Some Scientists Want to Try Blocking Sunlight to Combat Global Warming

As science-fiction as it sounds, it's very much a reality and in need of discussion

Hiya!

Have you seen the 2013 dystopian movie Snowpiercer? In it, Earth is going through an Ice Age caused by a failed climate-change experiment. To combat global warming, scientists launched chemicals into Earth’s atmosphere to block sunlight and cool the planet. But they overcalculated and blocked too much sunlight, plunging the planet into a rapid Ice Age. The survivors live aboard a never-stopping super train that spans the globe.

When I watched the movie, I thought its premise was tantalizing, but just over a decade after its release, it’s become far scarier because now there are correlations to real-life events.

The narrative or train may never play out, but scientists today are engaged in a very real and heated debate about whether to embark on a similar climate path as the scientists in the film. Some organizations are formulating different ways to artificially alter Earth’s atmosphere with the goal of blocking sunlight to slow climate change.

Science-Nonfiction

I came across an opinion piece in Scientific American by Chandra Bhushan, the president and CEO of the International Forum for Environment, Sustainability, and Technology (iFOREST), an environmental research and innovation organization, and Tarun Gopalakrishnan, a Ph.D. candidate at the Fletcher School and a predoctoral fellow with the Climate Policy Lab at Tufts University. In the essay, the duo explains how geoengineering is advancing in the shadows — and it’s time to bring it to light.

If you don’t know, climate engineering, or geoengineering, is an umbrella term for actions that intentionally and artificially change Earth’s climate.

Many of the concepts have roots in science fiction, like terraforming, the idea of artificially transforming a “lifeless” planet into a habitable one where humans can survive. But now, such ideas are quickly emerging from the pages of science fiction and are being considered in real life, so much so that there are different branches.

One branch is solar geoengineering, which aims to alter the climate by blocking sunlight using reflective materials — just like the scientists in Snowpiercer did. The idea is that the materials reflect solar radiation away from Earth, thus cooling the planet.

As you can imagine, the subject is quite controversial. Just Googling “solar geoengineering” serves up dozens of papers arguing both sides.

But in their article, Bhushan and Gopalakrishnan point out that many countries are already using technology to modify local weather. They cite that by 2025, China plans to add over 2 million square miles (about 5.5 million square kilometers) of territory to its weather modification program. Meanwhile, scientists in Australia are trying to save the Great Barrier Reef by injecting salt water into the clouds over it.

While these experiments are on a smaller scale, Bhushan and Gopalakrishnan caution that “the leap from weather modification to solar radiation modification (SRM) is close.” Maybe a little too close, as several organizations throughout the United States are trying out their own ideas, and many are putting ethics on the backburner.

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