6. Discussion
To summarize, the large infrastructural tasks required to put a tipping element response capability in place by 2040 are to:
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.