Harvard University announced Monday that it’s canceling a solar geoengineering experiment to use particles to block sunlight high in the atmosphere in an attempt to cool the Earth.
Frank Keutsch, the principal investigator of the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), said in a statement that he was “no longer pursuing the experiment.” While he didn’t specify a reason, it was likely the result of intense scrutiny and criticism from advocates concerned that the experiment would cause inadvertent consequences on the world’s climate.
For the project, the researchers planned to send a high-altitude helium balloon into the stratosphere where it would release fine particulate matter such as calcium carbonate and sulfuric acid. The idea is for the particles to disperse sunlight and reflect it away from the Earth—temporarily cooling the climate. Instead, the device will now be “repurposed for basic scientific research in the stratosphere unrelated to solar geoengineering,” the statement said.
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The development is yet another example of the headwinds that proponents of solar geoengineering research routinely face—and for fair reasons. Many critics fear that utilizing technologies and methods that alter climate patterns may result in a wide range of issues ranging from the small to the outright disastrous.
For example, while some simulations of solar geoengineering have shown that it can cool the planet, it also shows that it could result in more intense weather events or even spread disease. It could also cause adverse weather patterns in communities and areas of the world that did not consent to having the planet’s climate altered.
Moreover, critics say that such efforts fail to address the root cause of climate change: greenhouse gas emissions from big corporations.
“It's dangerous to be supporting geoengineering research,” Jennie Stephens, a professor of sustainability science and policy at Northeastern University, told The Daily Beast in 2022. “It’s a distraction from the transformative policies that we actually need.”
However, this doesn’t mean that solar geoengineering research is stopping any time soon. As climate change continues to have disastrous consequences all over the globe, world leaders are quickly coming to terms with the fact that radical efforts like blocking out the sun might be necessary. The White House has even invested in a five-year research plan into geoengineering. Harvard also made sure to note in the statement that it wouldn’t be putting the kibosh on its own sun-blocking research.
“Solar geoengineering research will continue at Harvard under the auspices of the Solar Geoengineering Research Program, which will explore the many dimensions of this issue, including the science and engineering, governance, and political and social implications,” the statement said.
So while the SCoPEx project might be dead, solar geoengineering lives on. As the effects of climate change worsen, we may need to start taking matters into our own hands sooner rather than later.
