MAMMA Mia! Here we go again! The Royal Society is having another go at promoting Solar Radiation Modification (SRM). For those of you who missed TCW’s series on this bonkers experiment published last year, this is the idea that shooting lots of pollutants into the atmosphere will reflect more sunlight back into space and stop ‘runaway’ global warming.
According to the Fellows (not me!) international co-ordination is necessary to avoid breaching our commitment to the 2016 Paris Agreement to limit a rise in global temperature to 1.5 degrees centigrade by 2100. It must be a very interesting rock these professors are living under but I would suggest that some recognition of reality is in order, viz: the US has withdrawn from the Paris accords, and getting 200 nations to agree on anything is like trying to herd cats. The UN can’t agree on the obvious wickedness of democracies such as Taiwan and Israel, and even its own climate experts have been dialling down the prophesies of doom lately.
According to Professor Keith Shine, Regius Professor of Meteorology and Climate Science at Reading University, ‘This is not a question of whether SRM is safe, as it is clearly not without risks. However, there may come a point where those risks are seen to be less severe than the risks of insufficiently mitigated climate change.
‘If policy makers did take the decision to deploy SRM, a scientifically informed, globally co-ordinated and internationally agreed upon strategy would be essential both to achieve global cooling and avoid potentially large undesirable regional climate impacts.’
Great. Thanks. Let me know when your globally co-ordinated and internationally agreed strategy is approved. Meanwhile, several countries have probably been experimenting without permission from the UN. The 2024 floods in Dubai and snowfalls in the Saudi desert in 2016 were quite likely to have been precipitated by cloud seeding.
The science has been understood for centuries. Tambora, Laki, Hekla, Krakatoa and other catastrophic eruptions threw millions of tons of dust and sulphur into the atmosphere and caused years without a summer, widespread crop failures and famines. Even a relatively modest eruption such as Pinatubo in 1991 cooled the globe by a degree or so (and gave us some great snow the second year – we were skiing up to our chests in November!)
Perish the thought that these Fellows of the Royal Society are angling for some cushy consultancies and five-star international jamborees. That’s not how science works, OK, bigot? ‘Nullius in verba’ (Take nobody’s word for it’) is their motto, although they seem remarkably credulous about the sincerity of the likes of China and India as signatories of the Paris accords. Professor Shine continues: ‘There is robust evidence from climate models . . .’ at which point you have to laugh. Climate models are the ne plus ultra of garbage in, garbage out. Robust? Evidence? Show me a computer model that has accurately predicted a medium-term temperature change and I’ll accept your nine bob note without holding it up to the light.
If you think global boiling, i.e. a 1.5 deg C increase by the end of the century is an existential problem, try the reverse scenario. The Little Ice Age (roughly 1560 to 1850) saw average temperatures drop by around two degrees, and its effects were severe. It wasn’t all frost fairs on the Thames or Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow. People starved.
In Ming dynasty China (1368 to 1644), famine and disease killed as many as the political famines under Mao Zedong. Poor harvests in Western Europe led to increasing dependence on grain from Baltic states and Ukraine, but shipping was severely disrupted. In 1569 the Venice Lagoon was frozen until March. In 1594 the harbour of Marseille was choked with ice. Trade stagnated at ports from the Netherlands to the Baltic.
Where resources become scarcer, violence follows. The civil wars in France caused four million deaths, the vast majority not on battlefields. The Thirty Years War in Germany reduced the population by a third.
Royal Society Fellow Shine admits that regional impacts of SRM would be difficult to predict. You don’t say! For no apparent reason England experienced a temporary reprieve from the cold from 1695 to 1735, when temperatures (measured, with thermometers) rose by roughly two degrees. This led to bountiful harvests, an economic and population boom that allowed us to defeat our enemies. The CO2 bogeyman hadn’t been invented at this juncture, and by 1735 the number of working steam engines was barely in two figures. Then the cold returned, with a vengeance. For much of the earth it had never gone away. The glaciers resumed their advance.
The science behind SRM may be robust, but the practice will be a crock. Even the boffins admit they don’t know how much stuff they need to shoot into the air. So it is highly unlikely they will hit the target of -1.5C with any accuracy. Even if they did, all it would take would be a major volcanic eruption and we’d be back to fighting over turnips. No doubt the Labour government will support the Climate Repair Action Plan as part of our global leadership of nations who have no intention of following our example. But if this scheme ever takes off the wise response will be to buy tinned food and guns. Lots of guns.
