AI Summary
5 min readHow to Dim the Sun
On a rooftop in the San Francisco Bay Area, Amy Scott from Marketplace's How We Survive found herself twenty-one feet off the ground, wearing a respirator and goggles, about to launch a balloon filled with sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The balloon was released by Make Sunsets, a startup co-founded by Andrew Song and Luke Eisman, who sell "cooling credits" for as little as one dollar per gram of sulfur dioxide released. Their claim: one gram of sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere offsets the warming caused by a ton of carbon dioxide. "It sounds crazy," Andrew admitted, "and I'll be the first to agree that this should not be a private company doing this, but the only thing worse than a private company doing this is no one doing this at all."
The Science of Dimming the Sun
The technique is called stratospheric aerosol injection, a form of solar geoengineering. When sulfur dioxide reaches the stratosphere—the second layer of the atmosphere, starting between 31,000 and 58,000 feet above Earth—it reacts with water vapor to form sulfuric acid aerosols. These tiny particles reflect sunlight away from the planet, cooling it. The stratosphere is key because material stays there for about two years, unlike the lower atmosphere where aerosols fall back to Earth within a week.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:35) **Launching Sulfur Balloons in the Bay Area** - Host Amy Scott joins Make Sunsets founders Andrew Song and Luke Eisman on a rooftop to release sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere.
- 2 (07:44) **The Mission: Engineering Nature to Save the Planet** - Introduction to the season's theme: tinkering with natural systems to combat climate change.
- 3 (09:55) **The Origin Story: Science Fiction to Startup** - Luke learned about stratospheric aerosol injection from Neal Stephenson's novel *Termination Shock*.
- 4 (14:58) **The State of Solar Geoengineering Research** - David Keith, a geophysics professor at the University of Chicago, contextualizes Make Sunsets as "political theater."
- 5 (16:16) **The Science of Stratospheric Aerosol Injection** - David Keith explains the mechanics of using sulfuric acid aerosols to reflect sunlight.
- 6 (19:22) **The Trade-Offs: Cooling vs. Harm** - Keith quantifies risks and benefits of solar geoengineering.
- 7 (24:18) **The Backlash: Community Opposition in Alameda** - Environmental activist Gary Hughes describes how a marine cloud brightening experiment was shut down by the Alameda City Council.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
The climate crisis is escalating. We have to decarbonize our economy, but we’re moving too slowly. So, what’s the backup plan? This season of How We Survive is about engineering nature: large-scale interventions that could be our last hope. We’ll explore technology that could alter our weather patterns, transform our planet, and possibly save us all from the worst outcomes of the climate crisis. Or lead to catastrophic, unintended consequences.
In this episode, host Amy Scott travels to the Bay Area to learn about a controversial solution to the climate crisis. It’s called solar geoengineering, and it’s basically a way to dim the sun to cool the planet. Some proponents view this as a necessary intervention, while others are not convinced. And while solar geoengineering is happening at a small scale, what happens if a rogue nation…or a rogue billionaire…makes the decision for us?
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