6. Discussion
To summarize, the large infrastructural tasks required to put a tipping
element response capability in place by 2040 are to:
- design and certify a modification program for Special Tankers
- manufacture or otherwise acquire a fleet of over 90 777s and run them
through the modification line
- roughly double the capacity of two large northern airports
- build nearly from scratch two large airports and related support
capacity in Patagonia
As previously noted, a roughly decadal time span should be sufficient to
procure the fleet. That would be more than enough time to build out
capacity at ANC and ARN if no new runways are required, but likely
insufficient time to build no runways. It appears unlikely that the
southern bases would be ready on this schedule, irrespective of whether
they are built upon the existing infrastructure at USH and PUQ or simply
erected on green fields elsewhere in Tierra del Fuego. However, it may
be that a smaller operation could commence from the existing southern
airports while the new ones are completed, implying that the attainment
of the full Antarctic annual deployment would lag its Arctic counterpart
by several years. Even with the benefit of this optimistic assumption,
in order to have our tool ready by January 1, 2040, we would need to
start on our longest span task by roughly January 1, 2030.
As earlier noted, “start” in this case would not mean “commence the
governance discussions” – it would mean one or more large governments
actually dispensing funds to contractors on three continents to begin
engineering on aircraft and airports. Within a few years, dirt would
need to be moving at various airports and Boeing or Airbus would need to
start delivering purpose-built aircraft. But if the funds started to
flow in 2030, with some fudge factor for the southern airfields, we
could conceivably have our response capability in place by our target
date. All that seems feasible.
What does not seem feasible is that we would be ready to pull that
trigger by 2030. This article is being written in 2024 and with luck
will be published in the same year. Insofar as we are aware, no
government is yet in motion to prepare a tipping point response
capability at all, let alone by 2040. There is no awareness among policy
makers of such a prospect, and no public support for it. And yet, in
five years and change, some consortium of governments must be ready to
sign a ~$20 billion purchase contract with a major
airframer and another roughly $15 billion in construction contracts
with Argentina, Chile, Sweden and the State of Alaska. Failing that, the
2040 date will recede into the future, and the span during which the
world will be vulnerable to and unprepared for tipping points in the
cryosphere will be elongated.
This flips the standard conception of the governance problem related to
SAI on its head. Governance is customarily conceived in negative terms
– i.e., the task is to prevent actors from deploying prematurely,
irresponsibly, and/or without widespread consensus and
legitimacy46,47. It is a matter of preventing parties
from doing things we don’t want them to do. However, the governance task
here is the opposite – how to get someone to step up to the plate by
2030 with a roughly $35 billion checkbook to put in place a response
capability that would protect all of humanity but that few people yet
understand to be required. This protection would be a non-excludable
good, creating incentives for all actors to free-ride. In light of that,
how do we motivate a first mover, and how do we distribute the financial
burden of implementing the program?
Addressing that is beyond our scope here, but we hope that a first step
in deriving an answer is to pose the question.
7. Conclusion
In the climate arena as elsewhere, when one finds oneself in a hole, the
first step is to stop digging. Emissions reductions are the
indispensable response to the climate problem, and neither SAI nor any
other palliative can replace them. However, it is increasingly clear
that those may not arrive in time to ward off substantial climate
damages in the coming decades, particularly from prospective tipping
elements with low temperature thresholds. Mitigation alone is no longer
sufficient to secure the future climate that we and our successors on
this planet will desire. A global peak-shaving SAI program could also
prove effective in delaying or preventing tips in both high and
low-latitude regions, but for both infrastructural and sociopolitical
reasons, it seems a distant prospect. The infrastructural hurdle related
to an SAI program targeting just the poles appears to be substantially
smaller, as would be the resulting deployment program. It is unclear on
the other hand whether the remoteness of the deployment program and the
prospective urgency of the tipping element threat may render this
intervention more acceptable to policy makers and the general public
than the global sort, but that is the question that needs to be promptly
presented. Policy makers are only dimly aware that tipping element
threats may be looming in our near future, and we know of no prior
literature suggesting that the intervention discussed here may be a
practicable remedy. A prudent response to these circumstances would be
to dramatically accelerate both research and communications in respect
of a polar solar geoengineering program such that by 2030, policymakers
might be capable of making an informed decision as to whether to
proceed.
On the one hand, this seems like an impossibly tall order given the low
awareness of and regard for SAI that obtains currently. And yet, the
response to the 1985 identification of the “ozone hole” demonstrates
that concrete pending threats have a galvanizing effect that slowly
rising temperatures do not. The analogy is not precisely apt, but the
tipping element threats appear to be real if somewhat indeterminate. We
are steaming heedlessly towards shoals that we are warned may lie
directly ahead. As we seem unable to rapidly stop the ship, it would
seem unjustifiably cavalier not to explore other response options that
appear promising.