After decades of trying to stop Earth from heating up, scientists are exploring how to reverse climate change and maybe even cool the planet back down.
Could clouds be brightened so they reflect more sunlight back into outer space? If lab-grown seaweed is sunk into the ocean, how much carbon dioxide could it absorb? Would drilling holes into glaciers extract enough heat to slow sea level rise?
The University of Chicago positioned itself as a leader in this emergent field — known as geoengineering — after recruiting renowned physicist David Keith to build out a climate engineering program with 10 tenure-track faculty hires and several young researchers.
“We cannot understand (geoengineering) with just a bunch of individual people working on this in an isolated way. We need to bring together a broad group of scholars and students to debate it in a much richer way,” Keith said.
While society is struggling to kick its addiction to fossil fuels, compensating by meddling with Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and land masses has long been viewed as taboo. Many scientists have argued that geoengineering interventions are a distraction from emissions reductions at best and too dangerous to study at worst.
The most controversial, and likely also the fastest-acting method is shooting aerosols into the sky to deflect the sun’s rays, known as solar radiation management or solar geoengineering.
Physicist Peter Irvine, 39, arrived in Hyde Park last week from London to study solar geoengineering as a research assistant professor on Keith’s team.
The process is anticipated to have a similar effect to massive volcanic eruptions such as the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in modern-day Indonesia, which disrupted weather patterns globally for three years. Summer temperatures in Europe were the coldest on record and fog dimmed sunlight in the United States.