Fires burning across the Amazon rainforest have renewed the debate about solutions to climate change. Bill Gates is backing the first high-altitude experiment of one radical approach called solar geoengineering. It’s meant to mimic the effects of a giant volcanic eruption. Thousands of planes would fly at high altitudes, spraying millions of tons of particles around the planet to create a massive chemical cloud that would cool the surface.
“Modeling studies have found that it could reduce the intensity of heat waves, for instance, apparently it could reduce the rate of sea level rise. It could reduce the intensity of tropical storms,” said Andy Parker, project director at the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative.
The technology is not far from being ready and it’s affordable, but it could cause massive changes in regional weather patterns and eradicate blue sky.
“These consequences might be horrific. They might involve things like mass famine, mass flooding, drought of kinds that will affect very large populations,” said Stephen Gardiner, author of “A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change.”
Plastic pollution has reached one of the most remote places on Earth: the Arctic. That is according to two separate studies released last week which found tiny plastic particles, known as microplastics, in Arctic snowfall and frozen within the sea ice.
Meet leading polar specialist Dr. Kate Winter, winner of a prestigious science fellowship, who’s journeyed to the ends of the earth to study the changing face of Antarctica. With her assistant James, she’s used an ice-penetrating radar and remotely sensed imagery to map and measure changes in Antarctica’s ice streams, paying particular attention to potentially life-giving sediments moving towards the coast.
Her work made headlines in 2018 when she discovered canyons and mountain ranges buried near the South Pole. This episode of Climate Travelers follows Kate and James as they traverse the extreme environment, aiming to unearth new knowledge about Antarctica’s role in future climate change.
