Geoengineering (Wrong 2) - by Neal Stephenson - Graphomane

Because of my book Termination Shock I am occasionally contacted by journalists writing stories about the idea of geoengineering—specifically Solar Radiation Management (SRM), a proposed way of temporarily cooling down the earth by putting aerosols into the stratosphere. These will reflect a small fraction of the sun’s light back into space before it can warm things up down here.

In general I have been declining such opportunities because I feel that I said as much as I have to say on the topic in the novel, which gave me enough breathing room to discuss SRM’s pros and cons, its risks and uncertainties, and the way that people would likely respond to it politically.

This recent article on the subject came out in the New York Times not long after I’d published a piece about fallibilism here on this Substack. Consequently I read it in a fallibilist frame of mind. The article itself, the mindset of the scientists featured in it, and most of the reader notes all make for a case study that I thought might be interesting to people who read my above-linked fallibilism piece.

In many realms of politics and society, scientific investigation frankly isn’t that useful. In this case, however, we have a lot of hard data to work with. Atmospheric CO2 levels over time are plotted on this page. I’ll screenshot the plot here in case the link goes bad:

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