Scientists have come up with a new and ingenious way of fighting global warming: use chemicals to blot out the sun. Whether we’ll then have to fight (and do everything else) in the shade, the research doesn’t quite spell out.

Since the world can’t seem to agree on reducing CO2 emissions, why not tackle the problem from the other end, scientists from Harvard and Yale have surmised. The researchers recently published a study which says that spraying large amounts of sulfate particles into the Earth’s lower stratosphere in order to literally dim out the sun could cut the effects of global climate change in half, and it might even be cheap!

 

With all the excitement over the “hypothetical” and “highly uncertain and ambitious” plan, there are no guarantees that it will not actually make things worse in a catastrophic sort of way. There is a suspicious lack of information about what ‘dimming the sun’ could possibly do to those of us who rely on it for basic things – like growing food, or not freezing to death.

Instead, the study published in Environmental Research Letters discusses the potential costs and necessary technology to realize the ambitious, if not hubristic, plan. The researchers discuss a variety of potential ways to accomplish the large-scale ‘geoengineering’ project: planes, balloons, or even just shooting chemicals in the air with large guns.

 

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