I first heard about solar geoengineering from one of the futures scenarios at the Urgent Optimists, where we were tasked to imagine waking up to a future where every day is winter after some governing body implemented a solar geoengineering program.
Then, I read about it from The Ministry of the Future (a climate fiction novel), where the Indian government adopted solar geoengineering (in defiance of the United Nations protocols against SRM) as a response after a heatwave had killed 20 million of its people.
The third time was when I learned more about it from my earth system governance class in Utrecht University. Solar geoengineering—also called solar radiation management (SRM)—refers to “a set of speculative technologies to lower global temperatures by artificially intervening in the climate systems of our planet. Simply put, solar geoengineering interventions would reflect some incoming sunlight back into space and hence ‘dim the sun.’”
One way to imagine a solar geoengineering aftermath is watching Snowpiercer: movie (2014) or series (2020).
Can solar geoengineering really fix the climate?
Although Make Sunsets believes that we can cool the earth with reflective clouds, hundreds of scientists don’t, including my teachers from Utrecht University—Prof. Frank Biermann and Prof. Aarti Gupta—who were one of Initiators of the Open Letter calling for an International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering which states that:
Solar geoengineering is highly controversial. It is risky and uncertain. It does not address the root cause of climate change, that is, greenhouse gas emissions and concentrations. Instead, solar geoengineering focuses on ‘symptom treatment’, seeking to limit global warming by merely masking the effect of greenhouse gas emissions
jessa 