Sunlight filtering looked at to reduce impacts of climate change

DEAR EDITOR, quoting Radio New Zealand International – March 12, 2018, “Filtering out a portion of sunlight from entering the Earth’s atmosphere is being explored as a way of reducing some of the impacts of climate change.

“It’s a theoretical proposal known as Solar Radiation Management or SRM, and is referred to as solar geo-engineering, climate engineering and climate intervention.

“The SRM Governance Initiative is looking at its potential as a weapon in the climate change mitigation arsenal particularly for countries at the forefront of climate change.

“The initiative is a partnership between the Royal Society, The World Academy of Sciences, and the Environmental Defence Fund.

“The initiative’s project director Andy Parker says it’s a conversation climate communities in the Pacific should start having.” Copyright: RNZI   (All Rights Reserved)

The question what is Solar Radiation Management and could SRM provide a solution to global warming had me thinking and I found some of the information I needed by looking at the GeoEngineering Monitor website which said (quote)

“Solar Radiation Management describes a suite of proposed technologies that aim to reflect sunlight back into space before it warms the earth’s climate. These proposed technique would achieve this in one of a number of ways: by spraying sulphur dioxide or hydrogen sulphide into the stratosphere (the upper reaches of the atmosphere), by launching a 300 km2 barrier into heliosynchronous orbit, by making the albedo (reflectivity) of clouds, or by launching billions of reflective balloons into the stratosphere.

“As a rapidly warming world manifests heat waves, floods, droughts and hurricanes, geoengineering – large-scale manipulation of the Earth’s natural systems – is being presented as a strategy to counteract, dilute or delay climate change without disrupting energy- and resource-intensive economies. Alarmingly, current debates about this big techno-fix are limited to a small group of self-proclaimed experts reproducing undemocratic worldviews and technocratic, reductionist perspectives. Developing countries, indigenous peoples, and local communities are excluded and left voiceless.

“Proposed geoengineering technologies are claimed to threaten people and ecosystems. Holistic assessments of the technologies also show that if deployed they are highly likely to worsen rather than mitigate the impacts of global warming.”

Reading the foregoing there is clearly no easy and, perhaps, safe way yet to having the answer to mitigating the impacts of global warming.

Yours sincerely

Frank Short

One comment

  1. This is the worse, every time we human improvise anything in nature the opposite always happen. How can you compensate for billions of organisms that have different billions of filtering mechanism to trap sunlight that sustain that live.

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