Yahoo News Digest — Fed report: Time to examine idea of purposely...

Science

It’s time to study and maybe even test the idea of cooling the Earth by injecting sulfur pollution high in the air to reflect the sun’s heat, a first-of-its-kind federal science report said Tuesday. The idea was once considered fringe — to purposely re-engineer the planet’s climate as a last-ditch effort to battle global warming with an artificial cloud. No longer. In a nuanced, two-volume report, the National Academy of Sciences said that the concept should not be acted upon immediately because it is too risky, but it should be studied and perhaps tested outdoors in small projects.

You’re talking about potentially changing weather and climate. You don’t want to do that without as good an understanding as you can possibly have.

Waleed Abdalati, a University of Colorado ice scientist and former NASA chief scientist who co-authored the report

This is the first time a government-associated science panel has openly discussed the controlled small-scale outdoor tests of the artificial cloud concept, called solar radiation management, or SRM. But even then, panelists downplayed the idea and said it would require some kind of government or other oversight before it is carried out. Some scientists worry that research will make this type of planet hacking more likely to occur.