Oliver Morton
speaker
275 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 7 Sep
Oliver Morton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
That takes a long time, mostly, because it would mean actually not just stopping putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but taking some out.
And that is a very, very long-term project.
The other thing you can do is directly look at making the Earth reflect away a little more sunlight.
And this was the insight of a paper by the great Dutch scientist,
atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, one of the first people ever to win a Nobel Prize for environmental work.
And Paul wrote a paper in 2006 saying, what if you could keep the cooling effects of having little bits of sulphate in the atmosphere while drastically reducing the health effects?
And he said, well, maybe if you put the little particles higher up in the atmosphere where they last longer, you can get the same cooling effect with fewer particles.
And this is an idea that's normally discussed as solar geoengineering and people get very hot under the collar about it.
But that was the anatomy of Paul's proposal.
And 20 years on, we are actually seeing what he warned about, which is as the nations of the world have in various ways saved people's lives by reducing sulfur emissions, they have also contributed.
It's not the only cause, but they've contributed to a further warming.
Well, I should add that I'm not a fan of geoengineering.
Vanishingly few people are fans of geoengineering, but I should disclose an interest in that I am a trustee of a charity that works in this sector.
If nothing is done along those lines, without any intervention, the effect of aerosols will diminish to a lower level than they are today.
There are still places in the world with terrible air pollution problems which will want to get rid of them.
So that will happen.
And...
Climate change driven by greenhouse gases, both directly and through feedback mechanisms like a loss of clouds, those will continue.
And some aspects of the way people have measured the feedback effects suggest that they may be a bit stronger than had previously been thought.
So some people are saying 10%, 30% more warming in the next few decades than you might otherwise expect.
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