You probably remember Morpheus’s info dump from The Matrix. It’s when he explains that the Earth’s sky was scorched to block out the sun to deprive the machines of their primary energy source—a cautionary tale about causing a problem in a misguided attempt to solve another.
Some people don’t interpret it that way, as evidenced by a solar engineering grant that was just issued in the United Kingdom. If implemented, it would dim the sun in our sky in an attempt to fend off climate change.
Would Dimming the Sun Actually Affect Climate Change?
Solar engineering projects are highly controversial, to say the least. A lot of them have been banned in the United States, even though evidence suggests cloud seeding-type projects don’t really work to begin with.
Meanwhile, the UK is about to spend tens of millions to collect data by running real-world experiments on how to cool the Earth by messing with the atmosphere.
Leading ideas include shooting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to bounce sunlight away, and fluffing up marine clouds using sea salt so they reflect more rays. There’s also “cirrus cloud thinning,” which, according to The Guardian, would involve “seeding thin cirrus clouds in the upper troposphere with ice nuclei” to “reduce their lifespan and increase cooling.”
All of this sounds like a desperate attempt to solve a rapidly deteriorating situation that no one seemed particularly interested in solving in a sensible, less drastic way.
The sudden enthusiasm to blot out the sun is funded by the Advanced Research and Intervention Agency, or ARIA, an agency within the UK government that has determined that we’ve pretty much got to the point where sensible, incremental long-term climate change solutions are no longer viable. And drastic measures that sound like the evil schemes of the Bond villain are all that’s left on the table.
Or, as ARIA’s programmer director Mark Symes told The Guardian, “The uncomfortable truth is that our current warming trajectory makes a number of such tipping points distinctly possible over the next century.”
The UK is betting that the solution to our overheating planet might just lie in turning Earth into a giant science fair project. Will it work? Or will it just make things worse? No one knows, hence pouring money into research to find out if any of these ideas are viable.
But someone has to do something because so far the human race’s current plan of doing as little as possible so as not to inconvenience ourselves seems not to be working out as well as we once thought it would.
The post The UK Wants to Fight Climate Change by Dimming The Sun appeared first on VICE.
