Imagine...Life without Sunshine

Heavy , heavy terraforming

  More Scientists Now Think Geoengineering May Be Essential

Some experts contend we may be approaching a moment when nothing other than geoengineering can meet the international community’s promise—made when signing the UN Climate Change Convention at the Earth Summit in 1992...

  Time is running out on climate change, but geoengineering has dangers of its own

Champions of solar radiation management (SRM) say this is the answer we’ve been looking for. SRM techniques cool the planet by reflecting sunlight away from it. The most discussed SRM technique involves continuously injecting tiny reflective particles – most often, sulphur – into the stratosphere to evenly cover the planet and shield us from the sun’s rays. However, there are reasons for caution, if not outright scepticism, about the wisdom of this techno-fix for climate change.

  Volcanoes show why solar geoengineering can’t save our food from climate change

Scattering aerosols in the sky would cool the planet, but it would block crucial sunlight for plants.

 A Big-Sky Plan to Cool the Planet

Pumping aerosols into the stratosphere may buy us more time, but it’s no substitute for cutting carbon emissions—and we still don’t know enough to do it responsibly.

 A Disappointing New Problem With Geo-Engineering

Dimming the sky won’t save the world’s harvests.

 Geoengineering is one way to fight climate change and cool the planet

Geoengineering raises a host of scientific, political, and even moral and philosophical issues. While some may find it an interesting trick to solve our global climate problem, others view it as strange and disturbing. But climate change is not going away in the future, and it is time we started to talk about geoengineering as a possible part of the solution for our planet.

 Harvard Scientists Begin Experiment To Block Out The Sun

A group of Harvard scientists plans to tackle climate change through geoengineering by blocking out the sun. The concept of artificially reflecting sunlight has been around for decades, yet this will be the first real attempt at controlling Earth's temperature through solar engineering. The project, called Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), will spend $3 million to test their models by launching a steerable balloon in the southwest US 20 kilometers into the stratosphere. Once the balloon is in place, it will release small particles of calcium carbonate.

 If We Start Geoengineering, There’s No Going Back

However, the gravest danger that geoengineering poses is that it only masks the real problem. We might spray sulfur into the atmosphere, but there would still be too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Therefore, if we were to stop geoengineering, the climate would snap back to where it was before, and likely get even worse, assuming that we didn’t stop emitting CO2.

 Immediate stop to climate geoengineering

Hands off Mother Earth! In a widely-supported Manifesto released today, 23 international organizations, six “Alternative Nobel Prize” recipients, and 87 national organizations from five continents called for a halt to testing and political consideration of climate geoengineering. The signatories include Indigenous Peoples’ and farmers’ movements and climate justice and environmental networks, among others.

 Science Says Geoengineering Could Create New Climate Catastrophes

Humans have arguably been unintentionally "geoengineering" the planet for at least the past several decades or longer by pumping tons of methane, carbon dioxide and other climate-altering molecules into the atmosphere. But new research finds that trying to undo the effects of all those years of emissions with intentional geoengineering still risks doing more harm than good.

 Should We Dim the Skies to Save the World?

Nobody knows for sure how much time humanity has until global warming makes the planet unlivable for large numbers of people. What’s clearer is that such a moment in history is not only thinkable but also, without dramatic technological or political changes, approaching. The scientists I spoke to aren’t frantically yelling, “Pull the goalie!” They’re saying something more like this: It’s getting late in the game, and if we must do the unthinkable, let’s understand the risks—lest we fail to act before all is lost.

 The Dangerous Belief That Extreme Technology Will Fix Climate Change

The impacts of geoengineering on the global scale are unknown, in part because no massive geoengineering project has been undertaken ― apart from human-induced climate change. But models are potentially troubling. Some suggest geoengineering will disrupt rainfall worldwide and damage the earth’s protective ozone layer. A Rutgers University study published in January suggested that suddenly stopping a large geoengineering project, once it has started, could lead to rapid warming, pushing species into extinction and accelerating climate change.

 To Curb Global Warming, Science Fiction May Become Fact

Solving the climate imperative will require cutting greenhouse gas emissions down to zero, ideally in this century, and probably sucking some out. But solar geoengineering could prove a critical complement to mitigation, giving humanity time to develop the political will and the technologies to achieve the needed decarbonization.

 What Happens If We Start Solar Geo-Engineering—and Then Suddenly Stop?

It might be worse than letting climate change play out.

 World Needs to Set Rules for Geoengineering Experiments, Experts Say

With interest in such research rising, and the risks uncertain, that conservation needs to start now.

Everything you need to know about geoengineering

Scientists may finally put some of the basic principles to the test in 2018—and not everyone is happy about that.

Geoengineering is a ludicrous way to deal with climate change. Let's consider it anyway

Geoengineering — the idea of deliberately fiddling with the Earth's climate to reduce global warming — has long been seen as a preposterous notion. Surely we'd have to be truly desperate before we ever tried something like blotting out sunlight to cool the planet. ...right? Right. But that's why it's so striking that many scientists now think we should at least consider the idea

How Much Do You Know About Geoengineering?

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Why you need to get involved in the geoengineering debate – now

Geoengineering comes in two distinct flavours. The first is greenhouse gas removal: those ideas that would seek to remove and store carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The second is solar radiation management: the ideas that would seek to reflect a level of sunlight away from the Earth.

3 huge geoengineering projects are under way to save the planet

It’s no longer science fiction to imagine altering the Earth’s atmosphere to try to cool the planet. In fact, several major “geoengineering” experiments are already underway. The scientists pursuing them believe that there’s already too much carbon in the atmosphere — and that to avoid catastrophic climate change, we’ll need to resort to climate-cooling technologies.

Blocking out the sun to reduce global warming - an idea still in the making

Solar radiation management is an idea that can reduce some of the risks of global warming by blocking out a small amount of sunlight. It sounds like science fiction, and is only in the early stages of research, but it’s being taken seriously by climate scientists and environmentalists. Social scientists concerned with the potential effects of global warming are also taking an interest. It involves spraying tiny reflective particles – such as sulphur dioxide – into the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere. They would remain up there for a year or two, reflecting away some of the energy from the sun before it reaches the Earth’s lower atmosphere.

Geoengineering Is Not a Solution to Climate Change

Using technofixes to tinker with global climate systems is an excuse to avoid unpopular but necessary measures to reduce carbon emissions.

In a way, climate change is a straightforward problem to solve

To solve the problem, we can do two things: find ways to reflect sun’s heat (solar-radiation management) or reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions (carbon management). Study after study show that the only way we can reach zero emissions without torpedoing the global economy is by investing in carbon-capture technologies.

One Scientist Hopes to Engineer the Climate With Antacid

TO HELP CURE the planet’s ailments, Zhen Dai suggests antacid. In powdered form, calcium carbonate—often used to relieve upset stomachs—can reflect light; by peppering the sky with the shiny white particles, the Harvard researcher thinks it might be possible to block just enough

One Way Geoengineering Might Get Started

In this excerpt from The Planet Remade, Oliver Morton imagines that a group of countries threatened by climate change go rogue.

Re-Engineering the Earth

As the threat of global warming grows more urgent, a few scientists are considering radical—and possibly extremely dangerous—schemes for reengineering the climate by brute force. Their ideas are technologically plausible and quite cheap. So cheap, in fact, that a rich and committed environmentalist could act on them tomorrow. And that’s the scariest part.

So You Want to Geoengineer the Planet? Beware the Hurricanes

EVERY COUNTRY ON Earth, save for cough one, has banded together to cut emissions and stop the runaway heating of our only home. That’s nearly 200 countries working to keep the global average temperature from climbing 2 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial Revolution levels. Phenomenal. But what if cooperation and emissions reduction aren’t enough?

The Good, Bad, and Ugly Approaches to Geoengineering

Geoengineering, or tinkering with the atmosphere to address problems we have caused, is an unfortunate term that includes very different technologies under a catchall umbrella for large-scale ways to not crash the bus and leave future generations with an unmanageable climate.

To Stop Global Warming, Should Humanity Dim the Sky?

The idea behind solar geoengineering is simple. For the last four decades, humanity has struggled to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas entering the atmosphere. We have decommissioned nuclear plants, introduced millions of new gasoline-burning cars to the roadway, and dawdled through treaty after treaty. Meanwhile, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has only risen.