Science & technology | Dimming the sun

Solar geoengineering is becoming a respectable idea

One way to fix an accidentally altered climate is to alter it again deliberately

People watch a partial solar eclipse.
Photograph: Getty Images
|Kigali

WHAT A DIFFERENCE a decade makes. That, roughly, is how often the Open Science Conference, run by the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), comes along. At the previous get-together in 2011, says Jim Hurrell, a climate scientist and WCRP member, almost no one was talking about geoengineering. This is the idea of deliberately meddling with the Earth’s climate to try to make it cooler, and thus to offset the worst effects of another type of climatic meddling—namely greenhouse-gas-driven global warming.

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This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Darkening the sun”

From the November 25th 2023 edition

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