May 30, 2025, by Brigitte Nerlich
Geoengineering and metaphors, 2009 to 2025: Continuity and change
Since around 2006, I have been interested in speculations about geoengineering, that is, attempts to deal with climate change by directly intervening in the planet’s atmosphere, oceans, or land. Such interventions include pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or dampening solar radiation.
In the UK there have been three inflection points in reflections about such speculations and experimentations: the 2009 Royal Society report on geoengineering; the 2013 (abandoned) SPICE project (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering); and the 2025 government announcement of £56.8 million worth of funding for geoengineering research administered by ARIA (Advanced Research and Invention Agency).
Geoengineering in the UK: A drama in three acts
A quick look at a few documents published around these inflection points of public and policy debate around geoengineering indicates what one may call a drama in three acts.
Act I: The Royal Society talks about an “unpalatable truth” that geoengineering might be needed; puts a strong emphasis on emissions reductions as a primary solution; and sees geoengineering as a reluctant necessity or the “price we may have to pay”.
Act II: SPICE’s engineering optimism runs into messy institutional realities, but puts public engagement and responsible innovation on the map.
Act III: ARIA claims that even aggressive decarbonisation might be insufficient; posits active cooling as a legitimate complement to emission reductions; treats geoengineering research not as a regrettable necessity, but as an essential component of a climate strategy, and goes for a ‘pragmatic’ “buying time to decarbonise” approach.
There was a shift over time from seeing climate change as a future threat requiring prevention to seeing climate tipping points as an imminent danger requiring immediate intervention. During that time, all geoengineering proposals have attracted strong criticism. One especially critical post published on 27 May stressed in particular that the “‘tipping point’ framing is … deeply flawed” and talks about a ‘climate cooling folly’.
A much more detailed historical review of shifts in institutional approach, media impact and public perception between 2009 and 2025 would be very useful, but is too big a task for one blog post. What I’ll do today is more limited and focused. I want to look at the language used in the UK press around these announcements.
Geoengineering: A technical, social and linguistic problem
Geoengineering is a huge technological problem. It throws up immense political, governance, social and ethical problems. But it is also a linguistic problem. As I. A. Richards said in his 1936 Philosophy of Rhetoric, a “command of metaphor plays a role in the control of the world that we make for ourselves to live in” (see p. 155). This means that we make the world we live in by the language we speak in it. Metaphors make us see one thing in terms of another and shape how we act according to these ways of seeing. What does this mean for geoengineering?
To explore these questions, Rusi Jaspal and I undertook two studies. In the first study, we examined a small body of articles published in trade magazines between 1980 and 2010, with the majority being published between 2006 and 2009. In a second (quick) study, we analysed a small sample of articles published in UK national newspapers between 1 January 2010 and 15 July 2013.
Geoengineering metaphors around 2010
The findings of our first study indicate that those trying to promote geoengineering use a series of powerful metaphors circling around one master-argument, namely that if emissions continue to rise, we face global catastrophe and geoengineering might be the only option left to avert it. This master-argument from catastrophe still informs ARIA’s approach to geoengineering, for example.
We found three main conceptual metaphors supporting this master-argument:
(1) The planet is a machine (car, heating system, computer) that is broken; this means one should ‘fix’ the planet; one can manipulate the planet’s ‘thermostat’ or put a ‘dimmer switch’ on the sun.
(2) The planet is a body that needs protecting; this means that one should build a ‘sunshade’ for the planet or apply sun cream, sunblock or sunscreen to it.
(3) The planet is a patient that needs curing; that means one should apply medical treatment (‘methadone’, ‘chemotherapy’) to the planet, curing the planet’s addiction to carbon.
We also found some other metaphors, such geoengineering as an ‘insurance policy’, a ‘Plan B’, and ‘a parachute’. For critics, geoengineering represented a ‘short term fix’, a ‘runaway technology’, a ‘moral hazard’, ‘playing God’ or ‘playing with fire’.
Geoengineering metaphors around 2013
After the SPICE project we imagined that the language used to talk about geoengineering might change, as mere speculation met reality. When we looked at the UK press coverage, we found a pronounced difference between right- and left-leaning newspapers.
The Times and The Telegraph (right-leaning) still displayed some of the optimism we had found in around 2010, while The Guardian and The Independent (left leaning) focused more on potential threats posed by geoengineering and argued that it distracts from climate mitigation (what others have called the moral hazard argument) and by pointing to many uncertainties, both scientific and social.
The Times and The Telegraph saw geoengineering as a last option in the ‘war’ against climate change, as a ‘palliative’ and a ‘silver bullet’ (linking back to the medical metaphors we had found earlier). They also, and more importantly, began to normalise geoengineering, either by comparing it to sci-fi but pointing out that it was becoming a reality, by linking it back to successful experiments in cloud seeding, or by comparing geoengineering to everyday activities we take for granted, such as stepping into our cars, thereby already significantly altering the atmosphere.
Geoengineering metaphors in 2025
To study how the language about geoengineering might have changed in the UK press in 2025, we analysed 60 news articles about the ARIA announcement of 24 April 2025. These were downloaded from the Nexis news database and published in UK newspapers between 1 January 2025 and 20 March 2025.
A rather cursory analysis (in which Claude helped me because I was still suffering from some eye problems) reveals that the metaphor of ‘dimming the sun’ took centre stage across nearly all outlets. From The Telegraph to The Guardian and from the Daily Mail to the Manchester Evening News, this became the go-to description for solar geoengineering proposals put forward by ARIA, that is to say, efforts to reflect away more sunlight from the Earth.
Deploying a ‘sunscreen’ is only mentioned once (The Telegraph) and applying ‘sunblock’ not at all. Readers’ attention is almost solely drawn to a technological adjustment of the brightness dial on our star, the techno-fix metaphor par excellence. While applying ‘planetary sunscreen’ might suggest protection and care, ‘dimming the sun’ evokes something more ominous – a fundamental tampering with the natural order.
As one Daily Mail article said, it sounds like something from a “Bond villain’s sinister plot.” On Bluesky this framing also evoked quite a few comments like this, linking ‘dim sun’ to ‘dim sum’ and thus ridiculing the whole exercise: “dim the sun with dim sum. i think we’ll need about 1 billion dumplings so i guess we better get to work”.
Similar ridicule comes through in a comment quoted in The Telegraph: “Certainly, its [the government’s] latest foray into geoengineering has been met with widespread public incredulity. When sun-dimming experiments were first mooted last month, one Telegraph reader likened it to: ‘What Hanna-Barbera might have dreamt up to foil Dick Dastardly in Wacky Races.’”
Some other planet-as-machine metaphors persist alongside this sun-as-machine metaphor, such as “putting the brakes on global warming” (The Telegraph). These mechanical metaphors suggest climate is something we can simply tune or fix – a comforting but potentially misleading notion.
Some newer metaphors appear in the 2025 coverage. These are gambling metaphors used by both The Guardian and The Telegraph (one can also find them on Bluesky), which I had first observed in 2021. The Telegraph accused the government of “playing poker with the public purse”. This framing might reflect growing public scepticism about whether such experiments are worth the risk and the expense.
The ‘slippery slope’ metaphor was used quite frequently (mostly quoting Mike Hulme), with scientists and critics warning that small-scale experiments could lead inexorably to full deployment. This was not so prominent in earlier coverage, suggesting perhaps an increased wariness about the research-to-deployment pipeline.
Right-leaning outlets like The Telegraph still employ more neutral technical language, while The Guardian and The Independent deploy more critical metaphors – calling geoengineering “barking mad” or comparing it to “treating cancer with aspirin” – a critical medical metaphor put forward by climate scientists Raymond Pierrehumbert and Michael Mann, who had already put forward similar arguments in 2021.
Why metaphors matter
These metaphorical choices are not merely stylistic. As I have long argued on this blog, metaphors shape how we think and act. When geoengineering is framed as ‘dimming the sun’, we are priming different responses than when we call it ‘planetary medicine’.
The evolution from medical metaphors (healing the planet) to gambling metaphors (taking risks with our future) may reflect a broader shift in public discourse. Such metaphors are critical of the techno-optimism about ‘fixing’ climate change and foreground a more cautious, risk-aware stance, which brings us back perhaps to the initial framing of the issue by the Royal Society in 2009.
Looking forward
As geoengineering research advances, we can expect the metaphorical landscape to continue evolving. Will ‘dimming the sun’ remain dominant? Will new metaphors emerge as experiments begin? What is clear is that these linguistic choices will continue to shape policy and public understanding of geoengineering.
As Suzanne Romaine warned back in 1996 when talking about the greenhouse effect, “it matters which metaphors we choose to live by. If we choose unwisely or fail to understand their implications, we will die by them.” In the climate debate, that warning has never been more relevant. Understanding the ‘metaphors we live (and die) by’ is important when we want to create rather than control “the world that we make for ourselves to live in”.
Future research possibilities
Future research should also look at social media posts about the ARIA projects. In 2008 and even 2013 social media were not yet a major force in shaping or distorting public perceptions, but now they are. As CarbonBrief noted: “The reaction [to the ARIA announcement] was even more exaggerated on social media, where anonymous accounts seized upon the news to spread misinformation about existing ‘secret’ government schemes to ‘control’ the weather.”
In terms of verbal and visual metaphors and tropes…when searching for Kier Starmer and ‘dim sun’ for example, I found this very satirical song on YouTube, and Jack Stilgoe, an expert on the social implications of geoengineering and an adviser to the ARIA programme, found these images on X. But I bet there is more out there!
And, of course, there are also podcasts to explore. Here, here, here and here…
Some reading material
Anshelm, J., & Hansson, A. (2014). Battling Promethean dreams and Trojan horses: Revealing the critical discourses of geoengineering. Energy Research & Social Science, 2, 135-144.
Buck, H. (2010a). What can geoengineering do for us? Public participation and the new media landscape.
Buck, H. J. (2013). Climate engineering: spectacle, tragedy or solution? A content analysis of news media framing. In Interpretive approaches to global climate governance (pp. 166-180). Routledge.
Corner, A., Parkhill, K., Pidgeon, N., & Vaughan, N. E. (2013). Messing with nature? Exploring public perceptions of geoengineering in the UK. Global environmental change, 23(5), 938-947.
Corner, A., & Pidgeon, N. (2020). Like artificial trees? The effect of framing by natural analogy on public perceptions of geoengineering. In The ethics of nanotechnology, geoengineering, and clean energy (pp. 361-374). Routledge.
Fragniere, A., & Gardiner, S. M. (2016). Why geoengineering is not “Plan B”. Preston, C., Climate Justice and Geoengineering, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham MD, 15-31.
Luokkanen, M., Huttunen, S., & Hildén, M. (2014). Geoengineering, news media and metaphors: Framing the controversial. Public Understanding of Science, 23(8), 966-981.
Markusson, N., Ginn, F., Ghaleigh, N., Scott, V. (2014). In case of emergency press here: Framing geoengineering as a response to dangerous climate change. WIREs Climate Change 5: 281–290.
Nerlich, B. (2021). Geoengineering metaphors: 2011 and 2021. Making Science Public Blog.
Nerlich, B., & Jaspal, R. (2012). Metaphors we die by? Geoengineering, metaphors, and the argument from catastrophe. Metaphor and Symbol, 27(2), 131-147.
Nerlich, B., & Jaspal, R. (2013). Geoengineering and the (un)making of the world we want to live in. Making Science Public Blog.
Stilgoe, J. (2015). Experiment Earth: Responsible innovation in geoengineering. London: Routledge.
Image: Honeywell’s iconic thermostat, also called “The Round”. Wikimedia Commons
No comments yet, fill out a comment to be the first
Leave a Reply