Quico Toro at Persuasion:
The climate debate is in a strange place. We’re told we face an epochal, civilization-ending calamity within our lifetimes. But when scientists bring up unconventional new ways of managing that risk, we’re told we mustn’t even talk about them.
Why? Because, alas, some of their most promising ideas got slapped with the label “geoengineering”: a term so scary it seems to shut down people’s prefrontal cortex altogether.
The result is a weirdly misshapen public debate, where a strong taboo weighs over a whole branch of atmospheric science. Our climate debate refuses to acknowledge something top researchers now strongly suspect: that we could reverse global warming quickly and affordably using nothing scarier than sea salt.
The idea is called Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB). It would work by making clouds reflect more of the sun’s energy back out into space. As we speak, researchers are working on the basic science needed to figure out if it can really work at scale.
I’ve been talking to some of them.
More here.
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