The climate change scientists racing to dim the sun

[rangerrebew]

The climate change scientists racing to dim the sun
April 14, 2026
By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

From the Telegraph:
 

Geoengineering schemes may hold the key to reversing global warming, but risks abound and many remain sceptical

Ian McEwan’s recent novel, What We Can Know, is set in a semi-underwater Britain in the year 2119. A few decades on from a climate catastrophe, things are pretty dire. If you want to get from the Chilterns to the South Downs, you have to travel by boat.

What saves humanity from total wipeout is, ironically enough, nuclear explosions in the Middle East. Detonations in the desert in the 2040s send gigatons of dust and sand into the upper atmosphere, where they begin to filter out the sun’s harsh light – and reverse global warming. “Over the graves of millions, the earth began to cool,” our narrator tells us. Over time, the cooling encourages “a new spirit of optimism”.

As sci-fi as all this may sound, the scenario is grounded in scientific fact. What McEwan is describing is a particularly brutal form of geoengineering – that is, modification on a planetary level – and specifically, “solar radiation modification”, or SRM. In other words, turning the dimmer switch on the sun. The good news is we don’t need a nuclear apocalypse to do this. It is, theoretically, entirely possible for humans to cool the planet by reflecting more sunlight back into space.

“When you run the numbers, there’s just no way to avoid global warming without geoengineering,” says Dr Hugh Hunt, deputy director of the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge University, who has been studying this for the best part of three decades.

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2026/04/14/the-climate-change-scientists-racing-to-dim-the-sun/

[Smokin Joe]

Questions: Earth's temperatures are the result of a number of variables, of which humans are the shortest lived (~2,000,000 years, 300+/- industrialized) in the past 4.6 Billion years. Even going back through the Cambrian (the last 600,000,000 years), temperatures have risen and declined through natural processes without human intervention.

Human effects on surface temperatures, through industry or war, beyond localized effects, have not been generally proven to exist, or be significant in scope or duration in the event they do.

What if the Earth is simply peaking in a natural warming cycle, and starting a cooling cycle as this is deployed, with the objective of lowering global temperatures and the concept proves effective?

Is there any way to mitigate or reverse (nullify) the effects of such intervention to prevent an Ice Age?

Have the effects of global temperature increases been thoroughly assessed on a global basis, or are the postulated effects only evaluated on a basis of maintaining the status quo, especially with regard to property values?

While some on Earth will possibly suffer from the effects of natural climate changes, others may well benefit. Certainly, the most populated areas today are those found to be most desirable by a majority of the population, would those people be the ones to decide what happens to the rest of the planet?
Would we leave the future of our habitation here dependent on the unproven assumptions and computer models which have failed to provide accurate projections and those who have sought to cause panic in the general population to cause demand for action when inaction might be the best course?

Humanity has traditionally moved when it found where it was living to be inhospitable, yet despite that, every climate regime present has a human population. We adapt, relocate, or otherwise devise means by which to survive natural processes. We do not seek to intervene in processes which have continued for hundreds of millions of years, any more than we try to plug volcanoes or stop continental drift (plate tectonics).

As history indicates, humans do best when the climate is warmer, not when it is colder. Intentionally propagating colder temperatures using an unproven method with unknown results which cannot be reversed would be inadvisable; a step in the wrong direction.


Get a bloody parasol, you wankers! His predictions are from a novel. Fiction. (If you want to 'save the planet' by blowing sand from the Middle East into the Stratosphere with nukes, that remains a possibility)

[berdie]

Bad, bad idea. I can see so many ways this could back fire and bite man on the hiney.

[Free Vulcan]

So basically they want to act out an episode of the Simpsons. So who gets to play Mr. Burns?