In 2006, a group of preeminent scientists met for a two-day conference at the NASA Ames Research Center in California to discuss cooling the Earth by injecting particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight into space.
At some point, one of the conference rooms became overheated.
“The room was getting kind of hot, and somebody went over to the thermostat to try and fix it,” recalled Alan Robock, a Rutgers climatologist who was in attendance. “And they couldn’t adjust it. And so many people didn’t understand the irony that you can’t control the temperature of a room, but you’re talking about controlling the temperature of the whole Earth.”
Solar geoengineering — also called solar radiation management or solar radiation modification — was then and is now a fraught subject. Many experts and nonexperts alike consider the idea of deliberately mucking about with Earth’s climate systems to counteract centuries of mostly accidental mucking about in Earth’s climate systems ethically dubious and potentially highly dan... Read more
