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Just a few years ago, the subject was basically taboo.
Katherine Ricke, a University of California at San Diego sustainability professor, turned to face the roomful of attentive scientists at the American Geophysical Union a few weeks ago. In any other year, she would have been about to break one of climate science’s biggest taboos.
“Geoscientists know very well at this point that solar geoengineering is not a very good substitute for emissions reductions,” she said. “The question that comes next, then, is, Is solar geoengineering a complement to mitigation?”
The answer, she then argued, was yes. While cutting greenhouse gas emissions might bring down the planet’s temperature in the long term, she said, it would not do so immediately. But spraying sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere was pretty cheap, and it could quickly help relieve the planet’s fever. “Solar geoengineering has a rapid but temporary effect on global temperatures, while the effect of emissions reduction is deferred but persistent,” she said.
Ricke went on to ask whether the economics of solar geoengineering made sense — and about its risks. Would it deprive other important efforts of research funding? Probably not. Could it encourage the public to procrastinate on cutting emissions? Maybe yes.
Yet perhaps the presentation’s biggest surprise — for people who have long thought about the issue — was that nobody in the audience of normal climate scientists gasped. Nobody shooed Ricke out of the room or told her that her talk didn’t belong in a session devoted to achieving net zero — that is, to climate mitigation, to reducing carbon pollution, not blotting out its effects.
To get a sense of what American climate scientists are talking about, you can do a lot worse than attending the annual fall meeting of the AGU, where more than 20,000 scientists come to network, present new research, and gossip about their superiors. This year, AGU was held in the cavernous Moscone Center in San Francisco. The arrival of tens of thousands of people immediately broke the city’s post-pandemic downtown; Starbucks ran out of breakfast sandwiches and every restaurant within a quarter mile of the conference site was jammed before the 8:30 a.m. sessions.
AGU is almost always held, for some nonsensical reason, at roughly the same time as the annual United Nations climate conference, and the two events have a lot in common: They are bazaars, free-for-alls, half salon and half trade show, and each way too big for any one person to see. Yet by keen attention to sounds and signals, one can detect a vibe at both events. The vibe of this year’s AGU was clear: Geoengineering is here to stay.
This sincere interest in geoengineering and climate modification represents a broader shift in climate science from observation to intervention. It also represents a huge change for a field that used to regard any interference with the climate system — short of cutting greenhouse gas emissions — as verboten. “There is a growing realization that [solar radiation management] is not a taboo anymore,” Dan Visioni, a Cornell climate professor, told me. “There was a growing interest from NASA, NOAA, the national labs, that wasn’t there a year ago.”
At the highest level, this acceptance of geoengineering shows that scientists have seriously begun to imagine what will happen if humanity blows its goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Why the sudden embrace of geoengineering? Part of it is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has become increasingly insistent that carbon removal is crucial — and opened the door to other once-taboo ideas.
But another part is that climate disasters seem to get bigger and bigger every year, and humanity seems to be growing more and more alarmed about them, yet no country plans to cut emissions fast enough to relieve global warming’s near-term dangers. 2023 was the warmest year in modern human history, but the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals remain far off. “It was always pretty clear that the kind of emissions reduction to stay below 1.5 [degrees Celsius] was never going to happen in any realistic scenario, but there was always a conviction that just by saying it was physically possible, it was going to inspire people into some kind of action,” Visioni said. “2023 has shown this to not be the case.”
Perhaps one more reason is that, for better or worse, geoengineering is already happening. Economists have long argued that stratospheric aerosol injection is so cheap that someone will eventually try to do it. Then, last year, Luke Iseman, a 39-year-old former employee of the startup incubator Y Combinator, claimed to have conducted rogue experiments in western Mexico delivering reflective sulfur molecules to the atmosphere using weather balloons. It’s unclear whether this “move fast and break things”-styled effort actually reflected any meaningful sunlight back into space. What it did do was awaken the Mexican government to a regulatory arbitrage. It responded by banning solar geoengineering.
Yet more serious attempts have been made at bringing geoengineering into the mainstream. In September, the Overshoot Commission, a panel of current and former world leaders — including an influential Chinese adviser and a former Canadian prime minister — recommended that the world begin to seriously study solar geoengineering. And Congress recently mandated that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy study the technique — although the office’s resulting report also suggested that scientists are still treading carefully around it. Its hilariously curt title: “Congressionally-Mandated Report on Solar Radiation Modification.”
“The way that broader climate intervention has started to move into the mainstream has been kind of astounding,” said Shuchi Talati, a University of Pennsylvania scholar and former Energy Department official. “If you look at AGU of four or five years ago, if there was one [solar radiation management] panel, that was novel,” she told me. But this year, there were more panels and side conversations than ever. “You can feel it in the air that there was more interest.”
Ricke’s was far from the only geoengineering presentation in San Francisco this year. In a packed lunchtime session, Lisa Graumlich, AGU’s president, led a town hall about the organization’s draft proposal on how to research climate intervention ethically. “Are we attempting to play God? Do we have the right to do this? What risks are we willing to accept? Or … do we have the right not to?” Cynthia Scharf, a former UN adviser who helped lead a Carnegie Foundation project on how the world could possibly govern geoengineering, told the room by video conference. The crowd wasn’t exactly rewarded for attending: After every panelist had finished going through their introductions, the audience only had time to ask two questions.
Across the hall, more than 60 people were talking about a different kind of climate intervention. For years, scientists have known that the stability of a few glaciers in West Antarctica could mean the difference between quasi-manageable amounts of sea-level rise this century and a rapid, catastrophic surge. So small groups of glaciologists have now started to ask whether those specific glaciers — such as Thwaites, which holds a quadrillion gallons of water and is larger than Florida — could be engineered or modified somehow to slow their collapse.
Perhaps a berm could be built on the seafloor, in front of each of the glaciers, in order to prevent warm water from eroding them. Or maybe holes could be drilled into the glaciers, allowing the warmth of their subsurface to be vented to the surface. Glacial scientists have already met twice this year — at the University of Chicago and later Stanford — to begin hashing out the idea.
Another approach — using ships to spray ocean water into the atmosphere, thereby brightening clouds and reflecting more sunlight into space — was also the subject of several events. One scholar, Chih-Chieh Jack Chen, showed research suggesting that brightening the clouds over just 5% of the ocean surface could cool the planet enough to meet the world’s temperature targets — but that the climatic ripple effects of doing so might simultaneously raise temperatures in Southeast Asia by even more than what global warming would do alone. Others presented work showing that cloud brightening might accidentally shut down the planet’s westerly trade winds — or even silence the Pacific Ocean’s El Niño oscillation.
Then there were the carbon removal people, who arrived by the tens and who seemed to have graduated to a less controversial (and possibly more remunerative) plane than geoengineering. Most scientists seem to have accepted that carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, will need to happen to at least some degree. “CDR is a given. People don’t even consider it to be geoengineering any more, which is what the CDR people have always wanted,” Visioni told me. A new Department of Energy report, released during the conference, argues that by 2050, the United States might be able to suck 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for a mere $130 billion a year, creating 440,000 jobs. In other scenarios — and not only those sponsored by the federal government — America seems likely to become the keystone of the global carbon removal industry, its vast geological capacity and fossil-fuel expertise giving it a competitive advantage.
In anticipation, venture capital and public-sector cash has surged into carbon removal, creating a corps of CDR startups with one foot in the geosciences and the other in Silicon Valley. Their employees were at AGU too, mingling in full force. “It was interesting how much industry was there — researchers at companies, even heads of companies,” Talati told me. “I’ve never really experienced that at AGU.” Employees from Lithos, Heirloom, Carbon Direct, Stripe, and Additional Ventures all registered for the conference; in what might be an AGU first, scientists and technologists sipped cappuccinos and nibbled pastries during an early-morning confab at the Salesforce Tower, a few blocks from the official conference site. “AGU is not the place where you would have expected to find these kinds of people, even just for CDR, so it’s interesting that they’re there,” Visioni said.
The whole thing presented both a stark contrast and an inescapable mirror to COP28, where oil lobbyists roamed the grounds. Some environmental old-timers grumble that the UN climate conference has transformed from a diplomatic meeting into a trade show. But maybe there is now so much money and interest and public attention directed at the climate problem that any major gathering about it will take on shades of the commercial. There are lots of rich people with huge amounts of money who want to help do something about climate change. At the same time, the United States government is looking like less and less of a long-term reliable partner on climate research. Sooner or later, someone is going to try to do more serious geoengineering than releasing a few balloons in Mexico. Scientists have started preparing for that day. Is that smart? I don’t know. But it seems like a better strategy than feigned ignorance about where we’re headed.
Editor’s note: This story originally misidentified the name of the person who conducted geoengineering experiments in Mexico. We regret the error.
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Give the people what they want — big, family-friendly EVs.
The star of this year’s Los Angeles Auto Show was the Hyundai Ioniq 9, a rounded-off colossus of an EV that puts Hyundai’s signature EV styling on a three-row SUV cavernous enough to carry seven.
I was reminded of two years ago, when Hyundai stole the L.A. show with a different EV: The reveal of Ioniq 6, its “streamliner” aerodynamic sedan that looked like nothing else on the market. By comparison, Ioniq 9 is a little more banal. It’s a crucial vehicle that will occupy the large end of Hyundai's excellent and growing lineup of electric cars, and one that may sell in impressive numbers to large families that want to go electric. Even with all the sleek touches, though, it’s not quite interesting. But it is big, and at this moment in electric vehicles, big is what’s in.
The L.A. show is one the major events on the yearly circuit of car shows, where the car companies traditionally reveal new models for the media and show off their whole lineups of vehicles for the public. Given that California is the EV capital of America, carmakers like to talk up their electric models here.
Hyundai’s brand partner, Kia, debuted a GT performance version of its EV9, adding more horsepower and flashy racing touches to a giant family SUV. Jeep reminded everyone of its upcoming forays into full-size and premium electric SUVs in the form of the Recon and the Wagoneer S. VW trumpeted the ID.Buzz, the long-promised electrified take on the classic VW Microbus that has finally gone on sale in America. The VW is the quirkiest of the lot, but it’s a design we’ve known about since 2017, when the concept version was revealed.
Boring isn’t the worst thing in the world. It can be a sign of a maturing industry. At auto shows of old, long before this current EV revolution, car companies would bring exotic, sci-fi concept cars to dial up the intrigue compared to the bread-and-butter, conservatively styled vehicles that actually made them gobs of money. During the early EV years, electrics were the shiny thing to show off at the car show. Now, something of the old dynamic has come to the electric sector.
Acura and Chrysler brought wild concepts to Los Angeles that were meant to signify the direction of their EVs to come. But most of the EVs in production looked far more familiar. Beyond the new hulking models from Hyundai and Kia, much of what’s on offer includes long-standing models, but in EV (Chevy Equinox and Blazer) or plug-in hybrid (Jeep Grand Cherokee and Wrangler) configurations. One of the most “interesting” EVs on the show floor was the Cybertruck, which sat quietly in a barely-staffed display of Tesla vehicles. (Elon Musk reveals his projects at separate Tesla events, a strategy more carmakers have begun to steal as a way to avoid sharing the spotlight at a car show.)
The other reason boring isn’t bad: It’s what the people want. The majority of drivers don’t buy an exotic, fun vehicle. They buy a handsome, spacious car they can afford. That last part, of course, is where the problem kicks in.
We don’t yet know the price of the Ioniq 9, but it’s likely to be in the neighborhood of Kia’s three-row electric, the EV9, which starts in the mid-$50,000s and can rise steeply from there. Stellantis’ forthcoming push into the EV market will start with not only pricey premium Jeep SUVs, but also some fun, though relatively expensive, vehicles like the heralded Ramcharger extended-range EV truck and the Dodge Charger Daytona, an attempt to apply machismo-oozing, alpha-male muscle-car marketing to an electric vehicle.
You can see the rationale. It costs a lot to build a battery big enough to power a big EV, so they’re going to be priced higher. Helpfully for the car brands, Americans have proven they will pay a premium for size and power. That’s not to say we’re entering an era of nothing but bloated EV battleships. Models such as the overpowered electric Dodge Charger and Kia EV9 GT will reveal the appetite for performance EVs. Smaller models like the revived Chevy Bolt and Kia’s EV3, already on sale overseas, are coming to America, tax credit or not.
The question for the legacy car companies is where to go from here. It takes years to bring a vehicle from idea to production, so the models on offer today were conceived in a time when big federal support for EVs was in place to buoy the industry through its transition. Now, though, the automakers have some clear uncertainty about what to say.
Chevy, having revealed new electrics like the Equinox EV elsewhere, did not hold a media conference at the L.A. show. Ford, which is having a hellacious time losing money on its EVs, used its time to talk up combustion vehicles including a new version of the palatial Expedition, one of the oversized gas-guzzlers that defined the first SUV craze of the 1990s.
If it’s true that the death of federal subsidies will send EV sales into a slump, we may see messaging from Detroit and elsewhere that feels decidedly retro, with very profitable combustion front-and-center and the all-electric future suddenly less of a talking point. Whatever happens at the federal level, EVs aren’t going away. But as they become a core part of the car business, they are going to get less exciting.
Current conditions: Parts of southwest France that were freezing last week are now experiencing record high temperatures • Forecasters are monitoring a storm system that could become Australia’s first named tropical cyclone of this season • The Colorado Rockies could get several feet of snow today and tomorrow.
This year’s Atlantic hurricane season caused an estimated $500 billion in damage and economic losses, according to AccuWeather. “For perspective, this would equate to nearly 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product,” said AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jon Porter. The figure accounts for long-term economic impacts including job losses, medical costs, drops in tourism, and recovery expenses. “The combination of extremely warm water temperatures, a shift toward a La Niña pattern and favorable conditions for development created the perfect storm for what AccuWeather experts called ‘a supercharged hurricane season,’” said AccuWeather lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva. “This was an exceptionally powerful and destructive year for hurricanes in America, despite an unusual and historic lull during the climatological peak of the season.”
AccuWeather
This year’s hurricane season produced 18 named storms and 11 hurricanes. Five hurricanes made landfall, two of which were major storms. According to NOAA, an “average” season produces 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes. The season comes to an end on November 30.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced yesterday that if President-elect Donald Trump scraps the $7,500 EV tax credit, California will consider reviving its Clean Vehicle Rebate Program. The CVRP ran from 2010 to 2023 and helped fund nearly 600,000 EV purchases by offering rebates that started at $5,000 and increased to $7,500. But the program as it is now would exclude Tesla’s vehicles, because it is aimed at encouraging market competition, and Tesla already has a large share of the California market. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has cozied up to Trump, called California’s potential exclusion of Tesla “insane,” though he has said he’s okay with Trump nixing the federal subsidies. Newsom would need to go through the State Legislature to revive the program.
President-elect Donald Trump said yesterday he would impose steep new tariffs on all goods imported from China, Canada, and Mexico on day one of his presidency in a bid to stop “drugs” and “illegal aliens” from entering the United States. Specifically, Trump threatened Canada and Mexico each with a 25% tariff, and China with a 10% hike on existing levies. Such moves against three key U.S. trade partners would have major ramifications across many sectors, including the auto industry. Many car companies import vehicles and parts from plants in Mexico. The Canadian government responded with a statement reminding everyone that “Canada is essential to U.S. domestic energy supply, and last year 60% of U.S. crude oil imports originated in Canada.” Tariffs would be paid by U.S. companies buying the imported goods, and those costs would likely trickle down to consumers.
Amazon workers across the world plan to begin striking and protesting on Black Friday “to demand justice, fairness, and accountability” from the online retail giant. The protests are organized by the UNI Global Union’s Make Amazon Pay Campaign, which calls for better working conditions for employees and a commitment to “real environmental sustainability.” Workers in more than 20 countries including the U.S. are expected to join the protests, which will continue through Cyber Monday. Amazon’s carbon emissions last year totalled 68.8 million metric tons. That’s about 3% below 2022 levels, but more than 30% above 2019 levels.
Researchers from MIT have developed an AI tool called the “Earth Intelligence Engine” that can simulate realistic satellite images to show people what an area would look like if flooded by extreme weather. “Visualizing the potential impacts of a hurricane on people’s homes before it hits can help residents prepare and decide whether to evacuate,” wrote Jennifer Chu at MIT News. The team found that AI alone tended to “hallucinate,” generating images of flooding in areas that aren’t actually susceptible to a deluge. But when combined with a science-backed flood model, the tool became more accurate. “One of the biggest challenges is encouraging people to evacuate when they are at risk,” said MIT’s Björn Lütjens, who led the research. “Maybe this could be another visualization to help increase that readiness.” The tool is still in development and is available online. Here is an image it generated of flooding in Texas:
Maxar Open Data Program via Gupta et al., CVPR Workshop Proceedings. Lütjens et al., IEEE TGRS
A new installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris lets visitors listen to the sounds of endangered and extinct animals – along with the voice of the artist behind the piece, the one and only Björk.
How Hurricane Helene is still putting the Southeast at risk.
Less than two months after Hurricane Helene cut a historically devastating course up into the southeastern U.S. from Florida’s Big Bend, drenching a wide swath of states with 20 trillion gallons of rainfall in just five days, experts are warning of another potential threat. The National Interagency Fire Center’s forecast of fire-risk conditions for the coming months has the footprint of Helene highlighted in red, with the heightened concern stretching into the new year.
While the flip from intense precipitation to wildfire warnings might seem strange, experts say it speaks to the weather whiplash we’re now seeing regularly. “What we expect from climate change is this layering of weather extremes creating really dangerous situations,” Robert Scheller, a professor of forestry and environmental resources at North Carolina State University, explained to me.
Scheuller said North Carolina had been experiencing drought conditions early in the year, followed by intense rain leading up to Helene’s landfall. Then it went dry again — according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, much of the state was back to some level of drought condition as of mid-November. The NIFC forecast report says the same is true for much of the region, including Florida, despite its having been hit by Hurricane Milton soon after Helene.
That dryness is a particular concern due to the amount of debris left in Helene’s wake — another major risk factor for fire. The storm’s winds, which reached more than 100 miles per hour in some areas, wreaked havoc on millions of acres of forested land. In North Carolina alone, the state’s Forest Service estimates over 820,000 acres of timberland were damaged.
“When you have a catastrophic storm like [Helene], all of the stuff that was standing upright — your trees — they might be snapped off or blown over,” fire ecologist David Godwin told me. “All of a sudden, that material is now on the forest floor, and so you have a really tremendous rearrangement of the fuels and the vegetation within ecosystems that can change the dynamics of how fire behaves in those sites.”
Godwin is the director of the Southern Fire Exchange for the University of Florida, a program that connects wildland firefighters, prescribed burners, and natural resources managers across the Southeast with fire science and tools. He says the Southeast sees frequent, unplanned fires, but that active ecosystem management helps keep the fires that do spark from becoming conflagrations. But an increase like this in fallen or dead vegetation — what Godwin refers to as fire “fuel” — can take this risk to the next level, particularly as it dries out.
Godwin offered an example from another storm, 2018’s Hurricane Michael, which rapidly intensified before making landfall in Northern Florida and continuing inland, similar to Hurricane Helene. In its aftermath, there was a 10-fold increase in the amount of fuel on the ground, with 72 million tons of timber damaged in Florida. Three years later, the Bertha Swamp Road Fire filled the storm’s Florida footprint with flames, which consumed more than 30,000 acres filled with dried out forest fuel. One Florida official called the wildfire the “ghost” of Michael, nodding to the overlap of the impacted areas and speaking to the environmental threat the storm posed even years later.
Not only does this fuel increase the risk of fire, it changes the character of the fires that do ignite, Godwin said. Given ample ground fuel, flame lengths can grow longer, allowing them to burn higher into the canopy. That’s why people setting prescribed fires will take steps like raking leaf piles, which helps keep the fire intensity low.
These fires can also produce more smoke, Godwin said, which can mix with the mountainous fog in the region to deadly effect. According to the NIFC, mountainous areas incurred the most damage from Helene, not only due to downed vegetation, but also because of “washed out roads and trails” and “slope destabilization” from the winds and rain. If there is a fire in these areas, all these factors will also make it more challenging for firefighters to address it, the report adds.
In addition to the natural debris fire experts worry about, Helene caused extensive damage to the built environment, wrecking homes, businesses, and other infrastructure. Try imagining four-and-a-half football fields stacked 10 feet tall with debris — that’s what officials have removed so far just in Asheville, North Carolina. In Florida’s Treasure Island, there were piles 50 feet high of assorted scrap materials. Officials have warned that some common household items, such as the lithium-ion batteries used in e-bikes and electric vehicles, can be particularly flammable after exposure to floodwaters. They are also advising against burning debris as a means of managing it due to all the compounding risks.
Larry Pierson, deputy chief of the Swannanoa Fire Department in North Carolina, told Blueridge Public Radio that his department’s work has “grown exponentially since the storm.” While cooler, wetter winter weather could offer some relief, Scheuller said the area will likely see heightened fire behavior for years after the storm, particularly if the swings between particularly wet and particularly dry periods continue.
Part of the challenge moving forward, then, is to find ways to mitigate risk on this now-hazardous terrain. For homeowners, that might mean exercising caution when dealing with debris and considering wildfire risk as part of rebuilding plans, particularly in more wooded areas. On a larger forest management scale, this means prioritizing safe debris collection and finding ways to continue the practice of prescribed burns, which are utilized more in the Southeast than in any other U.S. region. Without focused mitigation efforts, Godwin told me the area’s overall fire outlook would be much different.
“We would have a really big wildfire issue,” he said, “perhaps even bigger than what we might see in parts of the West.”