Scientists consider wild plan to dim Sun to save Earth
Hey, so, you know the plot of some disaster or post-apocalyptic movies, where the world gets so hot that scientists take action and actually make the Earth absorb less sunlight, thereby cooling it? Yeah, it never works, or it works too well, and ultimately Earth is doomed anyway.
It’s a fun plot device for a movie, but one group of scientists seems to be actually considering it as a possible solution to halt one of the effects of global warming, bgr.com reported.
In a new paper published in Environmental Research Letters, researchers led by scientists from the University of Cape Town suggest that spewing reflective particles into Earth’s atmosphere could ultimately prevent Earth from enduring devastating droughts as a result of ongoing climate change. No, this is not a joke.
The idea — puking a specific type of particle into the atmosphere to prevent some percentage of sunlight from reaching the surface — might sound like a totally ludicrous idea, but if we’re talking about preventing a worldwide collapse, we have to be open to even the wildest possibilities. The researchers that penned this paper suggest that, using models from the Stratospheric Aerosol Geoengineering Large Ensemble Project, we could potentially reduce the chances of a “Day Zero” drought (the term given to the hypothetical day when the world has officially run out of enough clean water for the totality of humanity) by 90 percent.
That’s pretty impressive if it did indeed work as intended, but there are several other issues that remain. For instance, as Futurism website points out, simply battling a catastrophe like a planet-level drought wouldn’t actually solve global warming at all. It would potentially mitigate one of the symptoms of global warming, but it wouldn’t actually reverse the damage already done. In fact, it could potentially make things worse in ways we might not fully realize yet.
Another major hurdle between humanity and global geoengineering is the fact that for such a decision to be made, everyone would have to be on board. One country can’t just go and decide to dim the lights for the rest of us without ensuring that all countries agree with the decision. Of course, it would likely lead to serious pushback by many nations and there’s even the potential that military conflicts could arise when two sides refuse to back down. Trying to save the planet from drought might ultimately spark another kind of planet-ending catastrophe: Nuclear war.