“But there are going to be events in the next decade or so that will sharpen people’s minds. When temperatures approach and then cross 1.5 centigrade, that will be a non-arbitrary moment. That’s the first globally agreed climate target we’re on course to break. Unless we find a way to remove carbon in quantities not imaginable presently, this would be the only way to stop or reverse rapidly rising temperature…. The idea is outlandish.”
Said climate researcher Andy Parker, quoted in “Dimming the Sun to Cool the Planet Is a Desperate Idea, Yet We’re Inching Toward It/The scientists who study solar geoengineering don’t want anyone to try it. But climate inaction is making it more likely,” by Bill McKibben (The New Yorker).
The enormous step of dimming the sun could turn out to be very easy, at least from a technological point of view. Filling the air with carbon dioxide took close to three hundred years of burning coal and oil and gas, millions of miles of pipelines, thousands of refineries, hundreds of millions of cars…. It would take only a tiny fraction of that effort to inject aerosol particles into the stratosphere. (Sulfur dioxide is the most commonly discussed candidate, but aluminum, calcium carbonate, and, most poetically, diamond dust, have also been proposed.)…
This is a long article. I’ll just jump ahead and give you the last sentence:
Solar panels and wind turbines are our best vaccine against high temperatures, but also against the hubris of one more giant gamble.