3.6 Other possibilities
Watch the following video to hear of some other suggested methods for solar radiation management (SRM). Other ideas – some worthy of science fiction – to manipulate the Sun or how much sunshine reaches the Earth may also be on the table one day.
Download this video clip.Video player: Video 1 More proposed SRM methods.
Skip transcript: Video 1 More proposed SRM methods.
Transcript: Video 1 More proposed SRM methods.
Dr Tamsin Edwards
I just wanted to quickly mention a few of the other ideas that have been put out there for solar radiation management, changing the albedo of the surface, the atmosphere or the clouds, on the Earth.
So you may have already heard of these when reading around the topic, but some people have proposed covering the Sahara in reflective, perhaps aluminium foil-- literally trying to change the albedo of a whole patch of the Earth-- or of the Greenland ice sheet. So covering the Greenland ice sheet in some kind of reflective blanket and that would protect the ice sheet as well as having the albedo effect.
People have talked about choosing or genetically modifying crops to be lighter, so kind of a lighter green so that they would be more reflective over crop areas. Instead of sulfate aerosol injection, people have talked about injecting diamond dust into the atmosphere as a different way to reflect particles that would have different effects on the atmosphere.
And one of the more science fiction ones is shooting lasers into clouds because that would potentially break up ice particles in the clouds into smaller pieces and that would then increase the albedo of the cloud, making it more bright, more white. And there's also other methods with clouds: so reducing the thickness of cirrus clouds in the atmosphere, making them last a shorter lifetime.
So there are lots of kind of different ways people have thought about for managing solar radiation on this planet.
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