The planet looks like it has been badly handled by a fiddling giant. Our sticky fingerprints are all over it.
Chemicals, dams, and rats imported in the hulls of ships have reshaped everything under the sun. The recent photos from Artemis II might have shown a familiar blue planet, but zoom in a little closer, and you see a planet transformed.
If you have any doubts about this, consider temperature. Global mean surface temperatures have risen about 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times and are set to climb much higher. Where they stop climbing will be largely up to us. If we don’t like the sound of 4 or 6 degrees of additional heat, we should all play our part in mustering the colossal mountain of will needed to make it otherwise.
Solar radiation management (SRM) – a technology to moderate temperatures temporarily by putting reflective particles between us and the sun – might help as the world transitions to an economy with less greenhouse gases. But SRM comes with huge problems. Uncertainties about what it would do to precipitation, to the ozone layer, and to a small subset of very vulnerable people around the globe make it a moral minefield.
Another worry involves what SRM might do to “nature.” Could it help save nature? Or would it turn nature into another human project, something else we manipulate to satisfy our ends?
A few years ago, I expressed concern that SRM was one of a suite of technologies hastening the earth into a ‘synthetic age.’ I recently got the chance to reflect again on this question for SRM360.
I joined Leonie Bossert, a political philosopher at the University of Vienna, and Paulo Artaxo, a physicist at the University of San Paulo, in a series of micro-essays offering three takes on whether SRM might be thought of as a conservation tool.
Enjoy “Could SRM Help Preserve Nature?” at SRM360.
Christopher J. Preston 