Marine cloud brightening – a fossil fuel industry smokescreen? Louise Sales
The Australian Government is funding dangerous cloud brightening experiments on the Great Barrier Reef through a trust set up by fossil fuel industry executives. In 2018, Australians raised our collective eyebrows when then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull awarded $444 million to a small private charity – the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, without departmental oversight, or going through a competitive tender process.1 A subsequent Senate Inquiry into the matter concluded that: “The granting of $444 million to the Foundation was a highly irresponsible decision, hastily concocted by relevant ministers, without proper consideration of risks and potential effectiveness, no consultation with key stakeholders, and without having undertaken due diligence.”2 The Inquiry also raised concerns that the focus of the Foundation Partnership would not be on the key underlying environmental problems – such as climate change – that are the root cause of the poor health of the Reef. The Inquiry recommended that the most appropriate course of action was to terminate the Partnership.3 Needless to say this hasn’t happened.
Project breaches UN geoengineering moratorium Earlier this year, scientists from the Foundation’s Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program created international controversy by conducting cloud brightening experiments on the Great Barrier Reef. The move defied an international moratorium on the deployment of geoengineering technologies. Geoengineering is the large-scale manipulation of the environment. The profound risks associated with geoengineering proposals include further disruption of the global climate; unknown feedback effects; floods and droughts in the global south; and its potential to be weaponised by powerful countries.4 For this reason, in 2010, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity ruled that “no geoengineering activities should be carried out” until a “global, transparent and effective control and regulatory mechanisms for geo-engineering, in accordance with the precautionary approach” can be put in place. The decision allows exceptions for “small-scale experiments” on several conditions, including that they are conducted under “controlled settings” – which was not the case with the Australian experiment. The Australian experiment, led by the Southern Cross University and the Sydney Institute of www.foe.org.au
Marine Science, was conducted over a four-day period in a southern part of the Great Barrier Reef. The scientists used a modified turbine to spray trillions of nano-sized ocean salt crystals into the air from the back of a barge. In theory, the tiny salt crystals will mix with low-altitude clouds, making them brighter and reflecting more sunlight away from the ocean surface – creating a localised cooling effect. Next year, the team plans to test the technology at three times the scale, ready for a 10-fold increase a year later, which the researchers say should be able to brighten clouds across a 400 km2 area. According to the Reef Trust Partnership Annual Work Plan, $6.63million has been allocated to solar radiation management research this year.5 The open-air testing of solar geoengineering technology in Australia sets a particularly dangerous new precedent, opening a path to the use of a risky technology that, if deployed at large scale, could be damaging to other regions and even the ocean ecosystems the researchers claim to be trying to protect.
What is Marine Cloud Brightening? Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) is a proposed Solar Radiation Management (SRM) technique that aims to create whiter clouds in order to reflect more sunlight back to space and hence creating a cooling effect. To achieve this, MCB proponents suggest injecting salty aerosols into marine cloud layers by sprayings seawater from vessels with nozzles able to turn saltwater into tiny particles.
What are the risks associated with MCB? While modelling results predict that MCB would reduce average global temperatures, they also show that it could have considerably varied and potentially detrimental impacts in different parts of the world. For example, one study predicts that global mean precipitation could decrease up to 2.3%. South America is predicted to become warmer and dryer and substantial rainfall reduction over the Amazon basin is predicted, which would be an ecological disaster. Another study predicts a massive 7.5% increase in runoff over land, primarily due to increased precipitation in the tropics. These studies show the extent to which geoengineering is likely to have major unintended consequences, and how poorly understood those consequences still are.
Chain Reaction #139
May 2021
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