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Live debate for the event "Should We Deploy Solar Geoengineering to Cool the Planet?" on superdebate.org.
Stratospheric aerosol injection will change precipitation patterns in ways that benefit some regions and devastate others. Monsoon-dependent populations in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are the most likely losers, and they have no voice in the decision to proceed. Solar geoengineering requires a global governance structure that does not exist and may be impossible to build.
Termination shock is the existential risk. Once started, solar geoengineering must be maintained indefinitely — any discontinuation causes rapid unmasked warming far faster than natural climate change. Committing to geoengineering means committing to it through every political system, conflict, and economic crisis that follows. The commitment is permanent in ways that are impossible to guarantee.
We already geoengineer inadvertently. Aviation contrails and shipping sulfur emissions have documented cooling effects on regional temperatures. Intentional and controlled understanding of what we are already doing accidentally is better than inadvertent and unmanaged intervention in a system we are already perturbing.
We are not on track to meet 1.5°C or even 2°C. Stratospheric aerosol injection is the only technology that could meaningfully reduce temperatures within years, not decades. Responsible research is necessary to understand whether and how it might be used — ignoring it because it's uncomfortable is not a climate strategy; it's wishful thinking.
The research community is not proposing deployment but field trials to understand atmospheric behavior. Blocking outdoor experiments on precautionary grounds is epistemically self-defeating — we cannot know if it works, at what scale, or with what side effects without testing it. The precautionary principle cannot be applied to exclude the only rapid-response option.
Solar geoengineering creates classic moral hazard. Once even the prospect of a technological fix exists, political pressure to cut emissions — already weak — will collapse further. The history of carbon capture is instructive: its prospect was used for decades to defer emissions reductions that never came. We are not deciding between geoengineering and emissions reductions; we are choosing geoengineering as an excuse to continue emissions.
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