geoengineering

Decades of efforts to cut carbon emissions have failed to significantly slow the rate of global warming, so scientists are now turning to bolder approaches.

Christopher Flavelle, who writes about climate change for The Times, discusses efforts to engineer our way out of the climate crisis.

Guest: Christopher Flavelle, who covers how the United States tries to adapt to the effects of climate change for The New York Times.

Background reading: 

• Warming is getting worse. So they just tested a way to deflect the sun.
• Can we engineer our way out of the climate crisis?

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

In this 191st in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.

In this episode we discuss climate science, models, and assumptions. How do urban heat, and assumptions of low vs high solar variability, affect climate models? Should apparent consensus among climate scientists give one pause? Are non-scientist humans capable of thinking for themselves? We discuss the difference between the environment, and climate, and discuss Apple’s new video starring Mother Nature herself. Finally, we review the move, in Canadian school libraries, to get rid of books published before 2008. What could go wrong?

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Mentioned in this episode:

Soon et al 2023. The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming (1850–2018) in Terms of Human and Natural Factors: Challenges of Inadequate Data. Climate, 11(9): 179.https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/11/9/179

CERES: https://www.ceres-science.com/about

Creon Levitt’s “Hot or Not” - https://open.substack.com/pub/creon/p/hot-or-not

Dr. Paul Offit on the difference between science and science communication: https://x.com/TheChiefNerd/status/1701966873129033985?s=20

Apple meets Mother Nature: https://x.com/tim_cook/status/1701732427897491578

CBC reports on the intentional disappearance of books from school libraries: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-library-book-weeding-1.6964332

Zach's fake business deals and lies are starting to catch up with him. The money has stopped flowing, and entertainment bigwigs are hounding him for answers. But like everyone else in Hollywood, Zach thinks he's just one box-office smash away from solving all his problems.

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Steven E. Koonin is a theoretical physicist, professor, former Chief Scientist for the BP petroleum company, and former Under Secretary for Science  at the U.S. Department of Energy under the Obama administration. He's also the author of "Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters."

“We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand famously wrote in “The Whole Earth Catalogue.” Human beings act upon nature at fantastic scale, altering whole ecosystems, terraforming the world to our purposes, breeding new species into existence and driving countless more into extinction. The power we wield is awesome. But Brand was overly optimistic. We did not get good at it. We are terrible at it, and the consequences surround us.

That’s the central theme of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future.” And yet, there is no going back. We will not return to a prelapsarian period where humans let nature alone. Indeed, as Kolbert shows, there is no natural nature left — we live in the world (and in particular, a climate) we altered, and are altering. The awful knowledge that our interventions have gone awry again and again must be paired with the awful reality that we have no choice save to try to manage the mess we have made.

Examples abound in Kolbert’s book, but in my conversation with her  I wanted to focus on one that obsesses me: solar geoengineering. To even contemplate it feels like the height of hubris. Are we really going to dim the sun? And yet, any reasonable analysis of the mismatch between our glacial politics and our rapidly warming planet demands that we deny ourselves the luxury of only contemplating the solutions we would prefer. With every subsequent day that our politics fails, the choices that we will need to make in the future become worse.

This is a conversation about some of the difficult trade-offs and suboptimal options that we are left with in what Kolbert describes as a “no-analog moment.” We discuss the prospect of intentionally sending sulfurous particles into the atmosphere to dim the sun, whether “carbon capture” technology could scale up to the levels needed to make a dent in emissions levels, the ethics of using gene editing technologies to make endangered species more resistant to climate change, the governance mechanisms needed to prevent these technologies from getting out of hand, what a healthier narrative about humanity’s relationship with nature would sound like, how the pandemic altered carbon emissions, and more.

At the end, we discuss another fascinating question that Kolbert wrote about recently in The New Yorker: Why is a Harvard astrophysicist arguing Earth has already been visited by aliens, and should we believe him?

Mentioned in this episode: 

Whole Earth Catalogue

Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth by Avi Loeb

Recommendations: 

"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka"

"The Song of the Dodo" by David Quammen

"Global Warming (The Complete Briefing)" by John Houghton

"Cosmicomics" by Italo Calvino

"The Phantom Tollbooth" by Norton Juster

"Charlotte’s Web" by E.B. White

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein.

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.

Thomas Kostigen (@kostigen) is a New York Times bestselling author and journalist. His latest book is Hacking Planet Earth: How Geoengineering Can Help Us Reimagine the Future.

What We Discuss with Thomas Kostigen:

• What is geoengineering, how is it being used today, and what forms will it take with rapidly developing technology?
• Why those who stand to be the first victims of climate disenfranchisement certainly won't be the last.
• How soon we need to act, and to what degree, if we want to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
• How we can use geoengineering to catalyze a solutions-based society that will reduce and eliminate these effects.
• In what ways have we geoengineered the world in the past, and what does this tell us about the transformative power of industry and the role Thomas believes it should play in current and future geoengineering efforts?
• And much more...

Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/348

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