On last Friday, the White House dropped a report on geoengineering – the practice of messing with the atmosphere to cool things down by blocking some of the sun’s rays.
If there’s less sunlight, temperatures drop. And if people aren’t smart enough to push for real action on global heating, we might have to resort to geoengineering, even though nobody really knows what the consequences will be.
The Biden administration is thinking about looking into two different geoengineering strategies.
- Stratospheric aerosol injection — spraying particles like sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight and cool down the Earth. It’s kinda like when volcanoes erupt or there’s a ton of smoke from wildfires.
- Marine cloud brightening — is all about making clouds brighter, either by adding sea salt or using other methods.
The report acknowledged there are risks associated with each form of solar radiation modification (geoengineering), because modifying sunlight could alter global weather patterns, disrupt food supplies, and lead to abrupt warming if the practice was widely deployed and then halted. Plus, it wouldn’t do anything to tackle air pollution from fossil fuels or the acidity of our oceans.
According to Clean-Future, the best way to tackle the issue of a planet that’s heating up too much is to stop using fossil fuels – right now or even sooner. We totally know how to do it, but lack the political motivation to get it done in time to avoid a total climate catastrophe caused by ourselves.
Reference- CNBC, White House Report, National Geographic, Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, Futurism