Tag: Solar Geoengineering

Inside the Controversial Experiment to Geoengineer the Atmosphere

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This lab is planning to test the world’s first solar geoengineering experiment in the field. Here’s why that’s so controversial.

Solar geoengineering, an idea that picked up steam over a decade ago when a Nobel Prize winning scientist called for more research on this climate engineering intervention, is back in the news. The idea made it into the 2019 UN Environment Assembly agenda and was used to kickstart a global conversation surrounding the contentious response to the climate crisis.

With growing urgency and scientific interest, a team at Harvard University took up the charge to investigate solar geoengineering in a fully fledged research program.

Solar geoengineering involves a plan that would disperse particles into the stratosphere and could ultimately reduce global temperatures by bouncing the Sun’s rays back into space.

However, this type of geoengineering intervention would not fix the root cause, which is the rising funnel of greenhouse gas emissions that are getting trapped in our atmosphere.

How Bill Gates-Funded Solar Geoengineering Could Help End Climate Change

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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.”