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. Unwilling to let such a threat recur, the country's leaders decide to take drastic action: by unilaterally dimming the Sun.
Day after day for seven months, fleets of India's planes pump vast plumes of aerosols into the stratosphere. From there, the mix of sulphur dioxide and other chemical particulates slowly spread across the northern hemisphere and "eventually everywhere".
By reflecting sunlight back into space, the particulates act as a planetary parasol, mimicking the effect of large-scale volcanic eruptions. The sky turns whiter, sunsets redder and the planet cools. The contentious move flies in the face of international law, as the book imagines it, and risks disrupting monsoon rains – but it also reduces global temperatures by "one degree, for three years".
In Robinson's imagined scenario, India's rogue deployment of solar geo-engineering turns out to be broadly benign, and buys time to scale-up emissions reductions. But in the real-world, the idea that such a deus ex machina technology could ever be safely deployed remains highly speculative, with many risks and unknowns.
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? READ MORE from BBC
No comments:
Post a Comment