How to Brighten Marine Clouds without Adding a Marine Solver? Proposal for Research Advancement in the 21st Century
“We would not be directly testing marine cloud brightening at any scale that would affect climate,” says Doherty. Critics, including environmentalist organizations and advocacy groups such as the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, however, fear that even small experiments could inadvertently affect the global climate due to its complex nature. “The idea that you could just do this on a regional scale and very limited scale, is pretty much a fallacy because the atmosphere and ocean are importing heat from other places all the time,” says Ray Pierrehumbert, professor of physics at the University of Oxford. There are also technical challenges. Developing a sprayer that can reliably brighten clouds is no easy feat, because seawater tends to clog up as salt builds up. The MCBP has enlisted the assistance of the inventor of the earliest inkjet printers, who worked at Hewlett- Packard and Xerox until his retirement. With financial backing from Bill Gates and a group of other tech industry veterans, Neukermans is now designing nozzles that will spray just the right size (120 to 400 nanometers in diameter) of saltwater droplets into the atmosphere.
Scientists are not sure how marine cloud brightening affects aerosols in the air. The authors of the new paper want to proceed with caution. The group of 31 scientists from around the world convened in 2022 to assess where the current scientific understanding of marine cloud brightening stands and what knowledge gaps need to be filled. A paper published this week summarizes their findings and proposes a plan for research advancement.
If we can figure out how to lighten Earth’s clouds without causing any harm, then it might be possible to cool the planet. The research road map was published in the journal Science Advances yesterday and was written by over 30 leading scientists.
There are differences of opinion about how solar engineering should be used as a solution for the climate problem. There was a different way to reflect the sun back into space called the stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI).
The paper’s co-author Lynn Russell said non-ideal backup plans were needed to buy us enough time.
How to mimic the effect of volcanic eruptions on a global scale using multicomponent Bacterial Bioinformatics (MCB) experiment
One startup caused a global uproar in 2022 when it forged ahead with its own makeshift SAI experiments despite a de facto global moratorium on large-scale geoengineering. You can watch the co-founders on YouTube grilling fungicide in a parking lot to create sulfur dioxide gas they then launch aboard a weather balloon. The experiments undermined serious research into how to mimic the way volcanos temporarily cool the planet when releasing sulfur dioxide during eruptions.
The effects of volcanic eruptions are mimicked by the marine cloud brightening. But unlike SAI, it entails sending reflective particles into low-lying clouds instead of higher up into the stratosphere. Sulfur in pollution from ship stacks has also been shown to have a similar reflective effect, although recent research suggests this might have been overestimated in the past.
“Interest in MCB is growing, but policymakers currently don’t have the information they need to reach decisions about if and when MCB should be deployed,” Feingold said. “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.”
