Is it possible that clouds can buy us time to fight climate change?
What is the role of the clouds in marine cloud brightening and how does it affect coral health and survival? A warning on the Great Barrier Reef
The paper says that how viable marine cloud brightening is in the real world will depend on whether lab tests and modeling studies show positive results. They’ll also need to see if small field tests can be scaled up to have global impact. Monitoring the outcomes of such experiments would be a priority if there were satellite observations. The societal and ethical implications will also be considered as the paper explores the feasibility of physical science. How do you avoid any disparities when it comes to who benefits, or who bears any unforseen burdens? Changing precipitation from region to region is possible because of marine cloud brightening.
Clouds are difficult to manipulate due to their climate enigma. Some clouds can block sunlight, others can cause heat. The goal with marine cloud brightening, of course, is to have more of the former. If clouds thin out and rain becomes more heating, that’s a problem. There are a lot of different factors that affect the way a cloud forms or responds to human intervention.
It’s a sweltering summer in Australia, and the corals on the Great Barrier Reef are showing early signs of stress. The authority that manages the largest coral reef system in the world is expecting another bleaching event in the coming weeks, which will be the sixth time since 1998 that spikes in water temperatures wipe out swathes of corals. Three of these bleaching events, which make corals more susceptible to disease and death, have happened in the last six years alone. When corals experience extreme and prolonged heat stress, they expel the algae living in their tissues and turn completely white. Thousands of fish, crabs and other marine species rely on the reefs for food and refuge, and this can have devastating impacts. To slow the rate at which ocean warming is bleaching the coral, some scientists are looking to the skies for a solution. They are looking at the clouds.
Solar Engineering or Missing Energy? Does Science Matter if It Really Needs to Be Overthrown? A Case Study of a Silicon Valley Startup
Researchers don’t understand how fruitful the efforts would be, and if they could create new problems by messing with the planet. With climate change whipping up worsening disasters and countries lagging behind on goals to reduce pollution, some scientists think solar engineering is a possible contingency plan.
Lynn Russell, co-author of the paper and a climate scientist at the University of California San DIEGO, said in a press release that “non-ideal backup plans are needed to buy us enough time.”
A startup caused a global uproar when it forged ahead with its own makeshift SAI experiments despite a global moratorium on large-scale geoengineering. You can see the co-founders cook a fungicide in a parking lot and then use a weather balloon to send sulfur dioxide gas into the air. The groups that were optimistic about solar geoengineering were not happy with the experiments because they undermined research into how volcanoes can temporarily cool the planet.
The marine cloud is similar to volcanic eruptions. Unlike SAI, it entails sending reflective particles to low-lying clouds. Recent research suggests that the sulfur in pollution from ship stacks might have been overstated in the past.
According to Feingold, policymakers don’t have the information they need to make decisions about whether or not to deploy MCB. “The question is whether we can design a MCB research program using our current modeling and observational tools to establish the feasibility of this approach on a global scale, and if not, what needs to be done to position ourselves to do so.”
