Harvard Global Cooling Geoengineering Experiment Halted
Last year was the hottest year in the global instrumental temperature record. Since 1960, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has risen from 315 to 425 parts per million, largely as a result of emissions from burning fossil fuels. Some researchers argue that the pace of global warming is increasing.
Given these trends, it would be a good idea to do some research on an emergency backup cooling system for the planet. Unfortunately, activists have pulled the plug on a preliminary solar radiation management (SRM) experiment. The aim of SRM is to lower average global temperatures by injecting tiny particles high in the stratosphere, where they would reflect a small percentage of sunlight. This would mimic the effect of Mount Pinatubo’s 1991 volcanic injection of 17 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, which cooled the planet by about 1 degree Fahrenheit for a year.
In 2021, Harvard’s stratospheric controlled perturbation experiment (SCoPEx) planned to test launch a high altitude balloon equipped with propellers and various sensors at a Swedish Space Corporation facility near the arctic town of Kiruna. If all went well, the researchers would later initiate an experiment in which they would release a couple of pounds of harmless chalk particles and then fly back through the cloud to measure their dispersal and reflectivity. The goal was to get some information that would help guide the safe and effective deployment of stratospheric sunscreen in the event that global temperature increase accelerates. But
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