The multi-million dollar race to shade the sun and [fail to?] stop climate change

Image credit: livescience.com

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The media loves the idea of plucky amateurs trying to save the world. The lack of any need to save it doesn’t matter to them. The weather botherers hope for taxpayer backing aka subsidies as they meddle with the atmosphere, but may run into opposition from tourism, farmers, growers in general, solar PV users and makers, etc.
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A secretive team of scientists is working on an unprecedented plan to fill the atmosphere with tiny particles that imitate a volcanic eruption and block out the sun, says The Independent (via MSN).

It might save humanity, or it could spiral out of control. [Talkshop comment – or just be useless].

Thousands stand opposed to such a scheme, but these plans may move forward anyway.

This is not the plot of the next Marvel movie, but solar geoengineering, one of the very non-fictional frontiers of climate research.
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Stardust Solutions is one of a small but closely-watched [Talkshop comment – who by?] group of companies and researchers pursuing such ideas in the hopes of making rapid gains on the climate crisis as international action remains perilously insufficient.

The basic idea is to limit how much of the sun’s energy reaches the Earth’s surface. While this won’t tackle the root cause of the climate crisis — still-rising greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels — “solar radiation modification” could reduce the global temperature and slow the melting of the polar ice caps, buying us all some much-needed time. [Talkshop comment – the usual media climate waffle].

While the idea has been around since the mid-Sixties, small-scale outdoor experiments have only begun in the last two decades, including cloud seeding in Switzerland and testing salt spray’s impacts on the clouds above the Great Barrier Reef.

For every fledgling experiment, another project has been canceled in the face of public opposition.
. . .
An RV packed with helium balloons
There are no international rules or treaties that ban solar geoengineering, though the area is a hot topic in legal circles, and some U.S. states are moving ahead with plans to regulate it.

Bills have been introduced in at least 19 states to ban various forms of geoengineering. Tennessee, Louisiana, and Florida have already banned weather modification, in part influenced by persistent conspiracy theories about governments and private companies nefariously using “chemtrails” in the sky to spread toxins across the world.

On the whole, however, regulation of the field remains in its infancy, and one company, Make Sunsets, is already conducting outdoor deployments.

Their efforts are on the scrappy side. The company often launches its balloons from a Winnebago RV in the hills of northern California, and it has reportedly raised just over $1 million from investors, pocket change compared to the funding that’s flowed to Stardust.

Make Sunsets hopes to make up for these more modest efforts with a highly impactful solution. [Talkshop comment – solution to what?]

Full article here.
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Image credit: livescience.com