To people familiar with “The Simpsons” – which, I assume, is most of us – the idea of blotting out the sun is not new.
In the finale episode of the sixth season, the show’s hero, local businessman C. Montgomery Burns, devises a plan to save Springfield from the effects of global warming by blocking direct sunlight via an enormous umbrella-type device shown in the photograph above. Alas, his misunderstood plan is not well received by local ne’er-do-wells, and Mr. Burns gets shot for his trouble.
Fifteen or so years on from the date of that episode first airing, another octogenarian is now considering a similar plan, the White House announced at the weekend:
The White House offered measured support for the idea of studying how to block sunlight from hitting Earth’s surface as a way to limit global warming, in a congressionally mandated report that could help bring efforts once confined to science fiction into the realm of legitimate debate.
The controversial concept known as solar radiation modification is a potentially effective response to fighting climate change, but one that could have unknown side effects stemming from altering the chemical makeup of the atmosphere, some scientists say.
The White House report released late Friday indicates that the Biden administration is open to studying the possibility that altering sunlight might quickly cool the planet. But it added a degree of skepticism by noting that Congress has ordered the review, and the administration said it does not signal any new policy decisions related to a process that is sometimes referred to — or derided as — geoengineering.
If you’re wondering how the sun might be blocked out – albeit partially rather than fully – then the answer is that methods have evolved since Mr. Burn’s plan for a giant parasol. According to the White House, a reduction in solar radiation would have to be achieved via atmospheric modification – changing cloud levels over the ocean to reduce the amount of heat hitting the water, and so on. This idea has been around for a long time, and is already the subject of a conspiracy theory amongst some who believe it is already being done in secret, and who refer to it as “chemtrailing”.
It is probably unlikely to happen ultimately, though, for a few reasons.
First, modifying the weather and the atmosphere has risks. Note the bit in bold (my emphasis) above about “quickly cooling the planet”. Get it wrong, and cool the planet too fast, and you could interfere severely with global food production. Second, it would be astonishingly expensive, with no guarantee of success. Third, were it to succeed, it would likely put the increasingly powerful green economy, and all the lobbyists and companies depending on that green economy, out of business. Who needs to fiddle with the clouds, when you can do nothing and get enormous taxpayer subsidies to build windmills instead?
If this kind of thing is to be done, it’s a safe bet that it will not be done by the United States: China is a much more likely culprit, given how eager it is to find any solution to climate change that does not require it to significantly reduce its own CO2 emissions. Indeed, China has already been experimenting with it, albeit on a small scale:
Chinese weather authorities successfully controlled the weather ahead of a major political celebration earlier this year, according to a Beijing university study….
….The Chinese government has been an enthusiastic proponent of cloud-seeding technology, spending billions of dollars on efforts to manipulate the weather to protect agricultural regions or improve significant events including the 2008 Olympics.
Cloud-seeding is a weather modification technique, which sees the adding of chemicals like small particles of silver iodide, to clouds, causing water droplets to cluster around them and increasing the chance of precipitation.
Note that cloud seeding to produce rain is not quite the same as trying to alter the amount of sunlight that reaches the planet on a global scale – both the technology and the intent are quite different. Doing the latter would require a global effort, probably involving the co-operation of at least every country in the G20. Ireland, of course, would have no say either way.
What is abundantly clear, however, is that the world is going to miss the targets that are set for it with great fanfare at every annual COP climate change conference. If we are hoping to save the planet by keeping fossil fuels in the ground, and if we believe that failing to do so will result in catastrophe, well, then we’d best all prepare for catastrophe. If the scientists are right about the consequences of warming (still a big “if” in my book) then something like this may become, in the end, the only option the world has left.
But we’d want to see a lot more harm from climate change, and the prospect of real and irreversible catastrophe, before there’ll be anything like a global consensus for blocking out the Sun.