Dr. Mason's Stopgap Solution to Climate Change?
I reviewed my YouTube feed this past afternoon and stumbled upon a video by Thunderf00t (Dr. Mason) who was a popular figure during the Skeptics Movement in the 2010s and always found his videos to be both informative and entertaining - so when I saw his claims to have discovered a stopgap solution to climate change, knowing this is a topic directly within his specialization, I had to take a look and reach out to him to evaluate if there might be a possibility to collaborate on a grant proposal.
Every year, humans add billions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Even if emissions stopped tomorrow, most of what is already up there would stay for a century or longer. Pulling it back out is possible in principle, but at current prices of several hundred dollars per ton, removing the excess would cost more than the entire world economy produces in a year.
That reality has pushed some researchers to look at a different question. If we cannot quickly remove the carbon dioxide, can we at least offset the warming it causes while the slower work of cutting emissions goes on? One of the more unusual answers comes from chemist Phil Mason, who has proposed doing it with ordinary sodium metal.
The principle behind his idea is well established. Tiny particles in the upper atmosphere reflect a small share of sunlight back into space, and volcanoes prove it. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it threw millions of tons of sulfur into the stratosphere, and global temperatures dropped by roughly half a degree Celsius for about two years.
The catch is the material. Sulfur forms sulfuric acid, which damages the ozone layer and eventually falls back to Earth as acid. That is a large part of why deliberately releasing it has proven so controversial. Harvard's SCoPEx project, which planned only a tiny test release, was shut down after years of public opposition.
The use of aerosols to control climate and weather is a topic that was also studied by the US military under the code name Operation Popeye.
Mason's suggestion swaps sulfur for sodium. When sodium burns in the presence of water vapor and carbon dioxide, which is exactly what comes out of a jet engine, it produces sodium carbonate and related compounds. These are close cousins of baking soda. They are cheap, largely harmless, and alkaline rather than acidic, so they would not add to ocean acidification when they eventually settle out.
His proposed delivery system is the existing airline fleet. Planes already fly at high altitude every day, and by his estimate a sodium load equal to about 3 percent of global jet fuel use would produce enough particles to offset a meaningful share of current warming.
He places the running cost at tens of billions of dollars per year, which is small compared with the damage climate change already causes.
Mason has also done early experiments. By spraying a liquid sodium and potassium alloy into steam, he reports producing clouds of fine particles, and he says his first measurements show dried particles smaller than a micron. That size matters, because particles around half a micron scatter sunlight most efficiently.
The idea is clever, and the early chemistry looks promising. There are still several serious problems that would need answers before anyone could treat it as a real option.
The first is altitude. Pinatubo's particles reached the stratosphere, well above where most airliners fly, and stayed there for a year or more. At typical cruising heights over most of the world, particles sit in the upper troposphere, where they tend to wash out in a matter of weeks. Shorter lifetimes mean far more material would be needed than the volcano comparison suggests.
The second is water. Sodium carbonate readily absorbs moisture, so particles leaving a humid jet exhaust could grow larger than they appear in a dry laboratory measurement. Larger particles reflect sunlight less effectively. They might also help form high, thin ice clouds, which can trap heat rather than reflect it.
The third is engineering. Sodium is corrosive to the metals inside jet engines, so it would need its own burner rather than being mixed into the fuel. Convincing airlines and aviation regulators to carry a ton of reactive metal on passenger aircraft would be a major hurdle in its own right.
None of these problems rules the idea out. They are exactly the kind of questions that careful, contained laboratory work can answer, and that work does not require releasing anything into the open air. Measuring particle size, water uptake, and chemistry in a sealed chamber is inexpensive by research standards.
Mason frames this as an insurance policy, and that framing is useful. The purpose is not to launch a global program tomorrow. It is to make sure that if the world one day decides it needs a fast, affordable way to limit warming, the science has already been done and decision makers are choosing from well understood options. Mason has deliberately made the concept public so that no one can patent it, which keeps it available as a shared tool.
When I discovered these presentations I sent them to the DSA (since I had previously campaigned with them with Hasan Piker in Denver). I was disappointed to find, however, that like my out-of-the-box ideas for re-assessing the covid response by focusing on point-of-care infrastructure and access to treatments like monoclonals over an almost singular approach to a focus on preventative measures and social distancing (though studies have shown Nordic countries that did not apply social sistancing but did have universal point of access care actually performed better over the span of the pandemic than countries which had a singular focus on attempting every person from getting sick which was an intractable problem much like trying to immediately put a halt at all emissions), this idea was not well-recieved. In fact, I was banned from the DSA discord chat. This is a problem I've noticed for many years in the sciences which have become somewhat gatekept and unreceptive to outside ideas that challenge the status quo. I suspect that regardless of the institution I am dealing with, leaders feel threatened by outside ideas - even if it is the DSA.
Cooling the planet with particles would never solve the underlying carbon dioxide problem, and it should not be treated as a substitute. At best, it could buy time while emissions come down and the oceans slowly absorb the excess - and having that time will be needed in order to maintain a reasonable quality of life while there is a transition to renewables. Whether sodium is the right material remains an open question. It is a question worth answering carefully and in the lab, before anyone faces pressure to answer it in a hurry.
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