Can humans do this better?
A friend sent me an article that has stuck in my head amidst all the other articles I've read lately: this piece about a two-person start-up that is selling 'cooling credits' to the public to pay for their company to use weather balloons to release sulfur into the atmosphere. The idea is to mimic the cooling impact that volcanoes have on the planet. There are two university teams of scientists that have been looking at various solar geoengineering ideas for the last 10 years, often involving ways of reflecting sunlight back into space, but have yet to run any real-world trials. Thus, here is the 39 year old entrepreneur co-founder of this company- called 'Make Sunsets'- quoted online as saying "we have a moral obligation" to be taking this kind of action rather than delaying while climate change continues to ramp up.
While I appreciate this guy's sense of urgency, the idea that he is setting a precedent for other non-scientists to potentially find a couple venture capital funds to support dramatic commercial ventures (in this case securing $750k) based on self-assurance more than science somehow does not remotely decrease my climate worries. The scale of what they've done so far has been small, but it's noticeable that this company seems to have not sought any government approval and had no clear ways of measuring their effects. A solar geoengineering expert was quoted at the end of this Washington Post piece as saying it's about "which values should rule in an era of rising temperatures... the start-up mentality or that of researchers" who naturally want to hypothesize and test rather than follow the modern business protocol of 'move fast and break things'.
From a geological perspective (where you measure time by Earth's 4.5 billion years), most human societies have already been moving fast & breaking things since the Industrial Revolution kicked in. Doing solar geoengineering without a clear plan to measure and evaluate its effects seems just as bonkers as continuing to pump CO2 into the air and water. Is a 'Wild West' free-for-all mentality really what our species needs to mitigate climate change?