U.N. discusses plans to reflect the sun to cool the Earth

PAUL MILLIGAN
UK Daily Mail
December 3, 2011

A group of scientists, philosophers and legal scholars are looking into radical geoengineering plans to artificially cool the Earth in a bid to reverse global warning.

A U.N. climate conference in South Africa on Friday said that – in theory – reflecting a small amount of sunlight back into space before it strikes the Earth’s surface would have an immediate and dramatic effect.

Within a few years, global temperatures could return to levels of 250 years ago, before the industrial revolution began dumping carbon dioxide into the air, trapping heat and causing temperatures to rise.

But no one knows what the side effects would be.

They could unintentionally changing weather patterns and rainfall.

The idea of solar radiation management ‘has the potential to be either very useful or very harmful,’ said the study led by Britain’s Royal Society, the Washington-based Environmental Defense Fund and TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world based in Trieste, Italy.

Full article here

This article was posted: Saturday, December 3, 2011 at 9:39 am

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