In an influential cli-fi novel, a desperate government ignores international consensus and pumps aerosols into the atmosphere to cool the world. Could it happen for real?
What if climate change became so intense that one country broke with international protocol to protect its people? In fiction, that scenario has already played out. Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 novel Ministry for the Future opens with a catastrophic heatwave in India sparking a climate disaster of unmatched scale:20 million people die as extreme temperatures take a horrific toll.
So if one rogue nation did decide to dim the Sun for real, what environmental and geopolitical consequences might unfurl? And is the safe deployment of such a technology even a conceivable goal? Andreas Malm, associate professor of human ecology at Lund University in Sweden and author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, agrees."The worst-case scenario for the deployment of geoengineering," he says,"is that you have it and then business as usual just continues with investment in fossil fuels and their infrastructure – and emissions continue to rise." You'd then have to keep increasing the injections, he argues, which would only exacerbate the risks.
Stratospheric aerosol injection would require"a fleet of several hundred large high-altitude jets of a sort that does not currently exist" If one nation or more were to push ahead regardless of such tensions, however, the worst-case scenarios are numerous. Countermeasures ranging from economic sanctions, to UN intervention and potentially armed conflict could all be deployed, says Biermann, with the ultimate result"difficult to predict". There is also a possibility that an arms-race develops, with nations developing the technology simply because rival superpowers are doing likewise.
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