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First sun-dimming experiment will test a way to cool Earth

Researchers plan to spray sunlight-reflecting particles into the stratosphere, an approach that could ultimately be used to quickly lower the planet’s temperature.
  1. Jeff Tollefson
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Zhen Dai holds up a small glass tube coated with a white powder: calcium carbonate, a ubiquitous compound used in everything from paper and cement to toothpaste and cake mixes. Plop a tablet of it into water, and the result is a fizzy antacid that calms the stomach. The question for Dai, a doctoral candidate at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and her colleagues is whether this innocuous substance could also help humanity to relieve the ultimate case of indigestion: global warming caused by greenhouse-gas pollution.

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Nature 563, 613-615 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07533-4

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 30 November 2018: An earlier version of this story said that David Keith received money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but that money came directly from Bill Gates.

References

  1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Global Warming of 1.5 °C (IPCC, 2018).

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  2. Russell, L. M. et al. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 94, 709–729 (2013).

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  3. Proctor, J., Hsiang, S., Burney, J., Burke, M. & Schlenker, W. Nature 560, 480–483 (2018).

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