Should we really be dimming the sun?! (Geoengineering)

[Whyx]

According to this article scientist are going to be filling the skies with reflective particles and salt water. It says no one is sure what the consequences to weather systems, drought, floods etc will be. It seems like an awful idea when we could just be mass planting trees and reducing emissions - as in actually do this rather than set targets that aren't met. But I do not know much about the subject. It certainly plays into the chem trail conspiracy theories.

I found a thread on here discussing it in 2023 but nothing recent.

This project has been approved to go ahead I think.

Scientists to dim the sun.

AIBU to think this is a bad idea?

I saw this in the Times yesterday and did a double take as thought I’d misread it.

Of course not we get no bloody sun in the UK as it is. Its playing with fire for sure

This must be what my friend was trying to explain to me yesterday... I thought she had lost her marbles..

Some people believe this has been going on for a few years, they think that's what chemtrails are a sign of.

I will be mighty peed off if they torn e the sun off, it's been lovely having it out

It's only a proposal. However, we can no longer plant enough trees in the right places and we're probably too late to cut emissions. It will take decades for ice sheets to recover after the climate cools centuries after we've reduced emissions, but we need the reflectivity of the ice sheets to reduce the temperature. Geoengineering could provide that reflectivity and cooling instantly. Chances are it will be a very short term effect so easy to reverse but there are huge climatic unknowns. It's potentially an easy and huge win which is why there is so much work done modelling the effects. The potential side effects are scary though, which is why it's not being done yet and more research is needed.

a friend seems to be quoting this, i thought she had also lost her marbles

And people called this a conspiracy 😳

Looks like they are doing it for real now. We all need the sun - to grow food and for Vit D. The UK is constantly under a blanket of grey as it is. YANBU

Literally! What a stupid idea.

During COVID there was a saying going around "what is the difference between fact and conspiracy theory? ...About 6 months."

If they will keep things from us and deny any truth to the rumours which eventually turn out to be true they can't be surprised the conspiracy theories continue.

We’ve just been watching Snow Piercer. I’m now extremely concerned. 😫
Seriously though, this does not sound like a good idea.

The way the headlines had been written would make you think we’ll all be shrouded in chilly darkness forevermore, such an absurdly ridiculous concept that to me feels intentionally overhyped. Distract the gullible into talking about some wild abstract scientific experiment whilst the country literally falls apart, cost of living keeps rising, NHS is a mess and our high streets die a death.

Absolutely. I mean, some conspiracies are bizarre and baseless. But this cannot be denied and brushed off as some made up fantasy now.

Trust in government is at an all time low. No one gets held accountable when they mess up, whilst the public suffer the consequences. 🤦‍♀️

Funding has been approved by ministers I think so I took this to mean the experiments will go ahead.

I think as you say in theory it is a good idea but I am wary. We've had bizarre weather for at least the last decade. I'm inclined to think these experiments have already been happening but this is without any evidence other than the lack of clear blue skies I've seen for a while.

The experiments will be on a very small scale. £50 million doesn't get you very much. They will probably mostly be building small simulated environments and trying to evaluate those with computer models.

The intention is not to "block out the skies above the UK". Various teams worldwide are working on projects of this type and this is the UK's contribution.

I'm no fan of Dominic Cummings, who got Boris Johnson to set up ARIA and ensured that it is exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests 🤔, but this sounds like genuinely interesting science and might lead to all kinds of interesting spin-offs.

For what it's worth I suspect that the problem may turn out to be too complex to solve safely and reliably with geo-engineering, but that sort of question (as in the title of this thread) is precisely why you run £50 million projects before you spend £500 billion worldwide on a scaled-up implementation. I also suspect that if they did find a way to do it safely and reliably, it would be politically impossible to go ahead with it anyway, given that literally every technological initiative these days has to overcome a wave of conspiracy theories, whether grassroots or orchestrated.

They've been doing it for years. It's a terrible idea.

They’re idiots.

This is incredibly dystopian. I find myself, once again, checking that I’m not living in an episode of Black Mirror.

It's an incredibly misleading headline. They are not trying to dim the sun, or do anything else to it.

Surely the Pinatubo eruption was enough to show what would happen on a small scale.

So it’s true, modifying the weather? Previously dismissed as “chemtrails” conspiracy theorist bullshit? Or is this a cunningly timed announcement to distract from what is really going on? Didn’t the BBC once report on “the great reset”, also dismissed as conspiracy theorist nonsense?

This has absolutely fired up my CT colleague. He has been ranting 'told you they were doing it!, didn't believe me, the gaslighting bastards have been doing it for years, just admitting it now' blah, blah..ffs..
He will be impossible now..sigh

Sounds like someone hasn’t read Piers Anthony’s book Rings of Ice!

Something similar to this turned out to be a very bad idea!

I hate it when conspiracy theories turn out to have any element of truth in them. I’m going to stop rolling my eyes at conspiracy theorists and start listening with half an ear from now on!

That's one data point of what happens if a certain combination of sulphur dioxide and particulates are pumped into the air in a certain part of the world (relative to prevailing winds, the jetstream, etc), at a certain rate, over a certain amount of time.

In fact it's precisely the observations that come out of natural events that often serve as the starting point for science. But we would want to get a better idea of what to pump out, in what patterns (only at night? only during the day?), in what quantity, for how long, and how much that would cost. Hence why we do research.

Think of Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin when some mould got into one of his petri dishes by accident. That was the starting point, and it's why we now have 500mg tablets of amoxicillin instead of a prescription to keep a loaf of bread in a damp bag for a week and eat some of it. 🙏

"... we need the reflectivity of the ice sheets to reduce the temperature. Geoengineering could provide that reflectivity and cooling instantly."

If everyone wore a tin-foil hat, wouldn't that have the same reflective effect?