Changing the World (Literally)

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All this talk of geoengineering sounds like the plot of a movie soon to be written. Yeah, a Bond movie.

Yes, and a Bond movie always comes with a Bond villain. That's what I'm telling you.
So the Bond villain is controlling

geoengineering. All right.
Coming up, we're going to find out: is it Bond villain or is it science on Star Talk?

Welcome to Star Talk,

your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Star Talk begins right now.

This is Star Talk. Neil deGrasse Dyson here, your personal astrophysicist.
And this is Special Edition. And we're going to be talking about geoengineering.

Gary, you cooked this up. Yes.
My co-host, Gary, here. How are you doing, man? I'm good.
All right. You looking in good shape.
I'm breathing in, as we've discussed. Breathing in.

It's the breathing out I'm not doing. It's all right.

Yes or no? Welcome back as my co-host. Oh, okay.

All right. So, Gary, what did you say about that?

All right, so the annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate takes place here in the Hayden Planetarium, and this year, 2025, it is geoengineering, the pros and the cons.

Seen by many as controversial, it's an approach to solving global warming, but there are others who see it as potential as very, very effective.

There are a number of different options up for consideration, but with them come not just scientific issues but ethical considerations as well so pre-debate we kidnapped two of the panelists sorry and we've dragged them locked them in the office and we're going to have our own debate because we couldn't wait until this evening so uh did they did they come willingly help

he's still in a box who we have here daniele vizioni daniele welcome to star talk thank you neal thank you yeah let me get a little bit of your bio here assistant professor in the department of earth and atmospheric science at cornell thanks for coming downstate to join us here.

Is it still snowing in Cornell? It snows there all the time. It is.
Yes, it does.

It is, and it does.

You're a climate scientist specializing in this cottage industry of people who care about stratospheric aerosols and their behavior.

Whether they misbehave or behave as you intend.

That's your whole. Let's find out.

And you also specialize in what they're calling climate intervention methods and what its impact would be on the climate, on ecosystems, and even on culture, societies.

So, I mean, what a, damn, that's a very high responsibility. Yeah, it is.
In other words, don't mess up. Yeah.

If I hold that up, there are a lot of people lining up with Lapel to say, don't mess this up. So who had the idea that this is a thing that would work? People have been discussing it for decades.

I would say some people point to Edward Teller actually being the first one discussing.

Yes, indeed. Or infamy.

Right. People had discussion about could we fundamentally deliberately alter climate for a long time, right? For as long as we understood what climate change is.

With my weather machine, I will one day rule the world.

Yeah, no, indeed.

So it is, in a way, one could say nothing new, except then as the problem of global warming, of climate change, became more and more prominent, more and more scientists started thinking about this maybe a bit more deeply.

So it wasn't just a fringe idea.

It was a fringe idea in the sense that a lot of people initially, but now it's no longer fringe.

Many would still consider it fringe, or at least would like not to talk about it too much. Oh, that's different.
Okay, okay.

Fringe in that sense,

I would say that the scientific basis is as well established as for most of climate science.

But most of the issues being in sort of the ethical, societal dimension bring this topic into a different light.

So as I understood from my bit of reading here, you had some prior awareness and understanding of this problem or this solution with volcanoes.

Because they pump all manner of nastiness. Yeah.

Nastiness into the atmosphere.

Nasty. Nastiness.
Into the atmosphere. And you get to study that.
That's nature doing it. And so what have you found from the history of volcanoes? Yeah.

so the interesting thing is that it was Benjamin Franklin my main one of the first yeah everybody loves Ben

and he was a great scientist too he was the first person to point out that potentially the weirdness in climate that people had seen in the early 19th century were due to the Tambora eruption volcano in Indonesia exploding in 1815.

Okay, so he's around, of course, at that time. Just remind me, I think Indonesia also has Krakatoa.
I mean, there's no shortage of volcanic... There's plenty of volcanoes in the tropical band, yes,

close to the equator. And sometimes they just go off, they explode.
Yes.

And you get to see which way the ejecta goes. Like, it goes west to east, right, following prevailing air currents.
Yes. So people get to study this.

And he was clever enough to connect the dots between odd weather and an odd...

atmospheric phenomenon of volcano yes okay so this is some of your foundational background for how you go forward from that Yes.

In the 20th century, then there were at least three different volcanic eruptions, not as big as Tambora, but still big enough, the last one being Pinatubo in 1991.

You know, I was observing at a telescope, and

when Pinatubo went off, it changed the optical properties of the atmosphere. We had to redo all of our data.
Pissed me off.

It's not all about you.

Not your favorite volcano, I assume.

Because I was at at the telescope when the stuff came by. Right.
Not when it went off, but it took a while. It took a lot of time.
Once again, scientists taking their cue from Mother Nature.

I don't mean that sarcastically, it's a fact. No, it's true, yeah.
So with putting it's sulfate aerosol.

Tell me what is an aerosol. Okay.
So by aerosol, us climate scientists define just every kind of solid or liquid particle suspended in air. But very tiny.

It's the suspended part that makes it an aerosol. Yes.
The suspended part, yes. Yes, okay.

The fact that it can be suspended at all makes it an aerosol, no matter what it is. Like SARS-CoV-2?

You see, that's a very interesting thing.

There were a lot of discussions about what constituted an aerosol when it came to the discussion around COVID, because there were different definitions between what climate scientists consider an aerosol, these very tiny particles, sub-micron scale, they float around for a long while.

Maybe microns. Droplets is a millionths of a meter.
So very small. Very small.
So gravity doesn't really do much. Turbulence actually keeps them afloat.

And the very large droplets, like the one, like Spit, that medical practitioners consider aerosols. Aerosols.
Right. So this was a lot of the confusion at the beginning around

airborne. Two slightly different usages of the term.

The same term. Same term.
To get to reducing mean temperatures here on Earth, what science do those aerosols have to put in? By mean temperatures, you mean average?

Mean.

These are the temperatures that you make fun of the lower temperatures. They're mean temperatures.
They're pissed off temperatures. There she goes.
Okay.

So the aerosols we think about, again, submicron scale, that ends up being the same size of the wavelength of most of the visible light that we get. Oh.

So they are at the specific size where they really interact a lot with incoming sunlight. That's wild.
So it's photochemical. It's actual more like geometrical physics.
No, it's physical.

It's a physical block. There's also some chemistry, but mainly all of the aerosols that are around that size will reflect, will interact with solar radiation through me scattering,

through various scattering processes. And

Mi scattering. This M-I-E scattering.
So that's a simple scattering where the wavelength of the light matches the particle. Right.
And then it redirects it. Not so.
Because it goes off. Yeah.

But we have like Rayleigh scattering is a different kind of scattering that gives us the blue sky. The blue sky.
That's very much. That's the whole episode of the light.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was great.

By the way, that makes so much sense because what's you're talking about the radiation that's coming in

and greenhouse gases, primarily carbon, is trapped. Carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide, sorry.

trapped because

when the ground radiates heat, it's the atmosphere that's trapping a different wavelength. Correct.
Completely right.

Infrareds. Infrareds.
Right. So that's so wild.

It literally becomes kind of a bounce board. It's called science.

It's so cool, isn't it? It's pretty cool. How about that?

I'm just saying. Oh, my God.
You can still call it wild, but at the end of the day, it's science.

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So, for this process to be successful to the level that we would all want it to be successful, how much aerosols do you have to put into the stratosphere? How long is it there?

I mean, who gets to argue over where you put them? Does it matter then on seasonality?

And what have we learned from volcanoes about where it goes? Right.

And if I remember correctly, I think it was the late 80s where there was talk of nuclear winter, where a total nuclear exchange would burn forest, put, I guess, aerosols in the atmosphere, blocking sunlight, plunging all the Earth into darkness and cold.

So that would be a bad effect of it, but now you're trying to make it a good effect.

So let me,

all, great question, but

it can also all be connected, right? So aerosols, we already have aerosols all around us, right?

Most of the pollution, the haze that you see in New York City, that's pollution. Those are aerosols, right? But it makes for a lovely sunset.
Let's make it. It makes a lovely sunset.

It's super bad for your health.

When you burn fossil fuels, you burn coal, you produce these aerosols. They're super bad for your health.
And once they burn. My aim for cheap has never been worse.
Look at the beautiful sunset.

Let me finish. Let me finish.
I want to hear this. I need to.
I'm just trying to think.

So they come down and they come down mostly. We burn them very close to where we live.
They stay in the air, but... they are below the clouds.
So whenever then there's rain, they just get washed off.

So actually, currently, we... Just to be clear, a raindrop forms on these particles.

It absorbs the... Not as much for sulfate.
Sulfate is actually not

as good as a cloud nuclei as other kind of particles.

Not all aerosol particles. But when they say something like things rain out, they typically mean that the droplet formed on these particles?

No, it can also mean that the droplet, while falling, absorbs

these tinier particles.

That's called wet deposition or washout of.

What's the real term? Wet deposition, wet washout. I love that.

I love that. Yeah.
So normally we emit, as humans, just as pollution, over 100 million tons of sulfur dioxide, which is the precursor of all sulfate aerosols,

per year. 100 million tons.
100 tons. It's a lot.
And most of that falls down close to where we live, right? Acid rain.

People who are alive in the 80s, not me, but people who are alive in the 80s will remember acid rain.

Also, I get my chemistry. Remember my chemistry.

Sulfur dioxide is not itself acid but if you combine with a hydrogen you get hydrogen h2s o4 yes which is itself sulfuric acid yes so that would be the acid rain so2 gets oxidized by oh the radical oh which is present everywhere in the atmosphere and these then eventually results another three reaction then results so3 and then h2so4 gotcha and then this h2so4 it's in vapor form sulfuric acid and then tends to nucleate into sulfuric acid particles liquid aerosols acid rain.

Yep, and acid rain. So back in the 80s, the US was emitting way more sulfur than it is now.
And so the global emissions were 160 million, 150 million tons.

Now we're getting the US has been going down for a while, Europe as well, China and India have been going up, but in general, we're still around 100 million tons.

These aerosol particles do have a cooling effect. We know this.
The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, has known this for a a while.

They do cover up a small fraction of the warming produced by the greenhouse gases. What you're saying is our effort to clean up the air has taken these particles out

and thereby

increased the effects of global warming. Unmasked.
It has unmasked.

That's the word that normally it's used. It has unmasked part of the global warming that before was sort of hidden.
So, and this is the other part of the observation, right?

You need, but to do this masking close to the surface, you need hundreds of millions of tons because these aerosols stay just a couple of days.

So the idea behind something like stratospheric aerosol injection is, what if you could put a tiny fraction of these aerosols, they would stay though for 100 times longer than they do at the surface before falling down, right?

Months, up to a year.

Essentially, you would get more bangs for your bugs, right? With just a smaller fraction, you would get the same amount of cooling, but far away from where people live and breathe.

And you could get the same effect while not pushing polarity. So what makes the stratosphere special for how long something would last there? Is it because we're not making clouds there?

Right, so there's no clouds, there's no water vapor, the stratosphere is very dry, so there's no rain out. But also the troposphere, it's called troposphere because it's turbulent, right?

Because there are tropospheres. Troposphere is the lowest level, the lowest level.
Where we live, where airplanes are.

Above the troposphere, there's a stratosphere that is called like that because it's very stratified. Things, there's no turbulence.
turbulence things move very slowly so once you

never thought about that

because if you have turbulence it's turbulence up and down

and if you're up and down turbulence it's not stratified so that's why you call it stratosphere very good thank you and so once you put something

what is it is it stratosvera

yeah stratosfera well that's where it comes from right yes it's the original latin yeah yeah yeah

so yeah once you put something especially in the tropical stratosphere, that's where there is the large-scale, what we call the Brewer-Dobson circulation.

It's essentially this large-scale stratospheric circulation that pushes things up close to the tropics and then pushes them poleward.

So eventually the air that is in the stratosphere goes back down, but close to the pole, and it takes a year, a year and a half, before a parcel of air that originates or of any material that is in the stratosphere goes all the way, gets removed from the stratosphere.

Got it. And you get a good spreading of

yes that too because

right because the other thing is that both on a latitude but even more importantly on a longitudinal way as in once if you put and this is another one thing that makes stratospheric aerosol injection complex from a political point of view is that you can't put these aerosols on top of the US and they're not going to stay there.

They're going to spread throughout definitely the whole latitudinal band. So China, which is on the same latitude as the US or Europe,

these aerosols are going to in a a week. So longitudinally, the winds are very fast.
And so in a week or two, there's a complete spread. And we see that with volcanoes all the time.

Small volcanic plumes spread in a couple of weeks throughout the whole. That's how I know.
Because I was in the Chilean Andes. And the Pitubo was east of us.
That just came due west. Just

messed all to me. Messed me up.
Yeah. Messed me up.

So when we had that explosion in Iceland, it brought civil aviation to the ground. Test him to to see if he can pronounce the name of that volcano.
What was the name of that volcano in Iceland?

Everybody calls it a.

I have a lot of volcanoes.

You got the answer you deserved. That's the answer I deserve.

But that stopped air traffic in and out of Heathrow

and everywhere in Europe, yeah. But that was not the sulfate.
Okay, so do we have a potential issue? Because you say it's going to sit above this area of commercial airflight. Will it not descend?

So two things. So volcanoes explode all the time.
And when they explode, the main thing they do, the short-term larger effect, is the ash. Right.
Right?

So, that's the thing that is very dangerous for aviation because when ash interacts with the aircraft, it can stop everything. Right.
It can glassify, and so it can be a real danger. Some volcanoes.

Do you say glassify? I think so. And I'm not sure whether that's an actual scientific term, but let's pretend it is.
I love that. So, this is the ash getting heated in the engine,

turning into glass. Glass.
But wasn't it already heated in the volcano? Right, but then it cools down pretty quickly.

And so the ash actually forms that way, and then it can sort of undergo the same thing. So the ash is pretty.
Okay, so when people get buried in ash, like they did in Pompeii. No, no.

No, Pompeii was not ash. Ercolano was ash.
Okay. Pompeii was a...
Well, just a magma. Yeah, the flu.
It was a magma flow? It was actually a mud flow, really. Oh, that's right.

That's why everything was preserved. It was preserved.
That's right. That's right.
It was a mud flow. Yeah, so I hadn't fully appreciated what the ash was and what it can be at its worst.

Yeah, so this ash is the first thing, the thing you actually see. You don't really see the sulfate, right? But it's the thing that is dangerous over a one, two days time scale, a week, right?

Also, because this ash is also very tiny, and so you can breathe in, it's very dangerous and so on. And it's dangerous for aviation.

Some volcanic eruptions also have what for climate scientists is a lot of sulfate. Not all volcanic eruptions also launch sulfate in the atmosphere.

For instance, Hungatonga, that happened in 2022, was a huge volcanic eruption. There was almost no sulfate.
It was just water vapor pushed up from the ocean, but there was almost no sulfate.

Hungatonga had something like 300,000 tons of sulfate. Pinatubo had 17 million tons of sulfate in a couple of hours.
And how much sulfate does a kuna matata have?

I would have to go back and check my numbers. I don't know.

Good question.

So we're putting aerosols into the stratosphere and we've got the natural cycle of the wind systems. How do you discuss this with sovereign nations?

And they say, well, I don't want that flying over my territory. Who then owns the territory above

the particular country? Do you have to find your counterpart in every country so that they can speak to their governments to come to an agreement on this? That's definitely what we do as scientists.

Yes. I constantly talk and work with climate scientists from all over the world, for sure.

For your question, though, I would would say nobody knows who the stratosphere belongs to the stratosphere of all places is actually one of the least regulated uh we know air airspace is in the troposphere and so we know how what who's who's liable for things that happen in the troposphere and then there's space and some other treaties regulating that but nobody really had to regulate the stratosphere for a long time the only treaty that exists is the montrell protocol for the for substances that affect stratospheric ozone which protects us from damaging ultraviolet light.

Right, that whole protocol was just for the ozone.

It was just for the ozone. And a couple of years ago, there was an increase in one of these ozone-depleting substances that was not predicted, was not expected.

And it took countries a year to figure out from which country this depleting substance, this increasing depleting substance was coming from. But even then, the motorcycle.

Which country was it? Well, it was a country in Asia. Okay.
Okay.

You see, interesting thing was that the agency, the US scientific agency that found out about where this product was coming from couldn't just point the finger and say this is coming from you, right?

They could say, we think that this increase is coming from this region of the world.

But

there is no enforcement mechanism, even in the Montreal Protocol, that could say, oh, you have to stop. I mean, the country...
voluntarily agreed to stop, right?

So a lot of these international treaties don't really have enforcement mechanisms.

For the Montreal Protocol, it's all a matter of all countries agreeing that ozone is important and it should be protected. I think more countries sign that than any other treaty ever.

It is the most successful climate and environmental protection treaty in the world. Yeah, every country signed it because every country realized how important it was to have an ozone layer.

Yeah, so Chuck, you missed it. Yeah.
Okay. It was a cosmic phenomenon that affects mostly white people.
And so they activated.

That is surprisingly correct.

What does it take to motivate the powerful countries of the world? Yeah. Just say...
Not get their tan.

If their tan is at risk,

you're going to lose the beaches. Yeah.

So

what could

the stratospheric aerosols achieve in terms of temperature?

So, first of all, very clear.

These aerosols cannot solve climate change. Climate change is a whole other problem.
It comes from the greenhouse gases that we have in the outer. So it's a band-aid, as you would say.

It's a band-aid. It's a stopgap.
You can call it however you want. It's something, you know, some people dismissively say, well, it's like taking an aspirin if you have cancer.

It's not treating the underlying causes, but even if you have cancer, you have the right to a dignified life and not to suffer from other pains, right?

And so in a way, it's a band-aid in the sense that, yes, it could help temperature from going up.

right it could prevent further warming and this way could reduce some of the risks that come from this warming warming, that we know are going to come from this warming, and that we are already observing are coming with the warming that we see now.

So, a couple of questions, fast ones.

Climate seems to me, even as an astrophysicist, to be an immensely complex problem to solve, given all the variables, given the turbulence in an atmosphere, gas and different gas species, and the interaction of the atmosphere with the ocean and the land, all of this.

So, is

AI

helping you in any of this? We are definitely exploring a lot of ways in which AI could help reading the

huge amount of data that we already have. For instance, from satellite observation of things like plumes coming out of volcanoes, nobody could look at all of them, right?

That's what AI is very good at. Pattern recognition,

finding stuff that humans would have a hard time with. So, this is really an emerging field, but there's a lot of interesting things that we are starting to do with AI.

Okay, so then here's a risk that I learned about, and I just want to know, is it authentic and is it the worst thing to worry about?

If the temperature starts rising and you say, we need more aerosols, and so you've got these two competing forces, you get to tamp it down,

then there's a terrorist attack on the people putting up the aerosols. Then the aerosol falls out.

And now you have a catastrophic shock to the system because the greenhouse gas is even going up. You thought you were masking for so long.
If you were masking for so long, then it's instantly,

you have a catastrophic exposure to

greenhouse warming.

How much do you think about contingencies here?

That's a great question. And I would say it is something to worry about, except I would say it would not be instantaneous.

If you stopped putting, since these aerosols stay for so long, if you stop putting them for a day, a week, a month, nothing really changes because the aerosols stay on for a long time.

Now, if you stop for a year or two years that's where you unmask all the warming right so this is your that gives you some you have time you have a closer to find a terrorist

kick there right and and rebuild and rebuild okay but of course you would have i think this is a very valid concern when it comes to um stratospheric aerosols but it's also one that points out to the fact that essentially you would need to plan carefully have contingency plans and you could not rely on just one actor doing this right because this is a worldwide thing.

Could someone go up and put something? Sure, maybe they could before they were stopped, but that's not how you would achieve anything.

To achieve anything, you would need a carefully planned thing with contingency plans for what happens if we need to stop.

For instance, I've done research on what would happen if a volcanic eruption happened while you're doing this. What would you do?

And well, it turns out that, you know, then you would ramp down or maybe shift where you're putting the aerosols to try to make it. This is true geoengineering.

You understand your planet and you interact in a way to your benefit. Yeah, the key difference is really in the word deliberate.
When we say what does geoengineering mean?

And a lot of people ask me, well, haven't we been geoengineering the planet already with all the greenhouse gases?

Maybe in a way, but the point of geoengineering, we say deliberate, because this would be the first time we consciously decide to globally affect. climate to our benefit.
Engineering's consequences.

Now, what about unintended consequences? Because you do something here,

something else has to happen over there.

So, what do you anticipate, or what have you seen? That's way too polite.

How can this go horribly wrong? There you go.

That is a perfectly fair question. Because most of the things you look that you know could go wrong, and then there are the things you don't know could go wrong.

So, for something as catastrophic as Earth's atmosphere, where does your confidence come from?

Our confidence comes from a lot of different observations the main one being we do have an upper bound for how wrong things can go and that's again pinatupo if a volcano can dump 17 or 20 million tons of sulfate all at once into the stratosphere into the stratosphere and things happened after that right temperatures cooled there were changes in atmospheric chemistry and so on but fundamentally that's really as catastrophic as it can get and we've been able to understand what happened there right on top of all of that, all of the sulfate came down, yes, but there's so much more.

When we talk about sulfate, the reason we do that is because we understand the environmental impacts. They're not good, for sure, but we understand them.

Now, you could be thinking of, what if we try to engineer a perfect compound to put in the stratosphere instead of sulfate, something that works better, that is not as toxic. You could do that.

People are thinking about that. That's legit.
But in that case, that's not something that we understand how it interacts with the environment long term.

Well, sulfate is something we understand very well. So I would say that's the problem.

It's the devil you know, right? It's the devil we know. We understand the upper bound of how wrong you know.
I think you have experience with it. You've seen it happen before.

And just to be clear, when the rain comes out, you acidify, you can acidify regions that could be harmful to wildlife or plant life.

So again,

as opposed to when we do it through pollution, these aerosols would mix very well.

And most of that actually would fall, most of the aerosols that would fall over the oceans, where really sulfate is not something that affects ocean acidification that much because that's mostly carbon driven.

Again, that's a clear trade-off. You would increase pollution by a little bit, right? 10% more than now in many locations, you would spread it evenly, but it would still come down.

And does that as effect?

Yes, that's one of the, again, the, that's one of the things we definitely are looking into and should be looking into more, actually quantifying and understanding these trade-offs, all the things that could go wrong.

And it could very well be that there are other things that could go wrong that we don't know yet, or maybe we haven't thought about, which is why I always welcome other climate scientists starting to look into this field, because

if suddenly

we found a roadblock, something we hadn't thought about, nobody had thought about in the last 30 years that would make this, no, look, we really can't do this. It's too dangerous for this reason.

Okay, at least we know, right? The point of doing research is that then at least we can say, nope, we've thought about this. Here's the reason why we can't do it.

So, I have an analogy from physics where in the Large Hadron Collider, where they're creating energies where there was some risk that you might create a black hole.

A small risk.

A small black hole. Yeah.

That would then consume the Earth as it moved through.

And so, why do you proceed, even if that's such a small risk? Because that's a small risk, but it's catastrophic to the planet. And it turns out nature gave us examples.

They're cosmic rays that come from deep space, like the center of the galaxy, at extremely high energies, higher energy than anything we're making inside the accelerator.

And they collide with molecules in our atmosphere, and it's not making black holes.

And we've been here for five billion years.

So

that's the cosmic pina tibu or pina tuba. Punatuba.
That's the cosmic pina butter.

We have nature to calibrate our expectations. Yep.
Where are we with the simulations and therefore then testing? Because we can sit here and have a talking shop for decades.

It sounds like we have, because I'm part of the team now, obviously. Right.
But surely this testing goes on, but there must be something pushing back.

for this not to be the case because this sounds too good to be true to even if it's a band-aid i think we'll take the band-aid right now

yeah i think that's part of the issue right and i would say i work a lot with social scientists as well and uh when it comes to this topic and one time i was talking to one of my colleagues and he really asked me the same question i was like well then this sounds good why aren't we doing it and we kind of set out to think about this from a societal perspective right as any good scientist should do you want to look at all angles even angles opposite which where you're trying to go with it right yeah and it is clear that there are a lot of worries right um when you talk to people about it, they're like, wow, this sounds crazy.

And that's a perfectly good reaction. Now, the question is,

when do people stop having that reaction? Will it ever happen? And what is it going to take?

Some people suggest that once people are going to experience more and more the effects of climate change, that's going to change their mind. But desperation is what you're saying.

I do not think we should make plans out of desperation.

On the other hand, people are saying, well, will there be a point in which we are secure enough into our assessments that this will convince most people, right?

I think that's kind of the angle that I try to work with, as in, I think that the main ways in which we're going to have meaningful discussions about this and move forward and maybe start even outdoor testing is once we've put the whole scientific community in a way behind assessing robustly what do we know and understand about something like stratospheric carousel injection.

So at this point, there's just, yeah, honestly, a handful of scientists compared to the whole climate science endeavor.

But the amount of people that are looking into this is getting bigger and bigger.

And so I think we're pretty close to having broader international assessments around the topic, which means that because eventually when I maybe talk to policymakers or to people in other countries, They don't want to know the results of my study or of my climate model run.

They want to know what's the agreement.

Right. So that's kind of why it's so important to talk about this from an international.
The results of any one way. You need a geopolitical scientific consensus.
Yeah. Consensus.

Imagine if they had thought about that with something like the IPCC. That's what I think.
That's really what you need.

Indeed, yeah. And once you have that, you might be in a better position.

You get 10 people in a discussion, you end up with 12 opinions. Of course.
Always the case.

But trying to get nations to sit around a table and, well, it's not bothering me, or you're not putting that over my sky.

Oh, yeah, they're not in my backyard. So, how far are we from making something like this implemented? I would have absolutely no way to predict that, I would say, and be honest.

But I think we can, for instance, look at climate change, right, and say, honestly, the first assessment report from the IPCC was in 1994, was in the early 90s.

And we've advanced greatly, but fundamentally, conclusions haven't really changed from 1994, which is we add greenhouse gases, that's bad, that increases warming, and that's going to make things worse.

True. And there have been, I want to take in this case the optimistic view of saying, you know, there have been many advances when it comes to climate change mitigation and policy.

Have there been enough? Definitely not, but there have been, right? There have been the Paris Agreement. Now, is the United States of America out of the Paris Agreement? Yes, it is.

Will they stay for long? I don't know. But, you know, solar and wind are kind of unstoppable.
There's a lot of

Europe is very much into renewable. China is even more than Europe and the United States.
In spite of their carbon footprint growing in some sectors, they're still making great advances.

Yes, they are, because they understand. They see it as an economic issue.
They don't even care right now.

They look at it as this is a necessity for our economy, unlike, unfortunately, the supposed greatest economy in the world.

So in this sense, I guess as a scientist, I'm not going to be the one making the decision about whether to do this or not. I shouldn't be.
It should be no science.

You know, me and Sir Nale as well, we've met enough scientists. We shouldn't be the one making this kind of decisions.
Come on. Well, you should if you can laugh maniacally while you're doing it.

Oh, yeah. That's how it is.
Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that's what you're doing.

But we can provide. I still think that the overall, the strongest merit of science is providing the information that can let people make the good decisions.
Will they make good decisions all the time?

No, because we're humans and we don't. But that's not a good reason why not to provide

the information that could allow people to make these decisions. So let me land this plane by saying every

stratospheric plane?

Every disaster movie begins with people in charge ignoring the advice of scientists.

Just saying. I hear you.
Yeah. That's it.
Daniele.

Vizione. Good.
I love how you say that. Oh, I love the thinking about how to say it.
Thanks for joining us here. Thank you.
Oh, my gosh. We loved your expertise.

And you put it in the mix and stir it up and see what comes out the other side. As these years progress, we don't know where the valuation will land.
Oh, we know.

Come on, guys.

It's America 2025. We're America right now.
America. So again, thank you for joining us.
Thank you.

So next up, we're going to get the point of view from a sociologist who thinks about the impact of all these measures on the human condition, not only domestically, but around the world.

Coming right up.

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So our next guest is Holly June Buck, Associate Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo. That's SUNY.

SUNY BUFLAL.

Yeah.

So ain't that something? When I was growing up, no one would have imagined a department with this title, Environment and Sustainability. And that's why we're in this mess that we are in right now.

Because nobody envisioned needing this.

Needing this.

I also have her down as Radcliffe Salata,

Climate Justice Fellow at Harvard. Oh, that sounds like a superhero.
That sounds bad, actually.

Cape and everything.

And interdisciplinary environmental social scientist. And with special attention to how people engage with emergent climate control technologies.

That's a thing.

It's like a whole sociological thing. It has to be.
It's got to be. Why not?

And my favorite title of them all, author of a book from 2019, After Geoengineering, Climate Tragedy, Repair and Restoration. Wow.

Sounds very much like the movie The Day After.

Or what's that other movie?

Snow Piercer. Snow Piercer.
That was after

that's where climate people messed up. Yeah, exactly.
Welcome to Star Talk, Holly. Thanks so much.
It's great to be here. Do we call you Holly Jean or just Holly? Either one's great.

Either one's good. Holly Jean's kind of

Holly Jean. Holly Jean sounds like a country Western star, you know?

Holly Jean. Holly Jean.

So we've just come off of a conversation looking at the pros and cons of aerosol injections into the atmosphere.

Could you just give us some options on how to achieve the same effect that are banding it about today? The same effect as solar geoengineering. Yeah, I mean,

it's got a noble goal to sort of protect Earth from our own misdeeds regarding climate.

And so if we don't do that, what are you going to offer us?

Did I direct that question to you? Oh, I'm sorry. Because I had an answer.

Well, there's plan A. Shall we go over plan A?

Please.

So a whole bunch of countries, including the U.S. up until a minute ago, but states as well, New York State, have signed on to these net zero targets.

So ideas that... That's net zero carbon dioxide.
Or greenhouse gas. In general.

Yeah. I mean, they're a little bit different targets.
But yeah, the main idea is you don't put out more than you can remove.

And that needs to happen by mid-century, which is actually yesterday. Really soon.
Yeah.

It could have happened yesterday.

It needs to happen yesterday. Yeah, and we've still got some issues if it would have happened yesterday, but go ahead.

So basically, remaking our whole energy system,

our built environment, it's a big transformation. That's why people are talking about geoengineering.
All right, so I get that. And this aerosol in the atmosphere solution sounds so bond villain.

It does sound sexy, doesn't it? You know, it sounds like this should be in a movie. Right.
But why not just take the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere?

And they don't have to worry about any of this. Well, you sound like my mother.
You know what you need? You need a sitcom.

Why don't you have a sitcom?

In other words, yeah,

go ahead. We do need to do some of that, but there's a limit at how much we can do.
I mean, think about, think about all the effort it took to take it out of the ground, right?

All the pipes, all the refining, all the distribution, all of that infrastructure. We're talking about building that basically all over again to put it back underground.

And there are limited places where you can actually store. Exactly.
Yeah.

It's an interesting sort of macro way to see that. That is, yeah.

That's a really interesting way to look at it because you never really consider how much infrastructure is involved in just oil extraction and then refinery. Just that.

Let alone everything else involved to get it to you where you know, everything else. But you have to put it.
I don't have to bury it, do I?

For example, the white cliffs of Dover, that's limestone cliffs, and that's a repository of carbon from our environment.

And they're not buried, but not that we're making that, but I'm just saying that didn't involve a pipe to put it back into the ground.

Yeah, so people talk about closed system and open system carbon removal. So in a closed system, you would have an injection well.
You'd be injecting that into rock formations deep underground.

more or less know where it is. But what you're just talking about is more of an open system approach, putting it into the ocean, putting it into fields where you can make rocks weather faster.

That's a bit trickier because it's harder to measure what's going on.

How are we transporting this? Because you've got certain industries that produce an awful lot of CO2 and then they don't have somewhere right on their doorstep to screw all this away.

I'll call it that. So how are we, I mean, pipes, so one, are we transporting it in any other way?

Barges, rail, trucks.

The same as oil.

The same as oil. It's exactly the same.
Two trucks go opposite directions on the highway. They tip each other in two.

So

that was my soft point. That's funny.
So if we're spending how many billions on carbon catcher plants, right? And I just say to myself, just... Are we actually, is that a real thing?

We spent a few billions trying to start them. We'll see if they'll get finished.

It's still a nascent issue. Yeah, very much nascent.

Are they better than trees at capturing seafood?

That's a very good question. I love that.
Yeah. I mean, trees are great for a whole bunch of reasons.

The thing with these land-based approaches, we need more of them for providing habitat for a million reasons, but we can't expect nature to do all the work here of what we took out of the ground. Yes.

We have limited land for trees, unfortunately, because we want that that land for growing food.

So basically, we should stop eating.

That's really important. Eating and heating, I'm going to hear it.
Stop eating and heating. Eating and heating.
Let it go.

So I get many of the land solutions to this, but how about ocean solutions?

Other than CO2 just getting absorbed into the water, surely there are creatures out there that would value some uptake in CO2.

If you're talking about the whale concept, that one might not scale to the levels that we need it to. But if you're talking about plankton, on the other hand, that seems more promising.

These are really early stages of research, though. But the theory seems really positive.

How does it work? What's the procedure? Basically, the concept of ocean iron fertilization would be to

add nutrients to the ocean to create a big plankton bloom. The plankton falls down to the bottom of the ocean.
What do plankton blooms have anything to do with CO2?

Or are these the photosynthetic plankton? Yeah, yeah. Oh, like a tree.
Yeah. Like a tree.
To do what a plant would do, right? Yeah, exactly. Oh, okay.
The light bulb went on. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you. So it's an LED light bulb.

I would expect nothing from that. Thank you.

So you're growing plankton in the presence of the CO2 no differently how you would grow trees in the presence of CO2. Except oceans are huge.

So what happens when the plankton die and then they fall to the bottom? Then what?

I mean, ideally that CO2 would stay at the bottom, but this is the issue with this category of approaches is that the science is really early and the science is expensive, right?

Because you need ocean-chartered vehicles going out there doing experiments. And we just haven't really begun that process in our neighborhood.
It's a photo laboratory.

But the potential for this sink and die of the phytoplankton is capturing massive amounts of CO2.

But surely that has some toxicity in in the ecosystem. Yeah, what does it do with oxygen?

Right, exactly. There's little creatures down there that they do matter.
I care about them.

What was the little microscopic creature that was here that put all the oxygen in the air? Oh, yeah, cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria, right?

Yeah. So there are consequences that happen when you do this kind of stuff.
Yeah, but they would absorb CO2 and release oxygen. So what's so bad about that? I mean, for ocean life?

What do you have up against oxygen?

What kind of a person are you?

Remember, I'm a sociologist. Okay, no, we get it.

No,

it's this lack of joined up thinking that's got us in this situation in the first place. So surely we've got to look at the effect of every living thing in any environment we go into.

But the problem is we need to explore, we need to research further, and it doesn't look as if there's a desire or possibly the finances to do it. Or am I wrong?

It's just short of what's needed to really get into some of these questions.

All right. So if you're not a sociologist of plankton, you'd be a sociologist of people.

So how do the effects of all these efforts land differently around the world, either economically or geographically? Well, the rest of the world is ripping us off. That's the first thing.

And it's time for us to make sure that we have dominance, the kind of dominance that comes from drill, baby drill.

Thank you.

Chew on the nose. No, I mean, there's a couple of issues here.

One is that unless people grasp the climate change, the energy transition, the situation we're in, talking to them about these ideas is probably not going to land very well because

if you don't know the, you know, why we would try it in the first place, right? So. But there are countries who have nowhere near the resources to participate in this.

So they would be passive observers, possibly even victims, of our efforts or our folly.

And oddly enough, those countries are far more amenable to the solutions that we need to enact in order to solve this problem.

You would think that from what you said, that they would be the ones who would be most skeptical. They're not.
We're the freaking problem. Was that right? Yeah.

Yeah, we actually do have some research that colleagues of mine have done in several different countries trying to learn about people's perceptions and they did find more support for countries in the global south countries that are facing a lot of climate impacts right now but i would caution that with most people haven't heard anything about any of these approaches so what somebody hears in a survey or initially is going to be shaped by what people say about it other messengers their friends and family once they start to discuss it with other people.

Which is, I think it was this year's Yale report, that still it's somewhere around upwards 53% of people say they rarely or never talk about climate change with friends or family.

That's this year's report. Not even a thing.
So

we're just not even discussing it at all. We're la la la.
So right now, this little group here are outliers.

So

how do we then think about the social consequences or ethical issues of this down the line?

How do you handle that?

I mean, I think the first step is just to involve more people in the conversation. Okay.
And that can be done a lot of ways. It hardly ever happens.
Yeah.

You need agencies or organizations that'll do that. Yeah, you need actually dedicated staff to work on it.
It's a big challenge.

So who's the most important voices that need to be heard in regards of this? Your voice. No, not my voice.
Lean into the microphone. My voice.
Go. Do it, ASMR.

It's my voice. Yes.
Holly Jean is speaking.

Is it the powerful rich Western nations or is it the global south? Is it African nations?

Is there a demographic or group? Well, everybody has a stake and everybody needs to do something with climate and energy, right? Nobody can sit by. Yeah, nobody's getting out of this one.

So of all the options that you've seen, what horse would you bet on as the most effective, but also most humane, if I may?

I think we need to triple nuclear capacity. We have a goal about that, or if we did, I hope we keep doing that.
We need abundant, clean energy for people

because a lot of people don't have access to energy and

turn the tables on the anti-nuke movement that had been so strong over the decades. I hope so.
We've seen public sentiment on that shift pretty quickly, actually.

So, that's the show we had with Catherine Hough on the small modular reactors? Right, because the nuclear reactors can be scaled scaled and they can be built anywhere you need them, right?

I don't think they're at the point where they can commercially put them in, although we've had nuclear reactors in submarines

for some time. So there must be some way to scale it and make it

practical. Oh yeah, completely.
Completely. Plus, there's not as much spoken of how dependent France has been on nuclear power for decades.
And it's not even a thing. Right.

They'll protest anything at any time of day. Except smoking.

I'll give you a true example about France's nuclear program.

I'll have to say nuclear and free. Stop giving France cancer.

Every time you're imitating a French person.

They put a nuclear power plant on the northwest coast of France closer to London than it was to Paris. That's how much the French love the British.

Okay.

So is there going to be... a mistake that we make in our attempts to do the right thing?

What are we most likely going to get wrong?

I mean, you can see a lot of problems considering that we're dismantling our capacity to even monitor what's going on in terms of, you know, attacks on science and government.

So, yeah, there's tons of risks. Although people who are concerned, I share their concern.
Okay, give us something positive here, please.

Tell us, what are you hopeful for? Well, I think... that public thinking about this can and will shift.
The question is one of timing.

That's why we're talking about geoengineering. Yeah, but you would know better than others what would help make that shift.

What kind of forces need to be in play to change an attitude or a perspective.

Has there been something in history that you're familiar with where a public sea change of opinion has happened for the better? Because that's kind of the shift that we need to have.

for this, at least here in America.

Some of the examples people point to are the civil rights movement, gay marriage, these

social things. I think it's a little bit trickier when you're talking about reconfiguring the built environment.

But the mindset has to happen first. How about we get ahead of the story? There seems to be a fair bit of misinformation regarding climate.
global warming.

Or disinformation.

That's exactly it. So there's this disinformation.
How about we get ahead of that narrative and start to put out real, solid, strong, and take that 53%

and make it much, much bigger?

I mean, you asked me about technologies and I said nuclear, but we have to also shift the framing into investing in social infrastructure, investing in people.

And I think that because we have an administration that's backing away from that, that's crashing our social infrastructure, people are going to recognize the value in the relationships, the agencies, functioning government, and we'll build that capacity to, when we do have the political will to build these new technologies, we'll have the social will that matches it.

Not to put words in your mouth, but are you saying that the dismantling of these social structures, these social institutions, may

awaken people to their need in ways that they had previously taken for granted. Yeah, we had a problem even before Trump where we passed all this money in the U.S.

for climate and energy projects, and we couldn't get it spent fast enough because we didn't have enough people in the agencies to spend it, to review it, to even hear about the grants.

People on the ground didn't know. And now people are realizing you need people to do this.
It's not just about investing in tech. So

what I was going to say is it takes money.

It actually takes money to spend money.

It takes money to educate people. And how do you combat the other side, which is disinformation? Fossil fuel companies, through their so-called outlets and foundations, right?

They spent $900 million that was tracked last year. $900 million on disinformation.
So we got to come up against that.

I mean, that's a serious thing. But I, and we got to like land this plane real quick.
But presumably, if you ask them, they wouldn't say it was disinformation. They would just say it's information.

So what you really have to do is empower the listener to know the difference. From a sociological perspective, how do you do that?

Yeah, you don't go to people and say you're misinformed because then it's like you're saying, well, you're dumb. You didn't know the right information.

So that's my problem. I've been an idiot all the time.
Jesus.

You give them information that's grounded in science and you say they're really hard trade-offs, but you have choices.

It's important that you don't make people feel like all of this stuff is going to take away their freedom. That's what they're worried about.
I'm saying

we do such a good job calling electricity liberty juice. Liberty juice.
Liberty juice. We need a focus group.
If you want to save America, what you got to do is get a car that runs on liberty juice.

All right, this thought experiment. Pretty good, Chuck.
I think that's a good idea.

The answers are out there, bro.

Say we fall on a technology that is practical, cost-effective, give or take, and we do get ourselves to these pre-industrial zero levels.

Will we not think, well, it doesn't matter, we can burn all the fossil fuels we want because we can control it now.

You okay with that?

That's a big argument, yeah, man. Yeah.

Is that likely to happen for us? Because

we've driven ourselves away. If we become good at it,

then drill, baby, drill. Who cares? I just think burning rocks is kind of archaic.
Like, I just think we can do better. I mean, whatever.
I think we can come out with something that out-competes that.

And also,

economically, then. And then the economics drives it.
But do we not

as a species do that thing anyway where we tie our own shoelaces together or find a way to shoot ourselves in the foot?

Speak for yourself, dude. I was.

I was. That was good.

Well, I think the danger that many people see is that once you have anything that's viable on a geoengineering scale, which we're nowhere near, by the way, but once you do, that fossil fuel companies will then use that as a cudgel to say, we can keep burning fuel.

You know, so a lot of people are like,

that's my concern. Yeah, a lot of people are like...
You foresee that, presumably.

Yeah, I wrote a book called Ending Fossil Fuels that was about the challenge of how you end fossil fuels and the geopolitics of it are really tough because some countries really depend on this for their revenue and their legitimacy.

And I could see them saying, well, let's keep on going. So, countries like Venezuela or Qatar

or Russia. Yeah.

Yeah. These are all the countries.
Yeah, so it's a whole other thing. Here we're saying, stop burying fossil fuels and you'll bankrupt the country.
Yeah. They built their whole economy on it.

Unless we're willing to make massive transfers of finance, which we apparently aren't. Yeah.
Well, then that becomes your problem as a sociologist.

I'll take all the problems. You fix it.

A lot of work. I love it.
Well, Professor Buck, thank you for being on Star Talk.

Delighted to have you on the Asimov panel and that you guys kidnapped her for Star Talk.

Very good job here. Thank you.

Thanks so much.

And just so you know how deeply I respect your profession, my father's a sociologist.

I was actually received a sociology award from Congress.

I think they appreciated how much I always tried to think about the impact of science on people. And I was very moved by that.
And so I wish you well. Thank you.
And maybe some luck.

Based on how stuff goes down with the human interaction function that's out there. Yeah, we're screwed.

Thank you, Chuck, for that

concluding.

So Holly, Chuck, Gary. Pleasure.
Always good. Always a pleasure.
Thank you, sir. This has been another edition of Star Talk Special Edition.

Geoengineering, the good, the bad, the ugly. Until next time, Neil the Grass Tyson.
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