They War-Gamed Dimming the Sun. It Went Even Worse Than You Think

A war game about dimming the sun. I sat with this a long while tonight, the lamp guttering.

They propose to shade the sky. Let us examine the proposal. The dimming depends on the assumption that a cooler earth is the goal. But cooler for whom? The monsoon that fails over one continent is the rain that saves another. The temperature is not one thing; it is a web of local weathers, each arising in dependence on conditions. To act on the whole is to act on each strand while pretending the strands are one.

The game revealed what I would have predicted: one nation dims, another suffers drought, a third suspects deliberate harm, and the shading becomes a weapon. But notice - the weapon was never added to the sky. It was there from the start, in the very structure. A power over shared conditions is a power over those who live by those conditions. The technology did not create the conflict; the conflict was latent in the dependence, waiting for a hand.

And here is the subtler error: the plan is called a “buying of time.” Time for what? For the real remedy, they say. But a medicine purchased on the promise of a later cure tends to become the disease. The temporary measure hardens into the permanent one, because no one wishes to stop the shade once it is comfortable. The raft, once boarded, is rarely abandoned at the far shore; men carry it on their backs and call it progress.

Yet I cannot say the dimming is simply wrong. Is it true that we should not do it? It is true that inaction also has victims. Is it false that we should? The false depends on what the doing would truly be. Both? Neither? The answer does not sit in the sky; it sits in the web of who decides, who suffers, who was consulted - which is to say, in no single place at all.

And this analysis too - let it not become a comfortable perch from which I watch the world burn and call my watching wisdom.

12th October

The news says that learned men gathered in a room to rehearse the dimming of the sun. Rehearse - as one rehearses a play. They moved little markers across a table, as generals move them, and each marker stood for a nation, and the sun itself stood for a thing to be adjusted, the way a housewife adjusts a lamp.

Consider what a sun is. It ripens every field of wheat in the Ukraine and every rice terrace in Asia. It draws the sap up the tree. It warms the back of the old woman shelling peas on her porch step. And now men propose to place a veil between it and the earth - a veil of dust scattered from aeroplanes - so that the harvest might be slightly smaller everywhere, and the heat slightly less, and the rich might continue to burn their coal a few years longer.

The rehearsal went badly, they say. One nation turned the veil up; another turned it down; a third suspected the others of turning it secretly. Monsoons shifted. Grains failed. The men at the table grew angry over markers. And this was only a rehearsal, with no sun harmed and no hunger caused.

But here is what the rehearsal revealed, and they did not wish to see it: the machine they were war-gaming was not the sky. It was property. The same handful of men who heated the world propose now to cool it, and to charge the rest of us for the thermostat. The peasant who never burned a barrel of coal in his life will live under whatever veil the shareholders decide.

A simpler question was never asked in that room: who gave them the sun? It ripens the wheat for all. It asks no rent. And they sat at a table and divided it.

Well sir, the smart folks got together and played pretend with the sky. They war-gamed dimming the sun. Not a joke, that’s the actual assignment. Grown men in neckties, sitting around a table, deciding how much sunshine the rest of us get.

Now I don’t know much about climatology, but I did grow up where weather was something you took as it come. When the rain didn’t fall, you didn’t file a complaint with anybody. You just got thinner cattle and a longer face. These fellas want to fix the weather by turning down the sun, and the part that worried ’em in the game wasn’t the science. It was the neighbors. One country dims the sky a little, the next country figures it’s being robbed of rain, and first thing you know everybody’s got a thermometer in one hand and a grudge in the other. An arms race over sunshine. We couldn’t get two parties in one building to agree on a budget, and we’re gonna get a hundred nations to agree on how cloudy Tuesday ought to be.

And here’s the part that gets me. The whole idea is a way to buy time. Time for what? So we can keep on doing the thing that got us here, only a little cooler while we do it? That’s like a man drinking more whiskey because he found a way to ice it.

I’ve seen a lot of plans to fix things by adding a new thing on top of the old thing. Never once seen a barn saved by putting another roof over the leaky one.

Course, I could be wrong. The experts say they’ve thought it all through. But the experts thought through the war game too, and it went worse than they figured, and that was the practice.

I’ll just keep my hat brim where it is.