neutral tomorrow any vehicle any performance vehicle any battered old truck aeroplanes we're compatible with all of us which is significant because nobody's making electric tractors or electric planes you have to do any modifications if we recycle all the plastic out of the oceans we'd never actually have to produce any more plastic because which is already not plastic out there to continue to so there's enough carbon in the atmosphere that we could just continually make a synthetic fuel like this to power our car yes we could this is the

real the killer app for what we're doing so transportation is about 20% of the co2 emissions how are we gonna do carbonize that there's a billion cars in the world so if we all go electric fifty thousand dollars for electric car that's 50 trillion dollars then you got to deliver energy and electricity to each cart it's a massive change yeah alternatively why don't we just change the fuel the price to you at the pump will be the same cars powered by this fuel would still release some carbon into the atmosphere but at least they'd be

releasing recycled carbon that could be captured again having something like a carbon neutral gas isn't even enough we've got to start going negative we've got to actually pull carbon out of the atmosphere now can can this do that and what's the plan there yeah absolutely we can take the co2 generated here and bury that underground and and negative emissions right it's a hugely important thing and how many do you need to scale it to get to carbon negative you need less of these than there are power stations in the world today to net emissions out

to zero and so how many is that it's in the region of tens of thousands if we are taking measures as we should be to remove emissions elsewhere now you start getting to an overall negative emissions from the world why isn't the world rushing to Squamish BC and saying can we please make a hundred thousand of these so first of all we're open and ready to receive the world secondly we've we've really just got to proof of concept here and it's working so the next step for our business is to expand across the globe go

make carbon neutral fuel and when the scientists and the government decide that they need to do negative emissions the technology is ready now obviously creating a carbon neutral fuel made by refining it out of pre-existing greenhouse gases would be a positive first step however there is so much carbon in the atmosphere that we need to get to negative emissions effectively going backwards and reversing the greenhouse effects and actually cooling down the planet by removing more co2 than we're adding and sequestering the excess carbon underground now while these technologies are promising and give us hope for

a brighter future all human innovations it seems come with unintended consequences there could also be a negative if countries weaponize or not even weaponize but say you know what I need a little bit more rain or a little bit less rain I'm gonna do this I'm gonna add that could this be the new arms race no technologies come without the potential for misuse so I think they're really two kinds of misuse were worried about one is sort of an actual misuse in action that is some country tries to make more rain in one place and

that makes it worse for somebody else that's a realistic fear I think and weather manipulation technology is already being tested China spends millions of dollars every year on the world's largest crowd feeding program using it frequently to mitigate drought another form of misuse is the misuse of these being over promoted and being used as a way to weaken efforts to cut emissions of carbon pollution which we must cut if we want to deal with a climate crisis this is our solution that we can keep driving all our cars and everything absolutely say that big Petro

States or Exxon or people who want to push against the need to reduce co2 emissions they will over claim how well this works that kind of want to use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card right so I want to say wow we don't need to worry now just go back and drive your SUVs and fly as much as you like and we don't need to cut emissions our failure to stop greenhouse emissions after years of scientific evidence and warnings has gotten us to this dangerous place and it is quickly becoming the greatest threat to our species

the irony here is that the scientists most invested in studying geoengineering are the same ones who are most afraid of its consequences we have started this era of geoengineering it's just beginning it's going to be a wild ride I don't see us backing away from it it's an engineering project of the century there's this whole moral hazard to geoengineering if you have a solution people say great I don't have to change your thing and that's not the message that people should get I hope this never has to be used at what if we get to

a point where we do have to use it it's probably going to be should be that we should be thinking of this you know as a war I think we need to be reducing our emissions in multiple different areas you can't rely on with one solution for everything this is not a panacea we would be foolish as a as a species to rely on just one technology or just one solution we need multiple solutions it's a huge problem worst case scenario it might be the dumbest thing we ever do it's a very odd situation to

work on something that you really hope never happens were we ever to actually deploy solar engine full-scale it's the clearest indication that we've failed it's a desperate act make no bones about it if there's a way not to do this every academic that's working I will rejoice you [Music] you