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Grant Shannon's avatar

Can we please get a shiny silver MEBA (Make Earth Bright Again) hat?! I’d wear that bad boy!

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Steven's avatar

Serious question: If building the models on marine cloud brightening is so daunting, how impractical would it be to just start conducting field trials as a way to gather more data? Salt seems cheap enough and it doesn't sound like something that could have catastrophic potential downsides when tested on a small scale, so why couldn't we just start experimenting in the real world and see what happens?

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Quico Toro's avatar

But yes, we should definitely just start experimenting. A team of US government scientists has officially proposed they set up a permanent experimentation site on a low-lying island somehwere — still waiting for congress to appropriate the money. (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi8594)

The main organization pushing for this stuff (https://www.silverlining.ngo/) is trying to do it stateside, working through existing academic institutions. That's obviously a bit slow and a bit cumbersome.

If it was up to me, I'd be jetting around low-lying island nations pitching this idea to their governments. Someone's bound to say yes — especially as low-lying islands are among the most exposed to what's coming.

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Quico Toro's avatar

The short, dismal answer is that we tried to start experimenting with this stuff, and a bunch of California NIMBYs shut it down.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/alameda-geoengineering-climate-experiment-halted-cloud-brightening/

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Steven's avatar

Yeah... I'm familiar with SoCal NIMBY...Any luck finding alternative locations? Seems safe enough that I really don't see why any government legitimately needs to be notified of something at this small scale.

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Russell Seitz's avatar

Here's a link to the original paper in<i> Climatic Change:</i>

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4737323/Seitz_BrightWater.pdf;sequence=1

Submitted 27 October 2009 Climatic Change

revised 29 Aug 2010 Accepted 28 September 2010

Bright Water :

Hydrosols, Water Conservation and Climate Change

Russell Seitz

Department of Physics, Harvard University,

17 Oxford Street, Cambridge MA.USA

02138

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Russell Seitz's avatar

With compliments.

If you find the work of Hasehem Akbari of Concordia on cooling cities by raising surface reflectivity interesting, you should be aware of the work on water brightening that lang precedes it:

https://www.concordia.ca/cunews/main/stories/2015/02/25/a-groundbreaking-way-to-cool-down-cities.html

https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2019/04/and-godfather-of-solar-radiation.html

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