https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/elizabeth-kolbert-under-a-white-sky-book-1123812/amp/
RS Interview: Special Edition’ With Climate Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert The Pulitzer Prize-winning author talks with Jeff Goodell about her new book “Under a White Sky,” Extract what did you learn when you went into this world to talk to people like David Keith and others at Harvard? Well, as you say, I spent a lot of time at Harvard where they have probably the biggest or best financed of the solar geoengineering research, called the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program. It’s a fundamentally very creepy thing to think about. But the guys that I spoke to, three scientists, mainly — David Keith, Frank Keutsch, also Dan Schrag — these are really smart and thoughtful people. And they made a very compelling case that we don’t have a lot of arrows in our quiver to do something about climate change quickly. And another thing that’s important to recognize is we have not yet seen the full effects of the carbon dioxide that’s up there now. So that’s decades away. Meanwhile, we’re still digging this hole. So at a certain point, and it may be decades from now, [but] decades are not that long, you decide, wow, we are committed to warming that humanity cannot deal with. That’s going to cause tremendous suffering and mortality. You can’t reverse that, you can’t stop it, except potentially — and I want to use the word potentially very vigorously — by shooting some compound into the stratosphere that would block incoming sunlight. That’s what happens when you get a major volcanic eruption. They spew a lot of sulfur dioxide into the air and it gets all the way into the stratosphere, drifts around, creates a sort of global haze that reflects sunlight back to Earth. The idea is we create these sort of manmade volcanic eruptions. Without the eruption part, we would just shoot the stuff with a special fleet of airplanes directly into the stratosphere. And that could theoretically — once again, theoretically — counteract the effects or partially counteract the CO2 we’ve dumped into the atmosphere. And everyone who advocates this — or they would not say they’re advocating it, they would say we need to look at it because we don’t have a lot of great options at the point that we decide we’ve gone too far. There’s a huge debate. I mean, I’m already getting e-mails from scientists saying, “We should not even be talking about this. It’s the most dangerous possible thing to even be talking about.” And I think that is also a legitimate point. It’s one of those debates where everyone has a legitimate point, and one of the privileges, I suppose, of a journalist is to say, “I don’t get to decide whether this is going to be talked about. It is being talked about.” And so I try to lay out the possibilities and the perils, which are boundless. Elizabeth Kolbert So, with geoengineering, and this is a theme running through your book, it’s not like we’re talking about messing with pristine nature. Humans have been mucking around on our planet for a long time. We’re dumping tons of carbon dioxide and particulate matter and reflecting away sunlight and doing all kinds of things now. And you point out the well-known quote from Stewart Brand of: “We are as gods, we may as well get good at it.” You know, we’re already messing with nature, we may as well get good at it. And we are already messing with the climate, more specifically with the reflectivity of sunlight. So the question is, should we be thinking about doing a better job at it? That is absolutely a key point. There’s a strong impulse, and I share that impulse, to say, “Let’s just stop messing around. Let’s try to preserve things.” And one of the messages of the book, I think, was that even preserving things today requires change. So much change has been set in motion. So, for example, while we might have thought of conservation [as] “Well, we’re just going to fence this off. Humans stay out, let the natural world do what it will.” Now, with climate change superimposed on that, that’s no longer a conservation strategy, right? Because everything’s going to be moving. Things are going to be moving in different directions. You’re not preserving that ecosystem as it is just by fencing it off. Even so, that leads you down this road or slippery slope or whatever you want to call it into “OK, what do we do now?” And that, I think, is the moment that we’re in. And it’s not going to be a moment. It’s going to be a century or centuries. I read a description of my book that was like, “You broke it, you own it.” We have manipulated the system. We didn’t intend to in many cases, we didn’t intend to warm up the planet, didn’t intend to acidify the oceans. But we did it. And you can’t just go back and say, “Oh, well, let’s just leave it alone now and maybe it will all be OK.” We know that’s not the case. So what are we going to do? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/CAJ3C-05jeE5U6DYuydG2ED4JC5COcbQktrMUqkFiXN%2BrJSAWhg%40mail.gmail.com.
