Not a Bright Idea: Cooling the Earth by Reflecting Sunlight Back to Space
By James Kerry, Aarti Gupta and Terry Hughes/The Conversation
The United Nations Environment Assembly this week considered a resolution on solar radiation modification, which refers to controversial technologies intended to mask the heating effect of greenhouse gases by reflecting some sunlight back to space.
Proponents argue the technologies will limit the effects of climate change. In reality, this type of “geoengineering” risks further destabilising an already deeply disturbed climate system. What’s more, its full impacts cannot be known until after deployment.
The draft resolution initially called for the convening of an expert group to examine the benefits and risks of solar radiation modification. The motion was withdrawn on Thursday after no consensus could be reached on the controversial topic.
A notable development was a call from some Global South countries for “non-use” of solar radiation modification. We strongly support this position. Human-caused climate change is already one planetary-scale experiment too many – we don’t need another.
A risky business
In some circles, solar geoengineering is gaining prominence as a response to the climate crisis. However, research has consistently identified potential risks posed by the technologies such as:
- unpredictable effects on climate and weather patterns
- biodiversity loss, especially if use of the technology was halted abruptly
- undermining food security by, for example, reducing light and increasing salinity on land
- the infringement of human rights across generations – including, but not limited to, passing on huge risks to generations that will come after us.
Here, we discuss several examples of solar radiation modification which exemplify the threats posed by these technologies. These are also depicted in the graphic below.
A load of hot air
In April 2022, an American startup company released two weather balloons into the air from Mexico. The experiment was conducted without approval from Mexican authorities.
The intent was to cool the atmosphere by deflecting sunlight. The resulting reduction in warming would be sold for profit as “cooling credits” to those wanting to offset greenhouse gas pollution.
Appreciably cooling the climate would, in reality, require injecting millions of metric tons of aerosols into the stratosphere, using a purpose-built fleet of high-altitude aircraft. Such an undertaking would alter global wind and rainfall patterns, leading to more drought and cyclones, exacerbating acid rainfall and slowing ozone recovery.
Once started, this stratospheric aerosol injection would need to be carried out continually for at least a century to achieve the desired cooling effect. Stopping prematurely would lead to an unprecedented rise in global temperatures far outpacing extreme climate change scenarios.
Heads in the clouds
Another solar geoengineering technology, known as marine cloud brightening, seeks to make low-lying clouds more reflective by spraying microscopic seawater droplets into the air. Since 2017, trials have been underway on the Great Barrier Reef.
The project is tiny in scale, and involves pumping seawater onto a boat and spraying it from nozzles towards the sky. The project leader says the mist-generating machine would need to be scaled up by a factor of ten, to about 3,000 nozzles, to brighten nearby clouds by 30%.
After years of trials, the project has not yet produced peer-reviewed empirical evidence that cloud brightening could reduce sea surface temperatures or protect corals from bleaching.
The Great Barrier Reef is the size of Italy. Scaling up attempts at cloud brightening would require up to 1,000 machines on boats, all pumping and spraying vast amounts of seawater for months during summer. Even if it worked, the operation is hardly, as its proponents claim, “environmentally benign”.
The technology’s effects remain unclear. For the Great Barrier Reef, less sunlight and lower temperatures could alter water movement and mixing, harming marine life. Marine life may also be killed by pumps or negatively affected by the additional noise pollution. And on land, marine cloud brightening may lead to altered rainfall patterns and increased salinity, damaging agriculture.
More broadly, 101 governments last year agreed to a statement describing marine-based geoengineering, including cloud brightening, as having “the potential for deleterious effects that are widespread, long-lasting or severe”.
Balls, bubbles and foams
The Arctic Ice Project involves spreading a layer of tiny glass spheres over large regions of sea ice to brighten its surface and halt ice loss.
Trials have been conducted on frozen lakes in North America. Scientists recently showed the spheres actually absorb some sunlight, speeding up sea-ice loss in some conditions.
Another proposed intervention is spraying the ocean with microbubbles or sea foam to make the surface more reflective. This would introduce large concentrations of chemicals to stabilise bubbles or foam at the sea surface, posing significant risk to marine life, ecosystem function and fisheries.
No more distractions
Some scientists investigating solar geoengineering discuss the need for “exit ramps” – the termination of research once a proposed intervention is deemed to be technically infeasible, too risky or socially unacceptable. We believe this point has already been reached.
Since 2022, more than 500 scientists from 61 countries have signed an open letter calling for an international non-use agreement on solar geoengineering. Aside from the types of risks discussed above, the letter said the speculative technologies detract from the urgent need to cut global emissions, and that no global governance system exists to fairly and effectively regulate their deployment.
Calls for outdoor experimentation of the technologies are misguided and detract energy and resources from what we need to do today: phase out fossil fuels and accelerate a just transition worldwide.
Climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity, and global responses have been woefully inadequate. Humanity must not pursue dangerous distractions that do nothing to tackle the root causes of climate change, come with incalculable risk, and will likely further delay climate action.
Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, James Cook University, Australia and Senior Marine and Climate Scientist, OceanCare, Switzerland, James Cook University.
Professor of Global Environmental Governance, Wageningen University.
Distinguished Professor, James Cook University.
This kind of nonsense is exactly the type that’s caused by humans’ lack of mental & spiritual evolution. People’s egos are way too big, and humans are filled with hubris, leading them to believe that their technology will fix everything. What we should be doing is living as simply & naturally as possible, and deferring to nature to take care of things, which is what properly mentally & spiritually evolved people would do. Humans can NEVER know enough to mess with things like our atmosphere, and we need to leave it the hell alone. Of course we also need to end industrial living ASAP so we stop polluting the atmosphere and causing global warming/climate change to begin with.
The real problem here is that the scientists subscribe to a number of incorrect theories about how the atmosphere functions. It is a logical result of their wrong theories that they will come to wrong conclusions about how to solve a problem.
There is little doubt that the polar ice is melting. There is however, considerable room for debate about why. The conventional view that the whole earth is getting warmer because of a supposed “greenhouse effect” from a build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere from combustion of fossil fuels is not really supported by the evidence. Neither is the usual dismissal of the warming trend as only another stage in a long-term natural cycle caused by variation in the output of solar energy. The warming of the poles is clearly of human origin, but is also clearly NOT caused by any “greenhouse effect” from burning of coal and oil.
What I think it is, is the widespread use of nuclear power. The reprocessing of nuclear reactor fuel rods releases a radioactive gas, Kr85, into the atmosphere. This gas goes up to higher levels, so it is considered harmless to life at the surface. No effort is therefore made to contain it. As a radioactive gas, it consists of charged particles. When charged particles enter the field of a magnet, they migrate to the poles. Since the earth is a giant bar magnet, the Kr85 tends to collect at the poles. There, at high altitudes, it interacts with the natural high charge at that altitude, resulting in a net increase in charge of the poles.
Strong tropical storms, including those that become strong enough to be classed as hurricanes, form near the equator. These storm systems are highly charged systems. How far they travel toward the poles depends on two factors: the strength of the charge of the storm, and that of the pole that is attracting them poleward. As charge builds up at the poles, these tropical storms are being attracted farther and farther towards the poles, bringing tropical heat with them. This transport of heat from the tropics toward the poles is warming up the polar regions and giving the illusion that the entire earth is getting warmer.
The increase in strong storms being drawn toward the poles is also causing more frequent and severe weather in the temperate zones, which give added support to the “global warming” theory because an increase in frequency and severity of storms is also predicted by that theory. This is coincidence, however, not really a confirmation of the “global warming” hypothesis.
That storm tracks in the North Atlantic are influenced by solar flare activity coinciding with the influx of charge from space which tends to build up at the poles has been known since the early 1970s, at least, from the work of Ralph Markson, of M.I.T. The current ongoing increase in charge at the poles is from man-made, not astronomical, origins, but the effect is the same. The poles are attracting more and more storms and tropical air masses and the effects will accelerate as long as nuclear power is in use on this planet.
The global warming debate is one of those situations where both sides are equally wrong. Certainly, there is no serious effect from excessive CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 simply cannot build up very much because plants remove it from the air and use it to build biomass. All that would happen from more CO2 would be a rise in the amount of plant growth. No such increase has been reported. Therefore no increase in CO2 has been happening.
Also, no amount of CO2 would have much effect on climate anyway. Water vapor is a far more effective greenhous gas, and there is far more of it. The normal variation in the amount of water vapor from one year to another is enough to swamp any possible effect from any conceivable rise in CO2. The concept that CO2 can trap heat and bring about a rise in temperature is wrong.
But to denounce the world scientific community as liars and frauds is unfair. They are doing the best job they can with the information available to them, and that information leaves increases of CO2 as the only understandable way–understandable to them, that is– to explain the climate effects that quite obviously are really happening.
The greenhouse gases theory is the only acceptable one–acceptable to them, that is– known to the world scientific community that can account for the observational data they have seen. So it is the theory they must accept until a better one comes along. And it predicts at least some of what they are seeing. So they have no professional alternative but to stake out a position that, based on the best science available, this is what we can expect. When this cautious scientific statement is translated into terms a layman can understand, it comes out as a solid claim that global warming is real and is caused by CO2.
And the consensus of nearly all the worlds climate scientists is that global warming is real and CO2 from human activities is the cause of it. Only a very few maverick scientists dispute that, most of them older scientists who are objecting on grounds of their experience of the atmosphere over a long lifetime, not on any scientific theoretical grounds. That they are right is beside the point; the point is that they have no acceptable theory–acceptable to them, that is– that can explain the data, and therefore no scientific grounds to dispute the only acceptable theory that can.
The small minority of climate scientists who think there is no threat from global warming, other than the elderly group mentioned, are the ones who have a right-wing political bias and fear the ecconomic consequences of a campaign to limit CO2 emissions. But under the rules of the scientific game, they are simply wrong. There is data that something is happening to the climate. There is a correlation between the climate changes and human population growth and industrailization. And there is a theory, and only ONE acceptable theory–acceptable to them, that is– that they know of, to explain the data, and until some better acceptable theory–acceptable to them, that is– comes along, that is the theory they must accept. That, however, does not mean it is right.
The mainstream view of the current climate crisis is that it is mainly caused by greenhouse effect from gases released by burning of fuels such as coal and oil. But there is another theory of man-made climate disaster that is hardly ever mentioned in the mainstream media. That is the theory that much of the anthropogenic change in climate in the last 60 years or so is due to the introduction of nuclear power.
Between 1949, when the atomic bomb testing program began, and 1963, when the atmospheric test ban treaty went into effect, over 1,000 atomic bombs were set off above ground. Since 1963, many more have been set off underground, and ever single one of them has resulted in leakage of radioactive gases into the atmosphere. That’s right! They have never yet managed to set off an underground test that did not leak.
Nuclear explosions are one source, but only one, of a radioactive gas called Krypton 85, which is not found naturally in the atmosphere except in insignificant trace amounts. There is now several million times as much in the atmosphere as in 1945 at the start of the Atomic Age.
Kr85 has a half-life of only around 12 years, so much of it would be gone now if bomb tests were the only source for it. But it is also produced by the recycling of nuclear reactor fuel rods. During the recycling process 100% of the Kr85 is released into the atmosphere with no attempt at containment because since it goes up into the upper atmosphere where it cannot contact any living thing, it is considered biologically harmless.
Kr85 is a radioactive gas. Radioactive gases consist of charged particles. When charged particles enter the field of a magnet, they migrate toward the poles of the magnet. The earth is a giant bar magnet. The charged particles of the radioactive gas, Kr85, end up at the North and South Poles.
Tropical storms like hurricanes form along the equator. Such storms are highly-charged systems. How far they travel from their birthplace along the equator toward the pole is determined by how strongly charged they are and how strongly charged the pole of the earth is that attracts them.
As charge from Kr85 builds up at the poles, more and more tropical storms are attracted farther and farther toward the poles, bringing tropical heat with them, causing warming of the temperate and polar regions. At the same time, the temperate zones experience more frequent and more severe tropical-type storms. The storm surges from these storms send high water marks higher, eroding coastlines and giving the impression of rising sea levels.
The build-up of radioactive gas at high altitude in the polar regions interacts with the influx from space that enters the earth at the poles and is known as the Wilson Current. This energetic stream then flows through the crust of the earth in huge surges, and is discharged back into space in the form of upward-striking lightning bolts as a part of the nearly constant belt of thunderstorm activity that circles the earth at the equator. The whole process is known as the Wilson Circuit, and it is the balance of inflow from space at the poles and discharge into space as lightning that maintains the electrostatic balance of the earth.
The ionization of the upper atmosphere at the polar regions, making the atmosphere more conductive, bleeds off a portion of the inflowing Wilson Current and the result is less lightning on a global basis. According to carefully-maintained insurance company statistics, the number of claims for lightning-related damage was steady from the 1830s until about 1950 and has since declined by about 35%, indicating a drastic decrease in lightning all over the earth.
Since lightning is the most important mechanism in nature by which atmospheric nitrogen is “fixed” into nitrogen compounds plants can utilize, and some species of plants are more dependent on lightning for their nitrogen needs than others, this would have a transformative effect on the composition of ecosystems, leading to a decrease in biodiversity as the most lightning-dependent species decline and other species, less dependent on lightning-produced nitrogen, succeed them in the ecosystem.
This subtle effect, changing the ratio of one plant species to another, is not likely to be noticed, and if noticed, is not likely to be ascribed to a cause so remote as a build-up of radioactive gas at the North or South Poles from nuclear plants scattered all over the industrialized regions of the world. But that is a perfect example of how closely connected and interdependent the natural world really is. And this effect is one of the most important consequences of the development of nuclear technology.
These are only some of the effects of nuclear power that are seldom if ever addressed by the mainstream anti-nuclear movement, and which MUST be addressed if the full costs of the nuclear age are to be understood.
I was talking to my mother once, on a hot summer day, and a thunderstorm came up. I mentioned that when I was growing up there in New England, there were thunderstorms all summer long, every few days, but now they seem rare. We still get plenty of rain, but we now get only one or two thunderstorms in the course of a summer, and even those have very little thunder and lightning in them compared to those I remembered.
My mother confirmed my childhood memory, and went on to say that when she was a child, there were even more of them, and that led me to start asking other people. I found that the older a person was, the more they were certain there is less thunder and lightning now than many years ago. So I asked a leading atmospheric physicist about it. He told me he knew of only one project counting lightning strikes, and that was only a few years old, so there was no baseline of data from years ago to compare it with.
He then made a mistake: He went on to say, “It is impossible to find out if there is less lightning now than there used to be”. Now, when a highly respected scientist tells me something is “impossible” , my usual reaction is to go out and do it anyway. So I did.
I went home and made a phone call to an insurance company. I asked to speak to the head of their actuarial department. Insurance compainies keep very careful records because they set their rates accordingly. The actuary found my question interesting and said he would get back to me.
He phoned me back that same afternoon. He told me he had checked their records back to the 1830s when the company was founded. From the 1830s until about 1950, the number of claims for lightning-related damage remained about the same, and since 1950 it has decreased by about 35%.
I asked two questions: Has there been an improvement in lightning rod technology since the 1940s? He said, No, they are still the same as when Ben Franklin invented them. And I asked, do more buildings have lightning rods now? and the answer was that they have always been required for insurance coverage.
Bingo! There is less lightning now than there used to be, no matter if the scientists know it or not. My next step was to try to find out why. I could find very little in the scientific literature on the subject, but quite by accident, I came across an abstract of an article published in a Soviet scientific journal in 1988, just before the implosion of the Soviet Union. The abstract was all I could find in English, but it was enough to cause me to pay a visit to the author when I happened to be in Vilnius, Lithuania, where he was located.
He did not speak English, and the conversation in a mixture of my bad German and worse French was far from fluent, but I did manage to discover that he had not been able to obtain funding for any more work on the subject since the end of the Soviet Union. Lithuania does not have a very big budget for scientific research. I also asked if he knew of anyone else doing anything along the same lines, and he said no. I take that as definitive since I would expect him to know if anything was being done anywhere in the world in a field in which he is the only published author.
What he had written about that got me so interested was the changes in the electrostatic balance of the earth as a result of the release of a radioactive gas, Krypton 85, into the atmosphere since the start of the Atomic Age. Kr85 is not found naturally in the atmosphere except in insignificant trace amounts, and there is now several million times as much as before humans started splitting the atom in 1945.
Kr85 is an ionizing gas. Ionizing gases make the atmosphere more conductive of electricity, so small charges bleed off continuously, instead of building up to the point of a sudden sharp discharge as a lightning bolt. The decrease in lightning reflected in the insurance company statistics is consistant with the amount of Kr85 known to have been released over the past 60-odd years.
A decline in lightning is a very serious environmental threat. According to research done by Pud Franzblou, at the New Mexico School of Mines, lightning is the most important source of bio-avalable nitrogen compounds needed by plant life, providing up to 99% of the nitrate compounds required by plant life to make the protein animals that live on them need. Plants cannot use nitrogen in the free form in which it is found in the atmosphere. They need it in the form of compounds known as “fixed” nitrogen. Some types of plants have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria on their roots,but other plants do not and are dependent on lightning. It is estimated that only about 1% of the biosphere requirement of nitrogen is provided by nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil. The rest comes from lightning.
Experiments done in sealed greenhouses with extra CO2 pumped in show the plants thrive and grow larger and faster from the extra carbon. But without added nitrogen to balance the added carbon, they are less norishing for animal life feeding on them. This is known as “nitrogen dilution”, and at some point animals will no longer be able to obtain enough nourishment from the plants to survive, even thought the plants will be larger and will look perfectly healthy.
And that is one of the most important hazards of the Nuclear Age.
The level of CO2 in the atmosphere cannot be rising because plants would remove any excess from the air. If the level of CO2 was rising, there would be an increase in plant biomass because of extra CO2 availability. Since there has been no increase in plant growth, there has been no increase in CO2.
But even if there was an increase in CO2 in the air, that would not affect the temperature of the earth noticeably. Water vapor is far more important as a greenhouse gas, and the albedo of the earth is much more important in affecting the surface temperature than greenhouse gases. The possible contribution of CO2 is negligible.
The mean surface temperature of the earth is not rising. The polar and temperate regions are warming up due to the use of nuclear power.
The melting of the poles and the warming of the temperate zones is giving the false impression that the whole earth is getting warmer because the poles are the most conspicuous place to notice warming and the temperate zones happen to be where most of the human scientists live.
The spurious greenhouse gas theory was invented by Arhenius in the late 19th century, true, but it was Carl Sagan who revived it in recent times as a political plot to undermine enthusiasm for nuclear war. If not for his publicizing it, the idea would have remained forgotten.
The term “global warming” is misleading. It conceals the vast scope of the atmospheric breakdown and trivializes it. It opens the way to bogus arguments such as if the same thing has happened before in the history of this planet, or if a slight rise in temperature would really do any harm.
Let us be clear about what we are talking about. A slight rise in temperature would not be a bad thing if it ever happened. In many past ages the earth has been quite a bit warmer than it is now and no harm resulted. On the contrary, the biosphere flourished in the warmer temperatures.
If I thought the earth was getting warmer as a result of greenhouse gases, I would celebrate. It would be a wonderful thing to have happen.
The earth is not getting warmer. The atmosphere is undergoing a catastrophic destabilization. All life on earth is in grave danger from the increasing randomness and chaotic instability of the atmosphere. It is getting hotter and colder. It is getting wetter and dryer. There are more frequent and stronger storms. There are long periods of stagnation, during which there are no storms.
Life can adapt to a change in climate. It can even adapt to a drastic change in climate. But nothing can adapt to randomness and chaos.
If the greenhouse theory of the atmosphere were correct, more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would indeed make the earth warmer. And if the greenhouse theory of the atmosphere were correct, a warmer atmosphere would indeed produce more frequent and stronger storms. But it would not also produce longer and drier droughts that would cover larger areas than before. Droughts are a symptom of stagnation in the atmosphere. A drought would not last as long if the atmosphere was moving more rapidly from increased heating.
The greenhouse theory is not correct. Droughts are not caused by warmer air masses. Storms are more frequent and stronger, but that is not because of warmer air either. The temperature at the poles is rising because the poles are getting more charged from the reaction going on there as radioactive gases released all over the world concentrate at the poles, attracting tropical storm tracks.
There is no such thing as global warming, but there are plenty of phenomena that are being mistakenly taken for it.
It is ironic that nuclear power is being promoted as a solution to a non-existant problem,while it is the actual cause of a very real problem whose symptoms are being misinterpeted as those of the false problem. Despite the fact that almost all environmentalists are solidly opposed to nuclear power and insist that it should not be seen as a solution to the so-called global warming problem, the nuclear industry has been the main beneficiary of the global warming scare.
If a significant number of new nuclear plants are built under the rubric of preventing global warming, they will probably be enough to tip the balance against the possibility of survival of life on this planet.
But there is also a further reason to oppose the global warming hoax. Some people, ignorant of how the atmosphere functions, have proposed absurd and fantastic geo-engineering stunts like dumping large amounts of iron dust into the oceans to stimulate plankton growth to increase absorbtion of CO2, or dumping various substances into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from earth, or placing huge mirrors in orbit to shield the earth from sunlight, or other similar schemes.
So, at the very time the planetary ecosystem is under unprecedented attack, it is also likely to be attacked by fools trying to “solve” a fake global warming problem which does not exist.
These “solutions” are just another form of pollution with which the already damaged atmosphere of this planet will have to cope, another assault on the environment by mankind in its’ 5,000 year long war against nature. None of them can possibly have any helpful effect on the breakdown of the atmosphere.
For a fictional take on this subject:
https://www.erbzine.com/mag48/4851.html
The science fiction topic of a planetary civilization destroying itself by trying to fix an environmental problem by technology is one that has some lessons for those who propose “geoengineering” solutions to the so-called “greenhouse gases” that are being scapegoated for the atmospheric deterioration being caused by radioactivity.