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Earth stands at a tipping point. As we fail to curtail emissions fast enough, our planet stares down a cascade of imminent, catastrophic, and irreversible disaster triggered by climate change. Yet a potent technology already exists to buy us more time: solar geoengineering. Through methods such as atmospheric aerosols, human-generated cirrus clouds, and solar sails, we humans can-at least in the short term-slow the Earth's warming. Should we?
Award-winning science writer Thomas Ramge's
Dimming the Sun is his provocative, informative, urgent, and necessary exploration of this intriguing stopgap solution. Ramge shows us how the science works, what the risks are-both geophysical and political-and how the international community might come together to agree on and regulate a safe and effective plan for geoengineering. And while he identifies the unknowns about the technology that remain, he believes this very uncertainty demands our full attention. With time to avert the worst of climate change rapidly running out, he makes a forceful case that the most responsible course of action is to dramatically increase research on solar geoengineering
now-before it's too late.
List of contents
- Introduction: heaven and sulfur
- Climate: Why we (probably) have to dim the sun
- Technology: The geoengineers' toolbox
- Research: The risks and side effects
- Law: How to regulate dimming the sun
- Scenario: A (plausible?) story from the year 2040
- Politics: Geoengineering? Yes, please!
About the author
Dr. Thomas Ramge thinks and writes at the crossroads of technology and economics, sustainability and society. He has published more than twenty nonfiction books, selling more than two million copies worldwide, including
Who's Afraid of AI?,
On the Brink of Utopia,
Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data, and
The Global Economy as You've Never Seen It. His essays and articles appear in
The Economist,
Harvard Business Review,
MIT Sloan Management Review, and
Foreign Affairs. He holds a PhD in sociology of technology and is an Associated Researcher at the Einstein Center Digital Future. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous publishing awards, including the German Essay Prize 2022, the Axiom Business Book Award 2019 (Gold Medal, Economics), and the getAbstract International Book Prize 2018.
