US builds early warning system to detect geoengineering

BOULDER, Colorado – In a guarded compound in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, government scientists are working on a new kind of global alarm system: one that can detect if another country, or perhaps just an adventurous billionaire, Try to dim the sun.

Every few weeks, researchers in Boulder, Colorado, release a balloon that rises 17 miles into the sky.

Similar balloons are launched less frequently from other locations in Alaska, Hawaii and New Zealand; the island of Réunion, near the African coast; and even Antarctica.

They form the building blocks of a system that would alert American scientists to the use of geoengineering.

As the planet continues to warm, more people are interested in the idea of ​​trying intentionally blockl solar radiation (sometimes called solar radiation modification, solar geoengineering or climate intervention).

Governments, universities, investors and even environmentalists are investing millions of dollars in research and modeling of geoengineering systems.

It could be a relatively quick way to cool the planet.

But it could also trigger incalculable dangers.

Many are concerned that solar geoengineering could have unintended consequences, such as alter regional weather patterns and harm everything from agriculture to local economies.

And the first steps could be taken inadvertently, by a rogue actor or another nation that operates without any regulation or control.

Therefore, the United States is building a system that will allow it to determine if and when others try to manipulate the Earth’s thermostat.

“This is one of the most important stratospheric investigations in the world today,” David W. Fahey, director of the Chemical Sciences Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), declared on a recent afternoon in his office in Boulder. for its acronym in English), which is building the sentinel balloon network.

Both NOAA and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have satellites that can detect large amounts of aerosols in the atmosphere, but they cannot capture smaller amounts, hence the need for these balloons. .

Each of them carries a 2.5 kilo device, the size of a lunch box, full of cables and tubes.

The device measures tiny particles suspended in the air, or aerosols.

A jump could indicate the presence of an unusual amount of aerosols in the stratosphere, possibly to divert some of the sun’s heat into space.

Fahey’s team is building the capacity needed to detect, track and understand the effects of any unusual aerosol emissions.

The geoengineering early warning system is a shared effort between federal agencies and laboratories.

NOAA provides the device to measure aerosol concentration and alert of any anomaly and NASA, the plane that can travel at high altitude and transport preferred test equipment to the place where an aerosol cloud or column is located.

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, who work for the Department of Energy, have a tool that can estimate when and where an aerosol burst was emitted.

The researchers emphasize that these detection efforts are still in their infancy. For now, they believe that solar geoengineering has only been attempted on a very small scale, despite the claims of conspiracy theorists.

But the work of NOAA and Sandia demonstrates that geoengineering has gone from being science fiction to being a source of growing concern for the government.

“If a country, whether a great ally or a great adversary, is developing capabilities, can our scientists tell us what they are trying to do and what their impact would be?” asked Kelly Wanser, founder and CEO of SilverLining, a nonprofit organization. nonprofit that advocates for geoengineering research and helped convince Congress to fund NOAA’s program.

“To what extent is it dangerous? How quickly and forcefully do we have to respond?”

NOAA’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory in Boulder looks like a college campus.

Some of the world’s best atmospheric scientists wander the halls in hiking boots and T-shirts, as if they are about to climb the Rocky Mountains visible through the windows.

The only indication of the nature of their work is the armed guards at the gates, who check visitors’ vehicles for explosives.

In a windowless room, Alexandre Baron, a young French scientist specializing in the microphysical properties of aerosols, shows the innards of the boxes his team has been sending into the sky.

The device introduces air into an intake tube and scans it with a laser.

Aerosols they scatter the lightwhich allows its concentration and size to be recorded.

Once the balloons carrying the devices ascend to 90,000 feet, nearly three times the cruising altitude of a passenger plane, a valve opens to slowly release helium and return the balloons to Earth.

The round trip takes three and a half hours, during which the instruments radio aerosol readings to the ground.

NOAA recovers most of the boxes, which cost about $15,000 each, and replaces the components so they can be used again (some of the agency’s balloons have been lost over the ocean and in the inhospitable terrain of Alaska).

Sometimes a balloon and its precious cargo get tangled in trees. Leaning against the wall of Baron’s room, among the lab equipment, was a large tree trimmer.

“I used it on one occasion where the payload got hung up in a tree,” explained Troy Thornberry, NOAA research scientist in charge of the program.

The immediate task of Boulder scientists is to gather enough data on aerosol levels at different points on Earth to have baseline values ​​for normal concentrations, in the absence of some external event such as a volcanic eruption.

This would allow NOAA to determine when aerosol levels at a particular point are unusually high.

Thornberry explained that the program, which Congress began funding in 2020, is part of NOAA’s broader mission to study the atmosphere, adding that its budget is less than $1 million a year.

To establish global reference values, NOAA has collaborated with researchers and government scientists in other countries.

It is coordinating launches with researchers on Réunion Island, a French territory near the island nation of Mauritius.

This month, NOAA staff launched a balloon for the first time from Suriname, a small country on Brazil’s northern border, where they plan to conduct other targeted launches in the future with help from that country’s meteorological agency.

NOAA plans to visit Palau, a small island nation located between the Philippines and Guam, early next year, seeking a similar agreement.

Thornberry noted that the United States wants to establish regular balloon launches from seven sites around the world and maintain those launches for three to five years; By then, the agency should have enough information to confidently identify unusual increases.

Thornberry added that he is not aware of any other countries carrying out a similar surveillance effort. “Maybe because they just don’t talk about it,” he added.

If the balloon system detected a suspicious level of aerosols, Thornberry would turn to another NOAA laboratory instrument.

It is the most sensitive device in the world to detect sulfur dioxide, the material most cited as likely to be used to reflect radiation away from the Earth.

It is a set of valves and tubes reminiscent of a racing car engine and can measure concentrations as low as one part per billion.

NOAA would load the device onto the back of a truck, take it to Houston, and bolt it to the underside of an airplane.

But not just any plane.

There are only a handful of aircraft that can reach the stratosphere.

One of them is WB-57, of which there are three at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

The aircraft, characterized by a bulbous radome and extra-long wingspan, can fly above 60,000 feet.

Thornberry estimated that his team could put the device in the air within three weeks of detecting an aerosol cloud and before it could dissipate.

All that would be needed would be to finance the flight time, which can cost between one million and one and a half million dollars.

A NASA spokesperson declined to grant an interview to agency staff members.

About 400 miles south of Boulder, researchers at one of the country’s largest nuclear weapons laboratories have solved another part of the puzzle:

how to identify the location of aerosol emission.

Sandia National Laboratories, located on the eastern edge of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was created as part of the Manhattan Project, the United States’ clandestine effort to build a nuclear bomb. Today, the lab, run by a subsidiary of Honeywell International under contract to the Department of Energy, has sophisticated computer models that can determine whether other countries are testing nuclear weapons.

Modern nuclear test ban treaties only work “because we could know if Russia conducted the tests,” said Erin Sikorsky, who previously led climate security analysis for the U.S. intelligence community and is now director of the Center for Climate & Security, a Washington research group.

“And it was Sandia scientists who developed the systems to be able to find out.”

This ability to build sophisticated detection models is very useful in the era of solar geoengineering.

Laura Swiler, a senior scientist at Sandia, developed an algorithm that could take an observed aerosol plume from any source (for example, a volcanic eruption or a large wildfire) and go back in time to estimate its size and point of origin.

The United States is still years away from being ready to detect a solar geoengineering effort, but it is ahead of the curve.

“We know more about important aspects of stratospheric aerosol as it exists today than any other group in the world,” Fahey said.

“We act in the long term.”