6 min read More and more climate scientists are supporting experiments to cool Earth by altering the stratosphere or the ocean By Mark Fischetti Meinzahn/Getty Images As recently as 10 years ago most scientists I interviewed and heard speak at conferences did not support geoengineering as a way to counteract climate change. Whether the idea was to release large amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to “block” the sun’s heating or to spread iron across the ocean to supercharge algae that breathe in carbon dioxide, researchers resisted on principle: don’t mess with natural systems because unintended consequences could ruin Earth. They also worried that trying the techniques even at a small scale could be a slippery slope to wider deployment, and that countries would use the promise of geoengineering as an excuse to keep burning carbon-emitting fossil fuels. But today more and more climate scientists openly support experimenting with these and other proposed strategies, in part because entrepreneurs and organizations are going ahead with the methods anyway—often based on little data or field trials. Scientists want to run controlled experiments to see if the methods are productive, to test consequences and perhaps to show objectively that the approaches can cause serious problems. “We do need to try the techniques to figure them out,” says Rob Jackson, a professor at Stanford University, chair of the international research partnership Global Carbon Project and author of a book on climate solutions called Into the Clear Blue Sky (Scribner, 2024). “But doing research does make them more likely to happen. That is the knotty part of all this.” A tacit race may be starting among scientists and entrepreneurs. More funding is being offered to researchers, and investments are growing in companies that would pursue geoengineering. In 2023 a start-up called Make Sunsets […]
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