Changing the World (Literally)

Could we create an atmospheric sun shield to halt the effects of global warming? Should we? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly are joined by climate scientist Daniele Visioni and sociologist Holly Jean Buck to explore the science and ethics of deliberately altering Earth’s climate.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All this talk of geoengineering, sounds like the plot of a movie soon to be written.

• 0:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, a Bond movie.

• 0:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A Bond movie?

• 0:05Chuck Nice?

  Yes. And a Bond movie always comes with a Bond villain. That's what I'm talking about.

• 0:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the Bond villain is controlling the geoengineering. All right. Coming up, we're gonna find out, is it Bond villain, or is it science, on StarTalk?

• 0:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, and this is special edition. And we're gonna be talking about geoengineering. Gary, you cooked this up.

• 0:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My co-host Gary here, how you doing, man?

• 0:49Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm good.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, you're looking in good shape.

• 0:51Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm breathing in, as we've discussed.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Breathing in.

• 0:54Gary O'Reilly?

  It's the breathing out I'm not doing.

• 0:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes and no.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back, as my co-host.

• 1:00Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so Gary, what did you set up today?

• 1:02Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so the annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate takes place here in the Hayden Planetarium. And this year, in 2025, it is geoengineering, the pros and the cons. Seen by many as controversial, it's an approach to solving global warming. But there are others see it as potential as very, very effective. There are a number of different options up for consideration, but with them come not just scientific issues, but ethical considerations as well. So pre-debate, we kidnapped two of the panelists, sorry, and we've dragged them, locked them in the office, and we're gonna have our own debate, because we couldn't wait until this evening, so.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did they, did they come willingly?

• 1:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Help.

• 1:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's still in a box. Who we have here, Daniele Visioni. Daniele, welcome to StarTalk. Thank you, Neil, thank you for having me. Let me get a little bit of your bio here. Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science at Cornell. Thanks for coming downstate to join us here. Is it still snowing in Cornell? It snows there all the time? Yes, it is, yes, it does. Yes, it is that it does, yeah. We good. You're a climate scientist specializing in this cottage industry of people who care about stratospheric aerosols and their behavior.

• 2:15Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 2:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whether they misbehave or behave as you intend. That's, that's your whole. Well, let's find out. And you also a specialist in what they're calling climate intervention methods and what its impact would be on the climate, on ecosystems and even on culture, society. So, I mean, what a, damn, that's a very high responsibility.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In other words, don't mess up.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I'm over that.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  A lot of people lining up.

• 2:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I grab your lapel and say, don't mess this up. So who had the idea that this is a thing that would work?

• 2:53Speaker 03

  People have been discussing it for decades, I would say. Some people point to Edward Teller actually being the first one discussing.

• 3:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Teller of the H-bomb fame.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  Yes, indeed.

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or infamy.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Right. People had discussion about could we fundamentally deliberately alter climate for a long time, right? As for as long as we understood what climate was.

• 3:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With my weather machine, I will one day rule the world.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, indeed. So it was, it is in a way, one could say, nothing new, except then as the problem of global warming, of climate change became more and more prominent, more and more scientists started thinking about this maybe a bit more deeply.

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it wasn't just a fringe idea?

• 3:31Speaker 03

  It was a fringe idea in the sense that a lot of people.

• 3:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Initially, but now.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No longer fringe.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  Many would still consider it fringe, or at least would like not to talk about it too much.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's different. Okay, okay.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  Right. In that fringe in that sense, I would say that the scientific basis is as well established as for most of climate science. But the most of the issues being in sort of the ethical societal dimension bring this topic into a different light.

• 3:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So as I understood from my bit of reading here, you had some prior awareness and understanding of this problem or the solution with volcanoes. Because they, they pump all manner of. Nastiness.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nastiness into the atmosphere. Nastiness. Into the atmosphere and you get to study that, that's nature doing it. And so what have you found from the history of volcanoes?

• 4:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the interesting thing is that it was Benjamin Franklin.

• 4:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My man.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  One of the first, yeah.

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody loves Ben.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  And he was a great scientist, too. He was the first person to point out that potentially the weirdness in climate that people had seen in the early 19th century were due to the Tambora eruption, a volcano in Indonesia, exploding in 1815.

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so he's around, of course, at that time. Just remind me, I think Indonesia also has Krakatoa. I mean, there's no shortage of volcanic.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  There's plenty of volcanoes in the tropical band, yes, yes, close to the equator. And sometimes they just go off, they explode.

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, and we get to see which way the ejecta goes. Like, it goes west to east, right, following prevailing air currents. So people get to study this. And he was clever enough to connect the dots. Between odd weather and an odd atmospheric phenomenon of volcano.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this is some of your foundational background for how you go forward from that?

• 5:26Speaker 03

  Yes, in the 20th century, then, there were at least three different volcanic eruption. Not as big as Tambora, but still big enough. The last one being Pinatubo in 1991.

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I was observing at a telescope. And when Pinatubo went off, it changed the optical properties of the atmosphere. We had to redo all of our data, pissed me off.

• 5:51Gary O'Reilly?

  It's not all about you.

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not your favorite volcano, I assume. Because I was at the telescope when the stuff came by. Right. Not when it went off, but it took a while.

• 6:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Once again, scientists taking their cue from Mother Nature. And I don't mean that sarcastically, it's a fact.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  No, it's true, yes.

• 6:08Gary O'Reilly?

  So with putting, it's sulfate aerosols?

• 6:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What aerosol, tell me, what is an aerosol?

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Okay, so by aerosol, us climate scientists define just every kind of solid or liquid particle suspended in air.

• 6:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a suspended part that makes it an aerosol?

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Yes, the suspended part, yes.

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, okay. The fact that it can be suspended at all makes it an aerosol, no matter what it is?

• 6:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Like SARS-CoV-2?

• 6:33Speaker 03

  You see, that's a very interesting thing. There were a lot of discussion about what constituted an aerosol when it came to the discussion around COVID. Because there were different definitions between what climate scientists consider an aerosol. These very tiny particles, sub-micron scale, they float around for a long while.

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Micron is a millionth of a meter, so very small.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  Very small, so gravity doesn't really do much. Turbulence actually keeps them afloat. And the very large droplets, like the one, like spit, that... Medical practitioners consider aerosols, right? So there was, this was a lot of the confusion at the beginning around airborne.

• 7:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two slightly different usages of the term.

• 7:12Chuck Nice?

  Of the same term.

• 7:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Same term.

• 7:13Gary O'Reilly?

  To get to reducing mean temperatures here on Earth, what science do those aerosols have to perform?

• 7:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By mean temperatures, you mean average?

• 7:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Mean.

• 7:23Chuck Nice?

  These are the temperatures that make fun of the lower temperatures. They're mean temperatures.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're pissed off temperatures.

• 7:29Gary O'Reilly?

  There you go.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  So the aerosols we think about, again, sub-micron scale, that's, ends up being the same size of the wavelength of most of the visible light that we get.

• 7:40Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  So they are at a specific size where they really interact a lot with incoming sunlight.

• 7:46Chuck Nice?

  That's wild.

• 7:48Gary O'Reilly?

  So it's photochemical?

• 7:49Speaker 03

  It's actual, more like, mu- magical.

• 7:51Chuck Nice?

  It's a physical block!

• 7:53Speaker 03

  There's also some chemistry, but mainly, all of the aerosols that are around that size will reflect, will interact with solar radiation, through MIE scattering, through various scattering processes.

• 8:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Remind me, MIE scattering? MIE scattering. So, that's a simple scattering where the wavelength of the light matches the particle, and then it redirects it.

• 8:16Chuck Nice?

  Bounces off.

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it goes off.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we have, like, Rayleigh scattering is a different kind of scatter that gives us the blue sky.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  The blue sky, that's where we're much smaller.

• 8:23Chuck Nice?

  That's for light, yeah. That was great.

• 8:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:26Chuck Nice?

  By the way, that makes so much sense because what's, you're talking about the radiation that's coming in, and greenhouse gases primarily carbon is trapped, carbon dioxide, sorry, is trapped because when the ground radiates heat, it's the atmosphere that's trapping a different wavelength.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, completely.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Yep, yep.

• 8:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Infrared.

• 8:51Chuck Nice?

  Infrared, right. So that's so wild. It literally becomes kind of a bounce board.

• 8:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's called science.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  It's so cool, isn't it? It's pretty cool.

• 9:01Gary O'Reilly?

  How about that?

• 9:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying.

• 9:03Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god!

• 9:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can still call it wild, but at the end of the day, it's science.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  I'm Nicholas Costella and I'm a proud supporter of StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 9:31Gary O'Reilly?

  So for this process to be successful to the level that we would all want it to be successful, how much aerosols do you have to put into the stratosphere? How long is it there? I mean, who gets to argue over where you put them? Does it matter then on seasonality?

• 9:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what have we learned from volcanoes about where it goes? Right. And if I remember correctly, I think it was the late 80s where there was, there was talk of nuclear winter, where a total nuclear exchange would burn forests, put, I guess, aerosols in the atmosphere, blocking sunlight, plunging all the earth. Into darkness and cold. Into cold. So that would be a bad effect of it, but now you're trying to make it a good effect.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  So let me, oh, great question, but they can all, and they can also all be connected, right? So aerosols, we already have aerosols all around us, right? Most of the pollution, the haze that you see in New York City, that's pollution. Those are aerosols, right?

• 10:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it makes for a lovely sunset. Let's be real.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  Makes a lovely sunset. It's super bad for your health.

• 10:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  When you burn fossil fuels, you burn coal, you produce these aerosols, they're super bad for your health. And, once they rain down-

• 10:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My empathy has never been worse. But it's a beautiful sunset.

• 10:40Gary O'Reilly?

  I want to hear this. I need to-

• 10:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just trying to think.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  So they come down, and they come down mostly, we burn them very close to where we leave, they stay in the air, but they are below the clouds. So whenever then there's rain, they just get washed out.

• 10:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lost away.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  So actually currently, we-

• 10:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, a raindrop forms on these particles?

• 11:00Speaker 03

  It absorbs the, not as much for sulfate. Sulfate is actually not as well, as good as a cloud nuclei as other kind of particles. Not all, not all aerosol particles-

• 11:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But when they say something, things rain out, they typically mean that the droplet formed on these particles?

• 11:15Speaker 03

  No, it can also mean that the droplet, while falling, absorbs these tinier particles. That's what, that's called- Wet deposition or washout of aerosols.

• 11:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the real term?

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Uh, wet deposition or washout.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool, I love that.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, washout. Yeah. So normally, we emit, as humans, just as pollution, over a hundred million tons of sulfur dioxide, which is the precursor of all sulfide aerosols, uh, per year. A hundred million tons. It's a lot, and most of that falls down close to where we live, right?

• 11:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  Acid rain, people who are alive in the eighties, not me, but people who are alive in the eighties will remember acid rain. That were because before.

• 11:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just so I get my chemistry, remember my chemistry. Sulfur dioxide is not itself acid, but if you combine with a hydrogen, you get hydrogen H2SO4,

• 12:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 12:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  which is itself sulfuric acid.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 12:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that would be the acid rain.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  So, SO2 gets oxidized by OH, the radical OH, which is present everywhere in the atmosphere. And these then eventually results another three reactions, then results SO3, and then H2SO4.

• 12:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  And then this H2SO4, it's in vapor form, sulfuric acid, and then tends to nucleate into sulfuric acid particles, liquid aerosol droplets.

• 12:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hence acid rain.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Yep, hence acid rain. So, back in the eighties, the US was emitting way more sulfur than it is now, and so the global emissions were a hundred and sixty million, a hundred and fifty million tons. Now we're getting, the US has been going down for a while, Europe as well, China and India have been going up, but in general, we're still around a hundred million tons. These aerosol particles do have a cooling effect. We know this, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, has known this for a while. They do cover up a small fraction of the warming produced by the greenhouse gases.

• 13:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're saying is, our effort to clean up the air has taken these particles out, and thereby increased the effects of global warming, unmasked.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  It has unmasked.

• 13:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unmasked, very good.

• 13:16Speaker 03

  That's the word that normally it's used. It has unmasked part of the global warming that before was sort of hidden. So, and this is the other part of the observation, right? You need, but to... Do these masking close to the surface. You need hundreds of millions of tons because these aerosols stay just a couple of days.

• 13:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  So the idea behind something like stratospheric aerosol injection is what if you could put a tiny fraction of these aerosols, they would stay though for a hundred times longer than they do at the surface before falling down, right? Months, up to a year. Essentially, you would get more bang for your buck, right? With just a smaller fraction, you would get the same amount of cooling, but far away from where people live and breathe, and you could get the same effect while not pushing.

• 13:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what makes the stratosphere special for how long something would last there? Is it because we're not making clouds there?

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Right, so there's no clouds, there's no water vapor, the stratosphere is very dry, so there's no rain out. But also, the troposphere, it's called troposphere because it's turbulent, right? Because there are turbulence.

• 14:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Troposphere is the lowest level.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  Where we live, where airplanes are. Above the troposphere, there's a stratosphere that is called like that because it's very stratified. Things, there's no turbulence, things move very slowly.

• 14:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I never thought about that. Because if you have turbulence, it's turbulence up and down. And if you're up and down turbulence, it's not stratified. So that's why you call it stratosphere. Very good, thank you.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  And so, once you put something.

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Italian, what is it?

• 14:43Speaker 03

  Stratosfera?

• 14:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I knew it would be a cool word.

• 14:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stratosfera.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Well, that's where it comes from, right?

• 14:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it's the original Latin.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a Latin root.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  So yeah, once you put something, especially in the tropical stratosphere, that's where there is the large scale, what we call the Brewer-Dobson circulation. It's essentially this large scale stratospheric circulation that pushes things up close to the tropics and then pushes them poleward. So eventually, the air that is in the stratosphere goes back down, but close to the pole, and it takes a year, a year and a half before a parcel of air that originates or of any material that is in the stratosphere goes all the way, gets removed from the stratosphere.

• 15:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it. And you get a good spreading of the effect.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  Yes, that too. Because, right, because the other thing is that, both on a latitude, but even more importantly, on a longitudinal way, as in once, if you put, and this is another one thing that makes stratospheric aerosol injection complex from a political point of view, is that you can put these aerosols on top of. The US and they're not going to stay there. They're going to spread throughout definitely the whole latitudinal band. So China, which is on the same latitude as the US or Europe. They're all, these aerosols are gonna in a week. So longitudinally, the winds are very fast. And so in a week or two, there's a complete spread. And we see that with volcanoes all the time. Small volcanic plumes spread in a couple of weeks throughout the whole.

• 16:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how I know because I was in the Chilean Andes. And the Pinatubo was east of us that just came due west. Just messed all to mess you up. Messed me up.

• 16:20Gary O'Reilly?

  So when we had that explosion in Iceland, it brought civil aviation to the ground.

• 16:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's see if he can pronounce the name of that volcano. What was the name of that volcano in Iceland?

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Everybody calls it a, a, I have a lot of volcanologists. They just call him.

• 16:35Gary O'Reilly?

  You got the answer you deserve.

• 16:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the answer I deserve. That stopped air traffic in and out of Heathrow. Everywhere and everywhere in Europe. Yeah.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  But that was not the sulfate.

• 16:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so do we have a potential issue? Because you say it's going to sit above this area of commercial air flight. Will it not descend?

• 16:52Speaker 03

  So two things. So volcanoes explode all the times. And when they explode, the main thing they do, the short term, larger effect is the ash.

• 17:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  Right? So that's the thing that is very dangerous for aviation. Because when ash interacts with the, with the aircraft.

• 17:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gunked up everything.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Right. It can glassify and so it can be a real danger. Some volcanoes.

• 17:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you say glassify?

• 17:13Speaker 03

  I think so, and I'm not sure whether that's an actual scientific term, but let's pretend it is.

• 17:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that. So this is the ash getting heated in the engine.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Turning into.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Glass.

• 17:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Glass, but wasn't it already heated in the volcano?

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Right, but then it cools down pretty quickly. And so the ash actually forms that way. And then it can sort of undergo.

• 17:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the ash is pretty, okay, so when people get buried in ash like they did in.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  Pompeii.

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no. No, Pompeii was not ash. El Galano was ash.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 17:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pompeii was a...

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Well, just a magma. That was a magma flow?

• 17:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was actually a mud flow, really.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Oh, that's right.

• 17:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why everything was preserved.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. It was mud flow.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so I hadn't fully appreciated what the ash was and what it can be at its worst.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this ash is the first thing, the thing you actually see. You don't really see the sulfate, right? But it's a thing that is dangerous over a one, two days time scale a week, right? Also because this ash is also very tiny and so you can breathe in, it's very dangerous and so on. And it's dangerous for aviation. Some volcanic eruptions also have, what for climate scientists is a lot of sulfate. Not all volcanic eruptions also launch sulfate in the atmosphere. For instance, Hunga Tonga, that happened in 2022, was a huge volcanic eruption. There was almost no sulfate. It was just water vapor pushed up from the ocean. But there was almost no sulfate. Hunga Tonga had something like 300,000 tons of sulfate. Pinatubo had 17 million tons of sulfate in a couple of hours.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  And how much sulfate does a Kuna Matata have? Um, I will have to go back and check my number. I don't know. Good question.

• 18:53Gary O'Reilly?

  So we're putting aerosols into the stratosphere and we've got the natural cycle of the wind systems. How do you discuss this with sovereign nations? And they say, well, I don't want that flying over my territory. Who then owns the territory above a particular country?

• 19:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have to find your counterpart in every country? So that they can speak to their governments to come to an agreement on this?

• 19:16Speaker 03

  That's definitely what we do as scientists, yes. I constantly talk and work with climate scientists from all over the world, for sure. For your question, though, I would say, nobody knows who this stratosphere belongs to. The stratosphere of all places is actually one of the least regulated. We know airspace is in the troposphere and so we know who is liable for things that happen in the troposphere. And then there's space and some other treaties regulating that. But nobody really had to regulate the stratosphere for a long time. The only treaty that exists is the... Montreal Protocol for the substances that affects stratospheric ozone, which protects us from damaging ultraviolet light.

• 19:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that whole protocol was just for the ozone.

• 19:58Chuck Nice?

  Just for the ozone.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  It was just for the ozone, and a couple of years ago, there was an increase in one of these ozone depleting substances that was not predicted, was not expected, and it took countries a year to figure out from which country these depleting substance, this increasing depleting substance was coming from. But even then, the Montreal Protocol-

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't leave us hanging. Which country was it?

• 20:18Speaker 03

  Well, it was a country in Asia.

• 20:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Okay. You see, interesting thing was that the agency, the US scientific agency, that found out about where this product was coming from couldn't just point the finger and say, "This is coming from you." Right? They could say, "We think that this increase is coming from this region of the world." But there was no, there is no enforcement mechanism, even in the Montreal Protocol, that could say, "Oh, you have to stop." I mean, the country voluntarily agreed to stop, right? So a lot of these international treaties don't really have enforcement mechanisms. For the Montreal Protocol, it's all a matter of all countries agreeing that ozone is important and it should be protected.

• 21:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think more countries signed that than any other treaty ever.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  It is the most successful climate and environmental protection treaty in the world. Yeah, every country signed it because every country realized how important it was to have an ozone layer.

• 21:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So Chuck, you missed it. Yeah. Okay. It was a cosmic phenomenon that affected mostly white people, and so they acted that way.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. That is surprisingly correct, but yeah.

• 21:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does it take to motivate the powerful countries of the world?

• 21:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just say-

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Not get their town. If their town is at risk.

• 21:35Chuck Nice?

  You're gonna lose the beaches.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:39Gary O'Reilly?

  So what could the stratospheric aerosols achieve in terms of?

• 21:46Speaker 03

  So, first of all, very clear. These aerosols cannot solve climate change. Climate change is a whole other problem. It comes from the greenhouse gases that we have in the atmosphere.

• 21:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a Band-Aid, as we would say.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  It's a Band-Aid, it's a stopgap. You can call it however you want. It's something, you know, some people dismissively say, well, it's like taking an aspirin if you have cancer. It's not treating the underlying causes, but even if you have cancer, you're the right to a dignified life and not to suffer from other pains, right? And so in a way, it's a Band-Aid in the sense that, yes, it could help temperature from going up, right? It could prevent further warming. And this way, it could reduce some of the risks that come from this warming that we know are going to come from this warming and that we are already observing are coming with the warming that we see now.

• 22:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a couple of questions, fast ones. Climate seems to me, even as an astrophysicist, to be an immensely complex problem to solve, given all the variables, given the turbulence in an atmosphere, the gas and different gas species and the interaction of the atmosphere with the ocean and the land, all of this. So is AI helping you in any of this?

• 22:58Speaker 03

  We're definitely exploring a lot of ways in which AI could help reading the huge amount of data that we already have, for instance, from satellite observation of things like plumes coming out of volcanoes. Nobody could look at all of them, right? That's what AI is very good at. Pattern recognition.

• 23:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Finding it, yeah.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Finding stuff that humans would have a hard time with. So this is really an emerging field, but there's a lot of interesting things that we are starting to do with AI.

• 23:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so then, here's a risk that I learned about, and I just want to know, is it authentic? And is it the worst thing to worry about? If the temperature starts rising and you say, we need more aerosols. And so you've got this, these two competing forces, you get to tamp it down. Then there's a terrorist attack on the people putting up the aerosols. Then the aerosol falls out. And now you have a catastrophic shock to the system because the greenhouse gases have been going up.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  What you were masking for so long.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were masking for so long, then it's instantly, you have a catastrophic exposure to greenhouse warming. How much do you think about?

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Contingencies here. That's a great question. I would say it is something to worry about, except I would say it would not be instantaneous. If you stopped putting, since these aerosols stay for so long, if you stop putting them for a day, a week, a month, nothing really changes because the aerosols stay on for a long time. Now, if you stop for a year or two years, that's where you unmask all the warm, right? So, this is your... So that gives you some time to find the terrorists and kick their ass.

• 24:37Chuck Nice?

  And rebuild or do whatever.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  But of course, you would have, I think this is a very valid concern when it comes to short-sphere aerosols, but it's also one that points out to the fact that essentially you would need to plan carefully, have contingency plans, and you could not rely on just one actor doing this, right? Because this is a worldwide thing. Could someone go up and put something? Sure, maybe they could before they were stopped, but that's not how you would achieve anything. To achieve anything, you would need a carefully planned thing with contingency plans for what happens if we need to stop. For instance, I've done research on what would happen if a volcanic eruption happened while you're doing this. What would you do? And well, it turns out that, you know, then you would ramp down or maybe shift where you're putting the aerosols to try to manage it.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  This is true geoengineering. You understand your planet and you interact in a way to your benefit. Yeah. The key difference is really in the word deliberate. When we say, what does geoengineering mean? And a lot of people ask me, well, haven't we been geoengineering the planet already with all the greenhouse gases? Maybe in a way, but the point of geoengineering, we say deliberate, because this would be the first time we consciously decide to globally affect climate to our benefit. Engineering on purpose. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:50Chuck Nice?

  Now, what about unintended consequences? Because you do something here, something else has to happen over there. So what do you anticipate or what have you seen?

• 26:02Speaker 03

  That's way too polite.

• 26:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How can this go horribly wrong?

• 26:08Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  That is a perfectly fair question.

• 26:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because there's things you look, that you know could go wrong. And then there are the things you don't know could go wrong.

• 26:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And for something as catastrophic as Earth's atmosphere, where does your confidence come from?

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Our confidence comes from a lot of different observations. The main one being, we do have an upper bound for how wrong things can go. And that's again, Pinatubo. If a volcano can dump seventeen or twenty million tons of sulfate all at once.

• 26:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Into the stratosphere.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  Into the stratosphere. And things happened after that, right? Temperatures cooled, there were changes in atmospheric chemistry and so on. But fundamentally, that's really as catastrophic as it can get. And we've been able to understand what happened there, right? On top of all of that, all of this sulfate came down, yes, but there is so much more. When we talk about sulfate, the reason we do that is because we understand the environmental impacts. They're not good, for sure, but we understand them. Now, you could be thinking of, what if we try to engineer a perfect compound to put in the stratosphere instead of sulfate? Something that works better, that is not as toxic. You could do that. People are thinking about that. That's legit.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  But in that case, that's not something that we understand how it interacts with the environment long term. While sulfate is something we understand very well.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the devil you know.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  It's the devil we know. It's, we understand the upper bound of how wrong things can be.

• 27:35Chuck Nice?

  You have experience with it. You've seen it happen before.

• 27:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, when the rain comes out, you acidify, you can acidify regions that could be harmful to wildlife or plant life.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  So again, in this, as opposed to when we do it through pollution, these aerosols would mix very well. And most of that actually would fall, most of the aerosols then would fall over the oceans. Where really sulfate is not something that affects ocean acidification that much, because that's mostly carbon driven.

• 28:05Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  Again, that's a clear trade-off. You would increase pollution by a little bit, right? 10% more than now in many locations. You would spread it evenly, but it would still come down. And does that affect? Yes, that's one of the, again, that's one of the things we definitely are looking into and should be looking into more. Actually quantifying and understanding these trade offs. All the things that could go wrong. And it could very well be that there are other things that could go wrong that we don't know yet, or maybe we haven't thought about, which is why I always welcome other climate scientists starting to look into this field. Because if suddenly we found, we found a roadblock, something we hadn't thought about, nobody had thought about in the last 30 years, that would make this, no, look, we really

• 28:49Speaker 03

  can't do this, this is to the interest for this reason. Okay, at least we know, right? The point of doing research is that then, at least, we can say, nope, we've thought about this, here's the reason why we can't do that.

• 28:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I, I have an analogy from physics where in the Large Hadron Collider.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where they're creating energies, where there was some risk that you might create a black hole.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 29:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A small risk.

• 29:13Gary O'Reilly?

  It's a small black hole, yeah.

• 29:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would then consume the Earth as it moved through. And so, why do you proceed, even if that's such a small risk? Because that's a small risk, but it, it's catastrophic to the planet. And it turns out, nature gave us examples. They're cosmic rays that come from deep space, like the center of the galaxy, at extremely high energies, higher energy than anything we're making inside the accelerator. And they collide with molecules in our atmosphere, and it's not making, making black holes. And we've been here for five billion years, so.

• 29:54Chuck Nice?

  So that's the, that's, that's the cosmic peanut, peanutiboo, or peanutuba, tuna tuba. That's the cosmic peanut butter.

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have nature to calibrate our expectations.

• 30:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. Where are we with the simulations? And therefore then testing? Because we can sit here and have a talking shop for decades, it sounds like we have, because I'm part of the team now, obviously.

• 30:15Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:16Gary O'Reilly?

  But surely this testing goes on, but there must be something pushing back for this not to be the case. Because this sounds too good to be true to, even if it's a Band-Aid, I think we'll take the Band-Aid right now.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's part of the issue, right? And I would say I work a lot with social scientists as well. And when it comes to this topic. And one time I was talking to one of my colleagues and he really asked me the same question. Like, well, then this sounds good. Why aren't we doing it? And we kind of set out to think about this from a societal perspective, right?

• 30:45Chuck Nice?

  As any good scientist should do. You want to look at all angles, even angles opposite what you're trying to go with it.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it is clear that there are a lot of worries, right? When you talk to people about it, they're like, wow, this sounds crazy. And that's a perfectly good reaction. Now, the question is, when do and when do people stop having that reaction? Will it ever happen? And what is going to take? Some people suggest that once people are going to experience more and more the effects of climate change, that's going to change their mind.

• 31:14Chuck Nice?

  So desperation is like your end.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  I do not think we should make plans out of desperation.

• 31:19Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  On the other hand, people are saying, well, will there be a point in which we are secure enough into our assessments that this will convince most people, right? I think that's kind of the angle that I try to work with. As in, I think that the main ways in which we're going to have meaningful discussions about this and move forward and maybe start even outdoor testing is once we've put the whole scientific community in a way behind assessing robustly, what do we know and understand about something like transference carousel injection? So at this point, there's just, yeah, honestly, a handful of scientists compared to the whole climate science endeavor. But the amount of people that are looking into this is getting bigger and bigger.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  And so I think we're pretty close to having broader international assessments around the topic, which means that because eventually, when I maybe talk to policymakers or to people in other country, they don't want to know the results of my study or of my climate. They want to know what's the agreement, right? So that's kind of why it's so important to talk about this from an international.

• 32:22Chuck Nice?

  The results of any one land. You need a geopolitical scientific consensus, consensus.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  Imagine if they had thought about that with something like the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Climate Change.

• 32:33Chuck Nice?

  Indeed, yeah. And once you have that, you might be in a better position.

• 32:36Gary O'Reilly?

  But then you get 10 people in a discussion, you end up with 12 opinions.

• 32:40Chuck Nice?

  Of course.

• 32:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Always the case. But trying to get nations to sit around a table and, well, it's not bothering me. Or you're not putting that over my sky.

• 32:48Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah, they're not in my backyard.

• 32:50Gary O'Reilly?

  So how far are we from making something like this? Implemented.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  I would have absolutely no way to predict that, I would say, and be honest. But I think we can, for instance, look at climate change, right? And say, honestly, the first assessment report from the IPCC was in 1994, or it was in the early 90s. And we've advanced greatly, but fundamentally conclusions haven't really changed from 1994, which is we add greenhouse gases, that's bad, that increases warming, and that's gonna make things worse.

• 33:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  True.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  And there have been, I wanna take in this case, the optimistic view of saying, you know, there have been many advances when it comes to climate change mitigation and policy. Have there been enough? Definitely not, but there have been, right? There have been the Paris Agreement. Now, is the United States of America out of the Paris Agreement? Yes, it is. Will they stay for long? I don't know. But, you know, solar and wind are kind of unstoppable. There's a lot of Europe.

• 33:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're going now.

• 33:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 33:49Speaker 03

  Europe is very much into renewables. China is even more than Europe and the United States.

• 33:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In spite of their carbon footprint growing in some sectors, they're still making great advances.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  Yes, they are, because they understand.

• 34:03Chuck Nice?

  They see it as an economic issue. They don't even care right now. They look at it as this is a necessity for our economy, unlike, unfortunately, the supposed greatest economy in the world.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  So, so in this sense, I guess, as a scientist, I'm not gonna be the one making the decision about whether to do this or not. I shouldn't be. It should be no sign, you know, me and Mr. Nail as well. We've met enough scientists, we shouldn't be the one making this kind of decisions. Come on.

• 34:30Chuck Nice?

  Well, you should if you can laugh maniacally while you're doing it.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:34Chuck Nice?

  That's how it gets done.

• 34:39Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's what you're doing.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  But we can provide, I still think that the overall, the strongest merit of science is providing the information that can let people make the good decisions. Will they make good decisions all the time? No, because we're humans and we don't. But that's not a good reason why not to provide

• 34:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  the, the information that could allow people to make these decisions.

• 35:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me land this plane by saying, every...

• 35:04Speaker 03

  It's a stratospheric plane?

• 35:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me say, every disaster movie begins with people in charge ignoring the advice of scientists.

• 35:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just saying. I hear you. Yeah, that's it. Daniele Visioni. I love how you say that. Oh, I love thinking about how to say it. Thanks for joining us here. Thank you. Oh, my gosh, we love your expertise. And you put it in the mix and stir it up and see what comes out the other side. As these years progress, we don't know where the valuation will land. Oh, we know. No, stop. Come on, guys. It's America 2025. We merk. It's merk right now. Merk. So again, thank you for joining us. Thank you. So next up, we're gonna get the point of view from a sociologist who thinks about the impact of all these measures on the human condition, not only domestically, but around

• 36:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the world. Coming right up.

• 36:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So our next guest is Holly June Buck, Associate Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo, that's SUNY. Nice name. Yeah. So ain't that something? When I was growing up, no one would imagine a department with this title. Environment and Sustainability. And that's why we're in this mess that we are in right now. Because nobody envisioned needing this. Need needing this. Yeah. I also have her down as Radcliffe Salata, Climate Justice Fellow at Harvard. That sounds like superhero. That sounds badass. It really does, yes. Cape and everything.

• 36:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And interdisciplinary environmental social scientist and with special attention to how people engage with emergent climate control technologies. Interesting. That's a thing. That's like a whole sociological thing. It has to be. It's gotta be. Why not? And my favorite title of them all, author of a book from 2019, After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy Repair and Restoration. Wow. Sounds very much like the movie The Day After. Or what's that other movie, uh, uh, uh, Snowpiercer?

• 37:34Chuck Nice?

  Oh, Snowpiercer.

• 37:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was after.

• 37:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that's where climate people messed up.

• 37:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 37:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, Holly.

• 37:41Speaker 05

  Thanks so much. It's great to be here.

• 37:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do we call you Holly Jean or just Holly?

• 37:44Speaker 05

  Either one's great.

• 37:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Either one's good. Holly Jean's kinda. Yeah, cool. Holly Jean.

• 37:49Chuck Nice?

  Holly Jean sounds like a, uh, country western star. You know?

• 37:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Holly Jean.

• 37:55Chuck Nice?

  Holly Jean.

• 37:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, so, we've just come off of a conversation, looking at the pros and cons of aerosol injections into the atmosphere. Could you just give us some options on how to achieve the same effect that are banding about today?

• 38:13Speaker 05

  The same effect as solar geoengineering?

• 38:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's got, it's got a noble goal to sort of protect Earth from our own misdeeds regarding climate. And so if we don't do that, what are you gonna offer us?

• 38:29Chuck Nice?

  Uh.

• 38:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I might, would, did I direct that question to you?

• 38:32Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I'm sorry. Cause I had an answer.

• 38:37Speaker 05

  Well, there's Plan A. Shall we go over Plan A?

• 38:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, go. Yes.

• 38:41Speaker 05

  So, a whole bunch of countries, including the US up until a minute ago, but states as well, New York State, have signed on to these net zero targets.

• 38:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:51Speaker 05

  So, ideas that.

• 38:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's net zero carbon dioxide.

• 38:54Speaker 05

  Or greenhouse gas.

• 38:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, in general.

• 38:56Speaker 05

  There, yeah. I mean, they're a little bit different targets, but yeah, the, the main idea is you don't put out more than you can remove.

• 39:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 39:03Speaker 05

  And that needs to happen by mid-century, which is actually.

• 39:07Chuck Nice?

  Or yesterday.

• 39:08Speaker 05

  Really soon, yeah.

• 39:09Chuck Nice?

  It could've happened yesterday and we've.

• 39:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It needs to happen yesterday.

• 39:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and we, and we still got some issues if it were to happen yesterday, but go ahead.

• 39:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:16Speaker 05

  So basically remaking our whole energy system.

• 39:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 39:20Speaker 05

  Our built environment. It's a big transformation. That's, that's why people are talking about.

• 39:25Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 39:25Speaker 05

  Geoengineering.

• 39:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so I get that. And this aerosol in the atmosphere solution sounds so Bond villain.

• 39:33Chuck Nice?

  It's, it, it does sound sexy, doesn't it?

• 39:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, it sounds like this should be in a movie.

• 39:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 39:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But why not just take the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? And they don't have to worry about any of this.

• 39:44Chuck Nice?

  Well, you sound like my mother. You know what you need? You need a sitcom. Why don't you have a sitcom?

• 39:51Chuck Nice?

  In other words, yeah, that's good.

• 39:53Speaker 05

  We do need to do some of that, but there's a limit at how much we can do. I mean, think about, think about all the effort it took to take it out of the ground, right? All the pipes, all the refining, all the distribution, all of that infrastructure. We're talking about building that basically all over again to put it back underground, so.

• 40:15Gary O'Reilly?

  And there are limited places where you can actually store.

• 40:17Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 40:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting sort of macro way to see that.

• 40:22Chuck Nice?

  That is, yeah. That's a really interesting way to look at it because you never really consider

• 40:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 40:27Chuck Nice?

  how much infrastructure is involved in just oil extraction and then refinery, just that. Let alone everything else involved to get it to you where, you know, everything that we see.

• 40:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't have to bury it, do I? For example, the White Cliffs of Dover, that's limestone cliffs and that's a repository of carbon from our environment. And they're not buried, but not that we're making that, but I'm just saying that didn't involve a pipe to put it back into the ground.

• 40:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, so people talk about closed system and open system carbon removal. So in a closed system, you would have an injection well, you'd be injecting that into rock formations deep underground. You more or less know where it is, but what you're just talking about is more of an open system approach, putting it into the ocean, putting it into fields where you can make rocks weather faster. That's a bit trickier because it's harder to measure what's going on.

• 41:22Gary O'Reilly?

  How are we transporting this? Because you've got certain industries that produce an awful lot of CO2 and then they don't have somewhere right on their doorstep to screw all this away, I'll call it that. So how are we, I mean, pipes are one, are we transporting it in any other way?

• 41:38Speaker 05

  Barges, rail, trucks.

• 41:41Chuck Nice?

  The same as oil. The same as oil. It's exactly the same.

• 41:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The two trucks go in opposite directions on the highway.

• 41:48Chuck Nice?

  They took each other in two.

• 41:52Gary O'Reilly?

  That was my, that was my soft point.

• 41:54Chuck Nice?

  That's funny.

• 41:55Gary O'Reilly?

  So if we're spending how many billions on carbon catcher plants, right? And I just say to myself, just.

• 42:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are we actually, is that a real thing?

• 42:03Speaker 05

  We spent a few billions trying to start them. We'll see if they get finished.

• 42:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's still a nascent industry.

• 42:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, very much nascent.

• 42:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 42:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Are they better than trees at capturing CO2?

• 42:13Chuck Nice?

  That's a very good question, Ashley.

• 42:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, trees are great for a whole bunch of reasons.

• 42:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 42:19Speaker 05

  The thing with these land-based approaches, we need more of them for providing habitat for a million reasons, but we can't expect nature to do all the work here of what we took out of the ground.

• 42:31Chuck Nice?

  Yes, right.

• 42:32Speaker 05

  We have limited land for, for trees, unfortunately, because we want that land for growing food.

• 42:37Chuck Nice?

  And so basically, we should stop eating. That's really the answer here. Stop eating and heating. Eating and heating, let it go.

• 42:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I get many of the land solutions to this, but how about ocean solutions? Other than CO2 just getting absorbed into the water, surely there are creatures out there that would value some uptake in CO2.

• 42:58Speaker 05

  If you're talking about the whale concept, that one might not scale to the levels we need it to, but if you're talking about plankton, on the other hand, that seems more promising. These are at really early stages of research, though.

• 43:11Gary O'Reilly?

  But the theory seems really positive, so you.

• 43:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How does it work? What's the procedure?

• 43:16Speaker 05

  Basically, the concept of ocean iron fertilization would be to add nutrients to the ocean to create a big plankton bloom. The plankton falls down to the bottom of the ocean.

• 43:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do plankton blooms have anything to do with CO2? Or these the photosynthetic plankton?

• 43:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, like a tree?

• 43:39Speaker 05

  Like a, like a plant.

• 43:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They do what a plant would do.

• 43:41Speaker 05

  Right. Yeah, exactly.

• 43:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 43:43Gary O'Reilly?

  The light bulb went on.

• 43:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, thank you, thank you. So, it's an LED light bulb.

• 43:49Gary O'Reilly?

  I would expect nothing less.

• 43:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, thank you. So, you're growing plankton in the presence of the CO2, know differently how you would grow trees in the presence of CO2. Except, oceans are huge. So what happens when the plankton die? And then they fall to the bottom, then what?

• 44:06Speaker 05

  I mean, ideally, that CO2 would stay at the bottom. But this is the issue with this category of approaches, is that the science is really early and the science is expensive, right? Because you need ocean-chartered vehicles going out there doing experiments. And we just haven't really begun that process in earnest.

• 44:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not a laboratory experiment.

• 44:25Gary O'Reilly?

  But the potential for this sink and die of the phytoplankton is capturing massive amounts of CO2. But surely that has some toxicity in the ecosystems?

• 44:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, what does it do with oxygen? Right, exactly. There's little creatures down there that, they do matter. I care about them.

• 44:43Chuck Nice?

  What was the little microscopic creature that was here that put all the oxygen in the air?

• 44:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, cyanobacteria.

• 44:49Chuck Nice?

  Cyanobacteria, right? Yeah, so, there are consequences that happen when you do this kind of stuff.

• 44:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but they would absorb CO2 and release oxygen. So what's so bad about that?

• 45:01Speaker 05

  I mean, for ocean life?

• 45:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you have against oxygen? What kind of a person are you?

• 45:08Speaker 05

  Remember, I'm a sociologist.

• 45:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, no, we get it.

• 45:14Gary O'Reilly?

  It's this lack of joined-up thinking that's got us in this situation in the first place. So surely we've got to look at the effect of every living thing in any environment we go into. But the problem is, we need to explore. We need to research further. And it doesn't look as if there's a desire, or possibly the finances, to do it. Or am I wrong?

• 45:35Speaker 05

  It's just short of what's needed to really get into some of these questions.

• 45:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so if you're not a sociologist of plankton, you'd be a sociologist of people. So, how do the effects of all these efforts land differently around the world? Either economically or geographically?

• 45:54Chuck Nice?

  Well, the rest of the world is ripping us off. That's the first thing. And it's time for us to make sure that we have dominance. The kind of dominance that comes from drill, baby drill.

• 46:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 46:09Speaker 05

  Chew on the nose. No, I mean, there's a couple of issues here. One is that unless people grasp the climate change, the energy transition, the situation we're in, talking to them about these ideas is probably not going to land very well because if you don't know the, you know, why we would try it in the first place, right?

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But there are countries who have nowhere near the resources to participate in this. So they would be passive observers, possibly even victims of our efforts or our folly.

• 46:44Chuck Nice?

  And oddly enough, those countries are far more amenable to the solutions that we need to enact in order to solve this problem. And you would think that, from what you said, that they would be the ones who would be most skeptical. They're not. We're the frickin' problem.

• 46:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that right?

• 46:59Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 47:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, we actually do have some research that colleagues of mine have done in several different countries, trying to learn about people's perceptions. And they did find more support for countries in the global south, countries that are facing a lot of climate impacts right now. But I would caution that with, most people haven't heard anything about any of these approaches. So what somebody hears in a survey or initially is going to be shaped by what people say about it, other messengers, their friends and family, once they start to discuss it with other people.

• 47:32Chuck Nice?

  Which is, I think it was this year's Yale report, that still it's somewhere around upwards, 53% of people say they rarely or never talk about climate change with friends or family. That's this year's report.

• 47:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not even a thing.

• 47:46Chuck Nice?

  So it's, we're, we're just not even discussing it at all. We're, we're la la la.

• 47:51Gary O'Reilly?

  So right, right now, this little group here are outliers.

• 47:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So how, how do we then think about the, the social consequences or ethical issues of this down the line? How do you handle that?

• 48:06Speaker 05

  I mean, I think the first step is just to involve more people in the conversation.

• 48:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 48:11Speaker 05

  And that can be done a lot of ways.

• 48:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It hardly ever happens.

• 48:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need agencies or organizations that'll do that.

• 48:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, you need actually dedicated staff to work on it.

• 48:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:21Speaker 05

  It's a big challenge.

• 48:22Gary O'Reilly?

  So who's the most important voices that need to be heard in regards of this?

• 48:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Her voice.

• 48:26Speaker 05

  No, not my voice.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lean into the microphone. My voice. But do it ASMR. It's my voice, yes. Holly Jean is speaking.

• 48:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Is it the powerful, rich, western nations? Or is it the global south? Is it African nations? Is there a demographic or group?

• 48:45Speaker 05

  Well, everybody has a stake, and everybody needs to do something with climate and energy, right? Nobody can sit by.

• 48:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, nobody's getting out of this one.

• 48:55Gary O'Reilly?

  No.

• 48:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So of all the options that you've seen, what horse would you bet on as the most effective, but also most humane, if I may?

• 49:06Speaker 05

  I think we need to triple nuclear capacity. We have a goal about that, or if we did, I hope we keep doing that. We need abundant, clean energy for people, because a lot of people don't have access to energy, and that's part of it.

• 49:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this might turn the tables on the anti-nuke movement that had been so strong over the decades.

• 49:25Speaker 05

  I hope so. We've seen public sentiment on that shift pretty quickly, actually.

• 49:29Gary O'Reilly?

  So that's the show we had with Catherine Hough on the small modular reactors?

• 49:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because the nuclear reactors can be scaled, and they can be built anywhere you need them, right?

• 49:40Gary O'Reilly?

  I don't think they're at the point where they can commercially put them in, although we've had nuclear reactors in submarines.

• 49:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:48Gary O'Reilly?

  For some time. So there must be some way to scale it and make it practical.

• 49:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah. Completely, completely. Plus, there's not as much spoken of how dependent France has been on nuclear power for decades, and it's not even a thing. Right. They'll protest anything at any time of day. Except smoking.

• 50:07Gary O'Reilly?

  I'll give you a true example about France's nuclear program. I'll have to say "nukilla", and thank you for that.

• 50:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Will you stop giving France cancer? Every time you're imitating a French person.

• 50:16Gary O'Reilly?

  They put a nuclear power plant on the northwest coast of France, closer to London than it was to Paris. That's how much the French love the nuclear.

• 50:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 50:28Gary O'Reilly?

  So is there going to be a mistake that we make in our attempts to do the right thing? What are we most likely going to get wrong?

• 50:36Speaker 05

  I mean, you can see a lot of problems considering that we're dismantling our capacity to even monitor what's going on in terms of, you know, attacks on science.

• 50:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 50:47Speaker 05

  And government. So, yeah, there's tons of risks. All the people who are concerned, I share their concern.

• 50:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, give us something positive here, please. Tell us, what are you hopeful for?

• 50:59Speaker 05

  Well, I think that public thinking about this canon will shift. The question is one of timing. That's why we're talking about geoengineering.

• 51:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but you would know better than others what would help make that shift? What kind of forces need to be in play to change an attitude or a perspective?

• 51:19Chuck Nice?

  Has there been something in history that you're familiar with where a public sea change of opinion has happened for the better? Because that's kind of the shift that we need to have for this, or at least here in America.

• 51:33Speaker 05

  Some of the examples people point to are the civil rights movement, gay marriage, these social things. I think it's a little bit trickier when you're talking about reconfiguring the built environment. But the mindset has to happen first.

• 51:49Gary O'Reilly?

  How about we get ahead of the story? There seems to be a fair bit of misinformation regarding climate, global warming.

• 51:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or disinformation.

• 51:58Gary O'Reilly?

  That's exactly it. So there's this disinformation. How about we get ahead of that narrative and start to put out real, solid, strong, and take that 53% and make it much, much bigger?

• 52:10Speaker 05

  I mean, you asked me about technologies, and I said nuclear, but we have to also shift the framing into investing in social infrastructure, investing in people. And I think that because we have an administrations that's backing away from that, that's crushing our social infrastructure, people are going to recognize the value in the relationships, the agencies, functioning government, and will build that capacity to, when we do have the political will, to build these new technologies, we'll have the social will that matches it.

• 52:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not to put words in your mouth, but are you saying that the dismantling of these social structures, these social institutions, may...

• 52:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Awaken people to their need in ways that they had previously taken for granted.

• 52:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, we had a problem even before Trump where we passed all this money in the US for climate and energy projects and we couldn't get it spent fast enough because we didn't have enough people in the agencies to spend it, to review it, to even hear about the grants. People on the ground didn't know. And now people are realizing you need people to do this. It's not just about investing in tech.

• 53:17Chuck Nice?

  So what I was gonna say is it takes money. It actually takes money to spend money. It takes money to educate people. And how do you combat the other side, which is disinformation? Fossil fuel companies through their so-called outlets and foundations, right? They spent $900 million that was tracked last year. $900 million on disinformation. So we gotta come up against that, you know? So I mean, that's a serious thing.

• 53:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But and we gotta like land this plane real quick. But presumably if you ask them, they wouldn't say it was disinformation. They would just say it's information. So what you really have to do is empower the listener to know the difference. From a sociological perspective, how do you do that?

• 54:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, you don't go to people and say you're misinformed. Because then it's like you're saying, well, you're dumb. You didn't know the right information.

• 54:20Chuck Nice?

  So that's my problem. I've been an idiot all day.

• 54:24Speaker 05

  You give them information that's grounded in science and you say they're really hard trade-offs, but you have choices. It's important that you don't make people feel like all of this stuff is going to take away their freedom. That's what they're worried about, I'm saying.

• 54:42Chuck Nice?

  We do such a good job. We need to start calling electricity liberty juice. Liberty juice. Liberty juice.

• 54:49Gary O'Reilly?

  We need a focus group.

• 54:50Chuck Nice?

  We want to save America, what you gotta do is get a car that runs on liberty juice.

• 54:57Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, this thought experiment.

• 54:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's pretty good, Chuck.

• 54:59Chuck Nice?

  The answers are out there, buddy.

• 55:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Say we, say we fall on a technology that is practical, cost-effective, give or take, and we do get ourselves to these pre-industrial zero levels. Will we not think, well, it doesn't matter, we can burn all the fossil fuels we want because we can control it now?

• 55:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You okay with that?

• 55:21Chuck Nice?

  That's a, that's a big argument, yeah, man.

• 55:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Is that, is that likely to happen for us? Because we've seen, we've driven ourselves at speed here.

• 55:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we become good at it, then drill, baby, drill, who cares?

• 55:31Speaker 05

  I just think burning rocks is kind of archaic. Like, I just think we can do better. I mean, whatever, I think we can come out with something that outcompetes that. And also fossil.

• 55:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Economically, then. And then the economics drives it.

• 55:45Gary O'Reilly?

  But do we not, as a, as a species, do that thing anyway, where we tie our own shoelaces together or find a way to shoot ourselves in the foot?

• 55:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Speak for yourself.

• 55:57Gary O'Reilly?

  I was.

• 56:00Chuck Nice?

  I was, that was good. Well, I think the danger that many people see is that, once you have anything that's viable on a geoengineering scale, which we're nowhere near, by the way, but once you do, that fossil fuel companies will then use that as a cudgel to say, we can keep burning fuel, you know? So a lot of people are like.

• 56:22Gary O'Reilly?

  And that's, that's my concern.

• 56:23Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, a lot of people are like.

• 56:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You foresee that, presumably?

• 56:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, I wrote, I wrote a book called Ending Fossil Fuels that was about the challenge of how you end fossil fuels, and the geopolitics of it are really tough because some countries really depend on this for their revenue and their legitimacy. And I could see them saying, well, let's keep on going.

• 56:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So countries like Venezuela, or Qatar, or...

• 56:46Chuck Nice?

  Russia. Yeah, these are all the countries.

• 56:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so it's a whole other thing. Here we're saying, stop burning fossil fuel, and you'll bankrupt the country.

• 56:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They built their whole economy on it.

• 56:55Speaker 05

  Unless we're willing to make massive transfers of finance, which we apparently aren't.

• 57:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 57:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then that becomes your problem as a sociologist.

• 57:05Speaker 05

  I'll take all the problems. You fix it. A lot of work.

• 57:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Professor Buck, thank you for being on StarTalk. Delighted to have you on the Asimov Panel and that you guys kidnapped her for StarTalk. Very good job here.

• 57:20Chuck Nice?

  Thank you.

• 57:21Speaker 05

  Thanks so much.

• 57:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just so you know how deeply I respect your profession, my father's a sociologist, and I was actually received a sociology award from Congress. Just, I think they appreciated how much I always tried to think about the impact of science on people, and I was very moved by that, and so I wish you well.

• 57:46Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 57:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And maybe some luck, because you might need some of that too, based on how stuff goes down with the human interaction function that's out there.

• 57:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we're screwed.

• 57:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Chuck, for that.

• 58:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Holly, Chuck, Gary. Pleasure. Always good. Always a pleasure. This has been another edition of StarTalk Special Edition. Geoengineering, the good, the bad, the ugly. Until next time, Neil deGrasse Tyson, keep looking up.