Think Climate Change Is Messy? Wait Until Geoengineering

Here’s the thing about the stratosphere, the region between six and 31 miles up in the sky: If you really wanted to, you could turn it pink. Or green. Or what have you. If you sprayed some colorant up there, stratospheric winds would blow the material until it wrapped around the globe. After a year or two, it would fade, and the sky would go back to being blue. Neat little prank.

This is the idea behind a solar geoengineering technique known as stratospheric aerosol injection, only instead of a pigment, engineers would spray a sulfate that bounces some of the sun’s radiation back into space, an attempt at cooling the planet. It’s the same principle behind a supervolcano loading the stratosphere with aerosols and blocking out the sun. And it, too, would rely on those winds distributing the material evenly. “If you do it in one place, it's going to affect the whole planet,” says climate scientist Kate Ricke, who studies the intersection of geoengineering, human behavior, and economics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “Not just because you've cooled down and changed the global energy balance, but because the particles spread out.”

While it’s not likely that someone will colorize the atmosphere anytime soon, it's getting increasingly likely that someone will decide it’s time for stratospheric aerosol injection. Emissions are not declining at anywhere near the rate needed to keep global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and the climate crisis is worsening .

But the science isn’t ready . This anthropogenic geoengineering might trigger unintended effects, like droughts in certain regions and massive storms in others. Plus, if engineers abruptly stopped spraying aerosols in the atmosphere, temperatures would swing back to where they started, potentially imperiling crops and species .

Still, stratospheric aerosol injection would be fairly cheap. And there’s nothing stopping countries from unilaterally deciding to spray their airspace, even though those materials would ultimately spread around the globe. “I just have a hard time seeing with the economics of it how it doesn't happen,” says Ricke. “To me, that means that it's really urgent to do more research.” WIRED sat down with Ricke to talk about the allure and potential pitfalls of geoengineering , what makes it so politically perilous, and how scientists can make sense of it—for the good of humanity and the planet. The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

WIRED: Can you give me an idea of the scale that we'd be talking about with solar geoengineering—both spatial scales and timescales?

Kate Ricke: Let's say you want to start geoengineering today to stabilize global temperatures where we are, or maybe bring it down a little bit. You basically need a fleet of airplanes that can reach the stratosphere. We're talking on the scale of maybe tens to hundreds of airplanes, and the capability to spray aerosol precursors.

But the way that the stratosphere works is that once you get up there, stratospheric winds take things around the planet relatively quickly in bands of latitude. And then slowly over time, on the timescale of months, things sort of migrate in general from equatorial regions up toward the poles, and then particles fall out near the poles. So you wouldn't need to be flying through the whole stratosphere spraying stuff. The stratosphere does a lot of work to spread it out. And that's part of the reason why you can't do stratospheric geoengineering over just one area.