It’s April 10th, 1815, and in just a few moments, the sun is about to be blocked out. On an island in present-day Indonesia, Mount Tambora erupts with a loud boom that can be heard over 2,000 kilometers away. Sulfurous plumes of steam and ash shoot up thousands of meters into the sky, forming dark storm clouds of soot and lightning. This eruption is remembered as the largest in recorded history, and its impact is only just beginning.
Tambora’s emissions ascend high into the atmosphere, spreading across the globe and blocking out the sun for almost an entire year. This causes the hazy skies and cold weather of 1816, leading to famines all over the Northern Hemisphere and epidemics in many nations. Artists create bleak tributes to these seemingly apocalyptic times, and it is remembered as the “year without summer”.
This event has caused some modern researchers to look for ways to replicate it, though not for the same reasons. They are interested in using sulfurous haze to block out the sun and slow the effects of global warming, which is one of many proposals in the realm of geoengineering. These plans include creating a helpful version of volcanic plumes, building a giant sunshade in Earth’s orbit, enlarging marine clouds, and making Earth reflect more sunlight by building huge swaths of white surfaces.
These plans may sound strange, but there is evidence that they could work, as seen with the cooling effects of the Pinatubo eruption in 1991 and 1883’s Krakatoa eruption. However, they are incredibly risky, as the Earth is a chaotic system where even the smallest changes can create unpredictable ripple effects. Solar radiation management does not address the greenhouse gases causing global warming, and if the band-aid of geoengineering is taken off prematurely, global temperatures could rapidly rebound, causing a period of intense super warming.
Researchers are currently running small-scale experiments, such as enhancing marine clouds to protect the Great Barrier Reef from further heating and bleaching. It is agreed that the primary focus should be on cutting emissions and removing atmospheric CO2. However, geoengineering might be civilization’s last resort in desperate times, and some of these plans could be easily executed by any rogue actor with enough money. For these reasons, it is important to continue studying these approaches. We need to be prepared in case someone begins geoengineering without governmental authorization. The most significant rationale to inspect the effects of geoengineering is that people are already carrying out extensive interventions in the atmosphere. In many ways, global warming is an unintentional geoengineering endeavor caused by the emissions created from centuries of burning fossil fuels. Unless we take measures to reduce emissions and take out CO2 from the atmosphere soon, summer may never be the same.