Our climate taboos aren't rational

A climatologist from Andromeda would find our climate change debate properly insane.

The first few days were a world-historical shitshow, of course, with people all over panicking at the news images of the giant spaceship descending over the East River and the aliens making their way into the UN General Assembly. It’s been a few months now, and life has returned to its usual rhythms after it became clear that they weren’t especially sinister.

The aliens mostly seemed to want to talk, really.

One of the visitors, a chill climatologist from Andromeda, took the time to learn all the basics of Earth atmospheric science, waded through all the IPCC reports, then took a human scientist to coffee.

Climatologist from Andromeda: So, if I’m understanding right, what you need is a sudden, complete cessation to all of the activities that add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. But that hasn’t proved politically possible because of this international system you have where each country is —what’s the word again? sovereign— and so other countries can’t actually force them to do anything.

Human scientist: Right. We’d need a voluntary agreement between all 192 countries, but each of them faces overwhelming incentives to free ride.

CfA: So nobody does anything. And there isn’t any way to force coordination between all these countries?

HS: A world government? Erm, no that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.

CfA: Wow, you guys really are in a bit of trouble, aren’t you?

HS: Yeah, it’s pretty dismaying.

CfA: I wonder if there isn’t some other solution we’re overlooking, though. Some outside-the-box solution that would somehow get around these political problems. If you have too much energy coming from your nearby star…

HS: The sun, we call it…

CfA: Right, the sun…and that energy gets trapped by the greenhouse gases and not enough energy can leave the system again. That is tricky. Couldn’t you, I don’t know, find some way to reduce the amount of energy coming in in the first place?

HS: [laughs nervously…]

CfA: Absurd, I know, I’m just spitballing here…

HS: Ahem. Um, well, yeah, actually, there has been some talk about that. We could increase the earth’s albedo, the amount of energy it reflects back out into space. It’s just, well, people aren’t really ready to consider such a radical approach.

CfA: I guess you just don’t have the technology to do it, as a practical matter.

HS: Heh, well, no, it isn’t that. We know how we could do it. The technology’s existed for about 70 years now.

CfA: Oh, huh. Funny! But I suppose it’s just murderously expensive, like an order of magnitude more expensive than reducing emissions in the first place.

HS: Ahm, no, actually, I mean, it’s notional but people have tried to cost it and, well, it wouldn’t actually cost very much. We could do it for less than a billion dollars a year. About what a major league baseball stadium costs. It’s about, um, five orders of magnitude less expensive than our best guess of what it would cost to stop producing greenhouse gases.

CfA: Five orders of magnitude? Blimey. So…let me get this straight, you do know of a way to solve this problem, or, well, at least the most glaring part of it. You do have the technology and you could afford it…but you’re not going with this…why again?

HS: It’s just that it gives people the heebie-jeebies, you know? They’re not really ready to talk about it yet.

CfA: Huh. Strange. I sort of get it, though, it would be a brand new intervention. That jump into the unknown can be scary for humans. Unprecedented is a scary word!

HS: [shifting uncomfortably] Well, no, it’s not exactly unprecedented either. Volcanos do it naturally, so we’ve seen it play out. The last time it happened was just a couple of decades ago, we had plenty of satellites in orbit to observe it. So yeah, we measured precisely how much material we’d need to put into the stratosphere to get a given level of cooling. It’s not even that much.

CfA: But people don’t want to do it because when that volcano went off and caused cooling this way it created some catastrophic side-effect, like, I dunno, it killed all the crops or something.

HS: There’s some controversy about this, actually. The volcano may have decreased agricultural yields, a little bit, or it may have increased them a tad. It’s not really clear. Certainly not some huge catastrophic effect, though. Mostly it made for really spectacular sunsets.

CfA: So people don’t want to try to do it artificially because they’re worried it would be irreversible?

HS: No, erm, it’s not that either. After the last big volcano eruption stopped, the cooling effect just ended. Pretty much right away. We know it’s reversible. You stop, it stops.

CfA: [stares]

HS: [stares]

CfA: So you don’t want to do it becaauuuuse…

HS: Well it could cause some regional effects we don’t like, like maybe some regions could get big droughts, or others floods, we just don’t know, we haven’t done the research.

CfA: So I guess accelerating research into this stuff is a big global priority now, right? Surely nobody could disagree with that, I mean…

HS: No, actually, people hate the idea of researching it too.

CfA: But…uh…but, I’m confus…I mean, why!?

HS: Ummm…well, it’s just —how to put this? The vibes are weird, you know?

CfA: What.

HS: It just makes us feel funny, you know? It’s like we’re cheating! We created this sprawling planetary catastrophe by burning stuff and now we’re gonna whip out our get out of jail free card and start pumping still more gunk into the air? It’s not fair!

CfA: Jesus fucking christ are you being serious right now? What about the tens of millions of poor people in India and Africa who are literally going to die from too much heat!? What about the wars from agricultural yields collapsing? And the cities under water? That’s not the thing that gives you the heebie-jeebies, this is? You’re willing to spend tens of trillions of dollars a year decarbonizing but you don’t want to even research an idea that could get 90% of the same outcome for 100,000 times cheaper? Have you lost your goddamn mind!?!?

HS: It’s just, well, see, if we do start spraying gunk into the stratosphere people are going to take it as permission to stop decarbonizing. It would jeopardize all the progress we know we need to make…

CfA: But rich countries started decarbonizing in the 1970s, way before anyone took climate change seriously. And rich countries have kept decarbonizing at pretty much the same rates since then. It’s right there in those IPCC reports you made me read! You know climate change isn’t the reason these countries started decarbonizing at all: they were decarbonizing before they were even worried about it, because technology improved. And you showed me the research showing decarbonization hasn’t sped up at all since you all freaked out about this. Why would that stop now just because you’re preventing a few tens of millions of poor people from broiling to death?

HS: It’s…it’s just that…

CfA: Well.

HS: It’s wrong.

CfA: Come again?

HS: It’s just plain wrong, ok? It’s pollution. It’s trying to fight pollution with more pollution. It’s straight up immoral is what it is.

CfA: This is…um, this is awkward, isn’t it? I mean, we’re not having a scientific discussion anymore, are we?

HS: No. No we’re not. The natural world is sacred. You hear that? Sacred. Our duty is to protect it from ever increasing human meddling. You can’t fight one defilement with another defilement. Fucking alien. Any human fifth grader can understand that without anyone needing to explain it to them.