A Super El Niño is brewing and it could be the most intense in decades, threatening a dramatic increase in deadly extreme weather. But what if there was a way humans could dial down the ferocious impacts of the most severe El Niños by temporarily dimming the sun?
That’s the question a group of scientists has investigated in a new study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
El Niño is a natural climate pattern originating in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which typically boosts global temperatures and fuels extreme weather. It’s being compounded by human-driven climate change, which is ramping up the planet’s background temperature, pushing El Niño years into increasingly extreme territory — with devastating impacts on human lives and global economies.
The study, led by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, focused on whether a highly controversial technique called solar geoengineering could be used as a tool to tamp down the severe heat, fires and other impacts El Niño brings.
Specifically, they looked at “marine cloud brightening,” which involves spraying particles into ocean clouds in order to reflect sunlight away from the Earth and back into space.
