And yet, with 1.1 degree of warming already locked in and scientists concerned that we won't be able to keep warming below 1.5, solar geoengineering research might finally have its time in the sun. Others, including environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth, have opposed solar geoengineering, writing that it 'will take us in the wrong direction' and is an 'attempt by those most responsible for climate disruption to continue polluting.' 'We should be having this conversation right about now, and we should be doing the research.' 'It's not a replacement for cutting emissions,' says Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University who has spent several decades researching geoengineering. However, some scientists argue that it could be a cheap, important tool in our climate change toolkit, if only we were able to research it more thoroughly. Solar geoengineering doesn't address the underlying cause of human-driven climate change: carbon emissions. Drastic reductions in carbon emissions are required for the world to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century - the chief goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement - and there is no substitute. While technology might help us adapt or mitigate the effects of climate change, alone it's not a solution to the problem. Less sunlight reaching the surface of the Earth means less heat trapped by carbon dioxide.Īs world leaders, activists and academics meet in Glasgow, Scotland, for COP26, the UN's premiere climate change conference, CNET Science is examining some of the technological advances being developed to help tackle the climate crisis. The most discussed, and most controversial, is solar geoengineering, an idea that would see light from the sun dimmed by injecting reflective particles into the atmosphere. In recent decades, geoengineering has become a hot topic, but not the kind Riker was proposing. It's proving particularly disastrous for the ice in the Arctic, and, strangely enough, it has has affected the tilt of Earth's axis.

By burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we've essentially been running our own geoengineering project. Riker's proposal never got off the ground, but in the past 110 years, humans have unintentionally brought his ideas to bear.

The engineer was no stranger to ingenious solutions - he'd built the first refrigerating warehouse in the world - but this was a proposal to engineer the Earth's system. Moreover, with less ice at one end of the Earth, he reasoned that the planet 'would swing around a bit' on its axis, warming up some of our world's coldest climates. Riker believed it could help warm water move into the Arctic, melting the ice and allowing ships to safely pass through. Riker's proposition was to redirect the Gulf Stream, a warm ocean current that works its way along the eastern coast of the US, by building a jetty off Newfoundland. The Brooklyn-based engineer and inventor concocted a project so grand that he believed it could tilt the axis of the Earth. Five months after the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic Ocean in April 1912, Carroll Livingston Riker had an idea to prevent the tragedy from ever recurring.

Dim sun