Researchers who favor climate repair are falsifying their preferences

Some speculation on what it will take to break the taboo

The Mount Pinatubo field experiment, 1991

Many climate researchers grasp that some kind of deliberate intervention to albedo will be needed to slow or reverse global warming, but never say so out loud. It’s too risky. The smart move, professionally speaking, is to keep quiet.

Political scientists know this kind of situation very well — it even has a name in the professional lingo: “preference falsification.”

It happens disconcertingly often, when a small group has enough power to enforce conformity to its line from a larger group. Preference falsification is, for example, why the Soviet Union kept going for another 30 years after pretty much everyone in Russia stopped really believing in communism: it was in no one’s interest to be seen to buck the party line. It was easier, and safer, to falsify your preferences: to pretend to continue to be a loyal communist, knowing a heavy blow would fall on the first person to fall out of line.

Talk to enough climate scientists and you soon realize a similar dynamic is at play over calls for albedo-based climate repair.

On the record, nobody will tell you they favor stratospheric aerosol injection or marine cloud brightening. Go to the bar after the conference, and after two or three beers it’s clear everyone understands this is where we’re going to end up. Many look forward to that future with foreboding, others with hope, but deep down climate researchers can see the writing on the wall: we won’t be able to avoid it.

Preference falsification is a tricky problem to fight. Taboo dynamics develop because the people who enforce the taboo are powerful.

In Soviet Russia, they had the power to decide whether you walked free or ended up in a gulag. In the climate debate they’re not that powerful —thank God— but they get to decide who gets the next fat research grant, who gets tenure, who gets to give tesimony to congress or keynote speeches to the AGU. They have set themselves up as gatekeepers, and people with an interest with passing through those gates can’t afford to antagonize them.

But there’s reason for hope, too, because a consensus upheld on the basis of widespread preference falsification is always brittle. Sooner or later, people are liable to look around them and realize that huge numbers of their peers are also falsifying their preferences. At this, the gatekeepers tend to panic: once everyone understands that everyone else is thinking the same thing, taboos can break down quickly.

It generally takes a big, coordinating event to get masses of preference falsifiers to reveal their true preferences at the same time. It takes an East German minister mis-speaking and sending thousands of Berliners streaming to the Berlin Wall for everyone behind the Iron Curtain to suddenly grasp that the apparently unanimous support for communism is paper thin. Then the whole thing can unravel quite quickly.

What event could coordinate mass-defections from the climate repair taboo? Well, if we had a Pinatubo-scale volcanic event in the 2020s, that would probably do it: knock a couple of degrees off of global temperature without overt disastrous effects in this intellectual climate, and people will start talking about albedo a lot more seriously as an intervention lever.

Alas, volcanos erupt on their own clocks, not ours. Absent a big natural demonstration like Pinatubo, it’s not really clear to me how we could get the silent majority of researchers to come forward and stop falsifying their preferences. The danger is that the process takes too long, and by the time the taboo breaks down, it becomes too late to avoid some climate tipping poing or another. We’d then end up intervening too late, and what disasters come later would surely be blamed on the intervention, rather than on its having come too late.

This is the stuff that keeps me up at night. I have no answers here, just questions.